The Startup Ideas Podcast - Build $1000/day cash-flowing startup on beehiiv (here's how)

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

Build your business with beehiiv: https://www.beehiiv.com/greg-isenberg?utm_campaign=Q22025-greg-isenberg-partnership&utm_medium=influencer&utm_source=podcast&utm_source_platform=podcast&via=greg-isenberg-Q22025&utm_marketing_tactic=awareness&utm_creative_format=podcast&utm_content=greg-isenberg&utm_term=greg-isenbergJoin me as I chat with Tyler Denk, co-founder of Beehiiv, to discuss how to grow a newsletter to 100,000 subscribers. He demonstrates Beehiiv’s platform features including customizable websites, subscriber data collection, automated welcome sequences, and multiple monetization options. Tyler emphasizes there's no "silver bullet" for growth—success comes from combining multiple strategies that each contribute incrementally to building a valuable audience asset.Get the 5-step guide to 100K subscribers: www.gregisenberg.com/beehiiv-businessTimestamps• 00:00 - Intro• 02:58 - Overview of newsletter growth potential• 04:03 - Website building and email capture features• 15:00 - Subscriber data collection and welcome automations• 25:00 - Cross-promotion and "Boost" network for growth• 38:06 - Lead magnets and referral programs• 55:00 - Customized email collection based on content  • 1:08:35 - Monetization strategies (sponsorships, paid subscriptions)• 1:10:55 - Final thoughts on consistency and getting startedKey Points• Beehiiv’s all-in-one platform includes website building, email capture, subscriber data collection, referral programs, and monetization tools• Multiple growth channels work together: lead magnets, email gating, referral programs, and cross-promotion with other newsletters• Monetization comes through direct sponsorships, Beehiiv’s ad network, and the "Boost" feature where newsletters pay each other for subscriber referrals1) Website & Email Capture StrategyBeehiiv gives you a full website builder where you can create:• Custom landing pages• Email capture forms• Pop-ups targeted by traffic source• Different signup flowsThe key? Create MULTIPLE entry points that convert 15-20% of visitors to subscribers.Tyler's Windows 98-themed site stands out because it's INTENTIONALLY different!2) The Subscribe Flow MagicThis is GENIUS:After someone subscribes, Tyler shows:• Sponsored newsletter recommendations• A quick survey collecting demographic data• A welcome page with popular contentThis data helps him:• Sell premium sponsorships• Create targeted content• Understand his audience (60% founders!)3) Network Effects & Passive GrowthTyler gets 200-300 FREE subscribers weekly through Beehiiv’s recommendation network!How it works:• Other newsletters recommend his in their subscribe flow• He recommends others in his flow"It's like getting $400-600 of value weekly just for existing on the platform" 4) The Boost Network (Paid Acquisition)Tyler spends $2-3K monthly buying subscribers through Beehiiv’s Boost marketplace.• He pays $2.50 per subscriber• Only pays for subscribers who ACTUALLY ENGAGE• Has autopause features to cut off low-quality sources• Manages 155+ acquisition sources in one dashboardIt's like a vending machine: put in $2.50, get $4 back!5) Lead Magnets That ConvertTyler shared his seed deck on Twitter (100K views) with a simple signup form.The magic:• Created a custom landing page in Beehiiv• Set up a different signup flow (no recommendations)• Built an automation to deliver the deck instantly• Added new subscribers to his newsletterPro tip: Get sponsors for your lead magnets to fund MORE promotion!6) The Referral Program (1% of growth)Tyler built Morning Brew's referral program (led to 1M+ subscribers) and implemented a simpler version:- 1 referral = Access to Series B deck (digital, zero cost)• 3 referrals = $10 off merch (dropshipped, zero cost)7) Monetization (The Engine)Tyler makes $20-30K monthly through:- Direct sponsorships ($7K per placement)• Boost network referrals ($2-4 per subscriber)• No paid subscription (though many make $100K+/year this way)Beehiiv’s sponsorship storefront lets advertisers book directly with just a $10 transaction fee!Notable Quotes:"Writing weekly and sharing my thoughts online has probably been the highest leverage thing that I've done in my entire career. It's opened so many doors to angel investing, meeting other founders, meeting people who are doing really cool shit." - TylerLCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.coFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND TYLER ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/denk_tweetsBig Desk Energy: https://www.bigdeskenergy.com

People ask me all the time, Greg, if you were to start a business, which one would you start? If you're just trying to get to 10 to 20K a month. And I usually say start with an email-based business. So start with building a newsletter. There are platforms like Beehive that make it a lot easier to go from zero to 100,000 subs and then start monetizing at 10, 15, 20, 30K a month. So I brought on Tyler Dank, the mastermind behind Beehive, the guy who was at Morning Brew, who helped them get to 3.5 million subs, $75 million acquisition, and basically dumped all his

knowledge into building a platform called Beehive. And he just gives us the sauce around how to actually go and build an email-based newsletter, how we can actually do it. What are the tricks to the trade, and he drops a lot of knowledge. This is a masterclass for anyone who wants to go and build an email newsletter or an email-based business, and I hope you enjoy this episode. I've been waiting to do this podcast for such a long time because I think that everyone should start an email newsletter. So had to have Tyler, co-founder of Beehive, to show us how he went from zero to almost 100,000 subscribers. We'll go almost 100.

100 sounds better, but I can't lie because we have the screen share up and I'm at 90,000. But we'll be at 100 soon. Exactly. And what I want to do in this episode, Tyler, and tell me if we can do it, is if you could tell everyone the sauce for how to actually go and do this, how to actually grow the list, What type, you know, how to think about content, how to create a website, how to think about sponsorships. I want people by the end of this episode to basically know how to actually do this, that they

can actually go and sign up for a beehive and start making progress. Do you think we can do this? Not only do I think we can do it. I would love to do it because I get so many DMs every day being like, yo, how do I grow my newsletter faster. And I've written an article about like how I got to 10,000 within a few months, but a full deep dive using all of our features, capabilities, et cetera, with the case study of it worked for me, zero to 90K in like 14 months. I will show everything. So it'll be doing me a huge favor as well. And if you get a, you know, before we hop in, but if you are able to build a

newsletter of let's say 90,000, what sort of revenue on a month? basis could you make from from a newsletter like that? Yeah, I'll give the, well, two things. One before everyone says, well, yes, you are the CEO of the company. That's why you've grown so fast. Everything that I am going to show in this video, like you can do just as well as I can. Like, I don't have any secret sauce outside of the fact that I know which features are coming and how to use them.

But we also publicize how to use everything. So there's no like proprietary advantage that I have. And then to answer your question directly, with the caveat again, that I have a full-time job, this is not like my main revenue stream. As a side project, I put five hours a week into between $20,000 and $30,000 a month. It's actually a joke. And it's a joke because people think, oh, it's just a newsletter, you know, but. I mean, it pays the bills, right?

Yeah, it literally pays the bills. So where do you think makes sense to start? start. Yeah, I think where where we can start is probably just top of funnel, which is like the website itself, because that is where I drive people to. So let me jump in here. A little, maybe not everyone is fully aware, but Beehive also has like a full website builder that you can build your own like fully customizable website. Right. So the big desk energy is the name of my newsletter. It is a Windows 98 theme. So it intentionally kind of looks shitty.

That is the purpose. But you can see like here's my subscribe page where I drive a ton of traffic to. So here I got to fix the zoom bullet. So this is the subscribe page. I have an archive page, which is all of my stories. The point here is you can create and spin up different pages. You can jump in here. I can change the title to be.

