Scaling the Creator Economy: Interview with Tyler Denk, CEO, Beehiiv

(upbeat music) - At Morning Brew, it was, I was naive, but willing to out hustle anyone and learn anything, so I joined Morning Brew without knowing a thing about email. I taught myself, I took meetings all day with people who were at larger media companies that were doing email really well. And I taught myself to hustle and was able to build something. And then I think the parallels between Morning Brew and Behaviour, pretty transparent and obvious, right? Like what we built at Morning Brew was really what we're trying to democratize here at Behaviour. So I think to the people who are thinking about building and launching something, it is what is like the value that you can provide, whether it's something you've done at a previous job, or just like a hobby and passion, that you are very passionate and knowledgeable about. I think it's where I start. (upbeat music) Hello and welcome to the exponential scale podcast. This is the show where we talk about how tiny teams with big ambitions are doing more with less scaling smarter, not harder and building big businesses with teams that you can fit around a dinner table. So before we jump in, I have a really exciting guest. I'm excited for many reasons. And I want to share a little bit of a personal connection to our guest here, Tyler Denk. One that I actually didn't even know I had, because a long time ago, we used to run this morning demo event series called Tech Breakfast, where we would just get together. And it's almost exactly like what it sounded like. We would get together in the morning and we would see cool companies, demoing cool things. That's pretty cool, 'cause I was working on a software company myself and I had moved from Boston to Baltimore, anyway, long story. I didn't know anybody in the tech scene. I didn't know what people were doing. And I saw a lot of PowerPoint, but I really wanted to see what people were doing. And the demo thing became alive. And I was talking to a mutual friend of ours and he said, "Yeah." I said, "Oh, I'm using B-Hive. I use B-Hive as our newsletter platform for exponential scale and our scale-grade audience." I was just talking about it to one of my colleagues and he said, "Oh, yeah." Didn't you know that the founder, Tyler, he presented at a tech breakfast a long time ago. I'm like, "What?" And I didn't realize that. So the connection goes a long way. And for those of you that aren't aware, we're gonna have Tyler introduce themselves shortly and talk a little bit about B-Hive. The Tyler has been on a lot of podcasts as well. So you can hear a lot of the story of B-Hive. It's founding. He's been on my first million newsletter operator, the Peel, World of Dasts, Professor G. prod, the biography. This week in startups format, behind the brand twice. And about 40 others. And Tyler, I did the research. So I'm happy to share it with you. Actually, my agents did the research and got that full list of, as well as a summary of all those takeaways. So I will link to those actually in the show. So I have no problem telling other people where to go listen. And also B-Hive is a great blog. And they published a story in four parts of the B-Hive's founding and their growth and their origin story and talk about the origins of how Tyler helped morning brew scale before their 75 million dollar acquisition, why emails beating social, how B-Hive went from zero to 250 million valuation in just three and a half years. And what it's like to raise venture funding while also grieving the loss of a co-founder. So there's a whole story there as well. And B-Hive has mentioned already document that story. So we're going to cover new ground on this podcast. While going over some of that stuff for those of you that may be hearing of this for the first time and get a little bit of that. And we're going to go somewhere where these conversations didn't go. And that is, how does Tyler actually think about team size and leverage? And we're recording this podcast before he's having an all hands meeting, which is kind of interesting timing because you're getting together with all those people. So where does B-Hive go from here? And how is Tyler building this organization with the team and strong product and world class leverage? So Tyler, thank you so much for joining us and introduce yourselves a little bit. And maybe a fun fact that people may not have heard on any of those other podcasts. - Yeah, you're putting me on the spot on the fun fact. I'll think on that on the first sec. I also think the timing is interesting with this all hands coming up because I'm going to introduce something around the AI in this all hands that we have in 60 minutes, which is, I think going to intertwine with a lot of the conversation here and of what you have been covering with a lot of these smaller teams doing more with less. And so we, and we'll get into like how lean we are, but we are trying to take the next step and being able to do more of that. But yeah, to quick intro previously was the second employee at Morning Brew. I helped, I led product engineering and growth there, helped grow that through the acquisition in 2020 by Business Insider, did a quick stint at YouTube music and then launched Behive in 2021. Behive is what we call now the operating system for the content economy. It's a newsletter