How long did it take for you to get to one million in revenue?
Took us about a year to get our first million.
If I copied step-by-step what you did, could I do the same?
I think most people could replicate the same strategy that we used.
Tyler, what's up, man?
How are you?
What up?
How's it going?
Did you see the YouTuber I think his name is Lab Coats who copied?
He figured out the Coke formula from scratch after two years of testing.
Did you see this?
No, no.
Okay, so the Coke formula, the flavor for Coca-Cola is top secret.
There's, like I don't know, A handful of people in the world who have ever known it at Coke.
They never patent it.
Because if you patent it, you publish it.
And then other people can clone it.
And so this YouTuber, after two years of scientific testing, flavor testing, made a chemically identical formula for Coke.
So he literally like got it exactly right.
And people are worried for this guy.
They're like, dude, you know, you need security.
You know, Coke does not take this lightly, but it's a pretty remarkable thing.
And I feel like what you're giving us right now is the sauce, just like that.
It's like brick by brick way that you can build.
You know that, get that, get those first hundred users, then those first thousand users, then that first 10000 of revenue and get to the first million of revenue.
And then now you're at 30 million of revenue.
And I'm kind of wondering if we can kind of remix what you did.
How long did it take for you to get to 1 million in revenue?
Took us about a year to get our first million.
Okay.
So it took you a year to get to a million in revenue by year two, where were you at?
About $5 million in revenue, so 5x in year two.
And now where are you?
We just did about $30 million in revenue last year, which was our fourth year in business.
Yeah, your growth is bananas.
And you're one of the investor updates that I like to open up.
But what I thought would be cool and we were talking, we were like what would be fun to talk about here?
Really, I think it's about growth.
I have this book that's on my bookshelf. called Steal Like an Artist.
And this book is basically about how most of what we think is original is a remix or a straight up copy of something that came before it.
And I feel like you, your story is kind of like that.
You were at Morning Brew and you helped make Morning Brew the fastest growing newsletter.
And, you know, it got to 75 million in revenue and it exited and all this good stuff.
And then you took kind of like the learnings from that.
You remixed it into a product so that anybody could grow their product.
And I'm kind of wondering if we can kind of remix what you did.
And see if we can extract the basic principles so that anybody who's out there trying to get to that first million in revenue can copy what you did.
So I want you to walk me through what did you do to grow and not like the high level, like build a great product, but like the real, the real shit, the specific stuff that actually worked?
Yeah, let's get into it.
What was the first thing that worked?
You're ground zero.
You have no customers, no revenue.
How did you get going?
Yeah, I actually think you already hit on it a bit of like, I think, about founder market fit a lot and the morning brew story of, actually and you've talked about this before of taking something you did at a company or something you've learned previously, become an expert in a low risk way as an employee and then apply those learnings to start a new business.
I think in the founders that I've backed and seen become extremely successful, there's typically a through line between them doing that previously and then launching again.
A quick story that I've never actually told before is while I was at Morning Brew, crypto between 2017 and 2020 was the biggest thing ever.
I didn't even own any Bitcoin.
I had no business starting a crypto business, but I wanted as, like a founder, I wanted to get into crypto.
And so I found this like open source library of like a 3D model of like a cold storage wallet.
I found someone in China who could make them, bought 1,000 of them, shipped them to New York.
And then on day two, started just trying to sell cold storage crypto wallets.
Now I'm the crypto guy.
And I didn't know a single person who owned Bitcoin.
I didn't know crypto at all.
I wasn't in any Discord channels.
And the point of that story is I thought I could will myself into being a founder in this space that I had no credibility whatsoever.
I had no connections.
I just wanted to be a crypto guy.
Lesson learned, I sold three of those and I still have 997 in my basement at my house.
In complete contrast to that, what you alluded to at the Morning Brew story.
Like, when I joined Morning Brew as the second employee, I had built the referral program.
I had built the growth mechanisms.
I've seen what success looks like. from the inside of that business.
And Morning Brew became this golden child of the newsletter ecosystem.
And as newsletters became more and more popular, I became like the newsletter person, out of experience and credibility.
So I preface all of that as like, what is the first step there?
One was actually just having the experience at Morning Brew and being able to lean in that credibility of I have done this before and now I'm building something that I think we could quote unquote democratize access to the same tools that Morning Brew had.
Right, right.
So you needed a story at the beginning.
I was given a talk, and I call this the marketing kill shot.
So some guy stood up, and I go, tell me about your business.
And he says-
We're a marketing agency for CPG companies, usually D2C, CPG.
I'm like, bro, this guy's throwing alphabet soup at me.
And then he goes you know, we help with copywriting packaging design, you name it, we could do it.
We do everything.
And I was like, okay, so you threw six acronyms at me and then said, we do everything.
All right.
I said, let me ask you this.
When you're pitching your company, who are you trying to get on board, right?
Some new brand you want to work with you?
And I said if you couldn't tell me all that junk and you only could say one sentence, but off that one sentence.
I had to want to work with you.
What would that be?
And he started with, we do like marketing for consumer companies.
And I was like, cool, you and a thousand other companies out there.
That didn't do it for me.
And I go, what's the most impressive thing you've done?
And he goes well.
We helped launch and he named, like I don't know, Poppy or like some, like huge consumer brand.
We did all the all of Poppy's initial branding, marketing, positioning.
And I go, why didn't you say that?
Because that's the kill shot.
If I'm a new consumer brand and I meet you and all you say is.
We.
We help brands like Poppy launch launch with their packaging, their positioning and their copywriting.
And then I'm like, oh, I want to be like them.
So I'm going to work with you.
It's an immediate credibility and proof that no general marketing claim could ever touch.
And I feel like credibility and proof is so massively underrated.
And I like this forcing function of coming up with your kill shot.
So for you, I think one of the the story, the I ran growth for the fastest growing newsletter in the world.
Now I'm building a tool for you to grow your newsletter.
Sign me up, right?
And so that's a very, very powerful story.
Now, somebody listening might be like, well, but I didn't do that.
And so what you're offering is two things.