I don't know, obnoxiously large. I can add a subtitle underneath. I can make the subtitle green, and then I can make all of this gray. So the thing I'm flexing here more is like this is a full website builder, top of funnel where I drive traffic to. You can make it your own. You can build custom web pages.

You can build lead magnets, which we'll get to. But full website builder. With that, there's a few things you can do because we're focusing on acquisition. So one thing we actually launched this past week is this email capture feature. So you can drop a pop-up that you can customize when and how and on what pages you want to have this on and customize it per page. So this is like one potential email acquisition strategy and you can drop it per page. You can even have like logic where if it's traffic from Facebook or Twitter, it's a different type of pop-up with different type of language.

So that is like one thing kind of just showing a new feature. but what I actually think is, sorry to interrupt. Don't free to interrupt me at any time, because I'm just going to start riffing. So what you're showing me basically is, how do you build the mouse trap? Because, you know, how are you,

what's going to happen is you're going to be creating content on places like X and Instagram and TikTok over here. You're going to be bringing them to this website, and your goal is to get, you know, 15 to 20% of people to land on this and actually put in their email. What you're showing me is, is interesting for two reasons.

One is, I mean, I've never seen a website that looks like this. Like, for a newsletter. Yeah, let me just pull up, like, I was in the website builder, but like here's a nice, like, Safari. This is like my live website. Again, top of funnel where I drive traffic. And this is for my newsletter. So I guess the other thing that we'll probably highlight is you don't need to send an email

newsletter, then copy and paste it into work. press or web flow to like hosted in two different places. When I publish my newsletter, it is also, here's the web version of my most recent newsletter. And we'll get to what that is in a moment. But yes, this is my newsletter. So it's simultaneously an email article or a web article and an email newsletter that's all published SEO optimized in the same location. That's cool. Because I, I'll be real with you, Tyler. I have like a bunch of different products I use. Like I'll use, you know, I have a substack over here and a kit over here and a

framer over here and a web flow over here. And it's just a lot of things to manage. So this is interesting because it's just like it's all in one place. So, okay. So the other thing I was going to mention is you don't realize is how actually having those pop-ups, like that'll get your conversion rate from, you know, 10% to 12%, you know, and having these little, you know, death by a thousand cuts in terms of like getting people onto your email list is going to make a difference.

Yeah. And I don't want to over index some like the pop-up. We like launched that three days ago. So I was excited to show this like new pop-up feature that you can have per web page, per traffic source. But that is not the secret sauce. It's just throwing pop-ups and annoying every web visitor. It's a part of.

And that's also I think like while we're at the top of the podcast, a important thing to note is, is there is no silver bullet from going from zero to 90,000 in a year. It is a compounding of like eight to ten different things, which will walk through, that all add, you know, 100 subscribers a week here, 100 subscribers a week here, 100 subscribers a week here. You build the base. You have referrals. You have other things working in compound.

And together, you start to grow by 15 to 2,000 subs per week. But there's not like a single feature. Everyone likes the quick and easy, like, silver bullet that typically doesn't exist. So an important caveat. So yeah, this is a great place to start. This is top of funnel. As you said, you don't need eight different accounts for your website and your automations and your newsletter. Like Beehive does all of that, which is more than just, oh, you don't need to log into four different things.

It also for data, which gets important in down funnel as well. Like we attract where subscribers and visitors come from, whether it's X or LinkedIn or whatever. we have all the UTM parameters and then you can track them for like what they do on your website down to what links are clicking in your email and as you get more sophisticated as a publisher or entrepreneur just understanding how the data fits together and being able to pull out analysis of who your readers and customers actually are is increasingly important and we can get to there in a bit. The next thing I was going to show is per subscribe form not only can you like customize you can see here like the width the height the cost

colors, the text, like you can just like change the text of everything. What I actually think is the most coolest for acquisition is up here, we have two different things. We have the sign up flow, and you can create a custom sign up flow. I'll show you what that looks like in practice, but it's essentially like after someone puts in their email, where do they go? And there's like interstitial steps from a recommendation model of recommending other newsletters.

There's a survey, which I'll show you where I collect data about the new subscriber. And then there's like a final destination thank you page that they land on, which is kind of like introducing who I am and what big desk energy is. You can create actually multiple different sign up flows. And each different subscribe form and pop up can send you down a different sign up flow. So if you had a specific sign up flow for acquisition on Twitter versus LinkedIn, you can do that. And then to piggyback that, we also, you can sync an automation flow to each sign up form as well. And so we'll get into automations in a second. And automation is like an automated journey of emails and other steps.

It can be a simple welcome email or it can be a 15 step journey of emails with logic and updating different parameters. But basically where people come in and which page they land on, you can send them to a different automation. We'll show the back end of how I set this up. But right now I have them going to my default sign up flow and my welcome series automation. And again, you do that per page. So you can have it all be the same.

But like my sign up page, which we'll get to in a bit, my lead magnet pages, actually have like an entirely different automation. And why should people care about automations? Like, why does that matter? Yeah, for a few things. Let me, I'll jump over here. We're getting ahead. That's fine.

The welcome series, why someone should care about an automation. So here's what my welcome automation looks like. It's like 10 steps. First is like what most people are used to receiving, which is as soon as you sign up for a newsletter, like what is this newsletter? Tell me more about it. Here's like my welcome email that explains exactly what big desk energy is. But you're also, you have someone's attention who just converted and you are top of mind for them. It's a perfect place to push them or incentivize them to take an action. So I'm kind of introducing them to the newsletter, the playlist, asking them to follow the playlist. And then I actually ask them to refer someone else. So we'll get to referral program in a bit as well. But I actually

make the ask in my immediate welcome email because they've already made the decision like this looks interesting to me. I'm going to sign up for it. While I have their attention, can I be like, is there anyone else who you think would be interested in this as well? And I'll actually reward you and incentivize you to refer a friend. So that's a bit of like the referral program, which we'll get to, but this is, like, one step of this, like, automated journey that I've set up as part of, like, my welcome series. But I'm sure, I mean, you do a welcome series as well. I'm sure there's like plenty of different reasons why you would want to send an automated email as soon as someone gives you their email. Yeah. I mean, the most, I think it's two things.

One is you want to build instant trust. So by the way, you putting a Spotify playlist is brilliant. because to me, I've never seen that before. I wasn't going to bring it up, but we might as well flex the playlist while you're talking. Yeah, we might as well. So I think it keeps you top of mind. It also increases trust, and it also just humanizes the person behind the newsletter.

So I think that's really smart. The second thing is if you're selling something, so let's just say I'm tweeting a few times a week. I'm trying to build this newsletter. I'm trying to get to a couple thousand subs a week. I could just, you know, in my welcome series, it could say, you know, if you want to buy one-on-one time with me, here's my intro.com link, you know, intro.com slash Greg Eisenberg or whatever. Or, you know, here's a course or here's a SaaS product I've built or just it's an opportunity to increase LTV. And we'll talk about, I think we'll talk about that later when we talk about what are ways to,

buy subscribers and how can we think about CAC versus LTV. But that's why I think dialing in your welcome series makes a lot of sense. And like you're looking at it from like the tactical, what can I do in my ecosystem, whether it's drive conversion or get people deeper into my funnel.

I'm just like an idiot who is doing this as a side project. And so like my like work playlist, which is big desk energy, which is also where I built the newsletter off. of is like a fun, unassuming thing to push people to. And like probably what I think will get the most traffic out of this entire video. It is not my newsletter, but my playlist, which you should check out. So let me pull up.