first platform, but we also have websites. You can sell digital products. You can sell digital subscriptions. We have an ad network with Fortune 500 advertisers like Nike and Netflix. And so we're trying to empower content creation at scale where users and large publishers can grow and monetize their content on the internet, kind of away from algorithmic feeds like social media. And yeah, we're four years in. We have 110 employees. We're doing, we did about 30 million in revenue last year and our fourth year projected 50 million this year. So it's kind of like a TLDR of where we are. Yeah, I'm trying to do the mental math on revenue for employee and that real quick, but that sounds fantastic. And one of the reasons why keep coming back to newsletters, which is interesting, we were in this sort of maybe post social media era, it's kind of hard to tell what era exactly we're in. But there's one thing about having an audience and another thing about developing a relationship in some way and of course owning your audience, which is one of the things I really like about newsletters and email that you don't have and you're posting things in Facebook groups and on Twitter streams and things like that, X I should say. And I think that's one of the most interesting things is that that hasn't really gotten a lot of fanfare is that the news letter and this sort of building this audience has become really one of the most powerful distribution channels that a small team can own not only because email is trending, but because it never really stopped working. Everybody just forgot for a few years while they were chasing the algorithm. And the highest leverage operators really figured this out early. It can be one founder, have one list, one direct line to the exact people you want to hear from, no platform, middleman, no feed optimization, no pay to reach your audience tax, you own the list. And actually, for those of you that might know who've been following Scalibrate early, we were originally on Substack and actually moved off the Substack platform 'cause started to feel a little bit social networking for me. I started to feel like I might actually lose my audience in many ways. So that's part of the reason why I do like, you know, I am not just talking interviewing Tyler because he's making the runs. I really do like Tyler and what he's doing in the Beehive platform. And those who are trying to not just grow but monetize, it sounds like a lot of the direction that Beehive is going is increasing that monetization. One thing Tyler didn't mention is he has his own newsletter as well, Big Desk Energy that I've subscribed to. And he kind of got me early because there was this product ization hook that you had, where it was $10, how to build a newsletter thing. And I'm like, I gotta do this. And I think I was one of your first clicks in there. And you grew that, even on that was like revenue went from zero to 10K or 15K in hours. So, I think maybe let's start there a little bit with the insight, where did this come from? Like the newsletter space has been around for a while. You know, the email providers have been doing things whether it's the old mail or light or kid or even mail champ and all that. What was the origin story? What sort of pushed you from Morning Brew to decide that, hey, this is something that I really need to really get into and innovate in this area. - Yeah, well, I think Morning Brew is a pretty eye opening experience. When I joined as the second employee, we had one advertiser, it was Discover, and they paid us about $4,000 per email that we sent. And at the time, we had about 100,000 readers. And it was just such a mind blowing concept of like, I saw behind the scenes the work put into it. It was, we had one writer, we had one seller. I was doing like the engineering and product work. We wrote the newsletter, we hit send, we made $4,000. And then as you fast forward and we grew to 1,000,000,000,000 three million readers, that same advertising spot became Visa and Apple and they were paying us $50,000 per send. And at that time, we also were able to diversify, not just have a single sponsor per newsletter, but we had a secondary and tertiary sponsor. So any given day, the work again, if you fast forward through those three years, the work to create the newsletter was kind of the same. We added a few writers, we updated the style, but it was still five to six hours of putting the newsletter together. But the output went from $4,000 a day to $80,000 a day. And so you start to see the dynamics of how profitable an email newsletter can be. So that was one thing that I think really jumped out. To, I think, during this time, we saw what Facebook did in 2018 to publishers, right? So Facebook used to be a place where they would encourage brands and publishers to grow their Facebook likes. And the thinking was, if you had a hundred thousand likes on Facebook, and I'm dating myself, you know, eight, 10 years now, but if you had a hundred thousand likes on Facebook, then roughly a hundred thousand people should see the content that you publish. And all of these publishers also monetize on their website. And so the thinking was, you post on Facebook, a hundred thousand people see it, they click through to this article and using the traffic that you're driving to this article, You may go. money with Google Adsense for