One is first go get credibility and track record in a low cost, low stakes way, like go join a fast growing company, go join a company that has high potential and go kick ass there.
That's one path.
But I do think fundamentally, like a story can work.
So, for example, if you didn't say that you worked at Morning Brew, But you said I spent a thousand hours studying how Morning Brew grew, and all these tools they built internally.
And I've built them now so that anybody can use them.
That would also work, right?
Like, you know, you could just create.
So I think it all starts with story and story is so underrated.
And so how did that story work for you?
What did you actually do with that story to get the word out there?
Yeah.
And whether you raise capital or go at it bootstrapped, I think it's important to know like, in the early days, all you really have is that story right.
Like when I'm pitching investors it is.
I did this at Morning Brew and I believe I can do it again and do it for more people.
Storytelling, I think, is the biggest asset as a founder, especially in the early days, because that's before revenue, before customers, before traction.
I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how to build a money-making skill, about how to leverage your time and energy.
And the team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my four rules of how to make money.
Now, this is not, you know, get rich quick advice.
It's just core principles, foundational principles about building wealth, things that I wish I knew when I was, you know, just getting started.
And so if you want to download it, it's in the description below.
It's totally free.
You can go get it.
Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document and making it available to all you guys.
All right, back to this episode.
Can I tell you the story I used to grow my newsletter?
So after you launched Beehive, I launched a company and it was called Milk Road.
And Milk Road's story is very simple.
I was very interested in crypto.
I had been for a number of years.
And so I created, I wanted to create the best crypto newsletter in the world.
And in one year we grew to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and we sold for millions of dollars.
Okay, so this is a great success story, probably the easiest and fastest business I ever built.
And I needed a story to start it.
And so I started manufacturing stories.
One of them was like anti-credibility.
So I told this story how I said, can I tell you about the stupidest moment of my entire career?
People will lean into that story.
You're going to tell me about this huge mistake you made.
I said, this mistake cost me more money than every failed investment I've ever had, than every failed company I've ever had.
You're like, how could this cost you more money?
I said, it was 2017.
My technical co-founder, the smartest guy I know, was supposed to come into a meeting.
I was like, hey, man, come on.
The meeting started five minutes ago.
He goes, hang on.
I'm just I got to buy this.
And I go, buy what?
What are you on eBay?
What are you doing?
And he was buying the Ethereum presale.
So this Ethereum?
But you know, back when it was like I think 17 cents or something was the was the presale.
And I should have leaned in and been like, why is the smartest guy?
I know the most technical guy I know. have to go sign up to buy this crypto token.
I should have leaned in and said, I was like, Ethereum, weird name, dude, come on, we gotta go.
Let's go do some real business over here in this meeting room.
Of course, you know, he made hundreds of millions of dollars off that.
And I made.
And I basically vowed to not make that mistake again that I that, when there's an explosive new industry where there's lots of growth potential, That I might start as the dumbest guy in the room, but I'm going to ask a lot of questions.
I'm going to learn really fast and I'm going to figure things out for me as a non-technical person.
Well, guess what?
That's what the milk road was as a newsletter.
And so I told that story of almost anti-credibility as the opening, as the gateway to get people interested in my new thing.
Yeah, I mean I could have used that back when I was starting my crypto company and sold three of my cold storage wallets.
But yeah, 100.
So yeah, I think credibility is huge.
The other thing, and it's like the greatest thing about being online and creating content, is like you can find people who are interested in the same things that you are.
And so, as I'm doing this like year building Beehive, as like a side project on nights and weekends, I'm on Twitter just connecting with everyone who has a newsletter, whether they are a known newsletter, whether they're an up and coming, whether they are a writer and operator.
I'm trying to understand.
What are the pain points that they're experiencing?
So I'm doing consumer research, essentially, just using Twitter.
It is.
Hey, I'm using Substack, but it doesn't let me customize X Y, Z.
Or they don't have a referral program, like Morning Brew has, which became one of our big value props in the early days.
And I'm basically, as I'm building with my co-founders, kind of lurking on Twitter, trying to see and connect with people in the industry.
And I think that's incredibly important because when you fast forward to, how do you get your first users?
In complete contrast to me not knowing a single person in crypto because of the credibility I built at Morning Brew.
And because of the people I had been connecting with for the past year on Twitter.
I already had hundreds of people who I knew had a newsletter and I know what their newsletter is about, what they're interested in, what their pain points are.
And that became like the initial early outreach.
So, like early days, I think that's like an underrated aspect of just getting around and surrounding yourself with those types of people.
Were you just cold emailing, DMing?
What were you doing to get in touch with those people?
So let's say...
How many people roughly do you think you kind of talk to?
Is it like 50?
Is it 100?
Is it 200?
Something in that order of magnitude, right?
Directly in a few hundred.
Okay, a couple hundred.
And how did you get in touch with those couple hundred core people?
Yeah, either reputation because you see that they are, you can just search newsletter, right?
And just see everyone who's talking about or promoting their newsletter on Twitter.
I'd follow them and kind of see their story.
So DMs primarily.
And then what I eventually did and like, as we were approaching launch for Beehive.
I was never a content creator.
I had 5,000 followers on Twitter.
So I think when you're like giving tactics of how to scale your business, everyone always looks through like oh, but I don't live in New York and I don't have that network, or I don't have tens of thousands of followers on Twitter and LinkedIn.
At the time I had 5,000 followers.
I was not big by any means, but I posted a tweet sharing what we had been building.
I talk about that.
We have this wait list limited time only.
Complete lie, right?
Like we had zero people on this wait list, but you try to build some urgency.
Like I call out that there's only a few spots for meaning.
Obviously there's unlimited spots for meaning.
I started, like from studying the people in the industry.
I already kind of understand where the frustration points are with other competitors, right.
Like what are people who have a newsletter?
Who's my target customer?
What are they already complaining about on social that they can't do with their current solution?
And so I worked that into the narrative.
It's we have a custom website builder.
Substack takes a cut of revenue.
We won't do that.
We are totally like writer and creator friendly.
And so you start to work on your counter positioning and narrative.
And then comes the credibility of oh and, I built this at Morning Brew and giving you access to the exact same tools that Morning Brew had.
