beehiiv Is Going To The Moon

Welcome to Rebel Markets Newsletter by Gannon Breslin. If you haven’t subscribed, please join to learn more about investing, business, personal finance, and all things that involve money alongside 5,234+ other subscribers.

Let me start this off by me saying sorry. 

It has been well over a couple of months since I have put out a Rebel Markets newsletter. Many of you know that my head has been just above water building my NFT newsletter The Drop and I am happy to say that as I put this newsletter issue out The Drop has eclipsed over 20,500 newsletter subscribers, 7,000 discord members, 65,300 Twitter followers, and has a full team of 9 working diligently on building the biggest NFT/Crypto media brand in the space. If you haven't subbed you are truly missing out (click here).  

Rebel Markets isn't going anywhere - my thoughts on finance, investing, NFTs, crypto, and all things money swirl around my head 24/7, and I will always be eager (although less consistently than before) to put out a newsletter about what is going on in the market.  

What is this newsletter about?

Fortunately, this past year I have been able to start my journey into angel investing and have dipped my pockets into two amazing companies. beehiiv in particular was my first angel investment and what this article is going to be covering. Needless to say, to be fully transparent as usual, I do have money on the line so I am naturally biased - but I have also put my money where my mouth is. You might have noticed that this email is not being sent on Substack (the prior service I have used for sending emails). I have built The Drop from the ground up using beehiiv as our email service (switched Rebel Markets over as well) and have watched the growth of the company and team from the beginning. I can say without a shadow of a doubt, that I personally believe beehiiv is going to the 🌙  not just because it offers dozens of tools that other services don't but also has an outstanding team that is hyperfocused on creators.

What is beehiiv? 🐝

beehiiv is a platform that allows content creators to create and publish a free or paid subscription newsletter. beehiiv offers a wide variety of features such as: 

• Paid subscriptions

• Referral program (not integrated on any other platform)

• Custom domains

• No code newsletter customization

• SEO-optimized web hosting

• Audience polls (more on this later)

• Ad revenue (coming soon)

• Creator-friendly pricing

• Best-in-class deliverability

• Data analytics built by growth gurus

• Multiple team members and publications 

• Templates Monthly recaps of newsletter data and growth

beehiiv was founded by the following former early Morning Brew employees: Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett, and Jacob Hurd.. Recently, co-founder of the Morning Brew Austin Rief joined on as an advisor as well. 

Who is Tyler Denk? 👷‍♂️

That's an important question because it is one of the larger reasons that I initially sought to invest in beehiiv. When it comes to angel investing I have been told by many that you invest in the founder more than you invest in the business. In the end, it's the founder that will overcome obstacles and hire the best team around themselves to get from A to B and hopefully Z. 

Tyler was the second employee at Morning Brew which is the biggest business newsletter in the world. Tyler helped scale Morning Brew from just over 50k subs - a newsletter that has now crossed over 4 million subscribers! Tyler was instrumental in building the early tech and infrastructure that directly facilitated the growth and success of Morning Brew. 

True story: Over the years I have gotten to know several Morning Brew employees, in particular, Ryan Duffy who resided in Dallas at the same time as me. Before beehiiv even existed (and before knowing Tyler), over beers Ryan told me life about Morning Brew and mentioned Tyler's incredible skills at building tools, being a leader, and being one of the crucial members to the success of the Brew. These comments about Tyler were always in the back of my mind and I was pleasantly surprised when he reached out to me before the official beehiiv launch to see if I wanted to be one of the first newsletters on the platform.  

Fast forward to now: Tyler and his team have built a newsletter platform that is shooting for the top and building more tools that I can even keep track of. Amazingly, Tyler still has time to answer my texts about new ideas that the platform can integrate, and more often than not less than 24 hours later, I see them come to life. Tyler has also been crucial for helping me grow The Drop and always lends his sage advice that he learned from his days at the Brew.

Oh, let's not forget to mention the incredible growth:

What Does beehiiv Do Well?

This Tweet below by Tyler himself can explain: 

Substack's Model

One of the main issues I found with Substack and other newsletter platforms is the amount of money that is taken from the creators. With Substack, it is free to create a newsletter, but they take 10% of whatever revenue the creator makes from paid subscriptions.  

While this may not seem like much, it can really start to add up. For example, if a newsletter generates $100,000 in paid subscriptions...Substack gets a cut of $10,000. 

Substack also has a cookie-cutter approach to newsletters design-wise. It is extremely difficult to make your newsletter stand out with the few design options and customizations. A common theme with Susbtack newsletters is they all look the same. (more on this later)

beehiiv’s Model 🐝

While Substack can take a lot of money out of a creator’s pocket, beehiiv charges a predictable flat monthly fee. This flat-monthly fee varies based on the plan that you choose. Below are the available plans and their associated monthly fees: 

Lets take a lot at exactly how much you would be saving via paid newsletter by using Beehiiv as your newsletter platform.

The savings are mind-blowing. A creator with 100,000 paying subscribers saves $99,901 just from using beehiiv! If you are reading this you are smart and can see how this saving multiple continues to expand as the number of subscribers grows.