all of the banner ads. Then they adopted Twitter, and then they obviously have always been very dependent on Google for search. And slowly but slowly, Facebook and 2018 changed their algorithm and made it so they actually deprioritized content from brands and publishers. So there's 100,000 likes that you have are now kind of useless and you can't reach that audience anymore on Facebook. In 2022, Twitter deprioritized external links. And so you can't post links as a publisher on Twitter and expect to get that same traffic. And then in 2024, Google introduced AI summaries and a lot of that search traffic also dissipated. And so now as a publisher or content creator, those channels that you did depend on are no longer there to drive traffic. But the publishers that did very well in that time, Morning Brew, the skin, Axios, Politico, Puck, all of these companies, the thing that they have in common are their email first. And so they've already shifted from the world of getting a million anonymous page views to having a million subscribers that they know exactly who they are, what content they like, what they're clicking on. And when they want to reach them, they have an email to actually get in front of them. And so I think the combination of obviously my experience at Morning Brew and this macro trend of the unreliability of these large tech platforms for driving distribution for content, just paved the way for what we're now seeing in this newsletter explosion where everyone from hobbyists, the journalists to massive publishers, and even like SaaS brands who are investing in newsletters to be able to reach their audience and their customers. So that's kind of like what I've been seeing over the past few years. Yeah, that's really interesting. That last point is hits home. Many folks know that I write for Forbes and one of the AI contributors. We actually had an all hands meeting because traffic is actually on the decline, even for major publishers, hard to get attention. But if you can build a relationship, you can maintain it. You're also mentioning journalists getting into it. There was a big layoff spree at Washington Post. And the first thing that a lot of people says, okay, I'm going to become independent. I'm just going to build my own audience. I don't need a publisher anymore. So it's kind of interesting how those dynamics are changing. And that might be for an additional podcast later. We'll talk about that. Now, let's think about leverage because that's what I know what our audience wants to know. Beehive is growing and raise some significant amount of money and company is valuation. Now it's over 250 million. I don't know what the latest valuation is in just three and a half years. And a lot of companies at this stage, they look at rapidly growing team size and sort of trying to flood the field and just go out there and try to dominate that way. But I'm kind of curious as to your perspective. What does the team look like right now? How are you looking at expansion? Staying lean and deliberate choice. When you were early, you were small and lean. But I don't really want to know what kind of the pressures or direction you're facing on sort of that leverage perspective. Yeah. The only pressure I think we feel isn't really external from investors and other shareholders. It really is the fact that we're an unprofitable startup and unprofitable startups on this VC-backed flywheel. There's only one thing to do. It's grow as quickly as possible, burn money and then raise more money. And that is kind of the traditional Silicon Valley playbook. I think there are ways to curb that and stop that proliferation of just spending money to raise more money. I think that is what I am personally interested is like we just raised a series B in 2024. So actually about two years ago, we have 30 million in the bank. We feel good. Is there a way that we can close the gap and continue to grow while being less and less unprofitable to eventually obviously reach profitability and not be dependent on venture dollars? And I do think we are living in a rare time where with the proliferation of these AI tools that I think were okay at best like two years ago to like now getting very good, being able to do things autonomously. I almost view it as like there's work done before computers were mainstream and being an accountant and having to do all of that type of work prior to Excel was probably very difficult and timely and computers made that much easier. And so where else in our company today are people doing things where there's a limit to how much output they can have because they aren't yet using and adopting AI to the fullest capabilities. And how can we actually rewire the team and train employees to be able to do two, three, four X more using AI. And so that's kind of like what we are prioritizing right now. I think at the rate that we're growing, there's always pressure to grow faster. We're in like a very competitive industry. And so, you know, we could take the stance of we want profitability. We could stop spending so much money. We could stop hiring and we can actually shift towards profitability. I think as what most founders would relate to is the uncertainty around taking your foot off the gas in a very competitive industry could mean like yes, you're going for profitability, but all of the other companies are out innovating