So I can like turn this into like practice, right? So here is my website. I drive someone to my website. They sign up. We have some security measures and I don't know if this is going to work on the first time. Cool. So this is like what I consider the subscribe flow. So thanks for subscribing.

here are you see sponsored the top four and then there's a few others on three underneath that are not sponsored which I'll get into the sponsored ones are using our boost network which is how I passively make money um so for example confluence VC if you and so I'm like the new subscriber in this situation I toggle this on this looks like interesting like morning brew but with VC stuff so if I'm a new subscriber to big desk energy these are my recommendations, someone comes and toggles on Confluence, that also signs them up for that newsletter. Confluence pays me directly two or three dollars per lead. And so if someone also is interested in study hall sampler and private lobby, that's $6 I just earned, like me as in

big desk energy, earned because someone was also interested in these recommendations. And those are sponsored via our boost network. And then below the fold you see CFO secrets, world builders, whatever. These are not sponsored. These are like my genuine recommendations of people and friends that I follow that I recommend because I'm not going to make money off my own demo. I won't do that. But that is like step one of like and that is the boost network, which we'll get further into, but also how a lot of these newsletters are earning thousands of dollars per week passively. They're driving new subscribers, which is good for them in their newsletter. Along the way, one in five people opt into like a additional subscription that pays them to three, four dollars per lead.

And then this person's happy because they are growing without having to get that subscriber themselves. So total network affects there. This is the first step. The second step of this, like, this is the subscribe flow that I was talking about, was this survey. And so I collect first name, birthday. Some people get pissed off.

I care less about that. I just want to know the year more or less. So I can have like basic, you know, demographic data. What best describes you? founder, freelancer, student, employee, primary skill set, engineering, design, finance, product. So this is my way. This is, I actually think, one of the most underrated steps of the entire thing. When you have a newsletter and you write about sports and you have 20,000 people, you know that you have 20,000 people who like generally like sports in one way or another, but you have no idea.

Are they 80% female? Do they prefer the NBA over the MLB? you have no real data about who your audience is, which can dictate, one, how you monetize, and two, what content to create. If you know that 80% of the people who sign up for your newsletter prefer the NBA, and you're only covering MLS and MLB, like, it's a huge missed opportunity on your part. So collecting data about your subscribers, again, when they're most likely to give you data at the beginning, because you've already converted them and they are engaged, this is like

the biggest step, I think, most newsletter operators overlook. And this is built natively within BIA. hive as well. And so I'll skip over that. And then the final step is like just like this like welcome page. So it's kind of an extension of the automation of the welcome email. But this is again, assuming that not everyone is going to open my welcome email. Here's information thanking them from signing up. I dropped three of my most popular stories and then tell people to subscribe to the playlist. And then you're like dropped on to my website can carry on with your day. But the subscribe flow that I kind of was talking about over here. That is what that was. And you can customize that any

which way cater to what your main objectives are. A couple quick thoughts. I think grabbing the birthday information is really smart. Could you, is it possible to send an email on their birthday? So there's something I do that's actually pretty interesting is the last thing that I collect is like what is your goal for the next 12 months? And I have their subscribe date saved, obviously, when they signed up. So 12 months later, I send to everyone. Like, this was your goal 12 months ago. Did you hit it? And I get a crazy amount of responses of people being like, actually I crushed it or like totally way too ambitious. But this is really cool that you did that. So that's like a few things that I do. Which you can see in this. So here, let me, let me jump around. So that was like the subscribe flow.

Again, big thing. One of the bigger features that we built is you can customize. subscribe flows and automations for your acquisition source and per page. This is like the actual automation. So the welcome email I already showed, I wait one day. And then so there's a true false branch, which you can customize however you want. Basically, I was checking here. Did they submit that survey? As you saw when I went through the subscribe flow, like I just canceled.

Like I didn't submit any information. And like a lot of people do just like skip over it. What I typically do here is, if they did not submit that survey, I actually send a follow-up email. So on the left, you can see the preview. It says, hey, it looks like you recently signed up, but it looks like you skipped over the survey. If you can complete this 30-second survey, it can help me help you, potential job opportunities, founder, fundraise, deal flow, IRL meetups, and so much more.

So I'm basically putting the value on them of like, if you give me this information, it's five questions, six to 20 seconds. I know more about you so I can cater events and offerings to better serve you. And you might be wondering how well does that work? Works really well. I have 22,000 responses to this survey out of 90,000 subscribers. So about a 30% conversion rate of people who sign up for my newsletter do end up completing this survey. And you can see, again, one thing that I want to emphasize with BIA is like it is like an

in one solution, you can do everything. So you don't need to use MailChimp or type form to create these forms and then use an API to send it back to like your database. This is like our survey builder. So first name, birthday, what best describes you, your primary skill set. Number one thing you want to accomplish in the next 12 months. So I created this natively within Beehive. You can add like drop down multiple choice, like a bunch of different questions. And here's like the 22,000 responses that I've received. Why that is important. So this is actually the one thing I'll show that is not within B.I. It's like my media kit of like how I monetize. So we'll eventually get the paid acquisition. I'm not just like burning money to grow this newsletter. Like I have an income stream

outside of like my salary, which is the newsletter. And it's primarily via sponsorship. I sell ads to my newsletter a few different ways. One using B.I. But prior to the new feature we launched. But here's like what I'm selling. I know the geography. of my readers based on the data that Bihive provides for location. I know the age because I collected on sign-up. I know the gender because I collect it. And then primary role and primary skill set. Again, like it intentionally looks like a shitty 1998 UI.

But like this is the information I collect. So when I try to sell advertisements to other companies, I can say 60% of my readers identify as a founder, 20% are employees, most are in marketing and product. So I have a good sense of who my audience is, which makes it easier to sell ads for my newsletter. Any thoughts? Should we keep on rolling? I mean, I'm just, there's a tear going down my face because I have 140,000 subs and I haven't done this. And now I just feel sad.

But I feel sad on one hand. But now I feel happy on the other end because now I'll go and do this. I think it makes, it's very intuitive that you would want to survey people. The other thing I really like about it is, do you remember, or have you ever read the book by, I think it was near A.L. Hooked? Yeah, yeah, huge fan. Yeah, I think one of the things in the framework of how do you build products that people are hooked is investment. and I think the mistake a lot of people make is, you know, when they're building newsletters,

is there's no real investment, you know, because people subscribe to a newsletter and they passively consume it. One of the reasons why I think your click-through rate is so high, your open rate is so high, is because people are investing once they do the survey to commit to Big Dest energy in some way. So I think that for what, you know, for the person listening, like, think about how you, how you want people to invest in this newsletter. And there's like, I think a lot of subtle psychological things that build up to it. Like, when you land on my welcome page, I'm not upselling you to an expensive course. So like shoving a bunch of shit down your throat.

It's like actually just follow my, my playlist that I think you might enjoy. So like I'm kind of trying to build some sort of rep with the new reader of like very, very, unassuming, like, just like, I'm just a tech guy building a platform that I will public which is the whole thesis of the newsletter. It's me like building in public. Here's some content I think you'll like. And then so when you get to your email and it's like, hey, you forgot to submit this survey and I'm also framing it in the way of it benefits them, which it does. I use this data, not just to sell ads, but understand like what, who am I even writing to? And like, what type of content would resonate more with these types of people? The fact that it's 60% founders

per the survey. All of my content is very like founder startup focus for that reason. And that's kind of like the only thing I can really write about. But it's like reinforcing. So then because I started Top of funnel with the website and kind of showed the subscribe flow, there's like a few different parts that I can break down a bit more. So we have a recommendation network. These are the three newsletters that I organically recommend. You can see over 15,000 subscribers. I, driven to their newsletters. And you can just jump in and browse every other newsletter within the Beehive ecosystem to recommend.