Do you want to sign up?
Again, not a large content creator.
I got 400 people to submit on this wait list.
And that really became like my lead list of being able to go out and target these people.
So if we break that down.
So step one was story either a story of credibility or almost anti-credibility.
Pain point right.
A problem you had, a failure you had, and that's what drove you to get smart about not making that mistake again or fixing the problem.
Okay, so story was component one.
Component two you said was you went and talked to a couple hundred people who were potential customers before, before and during, while you were building kind of nights and weekends.
And that gave you, it sounds like almost like a politician gets talking points.
We don't take a cut.
It was kind of like, you're no tax on tips.
It's like what are the?
What are the three or four messages that seem to always get people to nod and eyes light up?
And cool.
I know when I go out there talking about our thing, you know, in three months I'm going to stack those messages, one after another.
So I get nod, nod, nod.
OK, I got to check this thing out.
Yeah, no, 100 percent.
It's doing customer research and really just leaning into to where your customers are and understanding that story and narrative.
And then three was the false urgency, the false scarcity.
So saying waitlist, few spots left, limited time, you know, who wants it?
And then you're going to get the early adopter types, the type of people you want early on.
They like trying new products.
They're OK with things that aren't perfect.
They love to give feedback.
They're enthusiastic.
They share once they find something cool.
And so that's what they want.
And so what was the result of that wait list?
Yeah, so we had about 400 people sign up initially.
And in the questions that we asked.
One of the questions was why are you interested in using Beehive?
So they are basically on a silver platter, serving exactly what intrigues them, whether it's limitation with their previous platform, or they love the morning brew, whatever it is.
And so now as a team of three, I have this 400 person list that I can go after.
I have their email, I have their social handle and I'm just like you know.
It's like the paul graham essay of do things that don't scale like it's the non-sexy things at the beginning.
Everyone glamorizes the oh zero to a million in my first week of business and now there's these ai companies that have like that, straight vertical revenue.
I think the the truth is, for most of these startups getting off the ground, it's a lot of like the dirty gritty work of just doing the cold outreach yourself.
And also like one thing that I've always found a competitive advantages is it's almost like people like try to go too close to the let me automate everything.
Build like this 15 step automation funnel.
We'll use AI to make sure that the messaging hits at the right time to the right person.
I didn't use HubSpot.
I couldn't afford it at the time.
I was just doing cold outreach on email once a week, every week to all 400 people.
And I got 25% of the people convert in like the first few months.
Wow.
And so this thing you're showing here is literally the backend of the form they filled out.
And the most important one is basically like what got you interested in checking this out, which is kind of you're basically trying to figure out what's the burning itch for you.
If I was going to sell you, how would you like me to sell you?
This was my CRM, yeah.
It's an underrated question.
You know, in our sales, whenever I try to help our sales team in one of our companies, it's always dude.
You got to ask.
You know what makes this a win for you.
Like they just sit there and the sales guys want to tell them all about us and our pricing and our packages and our features and our benefits.
And I'm like, dude, you don't even know what they want.
You have no idea what their dream outcome is from this entire interaction.
And as I said, just ask them, what would make this a huge win for you?
You start with that, right?
Or you're like hey, I know you're a busy guy, but you booked a demo or you wanted to check out what we're doing.
I'm curious, what's the pain?
What made you want to do that?
Because I know you're not just kicking tires for no reason.
So you kind of set them up with a reputation.
You're a busy guy.
You don't waste time.
There must be a reason that you're here.
Why did you walk through our door?
Tell me the problem.
And then I know exactly how to sell you.
Right.
If we're a fit for what you do.
And I think that people don't really use those two kind of core discovery questions to get that.
Is that kind of how you felt as you were asking these questions and sort of like.
Were there features that came out of this or marketing messages that came out of this?
Yeah.
And so a lot of the feature and kind of like research was done in this like prior stage.
But you kind of, as you alluded to earlier, you figure out the messaging points that really resonate, whether it's the we don't take a cut of your revenue.
That's your revenue.
We don't touch that.
Back when I was at Morning Brew, the first project I ever built was I built the referral program.
We saw the scam they were taking off.
They had this massive referral program.
Everyone was raving about it.
And Austin Reif comes to me.
He's like, we're going to copy them and do it better than they do.
And so before I was even a full-time employee on contract, I built this referral program.
We refined it a million times over and it was a massive success.
It led to over a million subscribers.
Wow.
That's a huge number.
Huge.
And people would reach out and I kid you not, maybe 1000 a week would reply to the email and be like, how did you build this referral program?
What software are you using?
How were you able to build this?
Because I want to do it for my newsletter.
And these were either independent journalists, writers, they worked at another company.
But that was the signal of like, oh shit, what we built at Morning Brew was actually valuable, because other people who had newsletters wanted what we had.
And one of the biggest hooks was that referral program.
And after being asked and forwarded emails hundreds of times through my days, at Morning Brew I was like you know what?
I'm just going to write an article.
This is like where my building in public started.
I was like I'm going to write a Medium article and break down exactly the back end of how we built this referral program.
It got thousands of claps or whatever Medium uses.
But like that was like the signal that I used of like what I had personally built is valuable to other people who want this tech.
And so like another thing to lean into on these like early stages, is like what is that core differentiator?
A lot of founders like try to run away from competition.
I think we entered one of the most competitive spaces.
I could.
I could name 25 competitors that were existent and still exist today, that are infinitely bigger than us.
Um, but what we had is like that case study of I already knew what had worked at Morning Brew and I had people by the thousands who were using our competitors asking about this like very particular feature.
So when we launched Beehive, one of our value props was this referral program, the same one that Morning Brew used to scale to 4 million readers and get acquired by Business Insider.
You get that out of the box for free by signing up for Beehive.
And so that was really like our edge into the market.
Yeah, exactly.
That was your big Mac, right?
That's the number one thing on the value meal that people want.
I got a couple of kind of related stories because I want people to see this.
So the first is Ryan Hoover from Product Hunt did this a long time ago.
I think Product Hunt now is probably a little underrated, but there was a time about 10 years ago where Product Hunt was the shit.