you and you actually aren't going to be there for the long run. So I don't think that's an option. So I think adopting an AI and being able to extract more output per employee is really the only path forward. Yeah. Well, that definitely is what we talk about. You know, I'm trying to extract the most leverage you can per person. It is usually the sort of Silicon Valley trade off of growth versus profit, which for a lot of founders seems a little odd because it's strange that you have to sacrifice growth for profit. I think part of it may come down to power law effects, which is what you're talking to about, which is that unless you're number one or number two, like the number three through number 10 player just to have such a little share of the market that it makes it hard to, you know, even even grow at all or grow in a weird way. Although we've had some really interesting interviews of folks who operate in highly competitive spaces where they're growing very rapidly and linearly without that. So I'm what we call it is mid there may be a third way. You know, I think AI and automation to your point, the more that we leverage to multiply capabilities, the more that we'll be able to extract value without necessarily having to do the trade off. But I encourage our listeners to listen to those things. I think the question for you is about like the operating model. You know, when you're thinking internally now about leveraging more AI and automation to what I call multiply, right? We usually think of hiring as adding, we add people or subtracting, getting rid of people, but really AI and automation is about multiplying, keeping your people but multiplying their output. So can you think about what tools, what systems, what policies, what processes are you putting into place internally that is helping you optimize and grow the output per person for yourself and possibly for your customers as well? Yeah, I think we're still pretty early in this. We're like in the stage of building champions in the sense that we just started a few weeks ago doing like AI show and tells every week, which is we are, I mean, there's obviously I'd say the engineering team obviously has adopted AI the most and the most widespread. And it started with one or two engineers using cursor or cloud code. And then once you start to see that they're pushing out five poor requests a day and everyone else is doing one. There's kind of like that internal pressure that like you have to learn how to adopt and leverage AI while coding to keep up with the rest of the team and the expectations. So the engineers were all very early adopters. I'd say it's pretty spread through the rest of the team of some people have adopted these different AI tools, whether it's like cloud code, cloud code using chat, GPT for different workflows, other AI like CRM and different tools there. I think it's pretty sparse in like we have champions on different teams that are using it, but it hasn't really been pushed along by me or the company to really proliferate that. And so that's kind of the stage that we're entering now is how do we create this culture and we're doing it by creating like a dedicated AI channel where every team has to have at least one person that is going to be the AI champion on the team. And to be a part of this like quote unquote club, they have to post and share one new automation or one new task that they did with AI every single week, obviously related to work. The thinking is once they see that they can automate seven of their 15 tasks, they'll be able to reallocate time to do other tasks. It'll unlock that like multiplying effect that you mentioned. And once you have one or two people on a team that have kind of seen the light and are able to do that, it'll become pretty clear that they are outperforming the others in a sense that the others now have to adopt that tech. And now we have someone on the team that can teach them how they're doing all of these different automations and shortcuts. And so we're trying to take like a bottom-up approach to getting champions and doing it. I do think it is difficult because like to your point, we actually we have an incredibly talented team. We aren't doing it from a place of we are short on cash and want to remove headcount. We want to keep headcount. We want to expand what our current headcount is doing. And we want to prevent future headcount. I think that's important. Every quarter, there's like another wave of headcount request. And I think there has to be the question of, did you already try automating what you want to hire or like what this person to do? And most times it's like we already have two or three of these people on the team. They want a fourth or a fifth. And like are the existing three leveraging AI in their day to day? Because if not, it's like doing a job without a computer. Like you actually aren't leveraging all of the tools that are available in the field today. And until you've checked that box and either determine that the current tools aren't at the capacity or level of output to do some of these like more complex tasks per say with like the level of accuracy that we need. Or just like not the right skill set to be able to do that. Like then I think hiring becomes like on the table, but I think we need to start running those checks to prevent future hiring if we ever want to like