Future of Newsletters with Tyler Denk, Founder & CEO at Beehiiv

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:03]

Tyler Denk is incredibly driven.

Tyler Denk [00:00:04]

For the next X years, if you want it to succeed, and you don't want to be the statistic of the nine out of ten companies that fail, there are a lot of sacrifices involved, and you really need to put in the work.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:14]

Tyler Denk is very smart…

Tyler Denk  [00:00:16]

So I'm like, reading a book right now on quantum physics. And I just think time and gravity and relativity is, like, the most interesting concept in the perception of…

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:28]:

Tyler Denk is extremely humble.

Tyler Denk [00:00:31]

I grew up, like, pretty middle to low class. Uh, my parents worked extremely hard to put me through school and give me every opportunity where I could do what I've been able to accomplish. And so there's, like, a deep-rooted, like, I want to achieve a lot to be able to help my parents.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:48]

Tyler Denk is a team player.

Tyler Denk [00:00:50]

Success to me isn't just success for myself and the company, but it's everyone that we are touching along the way through the platform and through our ambitious goals as a company, um, is really motivating as well. So there's personal intrinsic motivation, there's extrinsic motivation.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:08]

You might be thinking that's a lot of adjectives for someone I spoke to for only about 60 minutes or so but, in those 60 minutes, Tyler Denk showed me why investors were happy to give him $16.7 MILLION DOLLARS so he could take his venture Beehiiv to the next level.

Tyler Denk [00:01:24]

So, yeah, my name is Tyler Dank. I am a co-founder and CEO of Beehiiv. Beehiiv is an email newsletter platform that helps content creators and publishers create, monetize, and scale their audience. Previously I was the second employee at Morning Brew and helped scale up that company, building a lot of the website, the newsletter, the referral program, the ad tools, et cetera there. Um, and that's kind of led me to where I am today.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:50]

In the course of the next 30 or 40 minutes, I hope I can do justice to the amazing grit and determination that Tyler Denk displayed throughout our 60 Minutes interview. 

Get ready and strap in for yet another first-class flight. 

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:11]

Hi, my name is Yong-Soo Chung and I am a first-generation Korean-American entrepreneur living the American dream. I started Urban EDC to cater to enthusiasts of everyday carry gear. I also own two other successful ventures: GrowthJet, a climate-neutral certified third-party logistics company for emerging e-commerce brands, and SpottedByHumphrey, an online boutique curating dog goods for good dogs. Through these three ventures, my business has generated over $20 million dollars in 8 years and I'm here to tell you how YOU can do the same!

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:45]

On today's episode of First Class Founders, I'm sharing my learnings from my conversation with the founder and CEO of Beehiiv, Tyler Denk.

Tyler Denk [00:02:54]

What's up? Thanks for having me.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:55]

If you're a regular listener of this podcast, you already know that I use Beehiiv for the First Class Founders Newsletter, and I'm incredibly happy with its offerings. I've done several episodes on this podcast and how to grow your newsletter, and Beehiiv features prominently in every single one of them. But I want to make it absolutely clear that this episode is not sponsored by Beehiiv or anything like that. I just love what Tyler and his team are doing and wanted to jam on newsletters, company building, and being a founder. Tyler and I spoke about various things, starting with his first venture during his college days Venture-storm, his stint as the Growth Engineer at Morning Brew, stepping away from Morning Brew to build Beehiiv, the various growth levers he used to scale Beehiiv, and finally, his thoughts about the current crop of founders and startups.

Tyler also bared his heart and shared some raw thoughts about losing his mentor and CTO Andrew Platkin, just five months after Beehiiv launched. Specifically, he spoke about how immense Andrew's loss was, how much it impacted him both personally and professionally, and how he navigated the tough moments after Andrew's loss, both as a friend and the CEO of Beehiiv. These wonderful moments are a part of a special segment available exclusively in the special ad-free version of this episode to the Premium members of First Class Founders. To become a premium member of First Class Founders, sign up@firstclassfounders.com/join. I'll leave a link in the show notes.

Go ahead and open up that link in the tab while I get this flight ready for takeoff.

Let’s get this flight ready for take-off!