It was the number one most talked about favorite product in Silicon Valley.
It was like your favorite founder's favorite founder was Ryan Hoover.
And one of the things he did to get off the ground.
He had no marketing budget but he realized really quickly.
There's only so many times people are going to care to hear about Product Hunt.
Cause that's about us.
But if I make it about you and what he did was he went to fast company.
And if you go look at fast company, he says how we got our first 2000 users doing things that don't scale.
You need a crowd to launch to.
And here's how we got one.
He doesn't even tell you what his company is.
He doesn't tell you what his product is, but he went and he wrote this guest post there about the scrappy do things that don't scale.
It's literally the same thing.
He was looking for anybody who was launching a product.
He would go personal email or DM that founder be like, Hey, this is really cool.
I just downloaded it.
It looks awesome.
You know, you should consider putting this on product hunt, because there's a community of people who like discovering new products there.
And then when it would go there, then he would retweet what they're doing.
And he created this thing and he used to go to Phil's coffee every day, 6 AM.
And his work looked completely unproductive.
He was just on Twitter.
He's just cold emailing random people.
But that's what it took to build that initial user base.
And he was religious about it.
And so I saw him do that.
That reminds me of what you're doing.
The second example, it comes from Emmett at Twitch.
So when we got acquired by Twitch Emmett, who's the founder, now we're probably whatever 12 13, 14 years into the company's existence.
You know the company was big now.
It had whatever, it was like the fourth most traffic site on the internet.
It was, you know, 2000 employees.
But I asked him, I said what did you do in those first, you know, three to six months to get to make Twitch work?
And he goes, what I did was I went and I talked to a hundred streamers that were on other platforms.
We were new and there was, you know, other platforms out there.
And I interviewed a hundred of them.
And Emmett is not the most sociable guy.
So I was like, what did you do?
You don't strike me as like this anthropologist, this thoughtful researcher who will observe them and come up with this nuance.
He goes, oh, no, no, no.
The interview lasted like seven minutes.
I only asked the same three questions every single time.
And I'll send you the Google doc of what I asked and all of their replies.
And so he sent it to me and I read this thing through and he always asked three questions.
So he would say, what do you like about your current platform?
Um, what do you dislike about your current platform and what would it take for you to switch to Twitch?
And most of them didn't, hadn't even considered it.
But a few people were like you know, I do like Twitch, but the thing that I don't you know, the thing that it's missing is X.
And then he would go build X.
Then he'd go right back to that person and be like Hey, we built it now.
That was the thing you said you would switch for.
Like And he's like.
You know, sometimes there was actually two or three objections, but they would, eventually they would.
They would sort of cave to my level of ferocity of how I was approaching this.
And one of the biggest features that the number one revenue driver for Twitch came from those conversations.
There was one streamer he wanted to get on board.
And the guy goes, I want to be able to make money.
And he goes, yeah, but you have such a small audience, dude, like your ad revenue will be so small.
He goes, no, I want them to be able to pay me five bucks a month.
And he goes, you know, people don't subscribe to individual creators.
It wasn't really a thing at the time.
And he's like, that's not really going to work for these 10 reasons.
He goes, well, that's what it'll take.
So he goes, okay, I'm going to build this feature.
It'll never work.
But his current platform doesn't have it.
If I build it, he said he'd move over.
So he builds it.
The guy moves over.
And he goes, indeed, he wasn't making big money.
He goes, but I got a very valuable insight.
Making any money streaming video games.
Even if it was just five 10, 17 in a month, you know their hourly rate was like, in the sense that to them felt like there's a path for me here.
If I just keep going and he goes, it was unbelievable.
I thought five bucks would never change anything for these people.
And it immediately changed their behavior.
And that feature subscriptions today drives, like you know, probably a bit close to a billion dollars in revenue for them.
And that was a feature he never would have built had he not had those conversations.
Well, which is more or less the exact.
I mean, when I'm emailing these 400 people, those conversations are exactly they, even though they showed the slightest bit of interest by filling out this Google form.
It is I'm kind of good on my platform and you don't have automations, you don't have X, you don't have Y, you don't have Z, And I think that's like the other trap that a lot of founders fall into.
It's like the perfection over progress, where they see these existing competitors or like the startups who are already quote unquote successful.
And they think that they always just like showed up that way.
Right.
Like they came out of the womb, just successful, polished, like beautiful.
And one thing that I've really honed in on is, in addition to like the things that don't scale, it's like the shipping and being comfortable shipping things that are 80 to 90 percent of the way there that you can get in people's hands to collect their feedback and then iterate as quickly as possible.
Because if this thing is going to work out, you have to assume that where you are now is the smallest you'll ever be.
And so to piss off and have a less than ideal first impression to your hundred first users is nothing if that means that you can take that feedback from those 100 people, make the product 10 times better.
So the next hundred and the next thousand get a much more polished product.
But I think so many people get stuck in not wanting to release that unpolished, unsexy feature until it's exactly right.
And so like I don't know an example of like another thing that we did in the early days that didn't scale.
It's like email is like ripe with spam and abuse and there's like security complaints and concerns there.
And when we first launched, we couldn't just have anyone sign up and just start blasting out emails.
Right.
Because, like we'd be overrun with spammers and we could have spent three to four months building this like automated security check, which is like was, was discussed as an option, but that would delay us three to four months.
And it would take so much time away from building other features that we knew that we already didn't offer.
And so we actually had the highest friction signup of all time.
You would sign up, you'd have to submit your name, what platform you're using, all this other information, including the handle to your Twitter and to your LinkedIn, and you couldn't do anything.
You couldn't send emails, you couldn't use the platform.
You were like in a brick until i approved you.
On the back end, we had this dashboard where everyone who signed up to the platform would populate and i would go by line by line and click on their twitter profile, their linkedin profile and try to look up their newsletter to see if they were legit And manually click a button to say this person is approved, and they get an email that they can now use.
The platform goes against everything in terms of like hyper growth startup.
Right.
We're preventing people from using the platform in the name of security.
The way that I flip that into a growth thing is when I would go to their twitter profile and their linkedin profile.