So I could type in product, for example, and it will take a half a second to load. And then you have like all of these different product newsletters that you can see like the description name and I can add them to my recommendations. Inversely, I have probably a hundred or so. Not all of them have driven a ton of subscribers. and they are not categorized or organized in any way. But some of them have driven like a couple hundred if you scroll enough. But these are all of the newsletters.

It's like 201 subs, right? She is in her subscribe flow. She is organically promoting big desk energy as a newsletter. And she has driven me 200 subscribers. Here's 95 down here. Here's 90 down here. So you can kind of see like the network effects at play. And this is like very passive.

but the more you promote your newsletter and we internally are working on ways like build these hubs of people so they can connect more easily. But again, not a silver bullet, but I probably grow by a couple hundred subscribers per week from this collection of maybe 100, 150 other newsletters in the ecosystem recommending Big Desk Energy as one of the newsletters that they recommend. So basically what you're saying is every single week, you're getting a few hundred free subscribers that are high quality, basically,

that if you value a subscriber at two to three bucks or something like that, you're getting four to $600 a week of value by just existing. Just existing. And this is, and we have like a network and you could see like the search feature. who search startups or tech or business like I come up and then I'm obviously pretty vocal and socials but what we are building internally is like the everyday person who lives in Nebraska who wants to connect with other people who write similar topics like how do we make it easier for them to build those hubs that they all recommend each other because like it gets

tiresome to recommend like more than three four people like I think most probably average only recommend two to three or it's just like a poor experience for the reader but in aggregate over time Like this is built up over 14 months of me publishing on the platform. I probably have 150 to 200 newsletters recommending my newsletter, which is like, as you said, a few hundred free subs every single week. So that is one way to grow. And like again,

this is like the network effects that take time. Like this is like, it's almost like the thing about investing. It's like time in market beats like timing the market. It's like this is 14 months of me publishing and like building a name for myself on the platform. It doesn't happen overnight. And this isn't like a silver bullet.

but it's a 300 subs. If you wanted to accelerate what I'm actually one of the features I am most proud of, I showed in the subscribe flow, the sponsored post. So this is boost. This is like the growing boost dashboard. So you can see I put like a good amount of money. But again, like because I am earning revenue through advertisements, like it pays for itself. So let me actually show like the other side of this first.

If I wanted to monetize passively via boost, I come in here. You can see I've earned like a few thousand dollars on boost. You can explore offers. So the boost marketplace, you can see, I promise I'm not intentionally first there. I don't know why that happened. But here are different publishers who are willing to, they have a paid budget to grow on the Beehive ecosystem. So if you look down here at Breaker, they have between 25 and 100,000 subscribers. they've posted frequently 14 hours ago.

English, here's like the majority of their demographic. They're mostly U.S., Australia, and the UK, and they are willing to pay you $2 per subscriber to promote Breaker. And the promote part is what I showed earlier, which is after you subscribe to a newsletter, like three things pop up. Here are the three recommend. Here are the three newsletters that I recommend. If Breaker is one of them and you send them a new subscriber,

you earn $2 passively. Here's status, $2.2. $2 for finance wrap. But you can search and filter. So, like, let's go highest payout. Paid Street Performance is paying $4 per subscriber. We have actually quite a few that are paying $4 per subscriber. And, you know, not every newsletter is created equally.

Like, maybe their subscribers more valuable because they push people into a funnel that sells a course or they have a more niche audience and they can earn more per subscriber. I think I offer about $2.50 per subscriber, but this is like a network. And so what I'm showing boost is like a little complicated because it is a two-sided marketplace within a platform. But there is a side of people who are looking to monetize and there's a side of people who are looking to grow. And it's not mutually exclusive. But what I'm looking at here is the D to C newsletter, right?

So let me go. Or let me go here. If I want to earn $4 per subscriber, I can apply to paid street performance. I think I'd be a great partner. I don't know how Any tips on I'm sure a bunch of people are applying to let's say

paid sheet performance like how do you like what do you write so that you actually get them to accept it? So one probably something better than I just typed in in five seconds on the spot right? Like I think especially for the higher paid

per subscriber you definitely want to specify why you actually are a good fit. You can also so here there's also geographic restriction. So paid street performance you can see here, you're only getting paid for subscribers that you send who are in the U.S. And you can see here is U.S. and Canada. So on the gross side, if you know that like a subscriber in Europe is less valuable to you, you can actually just set your geographic filter to be only U.S. and like you're only actually ever paying for U.S.

subs. If they send you subs from South America, Africa, Europe, you'll receive them. You just don't pay for them. And that's like made clear. So yes, to answer your question, a better description, but here I'll show you the flip side of this, right? So let me go to, well, first, here, I'll show you this is my like dashboard. So here's everyone that I am paying to promote big desk energy. You can see how much money I've spent over here. This evolving AI insights has sent me 5,200 subscribers. You can see the open rate, 38%. And the acceptance rate is like, of all the subscribers that they sent me, how many were like accepted, we do a few steps of like verification.

Like if you send just like shitty subscribers who never open, never click anything, like that you actually don't pay for them. So it's kind of like running a Facebook ad where you only actually pay Facebook if that becomes a customer. So if they send you unengaged subscribers who do not open your emails at all, like you actually don't pay for them. So it's like a risk-free growth. strategy in a way. Nothing is perfect, but we have a bunch of different models in place to make

sure. So I have like, I don't know, dozens of publishers promoting me. And you can see here, like you can pause them at any time. So this one right here was only giving me a 20% open rate. That was below my threshold. So I just like cut it off. Like you can monitor the stats and metrics. You used to have to do that manually. We actually added this feature called auto pause, which basically does that for you. So I've set the threshold to 30% open rate. And so as soon as any of these newsletters sends me more than 100 subscribers, it'll check frequently is the average open rate above this threshold.

And if it dips below it, it just cuts it off. So you can see here, autopause means that they were sending me, they sent me at one point like 5,000 subscribers. The open rate was only 20%. So rather than me having to manually carve out time out of my week to like assess and review these, it automatically turns off the worst performing channels. So, like, this is a full, like, growth marketer on steroids. It's just, like, constantly working for you.

And then I'll just show you the application thing. So as you can see, I have 155 applications. So what you saw me do five minutes ago was me applying to that one newsletter that's paying $4 per lead. So I have 150 applications. Used to be a total pain in the ass to manage. One, we also have auto accept rules. but you can add filters.

So you can be like the language. I only care about publishers who are in English. Majority is United States. And we can add what Canada in there. Number of posts, they've sent at least five posts. So it's not just like new senders who are trash engagement. So this is their open rate. So let's do average, good, or excellent.

And then boost quality is the other thing, right? So this whole ecosystem is called boost. And we have like a scoring mechanism to say like, these newsletters send higher quality subscribers and these newsletters. So boost quality, you can do like excellent good average. And then with that, it should filter down. So here's 28 that qualify that are, that sent more than five posts that are English in the U.S. Canada,

whose engagement is above a 10 to 25% open rate, boost quality, good, excellent. And you can see here, and I can kind of pick out whichever one, you know, Tech finds, new publisher, slower growth, 10 to 25% open rate, excellent boost quality. 99% in the U.S. I can just go ahead and accept them. By me just hitting accept, now every time that someone signs up for their newsletter, big desk energy now pops up as like, hey, you should also subscribe to that.

So I in like one click just added like a new acquisition source for me to grow faster. Granted, these are not free. I'm paying $2.50 per lead. but I only pay if they actually open and engage with my emails. Yeah. And if you're happy to pay $2.50 if you make on average $4, for example, right? Like if you end up, and I think that's what I want people to internalize is that once you are able to build a machine, it's kind of like a vending machine where you're able to put in, if you know, if you can put in $2.50 and $4 comes out, you're basically saying, how much money can I stuff in this vending machine in a scalable way, right?