Tyler Denk [00:04:36]

Hi, I'm Tyler Denk.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:04:43]

Growing up, Tyler Dank was lucky to learn the importance of having a strong work ethic from not one, but two amazing role models. The first, his grandfather...

Tyler Denk [00:04:54]

My grandfather, I guess, is a founder. He started a shoe store in downtown Baltimore and employs three or four of my uncles and my cousin. It's like a full family business and scaled up to multiple locations. He's 96, I believe and still goes to work every single day.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:11]

...and the second, his father.

Tyler Denk [00:05:13]

My dad woke up at 04:30 every morning to work for the government for 42 or 49 years, I believe. And so watching my dad up at night, we're watching an Orioles game, it's 10:00. And just him being like, I got to wake up in 5 hours and do it every single day for 40 some years was pretty ridiculous to see. And he also started a side business detailing cars. So on his off days, when he wasn't waking up at 04:30, he would be detailing cars for extra income and as like a hobby.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:43]

To say that this work ethic has seeped into Tyler would be an understatement.

Tyler Denk [00:05:47]

I typically wake up at 05:30 a.m., go to the gym in the morning, get to my desk by 8, and work till usually ten. So it's probably like 14-ish hours. We're definitely in the thick of things right now, and I probably wouldn't have it any other way, but it's definitely a lot.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:06:03]

But, of course, he's also smart and pragmatic enough to understand that he won't be able to do this forever.

Tyler Denk [00:06:09]

I don't think that this drive lasts forever. And I'll admit I can't imagine at like 45 with a family and kids that I want to lock myself in a room, work remotely for 16 hours by myself, and grind this out. At least I hope not. And while I have this drive and I have very little responsibilities outside of making this business successful, I want to do everything I possibly can to put the company in the best position to succeed.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:06:35]

This desire to win, to put the company in the best position to succeed, is a recurring theme of Tyler's life right from his first venture when he was in college.

Tyler Denk [00:06:44]

Going into college, I was always very interested in startups and technology. I read TechCrunch every single day, routinely looking at what was happening in the startup world. And so I joined an entrepreneurship program or several different entrepreneurship programs at the University of Maryland.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:07:01]

While attending the University of Maryland, Tyler quickly realized that there was a big gap. On the one hand, or rather on the one side of the campus, were all these students with brilliant business plans at the same time.

Tyler Denk [00:07:14]

We have so many smart engineers on the other side of campus who are capable of building these projects, they probably want the experience on their resume.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:07:24]

All that was needed was to bring these two together, which is exactly what Venturestorm was about.

Tyler Denk [00:07:29]

And so the initial inception of Venturestorm was, why don't we connect the entrepreneurs and startups on campus to software developers on campus to kind of build these vibrant entrepreneurial communities on college campuses? Kind of a win-win for everyone.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:07:43]

And because they were all broke college students without any venture-backed money, they had to work extra hard to grow Venturestorm.

Tyler Denk [00:07:50]

We couldn't just hire and build and scale this company. And so we had to get very creative with how we scaled our user base. And so one, like the grittiest blog post we would post on Medium, we would post on Hacker News, on Reddit, trying to get users to join our platform. We also identified, obviously, one-half of the marketplace as college developers and computer science students. And what we would do is we would apply to be sponsors for all of these university hackathons across the East Coast. So we sponsored the University of Michigan, the University of Harvard.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:08:24]

While most kids his age were partying and having tons of fun, Tyler and his partners were busy trying to make Venturestorm a success.

Tyler Denk [00:08:31]

We would spend our weekends, rather than tailgating, driving up to Boston to sleep in an auditorium on the floor in Harvard, just so we had a booth and could sign up these computer science students to join our platform.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:08:44]

Although Venture Storm was a brilliant idea, it soon became unsustainable for various reasons and Tyler's struggle to keep it afloat. But the whole experience had taught him an incredibly valuable lesson that taught a.

Tyler Denk [00:08:58]

And so that taught a lot of grit and just finding ways to get from point A to point B without throwing money at problems and a lot of sacrifices. Honestly.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:09:08]

Honestly, if you're an early-stage founder, you should definitely note this down as a serious lesson. 