stop like flatten the curve of hiring to get closer to profit. Yeah, for those of you that are listening to this podcast not watching, I'm like nodding my head vigorously here in part because that's this whole mantra here. It's called "Leverage Before Labor," which is the idea that it's not about non-hiring, it's not about firing, it's about before you make the hire, can you just maximize the output using the tools that we have? And I agree with you, a lot of it is not a technology gap per se. I mean, people do need to learn skills, but this stuff is basically speaking English. I mean, if you can talk, you can do a lot of the AI stuff now. So really, the limiting factor for a lot of the stuff is creativity, strangely enough. And just thinking beyond the way that you're doing things now, or maybe even thinking to, like, "Well, I do A, so therefore I need machine to do A, and therefore I will get the benefit that I usually get from me." It's like, "Well, maybe machine shouldn't do A, maybe machine should do B, C, and D, the things you could never have done." And so a lot of it is the creativity, which is ironic because this may actually be the time to bring back the old demo event, people just need to see what other people are doing, whether it's internally or externally. So that's another story for another time. Yeah, that's why I brought the AI show and tell to life, and that's why we're doing that weekly. And actually, right before I join, because we did an AI show and tell so far, and I think it's huge, very technical. We had an engineer do it, and he was doing stuff in the command line, and I think that turns off half the company that's not technical. And so there's a task that I do every Friday or Thursday this week before all hands, which takes me like 15 minutes that organize the all hands sheet and color code in and do a few other things. And it's not, like, the end of the world, it takes me 15 minutes, but it's 15 minutes. I'm actually not paying attention the meeting before all hands, because I'm like doing that and multitasking. So I did a screen chair right before this, because I know I have this meeting before all hands. And I showed exactly how I use Cloud Co work to describe here's the sheet. I want you to organize it in this way and color code it this way. And I went to eat breakfast. I came back and it was done. I have a recording of that. And so I think there is a lot of the show and tell aspect for like these not laggards, but the people who are less technical, because I think AI comes off as like a very technical thing. But yeah, I totally agree with that. Well, great. Well, show and tell is coming back to life. That is for sure. So let's focus a little more about Beehive and kind of kind of the enablement of what's happening now in this ecosystem. I think AI is really, as we mentioned, rapidly changing what a one or two person team can now do can now produce. So how are you seeing from your own? Because now I don't remember how many Beehive customers there are and how many newsletters and maybe how much visibility you have into how many people are using Beehive as their like business as their primary content business. So what are you seeing some of the best Beehive operators doing and not just to kind of write and communicate, but to build a business that they possibly couldn't do a couple years ago? Yeah, I mean, I was even just in London last week and we had a few different events there and a lot of our Beehive users showed up. And one of them started doing like strategy consulting a few years ago and launched a newsletter on the side. Now has 120,000 subscribers has a full business. It's this full-time job. And so I actually do think the power of kind of what I discovered with my time at MorningGrew in terms of growing an audience, finding ways to monetize that audience. The larger you grow, obviously, the more revenue you can generate from ads. You can do paid subscriptions if you're providing that value. You instant, you hinted earlier at my digital product, my $10 digital product, made $10,000 on that. And all I did was I had an existing deck that I had built for like a previous presentation. I uploaded it to Beehive. I put it behind a paywall and I made it $10 and I put it in my newsletter. And I made I made a thousand sales. And so the ways that we are helping content creators and journalists and media companies monetize and be able to extract revenue from their audience, I think is really like the innovation that we're trying to push forward. There's not just one way to monetize. I think two decades ago it was all digital advertising. And then with the it's launch of sub-sack, they really pushed a very opinionated stance of, oh, it's paid subscriptions or nothing like that is the proper way of what you how you should monetize this content. And I think what we are trying to show is it could be paid subscriptions, it could be sponsorships, it could be digital products, it can be really anything. And so allowing content creators to lean into what they do best and how they can extract revenue from their audience, I think we'll yield the best results. So we see tons of one person teams that are on our enterprise plans and are making millions of dollars in revenue from some combination of sponsorships and digital products and all of the above. A lot of them are leveraging AI. We have an AI