You want to make sure that you're managing all of the stuff and you don't want to grow too quickly. I think that's a mistake. I'm sure you've seen examples of people growing too quickly and then their cat goes up and stuff like that. But I do think that this is what's interesting about this whole business and business. building a business on top of Beehive is, is thinking about it almost like a vending machine. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy to think about. Like, if you know that you can make money on the back end,

I put $2,000 to $3,000 of like budget into this like growth machine every month. And I have 155 publishers who want to promote me, which means when they go out and publish on Twitter and LinkedIn about their newsletter, every person that they get in their funnel is then shown like, oh, I also recommend big desk energy. and I am happy to pay $2.50 per lead that they send me. And meanwhile, I'm able to, through the dashboards on B-Hive, VET, see the open rate, unsubscribe rate, acceptance rate.

And at any time that a publisher or newsletter sending me lower-quality subscribers, I can cut them off at any point and even automate that process. So it's like an entire growth engine with all of like the data and dashboards that you need. And it's just built on these network effects and what I think is like a pretty intuitive UI. But this is definitely like the most complicated part of the entire app because it's like a full two-sided marketplace network within the platform that is shown on everyone's individual websites. So there's like funnels on funnels, but we do our best just to show the different types of dashboards and data to make it as

transparent as possible, even down to the fact that everyone who applies to my newsletter, I can see the size, growth, engagement, and quality. So it's like full transparent marketplace. place. So one of, we've hinted a few times at lead magnets. I think you actually are the king of lead magnets. Your tweet threads into sign up for this. That's also my newsletter to get X is like superb. So I guess also do you want, you could probably do it better than I can. Do you want to explain like what a lead magnet is? You know my insight there is? My insight is on X specifically, there was a time when you can post a tweet and then your second tweet could be, if you like this post, sign up to my newsletter. And for two, three years, that worked like a charm.

But things changed. And the way to get news, you know, one of the ways that I've noticed has been really helpful to get newsletters as subscribers is to say, okay, how can you package up value. And that's related to a piece of, you know, a tweet, an Instagram post, whatever. And give that away. And people who get that value also get subscribed to the newsletter. That to me in 2025 is one of the best channels for growing any newsletter. Do you want to explain to the audience what a lead magnet is?

It's true. It's a smart audience, but it is worth defining. A lead magnet is a digital asset, or it could be a physical asset. It's an asset that people sign up to that's related to your main offer. So, for example, I have a lead magnet that is, here's the 30. plus of my favorite startup ideas from the startup ideas podcast. And people sign up to that lead magnet. And then in the future, I might send them an email that says, hey, I see that you're the VP product of Facebook. We have LCA that does zero to one product design for Google, let's say. And then we

sell them on that service. So it's basically a way to, and by the way, I wish I had done a survey. We actually have to, I go through it manually, like a chump. Like a peasant. I know, like a chump. And I know people are listening to this and expecting more of me, but yeah, I go through it like a chump and then reach out to it. And that's a lead magnet. Yeah, so great, great set up for one, they're super effective, right? I think you would agree. I think you're amazing at them. Like lead magnets work extremely well.

So I'll give you an example of like what I set up as a lead magnet. It's like the next leg of the stool of growth that I work on top of. So going back to our website builder, like I said, you can create a custom page for anything. So this is a totally like custom. I mean, the Zoom is pretty aggressive. so I apologize for that. But again, you can build a webpage for whatever. I use the Vehive website builder to create a lead magnet.

What that actually looks like in practice, while you were talking, I pulled this up. So here's like a tweet that I put out. This is, it's actually, I'm pretty proud of this. This was one of our earlier C decks that I created with like very shitty graphics, right? And so I totally coincidentally did stumble across this on my computer one day that I haven't seen in like two years. So I tweeted, holy shit, someone across the deck I used in 2022 to raise our seat extension.

So we raised 2.6 million and then I realized we didn't raise enough money. So I had to raise more money. This is like the deck I made to like communicate we needed more money. So we raised 1.6 million off of this deck. And so I link out to it. You can view and download here.

So one, it's interesting. Got 143 likes, almost 100,000 views. It's not Greg Eisenberg numbers, but it's decent. And so people click through. and here is like the lead magnet. I got their attention top of funnel. I posted on Twitter.

I also posted it on LinkedIn. And I drive people to this page. And it basically explains the exact same thing, right? Six months after launching me had 5,000 signups, 13 and a half MRR, $45 million sent or 45 million email sent. This is the deck I used to raise money, putting your email here. I also link to it up here in the resources. Why that is cool is like, again,

going back to what I showed earlier on this subscribe form, the sign up flow is different. It's a different sign up flow because I don't want to shove recommendations and boost and shit down their throat. It's like they came in expecting a lead magnet. So I'm pretty sure the sign up flow just takes them to a different landing page that says like thank you for signing up.

Check your email. You'll have like the seed deck. And then the automation right here is the seed plus deck lead magnet. And so I go all the way back to jumping around pretty quickly. Let's go to the automations. I basically created an automation right here. Beehive seed plus deck. And it's a very simple automation.

Someone puts in their email into that page. And I send them a download. Also shout out. Beehive has native downloads. So you can just like download the file directly from the email itself. But this is like full funnel, what a lead magnet is. Top of funnel, Twitter, LinkedIn. I'm like, yo, this is super cool.

Here's a seed deck. Anyone who's interested, it's also important to call out. People who are interested in seeing my seed deck are like the ICP of people that I want to sign up for my newsletter, right? Like I'm not just doing like clickbait things that are like the NBA's top 10 of all time like sign up here and I'll send you like my opinions. Like that's not the type of audience I'm looking for. I want people who actually nerd out on like these like investing decks. So I tweet about it. They go to my page that I built native on Beeh's website.

I set up the sign up form to have a custom automation that sends this email with an embedded download link. where they click it and they download the C-DEC directly to their computer. And then meanwhile, the assumption there is like, while doing that, they also signed up for my newsletter. So I just am distributing valuable content and getting email subscribers. You know what you can do here? You could, you know, once you get to this point of, oh, I'm adding 500,000 people a week from this lead magnet,

you can go and go to reach out to VC firms like Indreason. or Sequoia and be like, hey, do you want to sponsor this? Because your ICP is also people who are trying to make better decks. Right. And you could say for $10,000 a month, for $5,000 a month, you know, all include you in this in this automation. And then you can also take some of that money and go buy more subscribers to that lead magnet.

Yeah, 100% right. Like if I know my funnel and I know and I don't have that large of an audience, but if I had a large enough in audience, I'm like, hey, if I post this top of funnel thing, I'm going to drive thousands of signups to it. And And Andreessen is interested in getting in front of those people as well.

I'm like, hey, pay me $10,000 for that. I can then put $10,000 into like paid spend on Twitter to boost this post, get more people to click through. Each, Andreson's happy because they're getting whatever their eye, like they want eyeballs or founders clicking through. seeing their logo and whatever. I'm happy because I'm getting subscribers for free

that's paid for by and Driesen. So yeah, there's a lot of like clever ways to continue to like skin the cat, I guess, in terms of ways to boost growth. Last two things I'll show quickly is the referral program. So I built the referral program back at Morning Brew that worked extremely well.