LESSON NUMBER ONE: Money can solve a lot of problems, but there are also many ways to solve problems without money.

Here's the thing. I found that whenever life teaches you lessons, it also gives you opportunities to immediately put them into action, as Tyler soon found out. After he graduated in 2016, Tyler found himself working on gigs as a freelancer that summer itself. After deciding to shut down Venturestorm, Tyler was approached by Austin RIef, the co-founder and COO of a media company called the Morning Brew. Morning Brew was getting pretty popular, and Austin was looking for someone to help him with a feature he wanted to implement for the newsletter.

Tyler Denk [00:09:53]

They didn't have an engineer on the team and basically just asked, would you be willing to build a social share mechanism at the bottom of every story? So it's pretty standard now, but being able to share a story on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or email, we looked at the Skim and Axios. They had those features. He's like, we really want to build that. We have a little bit of a viral co-efficient, but that should accelerate it.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:10:15]

The Morning Brew had built a bit of a tribe for itself, which was helping it grow viral occasionally. But Austin's idea was that this social sharing feature would help accelerate the whole thing. Tyler immediately knew what his answer would be.

Tyler Denk [00:10:30]

The answer was no, but I had no money. And I was like, sure, I'll do that. And so kind of, like, fought my way through figuring it out, almost quit five times while doing it, and over the course of, like, 3 weeks, eventually got like v1 out. We launched it.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:10:44]

Austin probably liked what Tyler built because he then invited Tyler to do more of the same thing.

Tyler Denk [00:10:50]

And he was like, we have unlimited other things that we want to do. We just don't have the tech talent. So if you want to continue to build on the contract with us, we'll work with you. Throughout the summer ended up building, like, spending 40, 50, 60 hours a week working exclusively on Morning Brew, and he asked me to join full-time.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:06]

The official title Tyler had at Morning Brew was Growth Engineer. But what he was really doing was building solutions to help Morning Brew grow from 100,000 subscribers to well over 3.5 million subscribers. And a million of those came through. One of the first features he built for Morning Brew- a referral program.

Tyler Denk [00:11:29]

Where if people were organically already sharing, what would it look like to incentivize them? With stickers, I don't know, t-shirts, mugs, sweatshirts, whatever. And so building out the mechanism to make the referral program really much take off, that was like a huge accelerant growth. I'd say that was probably the first thing that I built initially on a contract that really moved the needle for us.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:50]

And when Tyler says it moved the needle, he means to move the needle.

Tyler Denk [00:11:55]

Went on to lead to over a million subscribers by the time that I was there, only through the referral program. So an incredible viral growth mechanism for us.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:12:05]

Keep in mind here that Morning Brew's referral program works so well because of two key components. One, they already had a strong brand identity with a core group of loyal readers, and two, they were large enough that a referral program could really move the needle, even if just one or 2% of their readers participated. If you're just starting out with your own newsletter, I don't recommend launching a Morning Brew-like referral campaign just yet. Instead, focus on delivering amazing content consistently, then find other similar-sized newsletters to swap recommendations. There are different growth levers to use at different stages of your business. Knowing which ones to use at different stages, that's the key. Actually, I think this is an important lesson for founders to remember.

LESSON NUMBER TWO: Understand which growth levers are better in the early days and which are better when applied at scale. Quick side note here, if you want to learn more about newsletter growth, I highly recommend you listen to my solo episode on newsletter growth, episode 35, and also episode 38 with my guest Chenell Basilio. Anyways, back to Tyler. The lessons Tyler learned with Venturestorm came in incredibly handy while working with and working for Morning Brew.

Tyler Denk [00:13:20]

My first year and a half there, we didn't spend a dollar on acquisition, so it was here's where subscribers are coming from. Here's how our landing page is converting. What would happen if we change the CTA, change the landing page, change the color of the button, and change the different incentives in the referral program? There are so many different levers to pull that I think once you can really nail just when you do get to the paid acquisition side of things, knowing that you're in a good place foundationally, it just makes the paid acquisition that much more effective.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:13:52]

Tyler was definitely in a very good place foundationally because this grittiness principle proved foundational for his next venture, which also happens to be his current venture, Beehiiv. I went into a fair bit of detail with Tyler about his Beehiiv journey, the growth levers he's deployed, and the current state of the newsletter space. I also got him to open up about an incredibly difficult topic the passing away of his mentor and Beehiiv CTO, Andrew Platkin. 

