beehiiv

At the end of 2021, we launched beehiiv into the world with this tweet.

Fast forward to today—we're a team of 65, scattered across 8 countries. The business is operating at roughly a $12M revenue run rate, growing over 5x year over year. We send over 1B emails per month and have helped tens of thousands of people and organizations launch, scale, and monetize their newsletters.

Since our launch in 2021, we've been building beehiiv alongside you, our users, who have been supporting and cheering us on since day one.

Recently, we announced our $33M Series B round led by NEA, with participation from existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Creator Ventures and Social Leverage. We want to extend this round to the beehiiv community to join this journey right alongside our investors. In the sections that follow, you can find more details about the investment. But first, we’ll take you on a little trip down memory lane.

How it all started

From the perspective of CEO/Co-founder, Tyler Denk

I joined Morning Brew back in 2017 as the second employee and led product, engineering, and growth up until the acquisition by Business Insider in 2020.

The goal was simple—grow the newsletter.

So, I only spent time building things that actually moved the needle- building a referral program, SEO optimization, social sharing capabilities, and acquisition dashboards, just to name a few. Growing from 100k subscribers to over 1M, the focus shifted towards streamlining operations- building a custom CMS optimized for newsletters, an ad management platform, and a data pipeline with insight into Morning Brew's audience and growth.

Before you knew it, the Morning Brew machine was as well-oiled as ever and had a bespoke tech ecosystem that fueled everything and really made the gears turn, leading to the launch of additional newsletters and over 3M subscribers.

But other newsletter operators weren't having the same success. And thus, the vision for beehiiv was born; I just didn't know it yet.

The founding team

My co-founder, Benjamin Hargett, was the first person I ever hired. He became the first full-time engineer at Morning Brew and was one of the smartest, most thoughtful people I had ever worked with. We spent two years together in the trenches building a lot of the tech described above.

As I was departing Morning Brew in 2020, we hired Ben’s friend, Jake Hurd, as the fourth engineer to join the team. Ben raved about Jake’s engineering chops, and the two of them would go on to build a ton of tremendous things and really become experts in the newsletter ecosystem.

The three of us ended up reconnecting in late 2020. A few conversations later and we committed to spending nights and weekends building what would eventually become beehiiv.

After nearly 10 months of building, we had a finished prototype of the platform in the summer of 2021. We ended July with a term sheet in hand, and the rest of the $2.6m seed round quickly came together after that.

We had a team of four engineers, a bit of capital, and a really ambitious goal to dominate email as a content channel.

The product

The playbook was never to follow those who came before us. We had years of firsthand experience building and scaling Morning Brew and wanted to bring those capabilities to the masses.

We obsessed over the user experience—finding the right balance between simplicity and offering all of the bells and whistles you could imagine. That obsession, in addition to the valuable feedback from our users, turned beehiiv into the powerful product that you know today.

And we're comfortable saying that there is quite literally no other platform on the market offering the same suite of features as beehiiv.

Even if you have zero coding, marketing, or sales experience, you can start, scale, and monetize your newsletter on beehiiv thanks to our best-in-class product suite:

• No Code Website Builder: Quite possibly one of the largest updates we've ever released, the recently launched website builder allows anyone to build beautiful websites without writing a single line of code.
• Email Platform: Hands down the most user-friendly platform on the market. Set up email automations, campaigns, polls, surveys, and advanced segmentation with ease. Beautifully styled emails that render in every inbox, again without ever needing to write a single line of code. 
• Premium Subscriptions: Want to launch a paid newsletter and charge your readers directly for access to your content? With beehiiv’s suite of tools you can build a thriving subscription business. Oh, and you keep 100% of your paid subscription revenue (i.e. beehiiv doesn’t take a cut). Yep, you read that correctly.
• Ad Network: Leverage the power of our brand and our internal sales team to monetize your newsletter with the click of a button. No need to run outbound campaigns or jump on sales calls. You can have the world's most notable brands advertise in your newsletter without lifting a finger.
• Recommendation Network: Don't know how to run paid ads, set up tracking pixels, or acquire subscribers? No worries — just use our recommendation network to grow your newsletter on auto-pilot.
• Integrated Referral Program: Set up rewards, milestones, and more to incentivize your subscribers to refer new readers to your newsletter. No need for third-party integrations.
• Text Editor: The Notion-based text editor is an absolute joy to use. It has collaborative editing to write and leave comments alongside your team, integrations with Giphy and Unsplash for content, seamless grouping and styling, and even an AI helper to generate text and images. 

And we're just getting started. In just over two years, we may have shipped more features than some of our competitors have in a decade.

Growth

Alongside our product feature expansion, our revenue and user metrics are growing exponentially.

Business model and revenue diversification

While SaaS currently makes up 70% of overall revenue, our revenue is diversified across three revenue streams:

• SaaS: Recurring subscription revenue from the beehiiv platform.
• Ad Network: Revenue generated from brands advertising through beehiiv newsletters.
• Boosts: Two-way marketplace, connecting newsletters looking to grow their audience with publishers looking to promote other newsletters. beehiiv generates revenue from a take rate on these marketplace transactions.

All three models are poised for rapid growth. When it comes to the Ad Network, the long-term plan is to lead the way for email monetization as Google did with search or Meta with socials.

Market: Defining a category of our own

We are currently focused on the newsletter model. However, our long-term goal is to become the default email communication platform for both content and commerce, providing best-in-class tools to support any business model.

Next steps

We have raised this Series B to accelerate our growth and continue building best-in-class features for email communication. Specifically, we'll use the funds raised in this round to:

• Scale the Ad Network team and capabilities
• Accelerate paid acquisition channels
• Expand the engineering and product team
• Invest in AI tooling and employees to optimize and scale certain functions
• Differentiate with industry-leading support, security, and compliance
• Upgrade overall tech and infrastructure

You are in good company

We are backed by some of the leading VC funds and investors in tech, and now you can be a part of the journey right alongside them.

Details

• We have reserved $1M of the Series B for this community round
• The community round will invest at the same Series B valuation and price per share as the institutional investors noted above
• We are going to do our best to accommodate everyone who wants to participate, but ultimately allocations may shift if we are over-subscribed and preference will go to active users, ranked in chronological order by when they signed up to use the platform (i.e. prioritizing our earliest users first)
• Additional investment details, disclosures and financials will be available in mid to late May prior to investment confirmations

We couldn’t be more excited to extend this opportunity to our community of amazing users.