It led to over a million subscribers for Morning Brew. Today, it's, I think, admittedly works a bit less. But the thinking is everything we have talked to talked about to date has been how do we get more people in the funnel the referral program is these people are already in your funnel like they are reading your newsletter how and they like your content they're opening it how do you get them to then share with their mom their brother their co-worker or whatever and there's different ways to do it we have a native referral program that we built into the platform you can see i have like you know approaching a thousand referrals to my newsletter so it's

like you know one to two percent of my overall subscriptions but it's like free I didn't do a single thing for it. And the rewards that I offer are also free. So this is me setting up a reward. I offer our series B deck. It's a little bit more sensitive. So you have to refer someone to get it. And one referral.

And I just have this silly image of me that's at the bottom of the newsletter that I stole from like Mr. Beast, I think. But basically you refer one person, your coworker, the person sitting next to you. And I'll send you an automated email where you can download our series B deck, which we raised $33 million for. And then I have another thing at three referrals. You get a promo code to get $10 off merch off of our store. Shout out the store real quick. Kind of cool swag. Don't kill the messenger.

Good, good t-shirt. Again, but to take a step back, neither of these costs me anything. The C-deck, like I already created. It's a PDF. I send it via an email. I think Morning Brew popularized sending T-shirts and hats and swag and mugs, which like costs money and there's fulfillment. And what people don't know about the referral program at Morning Brewers,

we had tons of college interns managing that because people hit rewards and then they don't receive things. And it's like lost in USPS and it's a total pain in the ass to deal with like physical stuff. So my referral program is a PDF at one, which costs a zero. And then it is my drop shipping store that I use fourth wall. Shout out fourth wall. I don't own any of this inventory. And I'm actually giving the reward is $10 off.

So like I'm like net net even on it. cost me zero to send that swag. So that is the referral program. And then you can see, and you can drop this into the newsletter natively. So again, the value of just like everything all in one integrated, like there's something which I'll show in a second when you're creating your newsletter where you could just do backslash referral program and it will show this at the bottom of the newsletter, which is it gives the reader a unique referral code that they can track how many people they've referred and a unique like here's your referral pipeline so you can see like how it's working and you can like edit how that looks um so again like super customizable you add digital

goods you add physical goods we have like the fulfillment where you can actually track who is actually receiving these different rewards and it's all like trackable easy done for you one click add it to your newsletter so i say that because everything to date has been top of funnel getting more subscribers to my ecosystem. This is me just turning super fans into a growth channel via incentives. Right. And these people are getting, they're getting the automation too, right?

So they're getting an email. Like what happens? If I refer someone, what happens? Yeah. So when you get in all, so that's the other thing I kind of just skipped over. but part of the referral program set up is like when you say that here is the reward that you get at one, the second step to this, here's like what you actually receive. So directly in Beehive, you set the reward. So step one was what is the reward and at what milestone, which I set to be one.

Step two is like what's the email that people receive when they hit that reward? And if it is like a physical good, you might send like a link to collect like their address so you can send them something if you're like manually shipping things. because mine is a digital reward, which you can set here. It's simply the embedded download link to download my series B deck. And that's automated, right? Like me as the operator, I'm not like once a week going through to see who has a referral and who do I need to send something to. It's like totally automated.

And so that leaves. And real quick on best practices for the referral program, you've got, you know, almost 100,000 subs. I notice you have two rewards. If you're going from zero to 100,000, how many rewards should you do? How do you think about that? Yeah.

So simple is better. I think anything with rewards you are kind of trying to teach a new behavior, which is I think most people who have been reading newsletters for a bit, whether it's the skim or morning brew or others, are kind of familiar about how a referral program works. But you're basically trying to take someone who just read your content and move them to action by copy and pasting a link and sending it to their friends or colleagues or whoever. So there is like a learned behavior. And the more that you have to explain, like, oh, we have

these 12 different rewards at these different tiers. It gets like very confusing. So I actually stole the one referral thing from Milk Road. Milk Road they did. So Milk Road is like a crypto newsletter. They went from zero to 250,000 subscribers extremely quickly. And one of their secret weapons were that they talked to 13 crypto experts. They said, here's the crypto predictions by the experts for the year 2023. And it was a PDF that you could download only if you had one referral. And so I think some people get reading and they're like, oh, I have super fans. Like, let's make the milestone 10 referrals. 10 referrals requires a lot of work. And like it's a lot, like, it only counts as a referral if they actually opt in. So you have to like, they have to do something to people you're sending it to.

And Milp Road was like, what's the highest leverage thing that we know someone would take the their minimum amount of effort, which is copy and pasting a link to one other person. And I think Milk Road grew by 25 to 30,000 referrals just with that one milestone. So I ever since seeing that as a case study, I've been a huge believer of like, get a free digital product to someone for one referral because that also teaches them how to use the referral program. And once they see how easy it is, if you have something else enticing at two or three, it's like that much easier to convert them. And then you can see here we have like physical goods.

We don't do the physical shipping, but like we handle reward milestones differently. If you are sending physical, we have promo code. You can upload 100 one time use promo codes to a store. And it'll keep track to make sure that a recipient only receives a unique code once. So you can't like share promo codes. And then digital is like a file URL, whatever.

So it takes you like the, here's a crazy idea. couldn't you do like let's say like does beehive have a affiliate program? Yes. So. A great one. A great one actually. 50% if you drive anyone to Beehive, by the way.

So if anyone's listening and wants to join our partner program, it is extremely, extremely competitive. 50% you said? We've had someone who has recommend an enterprise user that paid $50,000. All they did was say, hey, like, you're not happy with the email platform you're using. You should use Beehive. They sent one email.

They made $25,000 up front. We pay 50% of anyone you drive to us. It's very silly. And then we also have the Beehive Beach Club. So each quarter, the top affiliate, we send to Maui, the Bahamas or Aruba. So we have like a whole network. The partner program is amazing. So if anyone's listening and it's like great at affiliate sales, I guarantee we pay more

than anyone and we'll do the heavy lifting. But that's my quick plug there. Carry on. So you can go to a platform like Beehive and negotiate a or even sign up and get like a promo code and say like the, you know, the average promo code is 25%. Give me 35%. And then you can make it as a referral carrot that is basically like, I'll give you 50%. you know, 40% off beehive if you refer three people.

They're literally referring people to your newsletter. You're getting subscribers. And then you're getting paid because you're referring to the software. Yeah, it's next level growth marketing. But yeah, well, the deeper you get, I actually kind of think that affiliate marketers are like the greatest marketers because they find every bit of arbitrage to be able to figure out. Like what you just did there was like four birds, one stone, right?

you're growing your newsletter faster. You're making a margin on an existing partner program. They're making money. They probably like you more for even just like associating, getting them paid in the first place. There's like four layers of genius in what you just said and someone should definitely do that. Cool.

All right. I try to point that out there. No, there's a lot of opportunity there. Okay. So one of the last ones I'll show is just like email collection on content. So here's like a sample of my newsletter. I'll quickly,

quickly flex the editor. Beautiful text editor. We can go in here. Again, it usually looks like pure white screen. Mine is like super styled because of the 90s theme. And then we also just launched this where you can customize the style, like directly in the newsletter, build a bunch of different stuff. You can change the typography, whatever, whatever.