Yong-Soo Chung [00:15:32]

Before the break, I told you how Tyler's stints with Venturestorm and Morning Brew helped him develop an important entrepreneurial muscle, the grittiness muscle. It is what allowed him to come up with innovative ways to grow and scale, rather than to throw money at a problem hoping to make it go away. If you've been following the growth of Beehiiv, then you know that Beehiiv has quickly grown to become a serious player in the newsletter space. Even though they started only two years ago in August 2021, they have fearlessly gone toe to toe with some pretty popular names out there. And they have not only managed to hold their own against them but also shake things up. 

Tyler Denk [00:16:10]

Before we really came in and decided to innovate and offer all these different tools for monetization and scaling. If you look at the incumbent players in the space, we are an overpriced SaaS platform. You pay us $2,000 a month to contact your 50,000 people. We'll give you the baseline data. You can click in, and you can unsubscribe someone, but you're building the website. You have to build your own growth tools. You have to figure out how to monetize yourself. We are an email service provider who will send emails on your behalf, and everything else is on you.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:16:42]

In fact, Morning Brew was built on the same ecosystem that Tyler just described. But, Tyler and his team of super smart growth engineers custom-built a lot of additional tools on top to help the different teams at Morning Brew get useful data to build their part of the newsletter better.

Tyler Denk [00:16:59]

We built our own website. We built our own growth tools. We built our own data funnels and cohort analysis. We built our own sales team and sales tools, and we tied it all together into this perfectly well-oiled ecosystem to say the content team has what they need to build beautiful newsletters and try different and experiment with different things in the newsletter. And it looks really good. The sales team has the data that they need and the tools they have to be able to go to partners and advertisers and sell these advertisements and report on them accurately. The growth team has the right data. The right web infrastructure to test different things, and we were able to grow and write and sell really well. And so that was a three-and-a-half-year effort of custom building this entire ecosystem.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:48]

This three-and-a-half-year effort not only helped Morning Brew turn a profit on revenue of $20 million in 2020 but also resulted in Morning Brew being eventually bought out by Business Insider. More importantly, this three-and-a-half-year effort combined with the lethargic incumbents in the email newsletter space, is what planted the seed for developing BeehiIV in Tyler's mind.

Tyler Denk [00:18:11]

And so I saw that as an opportunity of why can't every newsletter, whether you're 500 subscribers large or 500,000 subscribers large, enter an ecosystem where you have best-in-class website acquisition, data growth, and monetization.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:24]

I can attest to the fact that ever since Beehiiv entered the space, its competitors seem to have been shaken out of their slumbers, launching a lot of similar features.

Tyler Denk [00:18:33]

And I think it's good. I also think the market is so massive because there are these legacy incumbent players that are just email service providers who don't offer this suite of tools. And there are a lot of publishers and content creators still on those legacy incumbent players that are just paying 1000 $2,000 a month to reach their 50,000 subscribers. And I think that's real value in what we are trying to build. We charge $99 a month for up to 100,000 subscribers. My goal as a platform is how do we give significantly more revenue to our users than they ever pay us.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:19:09]

I love how clear Tyler's thoughts are in regards to where Beehiiv stands as a platform. I especially love his definition of what a platform should aspire to do. That is, how do we give significantly more value to our users than they ever pay us? This is a question every founder should ask themselves.

LESSON NUMBER THREE: Always deliver more value to the user than what they are paying you. Having heard from Tyler how important it was for him to grow without spending lots of money, I was curious to know whether he had managed the same at Beehiiv. Tyler was so clear about not spending money on acquisition in the early days that he even instructed Beehiiv's head of growth to act accordingly.

Tyler Denk [00:19:52]

Our head of growth actually comes from an agency, so that's kind of like all he knew previously was how to spend money and optimize campaigns. And I kind of gave him the assignment of, okay, help us grow without spending a dollar.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:20:03]

If this sounds a bit harsh or a bit of a difficult task, well, here's a surprise for you. It worked.