The beehiiv Experience 

Monetizing via Ads 💰

For newsletters like this one that does not charge their subscribers any sort of fees to view the newsletter, I generated most of our revenue through brand-sponsored ads. While sponsorships are a great way to generate revenue for the creators of free-to-read newsletters, it can sometimes (always) be a difficult and tedious task to find companies that want to purchase an ad. 

However, beehiiv is looking to change the game. beehiiv is developing a solution for this issue that connects writers to companies seeking advertisements and this is expected to launch this year.

Often times creators spend weeks just setting up one deal for one newsletter and thus have to plan well in advance. Most newsletters are a solo team and don't have the infrastructure or system in place to consistently land deals for every newsletter.  beehiiv will allow creators to focus more on what they are great at, writing. Trust me when I say I wish I could have had this feature when I was pumping out two newsletters a week.

beehiiv’s User Interface and User Experience 🛠

Not only is the UI very pleasing to the eye and very easy to use, but you can also add multiple writers to the same publication. This is a game-changer because most of the big newsletters have multiple writers, editors, etc. that help pump out content. 

With beehiiv almost every part of the newsletter is able to be easily customized. Colors, borders, buttons, images, bullet points, spacing, social links, hyperlinks, titles, fonts, sub fonts, headers, footers, welcome emails - you name it you can change it. Other newsletter services don't even hold a candle to the number of design features there are on beehiiv.

Referral Program 🛍

Every successful newsletter wants a referral program. TL, DR: A way in which a newsletter can grow by incentivizing readers to share the newsletter with friends by offering rewards. Beehiiv is currently the only newsletter platform that has incorporated this function within its system! Something that other platforms have notoriously disregarded to do.  

As you can see above in Litquidity's Exec Sum newsletter (a beehiiv publication) the referral system is seamlessly in place at the bottom of the newsletter. This was an integration that Tyler himself built for Morning Brew's newsletter that was wildly successful (up to a 20% sign-up rate from the referral system alone). 

This brings up another point: Some of the biggest newsletters are on beehiiv

Here are just a few. Just in that image above, there are hundreds of thousands of readers and millions of followers across multiple social channels!

Sneak Peek

Newsletter Polls 📈

Tyler was kind enough to share with me the newest feature that is set to launch this week. 

You may have noticed a lot of your favorite newsletters incorporating polls directly into their newsletters. Here’s one that Milk Road typically features in theirs:

While the content of each poll varies, the goal remains the same—creators want to learn and understand more about their audiences (it’s also great for clicks and deliverability). 

🚨 The problem: there’s a handful of tools that offer this solution. But that requires a different login, it’s an additional expense, and your survey responses live in a separate platform from the data about your audience. 

💡 The solution: beehiiv is building this (and a better version of this) first-class natively into their product. You will be able to create and drop polls directly into your newsletter without leaving your workflow. This means you can tie subscriber acquisition data (where they came from) with engagement data (how they engage with your content), with metadata collected via polls (what they think about your content or anything else you ask).

And the polls aren’t limited to just asking what subscribers thought of your newsletter. You can ask anything (for example: “do you think Elon will actually buy Twitter?”). 

This is really at the heart of beehiiv’s ethos—let’s bring the best of the newsletter ecosystem into a fully integrated streamlined platform to make it easy and accessible for any content creator to scale.

Monetizing via Ads 💰

To be clear—this isn’t live yet but has always been a part of the vision for the team. I’ve gotten a sneak peek at what’s to come and I’m incredibly excited.

For newsletters like this one that does not charge their subscribers any sort of fees to view the newsletter, I generated most of our revenue through brand-sponsored ads. While sponsorships are a great way to generate revenue for the creators of free-to-read newsletters, it can sometimes (always) be a difficult and tedious task to find companies that want to purchase an ad.  

However, beehiiv is looking to change the game. beehiiv is developing a solution for this issue that connects writers to companies seeking advertisements and this is expected to launch this year.

Oftentimes creators spend weeks just setting up one deal for one newsletter and thus have to plan well in advance. Most newsletters are a solo team and don't have the infrastructure or system in place to consistently land deals for every newsletter.  beehiiv will allow creators to focus more on what they are great at, writing. Trust me when I say I wish I could have had this feature when I was pumping out two newsletters a week.

Conclusion

🚨 The problem: Creators are unhappy with the current newsletter services they are using.

💡  Here is how beehiiv is solving it: Building more tools quicker than ever, optimizing network effects to have the best creators on the platform, having the creator in mind first, hiring a team with real newsletter engineering experience, and delivering on said goals over and over again. 

As I have stated earlier, beehiiv is moving so fast in so many directions it is almost impossible to keep up with everything in one single newsletter. My friends at Exec Sum did an excellent job with their write-up on Beehiiv and I implore you to give it a read so you are fully covered on everything. You can read that publication here. 

Hopefully, this helps, I know nothin’

I know I put this at the bottom of a lot of my emails… but if you just share this with a friend that is curious that would mean the world to me!

- Gannon Breslin