I would follow every single person who signed up for the platform and i would send them a dm being like hey, i'm the co-founder at pi, thanks so much for signing up.
Here's what we're working on.
Let me know if there's anything i can do to improve your experience.
And i turned someone who was initially probably pissed off that they couldn't use the platform they signed up to to like wow, it's pretty wild that the co-founder and ceo just messaged me and followed me on twitter.
But as I amplify what we're launching whether it's new features or users having success I now have all of these people who followed me back as super fans who are now following the journey and engaging with the content.
So I think it hits on a few things of like one, not letting perfection get in the way of progress and just being OK shipping probably the least optimal signup flow of all time but also turning into a positive of how can I actually turn this into a growth lever where I can connect with these people, have them become fanatics of what we're building and then now be one of thousands of people following us on this journey.
Right, right.
What's the advantage that's buried inside this disadvantage?
There's usually one.
So, okay, if I'm If I have to manually approve them one by one, well, I'm already here.
Might as well shake their hand.
Might as well say hello.
Might as well connect with them.
Might as well get them to follow me because I followed them.
And then all of a sudden, now you have a bit of a relationship with all those early users.
And I think, again, the theme seems to be of like, you know, it's hard to build a startup.
And the things that don't scale, that no one wants to take the time to do in the early days, I think are the things that really compound and get you off the ground to get that escape velocity.
And I think it's actually even that much more impactful later in the company, when I'm still doing that four years later.
And like that is our competitive advantage.
And I read something recently that was interesting.
In a world where a lot of features are commoditized, it's the stories and the narratives and the people behind the company that actually becomes the competitive advantage.
And that's like a early competitive advantage that I think anyone could take advantage of.
We just had this guy on the podcast, Tommy Mello.
He's built this billion dollar thing starting with Xero, right?
He was like painting garage doors himself.
You know day by day and then realize he's painting doors that these other guys installed.
They're making more money.
He starts becoming a installer.
He learns how to be a technician.
Now he's built like one of the biggest ones in the country, a one garage.
And he said, he was telling us what he has his team do.
And he's like, you got to pet the dog.
And I just love this.
I'm like, I feel like I want to put that on a poster.
Pet the dog is basically like when you go to their house, you don't just go there and you give them a quote, you hand them a bill.
Like no, you go there, you pet the dog, you say hello, you smile, you make eye contact on the way over.
He always has them in their script is like, Hey, I'm just picking up a coffee.
Can I get you anything?
Oh, don't make me guess.
Tell me, what do you like?
You like it black or you like it with sugar?
He's like you know we would.
We, we want to bring them something into the relationship because, because it's a relationship.
I don't want to, I don't want to just be one vendor.
Uh, you know, you're just going to go for the lowest price.
Like I want you to, you know, people buy from who they trust and who they like.
Right.
And it starts with who they even know.
Do they even know you?
Right.
And so what you're talking about is basically how do you get them to know you?
How do you get them to like you?
How do you get them to trust you?
Like before I even used before I invested in Beehive, I was listening to your Spotify playlist.
I don't know if you have that in here as one of your growth hacks, but you made one of the best work music playlist called Big Desk Energy.
And I used to listen to that every day.
And so it was funny, like by the time we met, I felt like indebted to you.
And so it was like this little thing that I, you know, I would have never thought that that would work, but it totally worked on me.
I don't know if it worked on others.
I hope so.
I mean we seem to be doing okay, but yeah, I think Big Desk Energy might be my greatest accomplishment to date.
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All right, give us more of the sauce.
What's next?
I'm constantly listening to users.
And so, and I eventually become a user, and I have my own newsletter, also called Big Desk Energy, on the platform, which you should sign up to.
We entered, I guess I'll set the stage.
There are 25 plus competitors that we entered this space into.
And when we first launched, we had nothing, right?
We set up how to send an email two weeks before launch.
No automations, you couldn't customize anything.
Basically table stakes of what you could do on every one of our competitors.
You could not do in our platform.
And so basically, what we decided we would do is we would ship one marketable feature every single week.
So like we had a core team of engineers.
Our core competitive advantage was going to be product velocity, and it was the only option.
I'd be reaching out to all these people on the wait list.
I'd be convincing them to sign up to the platform.
I'd do all this hard work, and they'd be like, bro, I can't do anything on this platform.
Nothing works.
And so, from the earliest days, I did such a great job selling, but the product wasn't caught up to the expectations of what you were supposed to deliver in this industry.
And so what we decided to do, in addition to shipping one marketable feature every single week, was we turned each product release into a moment.
And so what I mean by that is, we would figure out what would be the most useful thing that would prevent churn.
And that would be flashy enough that when I launched this on Twitter and LinkedIn, that people would be like, oh one, that's super interesting.
The platform I have doesn't even offer that.
And when you do it repetitively, week after week, it becomes more of a narrative of yes, maybe they don't offer what I have, what.
It's only a matter of time until they offer exactly what I want.
And it sounds like when you said you didn't just say make the product better, build features.
You're saying build one marketable feature every week.
And I like the word marketable there.
It reminds me of the Amazon work backwards from the press release.
At Amazon, you don't get to build a feature until you have written the press release.
How would we announce this to the press?
Now press release is like this very outdated thing.
The reality for you is probably like what's the tweet.
What's the tweet?
Like, why are we building this if there's no tweet?
If nobody's going to care when we tweet this, why are we building this?
And that simple forcing function of starting with the tweet and working backwards to do product is going to eliminate like 30 of wasted effort just doing pet projects or things that sound good on paper to you internally but nobody cares about.
The users don't care about.
And that comes from a place of again like talking to the users from the beginning and being really indebted into these communities on Twitter.
And like the framework that I would use for prioritizing what to build is like three part framework.
One is preventing churn.
In the earliest days, we had 10 users, right?
If one user churns, that's 10% of our revenue.
So if someone says, hey, you don't have X and if you don't build X, I'm leaving.
Like I can't take that 10% hit of revenue.
So that's like top of the line.
We have to ship that first.
Next is unblocking growth.