Tyler Denk [00:20:09]

And it got our foundation very, very strong to the fact that when we eventually did turn on paid acquisition in like month 13-ish, we knew where people were converting from how to optimize it and they were entering a more robust system of converting in the first place that we've already invested in.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:20:28]

But, I was still curious to know how he had managed to make it happen. What were the growth levers he had to use to make this wonderful growth happen organically without any paid acquisition? It turns out that the first growth lever was actually something quite straightforward, but also genius.

Tyler Denk [00:20:44]

Our initial seed round was very strategic, so we raised money from people who had newsletters, had a large audience, were familiar with my work at Morning Brew, or were unhappy with an existing solution that they were using. And strategically we wanted them involved from early on.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:21:02]

So Beehiiv’s first growth lever was raising seed capital from early adapters who already had significant distribution through their large audiences, thus getting them truly invested in your product.

Tyler Denk [00:21:16]

For example, Liquidity has a large newsletter execsum. They were using a competing platform, not sold on it, they invested. Now he's invested financially on the cap table and incentivized to help us grow.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:21:29]

Simply put, Liquidity no longer was just another early adapter, they now had skin in the game and needed Beehiiv to succeed.

Tyler Denk [00:21:38]

And so using Liquidity as an example, but multiplying that by 10, 15, 20 of the strategic investors that we had involved, that was our initial go-to-market strategy was “Let's raise money from people who can initially be our early adapters.”

Yong-Soo Chung [00:21:53]

Having these early adopters invest in their seed round was also beneficial in another matter. It bought them time and helped them get some honest feedback because they were.

Tyler Denk [00:22:03]

On the cap table and incentivized to grow with us and not to leave. That bought us a lot of patience where they could suggest like, this isn't working well, or it'd be really nice if you had XYZ feature. We were able to prioritize that and build those features for them, knowing that they weren't going to leave in frustration the next day because they are obviously incentivized to help us grow.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:22:24]

That's an excellent lesson for early-stage founders looking to raise seed capital.

LESSON NUMBER FOUR: Raise capital from early adapters who are incentivized to help you grow quickly.

Tyler Denk [00:22:36]

That's one I'd say like a cheat code for startups in general of getting early adapters on the cap table also because they aren't just dumb money per se, they aren't just investing to get involved with around, but they're users, so they know exactly what you should be building. They almost become like quasi-advisors as well, where they can say “I was on X platform before they did this really well.” So they're investors who are actually giving very tactical advice, which then encourages us to take that advice to heart build it, and expand our offering and our platform.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:23:06]

The second growth lever that Tyler described could have been something you might have read in a book titled How to Interview for Your Ideal Job because it involved Tyler leaning quite a bit on his previous success at Morning Brew.

Tyler Denk [00:23:20]

Morning Brew was such a success. And we started Beehiiv about a year after they got acquired by Business Insiders. So fairly large exit. They've kind of become like a gold standard in the newsletter space, really being able to tell the narrative that I and my two co-founders were early employees, early engineers at Morning Brew, we know what it takes to scale a newsletter from 100,000 to 3 and a half million and beyond. We know what content creators want, what the writers want, what the sales team wants, how to grow, what data is important, and what tools are important to help you scale and monetize. That narrative does sell, and it should, because we actually aren't just building SaaS, we're building a product and a platform that we know based on the foundation of things that we know work. And I think that has helped a lot in just legitimacy of, like, yes, we're a new platform, but we do know what we're doing.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:10]

So Beehiiv's second growth lever was leaning on the previous success to help grow Morning Brew to 3.5 million subscribers. The third growth lever that Tyler was able to operate was something that I heavily recommend all the time.

Tyler Denk [00:24:28]

And then it's also kind of cliche, but I'd say, like, the building in public also really does help.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:31]

Anyone who follows me knows that I love building all my businesses in public, and anyone who follows Tyler knows that he has been incredibly transparent about building Beehiiv in public.