website builder and so it's getting better daily. We're like pushing out updates to it like several times a day. The goal there is if you and I think websites are coming back is like another theme, especially with the age of like AEO and GEO. I think having premium content on your website that these different LLMs can scrape and leverage helps you get more exposure in the LLMs. And so yeah, I think like what it was old is new again in the sense that email and websites I think are really valuable in the stage that we are and hopefully we can help empower all of that. Yeah, it's really interesting. Well, from your insights, you know, attention is one of the hardest things to get right now because there's so much content. There's so many newsletters. But you're mentioning you said some people have been able to get, we really successful and get 100,000, 200,000 subscribers. What are you seeing in sort of this modern age or this sort of today's age of just the proliferation of content? What are some of those successful people doing and through grow possibly from not having any audience at all to building something significant? Yeah, I think a lot of it is like being paved by people that can show that it's possible. And so when you see Ben Thompson at Stratekery, build a $5 million a year business more or less by himself through a three times a week newsletter, that kind of shows what is possible by creating very premium content and putting it behind a paywall. When you see these other individual content creators who are building multi-million dollar businesses, like you can kind of take from the playbooks of other people who are doing it well. And I think because of the proliferation of the creator economy, there's just a lot more case studies to study and understand how you can take something you like and leave something you don't like, but build your own path forward. I think the tools behind it, whether it's sub-sac or B-hive or a lot of these other platforms. Back when I was at Morning Brew, we had our own custom website. We had to use MailChimp and then another ESP. We built our own referral program. We had to do our own ad sales. We had to set up our own paywalls. That infrastructure was so tedious and not available to people who weren't technical that it prevented people from being able to launch their own Stratekery or their own newsletter just because the tech stack was so not consolidated. And so I think platforms like B-hive definitely play a large part in like being able to make this more readily available to people. And then obviously AI plays a big part as well. You kind of have like there's not a one-size-fits-all for creating content. And so if you are recording a podcast, then you have to like chop it up and put it into smaller video formats and you have to post on TikTok and Instagram and then shorts and then you have the YouTube. And then you need to create thumbnails and then you want to summarize the transcript and make it a newsletter. Like that used to be a full team work, but because of AI, there are now kind of tools for each individual step there where you could probably feed it this video that we're recording now. And it will automatically pull out 10 clips for short form video. It'll pull the transcript. It'll help you draft the newsletter. It'll help you like maybe draft multiple newsletters and lead magnets and stuff to post on LinkedIn and X. And so I do think tools and software and AI really behind a lot of that is actually pushing the proliferation of what a one-person team can do and give more creators multiple shots on goal to get their content out into the world. Absolutely. Well, that's exactly what I'm doing. Yeah, for sure. And I've combined that with some of the agentic tools as well. I share some of that with our audience. I've actually built a second brain on Obsidian and I've tied in Clawed Code and it's got agents and it's doing everything for me, including sending out all those little emails to you that you might have gotten on booking this podcast and the next steps that are going to happen thereafter. So absolutely. We're in this era now that I would say even push this even further that if you're not using those tools, if you're not taking advantage, you're going to find yourself at a strategic disadvantage because what's going to happen is if you're doing things the old way, you're just going to become swamped by the other people who are doing things in the modern way. I don't really think there's much of an alternative now to sort of resisting, if you will, the the board, you know. I mean, it's exactly what I said earlier in like how we're thinking about deploying it at our company. If we're going to require at least one person from every team to do it, after two months, that one person who's adopted AI and each week created their own automation or workflow, like they are going to be so much more productive than those who have not adopted it. And then there's this an interesting dynamic of like there's only one path forward. You either have to like follow and adopt like with the latest automations and intact to be able to do your job better or you fall behind on the team and typically when a subset of people will fall much further behind the other output on the team, like there's only really one answer there of how to proceed. And so I think the writing is kind of on