So, as I'm trying to convince all of these people to leave their perfectly good platform to come to our platform, someone might be like you don't offer this feature, thus I can't move over until you have that.
Once I hear that two, three, four times, it becomes a pattern.
That becomes something that needs to be prioritized to be able to unblock and bring new people into the ecosystem.
And then the third one is just maximal hype, right?
So some combination of what do I know whether it's the Morning Brew referral program or XYZ feature, when we first launched the AI writer into the editor, right.
It was like at the peak moment.
It was like a year after ChatGPT, like I knew that AI would hit, as it does for everything now.
But some combination of like.
We don't want the people that we've already worked so hard to get into this platform to leave.
So anything to prevent that.
What opens the door and cast a wider net for more people to come into our ecosystem?
And then what's that sizzle at the end that we can add?
That we know that when we tweet it, working backwards from the tweet and the press release, that we know will spread because it solves the problems of the people that we know we want on this platform.
So that's how we would think about the product release.
And we do a few different things with the product release.
And this is like probably what we are most well known for today is when we would turn each product release into a moment.
We have the email that goes to every user.
And this is coming from a place of insecurity, of.
I wake up every morning in these days and I have you are one of them way back when of like hey, if you don't ship this, like I'm out of here.
And so the email goes out to all of our users.
Threats because we were one of your early users.
I don't know what like do you know.
Roughly, we were like in the first, what we'll call you the first few thousand users yeah, and we uh, i remember we needed automations.
It was like hey, when somebody signs up, i need to be able to uh like automatically send them this email first after a day, this one after two days, and then, you know so on these sequences or whatever.
And you guys did not have that and we were like yeah, we need this.
Um, And the funny thing is you had pitched us for an investment and I said no, I was like I don't know.
Newsletter seems, I don't know.
Isn't that a solved problem?
It's kind of a small market.
How many creators are there going to be really that create newsletters?
Dumb in retrospect.
But at the time I didn't understand the market.
And so we passed, but we wanted to be a user.
I liked the product.
I was like, I'm a user, but I just don't know how many people that are like me out there.
And then as we're using it and you had this crazy story where your co-founder passed away.
Your technical co-founder passed away and we were sitting here badgering you about features.
I felt like such a jerk when you're like Hey here's, here's why we're just a little slow for this.
You know the last couple of weeks here.
To get it back to you
And then you guys picked up the velocity like crazy after that.
And I just thought, man, this guy's a force of nature.
Like if he's going to do this, he's going to solve our problems this fast and this well.
I got to make this bet.
I actually didn't change my mind about the market at all.
I was like I still think all those bad things about the market, but now I think new things about him.
That's going to Trump this, because I've seen that founders who have that sort of force of will that that they create the sort of avalanche of momentum, whether it's with product or with marketing.
I don't know.
They get like many shots on goal.
It leaves a lot of room for error and you can recover from whatever your shortcomings are.
You can overcome them that way.
And so that's been one thing.
And I think you've parlayed that with your investor updates.
The company does well.
You talk about how well the company is doing.
It makes the company do better.
And then that flywheel.
And I've always been hesitant to do that because it feels like you're you're exposed, you're naked, you're vulnerable, you're putting out your numbers out there for the world to see.
But you've done this.
So I guess, like show your investor update here and like why does this?
Like does this work and why does this work?
Yeah.
I mean, I'd even take a step back in the sense of like, you know, building in public.
I mean, everyone talks about it now on Twitter and like that's something I've been very intentional.
There's like an altruistic view of it of like entrepreneurship's great.
There's a lot of people who are successful who don't share their secrets of like why they're successful and And like that is to the disadvantage of everyone else who wants to build something.
Right.
And then there's, like the more selfish reason of I could tweet and post about newsletters all day long.
And there's probably a few thousand people who would love that content.
But if I were to post all day about, here's how we hire, here's how we built this feature, here's the strategy and tactic to get us from one million to two million.
Then all of a sudden, like the addressable market of that content is ten times bigger.
It's anyone who wants to build a startup.
It's anyone who's in a small, medium sized business.
It's anyone who's like an early startup employee who's thinking about maybe going off on their own.
And so I made a very intentional decision from the very beginning of I want to share everything that we do.
The ups, which is, you know, from zero to a million to one to five in the second year.
The downs.
Obviously, you hit on the worst moment of the entire journey, which is us losing our co-founder.
And like just all of the different things along the way, because again, I think people follow people and they want the story and they want the narrative.
And also if I can turn that into useful tactics that other people could take and use for their business.
Now I become someone that they look to and that they trust.
Yeah.
Do you have like data on like how these get forwarded around or how many people sign up from this, from the investor updates?
Do you know anything about that or is that do you not track that specifically?
So the investor updates.
It says very clearly at the top you're not supposed to forward these people do.
And it's like it's like private ish.
Right.
And so, yes.
So they hit on the investor update.
It's like whether it started on Twitter, when I would say here's our first hundred users, here's how we got a million dollars.
Eventually, I turned that into sending an investor update to all of our initial investors.
I also have everyone who passed as an investor.
You were on this list as well.
I think I got a few of those and that made me have some FOMO.
Right.
Exactly.
So like to me, to your point of like being exposed and naked, like yes, but that's kind of like where I think I thrive.
Like, I want the accountability and I want the pressure on that, no matter what happens.
At the end of the month, I'm going to send an investor update to 500 people who trusted me with their money or passed.
And I don't want them to get the gratification that they were right in passing.
And I know that we are going to be exposed and share our revenue numbers.
And I want those numbers to be up into the right and green.
And so there's like a inspirational, like motivational tactic behind it.
There's also like a very tactful like a lot.
Time is your biggest resource, especially as a founder, when you're being pulled in a million different directions.
And like we went down the venture backed route.
And so, as you're building in public and sharing your milestones, there's always investors who are reaching out on Twitter.
Hey, you want to grab coffee for 30 minutes?
Hey, you want to do this?
And, like my, time is too valuable to have these coffee meets.
But I do need to nurture those relationships in some capacity if I do want to raise a later round.