Tyler Denk [00:24:41]

I think fundamentally people align more with an individual person than a brand and kind of like self-nominating myself as the face of the brand, being able to talk about the ups and downs of the business, what we're prioritizing, what's working, what's not working, sharing revenue numbers, sharing growth numbers, but also sharing things that we had tried that didn't work out. And just being very realistic about the journey of building this company has helped us through my audience on Twitter and LinkedIn, which, granted, isn't massive, but those people who do follow have seen us go from nothing, zero dollars in revenue, a platform and underdog, trying to prove ourselves to see how much we actually do care about solving the problem of our users. And that does buy you one, like, people who want to be a part of the journey, and two people who trust us that we aren't just some behemoth company that doesn't care about our users, but we're in the weeds, in the trenches, talking to all of our users and really taking their feedback to heart.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:25:37]

I certainly couldn't have put it any better myself. So Beehiiv's third growth lever was building in public. I also wondered if Tyler had managed to spot any patterns for successful newsletters from the vast amounts of data that Beehiiv had collected since the start. Tyler's answer can be summed up by the very first statement he uttered in response to my question.

Tyler Denk [00:26:01]

It's definitely different. Like, on a case-by-case basis. Like, there are so many different types of newsletters and each of them has such a different foundational goal of what they're trying to achieve.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:26:09]
The rest of his answer basically went into detail about how all the different newsletters were different.

Tyler Denk [00:26:16]

Some are truly just hobbyist projects, or they begin as hobbyist projects. Some go broad in general just to aggregate news and data and like a certain topic. Others go very niche and want to target product managers in this type of industry.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:26:31]

But despite all the differences, there was something common to all the successful newsletters.

Tyler Denk [00:26:38]

I think the most important thing is to understand who your target audience is. Like, who are you actually writing for? Because that dictates a lot of other decisions downstream. Like how are you going to monetize? How are you going to acquire these readers? What should you be writing about and what should you be offering as like, a value add to your readers? You really have to understand who they are.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:26:58]

Know your audience. So many of the past guests on First Class Founders have reiterated this point. You have to know the audience you're creating your content for. That's just a fundamental part of being a creator. Oh, and there's another question that also needs to be answered.

Tyler Denk [00:27:14]

What are your goals with the newsletter? A lot of people, I think, look at the Hustle Morning Brew, Axios, and Milk Road and want to be the next version of that. And they want to build a sustainable business that is generating revenue. And I think it's no secret now, with the number of acquisitions in the newsletter space, it's an incredibly economically favorable business to go into.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:27:37]

Lesson number five if you're planning to start your own newsletter, ask yourself what your goals are and who your newsletter is for. I think Tyler summed it up best in these words.

Tyler Denk [00:27:48]

Do you want to go for a home-run business and generate revenue? Do you just want to find a niche in the gaming community and be a voice and write about things that you care about? And from there, I think there are a lot of different options that you can kind of explore in terms of what to do next and how to hit your audience and scale.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:28:08]

Coming up in a bit, I asked Tyler to share his thoughts on what the future holds for Beehiiv. Plus some incredibly useful advice from Tyler for first-time founders and entrepreneurs. But first, I want to give you a sneak preview of the specially crafted exclusive segment that the premium members of First Class Founders are listening to at this very moment. I craft a special segment every week for premium members of the First Class Founders Community. 

Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please? This week, the special segment contains Tyler's thoughts about his mentor and CTO Andrew Platkin, who passed away a mere five months after joining BeehiIV as CTO. Tyler was introduced to Andrew while working with Morning Brew.

Tyler Denk [00:28:59]

Me being both the only engineer and a self-taught engineer, like fairly vulnerable, and Austin the COO was smart enough to identify that, and he reached out to his investors. And one of the investors says, “My friend Andrew is the smartest engineer I've ever met.”

Yong-Soo Chung [00:29:14]

Soon, Andrew was helping him out with a bunch of things, even though Andrew himself was employed elsewhere.

Tyler Denk [00:29:20]

Anytime that we had an issue or I messed something up, which was fairly frequent, I would message or text Andrew out of the blue. He could jump in and fix it in like ten minutes.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:29:30]

Even when BeehiIV launched the public, Andrew took on a full-time role as CTO without asking for any kind of competition for the first two months.