Super customizable, no code needed. That's the plug. Down here is like my. referral section that I've created. So this is what shows in the newsletter. So this is just a continuation of the referral thing. Now that I have all these people in my funnel, every newsletter that I send has this referral section at the bottom. And I can show, granted, I just made this look terrible. So ignore this style. But you can masquerade as like this person. I scroll down. So what this reader sees is this. Here is their unique referral link. So they can

go and say, hey, mom, sign up for my newsletter, goes to the landing page. It has his unique code in the URL. So if this person, and I'm his mom in this situation, signs up, like he gets credit, he gets the Series B deck. And then he can also just track his progress, right? So this person actually, funny enough, already has a referral. So here's like their personal referral page. He has a referral, it shows that he's unlocked this milestone, and he's two away from getting $10 off. So this is just like the continuation. Like I kind of showed you how to set up the referral program. This is like what readers say. I'm in like for security purposes, kind of block out the email. I can't believe I pick someone who actually had a referral. But yes, this, this is how the

referral program works for them. This is all handled totally native again within Baha. Like you don't have to set this up. You add the rewards. We do the rest. And then so the last thing I wanted to show is like kind of the simplest, but one of the most effective, is when you go to, you're building your post, this is like my newsletter slash web post that I'm sending out. Advanced email capture. So we have three options. None just means like when you publish,

assuming you publish both email and to the web, like people online can find your URL and click on it. Popup means that there's like a pop up that you can style. Like as you're scrolling down the page, like 40% down the page, a popup shows up asking them to. sign up to their newsletter. They can dismiss that pop-up like it's up to them. Gated is the most aggressive. It just means like you cannot read this content unless you're a subscriber. And so I do

every, well, I think I signed up so it will work, but all of my posts are gated. So what that means in practice is if I land on my website and I want to click how to build in public, it won't work now because I signed up earlier. But here, let me do a little Firefox action. We're, we're rolling with the punches here. Where's Firefox? I didn't know you were a Firefox guy. I'm not, but when you have to test a bunch of things, it's because this is actually a case study of it working well, right?

Like, it knows that I signed up earlier, so it's not email-gating. So I actually shout out of us for doing it correctly. So let's say I'm a new visitor. I am interested how to build in public. I click on this. As I scroll down, it says right here, subscribe to read this post. And so I wish I prepared with the tweet. But basically what I'll do is I publish my newsletters every Tuesday on Monday night.

I already know what I'm going to write about. So I hype it up. And I'm like, yo, I'm writing about this tomorrow. Be the first to find in your inbox. Sign up to my newsletter here. And it's just like a subscribe form, typically just to the subscribe page. I published my newsletter on Tuesday. And then I say, I just shared all of the secrets of how Beehive builds in public and like what it's done for me.

Click here to read. So like very, not like click baby, but anyone who's again in my ICP. who's curious about building in public and startups is like, that sounds interesting. I'll click on that. So I post on LinkedIn, post on Instagram, post on Twitter. They land on this page, which is the web version of my newsletter. They scroll down. Now they're like email gated, right? And so like I've already done the hard part of like I have their attention. They clearly are interested in building in public and startups. They just have to put in their email. It'll sign them up to my newsletter. And then they will be able to read the rest of the content. But like the email gate is like the simplest and

easy thing to do. It's just like a drop-down setting on every post, and I have it, like, set by default. But if you're good at, which you are as well, just like, again, it's kind of like the lead magnet, but just top of funnel, get someone's attention, sell them on what value you can provide them, and then send them to a page where they have to put in their email. Yeah. It's kind of it's kind of like the newsletter send or the post is the lead magnet. Yeah, exactly. And then if you're sending weekly or daily, it's just like constant, constant. You've already done the hard part of I've already written the 1,500 words to build this post. I've already published it.

Now I just want to attract other people who may not have received it because they're not a subscriber yet to come click on this page and put in their email. So it's like a constant lead magnet that you don't have to think about because you've already done the hard part. And then so that's kind of like I guess we'll pause there. Like that is my in a nutshell. I say nutshell, but I think we've been recording for an hour. the how I have grown from zero to 100,000 more or less in 14 months. The last kicker that I'll hit on is monetization because like that is like kind of like what makes the wheels go, right?

Like I can't just like continue to dump money into this newsletter if I'm not making money back. So on my website, I have this advertised tab. This is a brand new feature that we launched last week. But this is like my sponsorship storefront. And so this is publicly available. I publish it, I promoted in my newsletter and then obviously on my website up here in like the nav bar. But it shows the stats of my newsletter.

And this is targeted for advertisers. So I showed the media kit earlier. If you want to sponsor my newsletter, you can as an advertiser, if you are late checkout and you want to get in front of 90,000 startup founders and employees, you can book right here. And this is like all fully integrated within Behive. So as a publisher, I'm receiving inbound opportunities from advertisers who are booking ad placements. It's integrated on my ad calendar. So I haven't shown that. But we have like a calendar which kind of shows all the posts that I've published and allows me, so I only post on Tuesdays, but allows me to also say like I post every Tuesday.

So I open up available inventory for advertisers to book right here, right? Primary sponsorship, the 22nd, wide open, 29th wide open the 6th of May wide open so advertisers can come in they see that there's available spots they can book it for $7,000 I get notification so B.Ive has like a built-in notification thing you know late checkout once to sponsor your newsletter you have a pending booking for $7,000 on April 22nd I can go through the process collect assets from you approve invoice get paid directly and everything goes directly into like the Behive wallet which is um Basically, just like a bank account of money that you've made through Beehive.

So that is like, that's the do it yourself version of the ad network of like, I'm still doing the hard part of driving traffic to my sponsorship page to get advertisers to book. The other thing that Beehive does is the ad network. Quick question on that. Does Beehive take a cut of the sponsorship revenue? Like, is there? No. So we do. We, there's other companies.

in the space that help you find bookings. And if they do the invoicing and placement, they'll take five to 10 percent of every sponsorship, which like totally misaligned incentives of like, why would I want to book when I can just send an invoice myself? We do a $10 flat rate transaction fee, but everything is fully integrated. So you pay $10 to do the booking, but you make all of the money from the invoicing yourself. And then the advantage of doing it within our ecosystem is you'll receive notifications of like, hey, you have an upcoming placement. So like, don't forget to put in your newsletter. You can do backslash ads in the editor and it'll actually pull up the assets that you've created and you can one click add it to the newsletter. And then

like reporting is fully automated as well. So for like the cost of $10, it like puts you fully into our ecosystem where everything is kind of done for you versus you having to do the copy yourself for you having to do like the inventory management and the invoicing and the reporting. So it's like a total simplification. Bad timing on my part. So the other thing I was going to to say two things. One paid subscriptions. I don't have a paid product, but through Beehive, you can run a paid subscription where you charge your readers $5, $10, $20 a month or annual. We also have one-time payments. We don't take a cut of subscription revenue. And we have the dashboards and data, free trials, discounts, everything built in. So you can build like a full subscription product if you

wanted to monetize via content or community. So that's one way to make money on the platform. Boost is the other way to make money on the platform, which is the passive thing that we showed earlier. And then last ads. On paid subscriptions, are people making money doing paid subscriptions? Like, is that working?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So not me. This dashboard is not very intuitive because I don't have a paid subscription. But we have like dozens and dozens of users who are making worth of $100,000 a year via paid subscriptions. We have journalists like Oliver Darcy,

who's like making a push for like a million dollars in revenue through paid subscriptions in its first year. We have dozens of other like real estate politics, news content creators who are like making you know, five to $10 per reader and making tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. So paid subscriptions is like a huge revenue stream and it doesn't have to be all content. So like you can build a paid tier that is like a community upsell and because Beehive is open source in the sense that we have like, I guess open sources and correct open with like

APIs and web hooks. You can say it soon, and we have automation set up where as soon as someone upgrades from free to paid, add them to your Slack community, add them to your Discord channel. And so you can upsell like an additional piece of content and an exclusive community. And it's all automated directly with APIs and web hooks through our automations. And so you can like upsell them on more than just content. So yeah, people are making a ton of money on paid subscriptions and we are one of, if not the only platform in the space that doesn't take a cut of subscription revenue. So there's like the 2% fee for Stripe, which is like just the cost of doing business on the internet. But like if you charge $10 a month, you make $10 minus the strike

fees. We don't take any cut. Boost is the second way. We already showed boost, which is the passive revenue when people sign up for your newsletter. You push them to other people. Those newsletters pay you. And then ads is like the third leg of the stool. where you can go direct. And so Big Desk Energy sells direct sponsorships via the sponsorship storefront that I just showed off a minute ago. Or we have an ad network with Netflix, Nike, Roku,