And so the investor update to me became the greatest life hack of saying like no, I'm not going to spend 30 minutes meeting for coffee, but I'll add you to our investor update and you will learn far more about me and the business and how I think about this and how we're growing month over month by reading three to four months of our investor updates than you would ever get in like a 30 minute coffee meet.
And so, by using these investor updates, we actually raised our series a in one week, where it's 12 and a half million dollars in a week.
I don't know with AI companies, maybe that's not as impressive, but it was amazing for us.
Love it.
Was there anything else, as you were reflecting on what worked, how you guys grew to a million that you're like oh, I got to share this.
This is a good one.
This one, this thing works.
I mean again, it's like the little things, like so we built into the company.
That's like very social first culture where everyone is distribution.
And what I mean by.
That is like when you get hired at Beehive.
Our social media manager shows you how you should use social media and engage with our content and promote different initiatives at the company.
And so starting from the top of like me actually building in public is like I have this constant stream of content out about the business.
We have our employees who we do a few different things internally.
One every week.
We have like an award of like who was like.
We call it the social media girly of the week.
Who's like, who was the most active and engaged on socials?
There's like some like incentive built into that.
We have a Slack channel called pump channel or pump.
Yeah. whatever.
And the whole purpose of the channel is like anytime that one of our users says something positive about Beehive whether they're having success, they had a milestone.
It's so much better than their old platform.
Someone sees it, drops in that channel.
Now the entire company gets that notification, jumps in, engages, retweets and likes.
And so we've been able to build this narrative of One.
Like the early days.
It's like oh, everyone's seemingly moving to Beehive, because every time that someone says anything remotely nice about us, you get a retweet and like from me and the house account and like 15 of our other employees.
And so like a very grassroots method that we've been able to scale now to over 100 employees, in the sense that we utilize every positive thing that we can get and all of the employees at the company to help amplify the different messages.
Yeah, it's frustrating because everything you've said here so far is so simple.
And then when I run back through an audit of stuff that we did in any of my startups, I'm like oh yep, didn't do that.
Didn't do that.
Yep, left that low-hanging fruit right there.
Didn't grab that either.
It's annoying, but it's also a good reminder, a good kick in the butt of like Dude.
Stop searching for the genius strategy.
Stop searching for the one thing that's going to cure it all and just look for the obvious.
It's like, hey, people are saying good things about you and you guys don't even reply.
Do you think they're going to say another good thing?
You know, you don't engage.
You don't spread that.
There's this amazing thing, but nobody saw it.
You know you've launched this feature, but you didn't think about what the tweet would be in advance.
And so you kind of spent, you know, a month on something that nobody really cared about.
And so everything you're saying is like straight from the Department of Common Sense.
And that's why I love it.
Yeah, which is why I'm always like self-conscious and almost like sharing the tactics.
It's because like to me, it's second nature.
It's like, very like, if you wanted to build a business that people love and people love you as like the founder and the person who's building behind it.
Engage with them, listen to their complaints, build and prioritize things that they want to use on their day to day basis.
Solve their problems when they run into them.
And it sounds so simple and intuitive, but I feel like a lot of people overcomplicate the startup building journey and don't do the little things right.
We want it to be complicated, because if it's complicated, then that's why we're not doing it yet, because we just didn't know this advanced thing yet.
But when the answer is you're not doing the obvious simple, no brainer, brick by brick tactics, then you got to look at the mirror.
You're the problem.
Right.
And it's like, go look at the best investment advice.
Go look at what Buffett says.
You know, Buffett doesn't open a spreadsheet.
Buffett doesn't he doesn't do any of that stuff.
Right.
He's like, you know, we invest in, you know.
Companies that are well-managed, that have a good brand, make products that people like, have been around for a long time and make a healthy profit, but not even too much where they're gouging their customers.
It's like stuff that you could fit on the back of a cereal box.
It doesn't take a PhD to understand it, and yet so few can actually execute it.
Well, I'll chase the next dog coin or whatever. you know, trying, trying to do something fancy.
Like you're showing this thing on the screen right now.
It's literally a little button at the little badge at the bottom of of the, probably the free email tier, which is like Hey this, this email newsletter that you just saw, this nicely formatted thing powered by beehive.
Right.
Inherent virality in every single email that gets sent out when you're sending.
How many emails are you guys sending a day?
No idea a day, but about three billion a month today.
OK, you're sending three billion a month.
So you're getting three billion mini billboards at the bottom of those emails saying that these emails are powered by Beehive.
Right.
Like that type of stuff adds up.
Yeah, it's like the quintessential Silicon Valley example of Hotmail, where they had at the bottom of their emails get your free email at Hotmail.
And they went from tens of users to tens of millions in a few years just from that simple viral hook.
All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story.
Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team.
I was using a traditional bank and you know the type.
It's got a janky interface.
It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours.
And I hit send and it froze.
They flagged the transaction.
They locked my account.
They put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me I got to visit my local branch.
And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution.
After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury.
And so now my payroll is two clicks.
I can wire money.
I can pay invoices.
I can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard.
That's why I use it for all of my companies.
And so do 200,000 other startup founders.
And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to Mercury.com and apply in minutes.
Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank.
Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column A, and Evolve Bank & Trust, members FDIC.
I'll leave with one last thing is like I love the concept of not making people think in the sense that, like there's always, I mean granted, I just talked about how high friction the signup process was, but prior to signup process.
All of our competitors had this, the most complex pricing models.
You're limited on how many emails you can send per week and contacts.
You have to like calculate how much volume you're sending per month, which no one has any idea how many emails they're sending per month.
It's like way too hard to even figure out the simple question of how much is this going to cost me to use.
And so when we launched, we had an all-inclusive, every premium feature for $99.
And you can send unlimited emails.
In retrospect, not the most scalable model and not the most optimal model to make the most amount of money, but going back to not letting perfection get in the way of progress.
I could explain that in a tweet at any time saying for 99 on limited emails, every feature you see here.
And so I'm a big fan of living to fight another day, in the sense that a lot of people get handicapped by trying to think of the most optimal solution in the future.
But if I'm trying to figure out the most scalable pricing model that I can't communicate easily.
I might not ever live to see that future day, because we already shot ourselves in the foot.