Tyler Denk [00:29:38]

It's the summer of 2021. I approached Andrew to see if he would want to work with us and help us out.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:29:45]

Andrew relayed a lot of early tech initiatives for Beehiiv. He was actively looking into some of the issues Beehiiv was having. When news came that he was no more.

Tyler Denk [00:29:59]

He passed away on a Friday. I found out on that Saturday, by far the worst day of my life.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:30:07]

On the subject of Andrew and what he meant to Tyler and BeehiIV, Tyler had a lot of thoughts to share. I pressed him, especially on the business side of things, and asked him to share his thoughts on how tough it was to navigate that ship in such a difficult storm. All of this and more can be heard in extensive detail in a special segment of the episode available exclusively to premium members of First Class Founders in the ad-free version of the podcast feed. Additionally, the First Class Founders membership also comes with a ton of other perks. For instance, members of First Class Founders also get early access to podcast episodes, bonus episodes, including the entire Raw unedited interview, the ability to ask me anything, and much more. Head on over to Firstclassfounders.com/join. I'll put a link in the show notes, and while you do that, I'll queue up the final segment of this episode. 

All right, let's now get back to Tyler and his thoughts about entrepreneurship, because it turns out he has some strong views on the current startup landscape.

Tyler Denk [00:31:15]

I think far too many people that I meet at these networking events and dinners are asking me, am I hitting my metrics to raise a Series A or what does a Series B look like? And these companies are building very much for the perception of what an investor would think about them versus how we get to profitability, how we make our cost economics more favorable and scale the company in a way that it becomes a profitable, sustainable company in itself.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:31:42]

Truth be told, this has been a tug of war ever since VC-funded Internet startups became a regular thing. Some startups need capital to grow and therefore might need VC money. Others require the user base to grow first before VCs can infuse additional capital to help scale the business.

Tyler Denk [00:31:59]

I understand that there are definitely companies that require a lot of capital to get off the ground and some businesses and industries are more capital-intensive, but so many are not. And the conversations around startup and entrepreneurship are so money and VC-focused where I think they should be, are you solving the problems of a customer and can you innovate and provide new solutions in a space?

Yong-Soo Chung [00:32:22]

This thinking was also reflected in his responses when I asked him about what advice he would give to entrepreneurs. The two bits of advice Tyler offered were, to put it mildly, quite interesting, to say the least.

Tyler Denk [00:32:35]

One is like, be very careful with who you work with and choose your co-founders wisely. My two co-founders, Ben and Jake, are incredible. They're so smart, they're so committed, they're so bought in, and they're very good at what they do and very reliable.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:32:50]

It's unorthodox advice but is definitely good advice and something for all entrepreneurs and founders to keep in mind. Purely from a practical standpoint.

Tyler Denk [00:33:00]

Everyone has extrinsic motivations, everyone has different things going on in their life. To go on a journey and build something that you want to last, you need to do it with people that you can trust and rely on. And so the amount of times that I've had to call Ben or Jake while they're asleep in the middle of the night and no hesitation to wake up, jump on their computer, put out a hotfix, and fix things, it's hard to find people that are willing to do whatever to scale and build a business with you. And so being very careful in who you choose to work like, I could not have done any of this without Ben and Jake and Andrew initially as well.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:33:35]

So, advice number one, choose co-founders who are willing to do whatever to scale and build a business with you. Throughout this interview, the one thing that I was constantly amazed by was Tyler's amazing work ethic. And I wasn't surprised at all when it turned out to be Tyler's second bit of advice for entrepreneurs.

Tyler Denk [00:33:53]

I'm locked into my room, I wake up at 05:30. I work till 10-11. It's no joke and I love it. And maybe I'm a psychopath and I just have a very strong vision of where I want this business to go and there's nothing I want to get in the way of that happening. I think I read Mark Cuban's book The Sport of Business, and that always resonated with me of “If you're not working, there's someone else out there that's working harder than you to beat you at what you're doing.” and that is how I operate every day. I want to work harder than anyone.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:34:24]

This is definitely an amazing mindset to have for sure. Although I would be wary of pushing yourself to the point of burnout by following this mindset blindly.