HubSpot, etc. We're basically, we are constantly provisioning ads to publishers who are the best fit saying Nike wants to sponsor your newsletter. They're paying $3 per click. You see the different copy. You can choose the copy that you like the most. The day that you want to run it,

you add it to your newsletter in one click, and then you get paid three weeks later. You never had to speak to a single person at Nike, and you have like a premium Nike sponsorship at your newsletter, paying $3,4 per click. That times like the 100 placements or the 100 campaigns that we have now. So like I'd say we are very flexible. And like my stance as like the founder is,

I don't care how you make money. I just want our users to be able to grow as fast as possible and make as much money. And whether it is subscriptions or boost or ads and whether we give you ads or you sell them yourself. As long as you are making money on the platform, I'm happy and I feel like I'm doing my job. We're not going to have enough time to cover this, but if people want comment for a whole episode

around startup ideas related to a newsletter-based business, but one thing we didn't really cover today is how do you know if your idea for, you know, building a newsletter is a good idea, right? Like you intuitively, you know, you came from Morning Brew and you had some intuition that big desk energy. There was, I mean, I guess it's just your personal story and what's going through your mind. So maybe there isn't too much to think about it. But I'm just curious, how should people think about their idea for starting a Beehive newsletter? Yeah, I think it ultimately depends on what your end goal is, right? So even though this video was like

an hour and 15 minutes of like high packed how to grow as fast as possible, like a growth marketer and make as much money as you possibly can through boost and ads. And I think that's kind of like the perception and market of what Beehive has been built for. Because like we did build these tools from my experience at Morning Brew, which like the name of the game for me at Morning Brew was let's grow as quickly as we possibly can. And Beehive is basically my brain through that experience put into a platform built for that. So like this is like the high flying growth view of what this can be. But like, I don't do big desk energy to make money.

It's like not really a business for me. I get more benefit out of being able to send an email to 90,000 people every Tuesday about how we're building the company, about my philosophies around startups and business and growth and monetization and work life balance and like all of these different things and topics that I write about. And I get more benefit. Like I've hosted three founder masterminds in Costa Rica with like 25 amazing things. founders that are now like my boy's like very close friends and relationships who are all building like multi million dollar companies and they all came from reading the newsletter

total strangers before that so like I'm doing this more for community thought leadership and the value I get out of publicizing the journey the money's like a nice to have that pays the bills and I know how to like pull the levers to to make that happen so I say that with like some people want to see a newsletter as a channel to make a lot of money like I kind of explained and you can monetize via subscriptions and ads and boost and grow super fast and like that's great. Some people are going to use as top of funnel for community and courses. Some people like you, it's like you have an agency, you have other businesses and properties, and you being a thought leader and someone that people go out of their way to read and trust

is better for your portfolio of businesses and just like life endeavors. So I think it's important to start with like what you're trying to get out of the newsletter because there's all different shapes and sizes of what you can leverage it for. I want to share my screen for a second. Yeah, I've been sharing for way too long, so it's all you. So I met, I'll tell you a little story before I share my screen, actually. So there's a friend of mine and someone I used to work with, she started a newsletter and wrote like a couple newsletters. And I thought that they were amazing and that they would really help her.

build a brand for herself, have this asset, have it be a creative outlet, and really transform her life. But she stopped. And I had coffee with her recently. I said, why did you stop? And she just said, you know, life got in the way. And I know it's something I should be doing.

But, you know, I guess I didn't have the time or whatever. And I said, you know what? The greatest thing I've done has been, one of the greatest things I've done in my career since COVID. it has been consistently posting. And that means on X, and it means on a newsletter and stuff like that. And I said, if I were you,

I would just pick a weekly cadence and just post something. And I gave the example of Seth Godin. Seth Godin has been writing a daily blog for the last like 14 years. And some days, Seth Godin has an incredible story that he shares. And some days,

it's like a two-line, you know, post. And it's just a thought that came into his head. But he ships no matter what. He made that commitment to his self. So all I told my friend was, I'd want you to make this commitment. She actually just texted me.

Here, I'll share my screen. We might have to blur out some of this, Roth. I don't know what we were blurring out. But she just sent a message, you know, Greg, you're so right, consistently you have inspired me. She says, the consistent newsletter is really the foundation to unlocking everything else because it builds trust, engagement and your brand, communicating your

essence and what you're really bringing to the table to share. And she goes, and I think this is actually one of the most important things she said. She says, it was helpful to speak into the fear of not delivering top-notch content if I write more often. And then she reminded me today, she said, thank you so much for the encouragement. I really appreciate. I really appreciate it. I bring this story up because I think that a lot of people fear not starting and not being consistent. And I think that I'm not saying that everyone should write a newsletter, but I still think I think that everyone should try and commit to the process because the upside we've seen today is pretty big. And I was just curious your thoughts on that. And I want to end

on that note. Yeah, I mean, I've said it, I think even in one of my most recent newsletters, writing weekly and sharing my thoughts online has probably been the highest leverage thing that I've done in my entire career. It's opened so many doors to angel investing, meeting other founders, meeting people who are doing really cool shit and are either inspired by my journey or inspire me by bringing me into their journey. and it's just unlocked more doors that I can explain in like a 30 second unprompted clip, but it's been like the highest ROI thing possible. So I think like in reflecting kind of on like everything we ran through, I think I just gave like the crash course of like intense growth marketing and monetization for like a high growth newsletter.

And I feel like that could be overwhelming for like a ton of people. I get a lot of enjoyment just right. I got enjoying when I wrote to a thousand people for the first month and like barely anyone responded, but I felt productive and I got a lot of like getting my thoughts out onto paper. So take what you want out of the long video. Like you don't have to do all 15 things that we ran through. You could choose one or two of them. You don't even have to be like a high growth startup that puts money or a high growth newsletter that puts money into acquisition. You should just focus on kind of like what is your end goal. And some are very entrepreneurial and

startups and like want to build their business, build their pipeline. Others just enjoy writing and sharing content. And I think obviously I'm very bullish on email as a medium. If people want to get started with Beehive, how do they do it? I think we're hooking you up with a nice promo code too. So they can get a discount. So I guess look in the comments. I think we're going to give Greg and Greg's followers a nice 30% off for the first three months. But we're also the most affordable platform in the market by far. So call should not be an inhibitor to using the platform. And if you've learned anything from the video, you can make a lot of money fairly quickly. And my, I didn't hit on this,

but my North Star for the business is how many people are actually making more money through our platform than they're paying us. And like that, I think is like the real value of the platform. If you pay us $79 a month, but you're making $500 a month through the ad network and boost, like that is ROI positive to our users and our ultimate North Star. So a very long-winded way of answering your question, Behive.com, and then use the promo code that we're going to give Greg to get a discount. Beautiful. I'll pin that as a comment in the YouTube. And, dude, Tyler, come back again. This was awesome. People really appreciate these like master classes around, okay, where do I start? How do I do it? Best practices. So, thank you for

spilling the knowledge and the sauce. You under promise and over the way. Copy everything. Copy everything, right? I showed you my live unfiltered account and how. I set up everything and it's free for the taking. So I love it. Later, Tyler. Appreciate you. Cool. Peace.