And so I'm a big fan of kind of pushing off some problems to be solved later under the assumption that later will involve us having more money, more revenue, more people to help us solve that problem later. in the future yeah you made it simple and you made it easy to understand even if it's imperfect and not like sort of optimized yet it reminds me of robin hood robin hood built a hundred billion dollar company off of free trade free trades commission free trades so don't pay 9.99 i remember on e-trade it was 9.99 to just buy and sell a stock and robin hood got rid of that now that's a single sentence, right?
If you trade on Robin hood, your trades are free.
They didn't have to figure out.
You know, today they have banking and crypto and they have mortgages and they have personal margin loans and options and derivatives and prediction markets.
And they make tons of money.
I think they have nine different product lines that do over a hundred million dollars in revenue, but the entire empire was built on a simple promise.
You know Free trades.
Right.
And it tied in with the story, the name Robin Hood.
We're letting sort of the little guy win.
Right.
We're stealing from the rich.
And, you know, we're enabling the masses here.
They built the whole thing off of that one simple idea.
And at the time they forced the whole industry to change, because the whole industry was based on this, you know commissions, model.
And they realize like, first of all, you don't even make that much money off of the commissions.
It's not even necessary.
There's not that big of a cost to doing a trade.
And I've heard an interview with the guy where he was like, because we did it for free, We had to innovate on the cost structure to make sure we're not going to burn too much money doing this.
Whereas these other guys never did anything because they were charging so much.
They had 90 whatever percent margins on that trading commission.
So they never cared to figure out how to make their trades faster cheaper, simpler to do under the hood.
We had to because we did commission free trades.
And then that enabled the next layer of benefits to the customer.
And so, you know, don't underestimate these things.
You know that's simple trade, that simplicity that anybody can understand.
Don't make the user think too much.
That simple story can build a 100 billion company.
That's the goal, $100 billion, right?
I would enjoy that.
As an investor, I would very much enjoy when you guys get to $100 billion.
Tyler, this has been fun, dude.
I guess, what do you want to leave people with?
I don't know.
Getting started is always the hardest part, right?
And I think if this journey that I've been on, if it shows anything it's that I don't have and where I always admire you is, like the work smarter, not harder approach.
I think my advantages have always been different, right?
Like the only two things that I can control are my effort and my attitude.
And so I'm like the brute force of like I'm up at 530 in the morning.
I'm at my desk to nine o'clock.
Different than your preferred life.
But what I do and like what I found has worked best for me, is just brute force, working hard and doing the little things right that start to compound over time.
And there's no secret sauce outside of the very applicable things, that anyone could listen to this episode and actually start applying and understanding who their target user is.
Get an MVP, a V1, out.
Start talking to your users, figure out where they're dropping off and where you can improve.
So getting started, I think, is the biggest thing, holding back most founders and just focusing on the little things.
Yeah, I love it.
You probably shared, I would say, I don't know, seven or eight of the little things.
Any one individually doesn't seem like it's going to, you know, be earth shattering.
But when you start to stack them up and you take this attitude of I'm just going to do the obvious common sense positive, you know one unit forward type of mentality, you can get pretty far.
I don't know if you've ever read this the story of the South, the guys who conquered the South Pole.
It's one of my favorite stories.
Do you know the story?
Nope.
All right, so back in the day, there was like all these like races.
So there was the World Wars, and that's where countries competed.
But in between the World Wars, there was like, ooh, the North Pole.
Which country can get there?
And it was a sort of like, you know, a bit of an ego contest between countries.
And it was pride.
It was who's the bravest, who's the fastest, who's the strongest, who's the smartest.
And so there was the North Pole, there was the South Pole, and there was Everest.
And I'll tell you the South Pole story because I think it's pretty crazy.
So there's these two teams that go down to the South Pole.
And one team basically bets on, we're going to have the strongest animals to pull our sleds.
We're going to make sure we're fully stocked.
We're going to build like really sturdy camps so that we can survive.
We're going to take this known route.
And they were very smart and strategic.
So they would, when the weather was good, they would like gung-ho.
He would give a motivational speech and they would try to go as many miles as they could.
And when the weather was bad, they would bunker down and they would wait it out.
And it seemed like the smart, strategic thing to do.
And so that was one of the guys.
And then the other guy took the opposite approach.
He's like, I'm going to try to go in a straight line.
That seems like the fastest path.
We're not going to bring all those supplies.
It's going to be too heavy.
So we're going to bring like just what's needed.
We're going to use dogs instead of horses.
Yeah, they're not as strong, but hey, we're not bringing so much weight with these supplies.
So I think it'll be okay.
And he took this like absolute brute force mentality.
And his approach was 20 miles a day.
So it's like good weather, 20 miles.
Bad weather, 20 miles.
It would just march 20 miles on average.
Whereas the other guy had this huge variance in what they would do.
And he was very dependent on the weather, the conditions.
People have taken this lesson and they sort of like you know, like a moral of the story was This idea of the 20 mile march that you know you could start in New York.
But if you just take this approach of 20 miles a day of walking, it's not an unreasonable amount to walk in a day.
You can get to California.
You will be on the beach soon.
There will be water in between your toes if you take this 20 mile march idea.
If you try to, like you know, sprint some days and rest some days, and run some days and jog some days and you try to like, bring all you know you think you need all these resources to get there, you'll never make it.
And so what I love is is, to me your story is very much this sort of 20 mile march idea of like you just wake up every day and you just do the next thing.
You live to fight another day just by doing.
You know the basics.
Really, really well.
The common sense things really, really well.
All right, Tyler, thanks for coming on.
Everybody should go listen to Big Desk Energy on Spotify.
That's my plug for you.
Great playlist.
And subscribe to your newsletter because I think your newsletter is pretty fun.
It's partly, you know, founder stuff, how you're building your company.
It's a pretty entertaining read.
Yeah, if you liked anything in this episode, my newsletters, that pushed out, right?
So subscribe to the newsletter, follow the playlist, and thanks for having me.
All right, that's it.
All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out.
It's called Content is Profit, and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo.
After years of building content, teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue.
In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit.
So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.