Tyler Denk [00:34:33]

The quote that's always resonated with me, and I'm going to butcher it. But the only thing you really control in life is your effort. And so maybe I'm not the smartest or gifted at XYZ skill, but I will outwork every single person that I come across, and that's the one thing I can control.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:34:48]

On that, my friend, we are both in agreement. If you listen to my past conversation in episode 36 with Clint Murphy, you might remember me mentioning something called the inner scorecard. Your effort is a part of your inner scorecard, and your inner scorecard is the only thing you can control. So, yeah, that's our final lesson for today.

LESSON NUMBER SIX: Build a team that strongly believes in your company's mission and is willing to work harder than everyone else to scale and grow the business. Listening to Tyler's thoughts reassured me of two things. One, Tyler has incredible clarity of thought about what his goals for Beehiiv are. And two, his incredible work ethic would prove instrumental in him achieving those goals. But what excites me, even more, is Tyler's absolute clarity of thought regarding Beehiiv’s long-term future. He confirmed to me that he wasn't looking at any form of exit yet, neither by way of IPO nor by way of acquisition.

Tyler Denk [00:35:49]

It's always weird in the early stages, like we're 18 months old, to say the word IPO. Those letters just don't really cross my mind. But we're not looking to get acquired. We're looking to be acquirers. I believe we are the innovators in the space. We have a tremendous nucleus of talent. We have a very, very ambitious roadmap. And if MailChimp could sell for $12 billion for what they accomplished, I think what we're building is far more ambitious and powerful than what they have built. And so we're looking to be innovators in the space. We're looking to make acquisitions. We're not looking to be acquired.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:36:24]

As a newsletter writer, and as a newsletter writer on Beehiiv, this is wonderful news. I'd strongly recommend you consider moving your newsletter to Beehiiv as well. Exciting times are ahead. I'll leave my referral link in the show notes. You should get it on the ground floor of this flight to the moon if you ask me. Before we wrap up today's episode, let's quickly recap the six amazing lessons we learned from Tyler on today's episode:

LESSON NUMBER ONE: Money can solve a lot of problems, but there are also many ways to solve problems without money. 

LESSON NUMBER TWO: Understand which growth levers are better in the early days and which are better when applied at scale.

LESSON NUMBER THREE: Always deliver more value to the user than what they are paying you.

LESSON NUMBER FOUR: Raise capital from early adopters who are incentivized to help you grow quickly.

LESSON NUMBER FIVE: If you're planning to start your own newsletter. Ask yourself what your goals are and who your newsletter is.

LESSON NUMBER SIX: Build a team that strongly believes in your company's mission and is willing to work harder than everyone else to scale and grow the business.

You can connect with Tyler on his Twitter.

Tyler Denk [00:37:37]

@denk_tweets is the Twitter handle fairly active there? If you've enjoyed anything that I've said in this podcast, I communicate a lot of that pretty transparently through Twitter, so that's probably the number one channel. And from there, you can find Beehiiv and all the other channels.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:37:59]

All right, that wraps up today's show. In the next episode of First Class Founders. I'm sharing some detailed thoughts on Meta's new social platform threads. We'll dive into what it is, if I think it'll succeed long-term, and why I'm doubling down on it. For now, I'll even get into how I'm using it to grow First Class Founders, the podcast, and the newsletter. If you've been curious about threats, then tune in next week. And one last thing before I go. If you're a new listener, you enjoyed this episode. You can follow the show by going to Firstclassfounders.com and clicking on the link that matches your preferred podcast player, like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or you can also add your voice to the show by leaving a message on Firstclassfounders.com. For example, what do you think of this episode specifically? And when you get a chance, could you also head over to Firstclassfounders.com/review and leave the podcast a five-star review. It really helps boost credibility for the show, which means more incredible guests for you. And why wouldn't you want that? I'll leave a link in the show notes to leave us a five-star review. Thank you so much. If you want to connect with me, you can hit me up on Twitter at Yongs-Soo Chung. I also joined the Threads bandwagon, so you can find me on Threads at Yong-Soo Chung as well. You can find links to all my social accounts in the show notes. I'll see you in the next episode of First Class Founders.