the wall there. Yeah. So let's get into a little more in the creative economy. And I'm kind of curious as to where B-Hive sees its role sort of maybe evolving. You know, as mentioned, I've been keeping an eye on these platforms and what used to be say a newsletter platform then adds a podcast and then it's video. And the next thing you know, it's kind of more of sort of a creator platform and audience growth. both platform. And so where do you kind of looking out sort of farther? You know, where does Beehive fit into this broader picture of how independent operators and small teams especially are building media businesses? Because everything you're saying, I'm thinking, yeah, it's like, you know, I got to get my video act together, the podcast, I got the newsletters, I need to build that ecosystem grow my audience because usually when you're monetizing it all starts from, do you have an audience? You know, if you don't have an audience, really not much to monetize. Yeah, 100%. I think the thesis that I have and the one that we're executing against is I think there's going to be a lot of consolidation in the creator economy. I think that the days of having one platform to host your website, a separate platform to have your newsletter to sync the paywalls and like data between both of them to have like your monetization and your distribution and your podcasts on all different platforms to have to like do a data dump into S3 and then set up your own analytics. Like there's just so many constituent parts to building a successful creator business. And I think those that are best in class have their act together and can pull that off. But the long tail doesn't have the technical capability is or the engineering bandwidth to really pull together these like eight different disparate systems to do anything that would truly be best in class. And so like we acquired a website builder a year and a half ago. And that was our thesis that we had a website builder before that was pretty rudimentary. And so being able to couple web and email was like a big thing for us. We've obviously always had paid subscription. So you can you can charge your audience $10.20 a month. We handle the paywall. We handle all the payments. We don't take a cut of revenue, which is very rare for the creator economy. Most of those platforms that we compete with do take a cut of your revenue. The network is like a huge innovation and they can monetization opportunity. And so I think you can work your way down like we launch a Lincoln bio tool in November. We launch part of podcast in November and more podcasts coming in the next month or two. And so I think you can just see if our thesis is that the creator economy is going to consolidate and that's what we're seeing other players in the creator economy do. You can imagine a world where be high is the place that you go for to create content to distribute content to monetize content and define new audiences to tap into. And I think that's kind of like the real vision of what we're building towards. Yeah, it's interesting. Like the the closest analogy that I can think of that's not directly in your industry would probably be like Shopify. How Shopify started as shopping cart. I don't remember those guys when there were just 12 people too. And now they're just like, hey, if you're doing anything with e-commerce, anything related to it, Shopify has become that big platform. So it sounds like you have that sort of platform perspective and vision, but focused on sort of the creator economy. Yeah, Shopify for the content economy is exactly our North Star on the huge fan of the Shopify roadmap. Again, started just with merchants. Now they do everything from tax to fraud to shipping and have built really the whole operating system around what it means to do commerce online. And so can we build an entire operating system around what it means to do content online? And that's really what we're building towards. Well, great. So let's give an audience a little more advice. So we have probably people who are haven't really taken advantage of the content economy. They're sort of thinking about it. And maybe what tips or advice would you have? Because I know that you've had a lot of success. You've worked with, you know, prior even to be high. You're at Morning Brew and prior to that. You were at a few other organizations. You're a YouTube. And then you were before that. You were at venture storm. I think it was right. That's the one that I pitched at Tech Breakfast. That's right. So like you've actually, there's an interesting thread here along this whole part. And you know what it's like to start from zero. So for those who actually are at zero, you know, what, where should they go to build to be part of this new economy, basically? Yeah, you set me up to to be using that one. Does not say be high. Is the answer? So it'd be high. It's definitely the place to start. But like what would I actually think about? I think one, it's like what is your unique perspective or value that you can bring? I've made the mistake before of thinking because like I thought because crypto was the hottest thing ever that I should get into crypto. And I tried launching a startup company that sold cold storage wallets. But I didn't know the first thing about crypto. I was in zero discord. I had no community. I had no expertise. No one looked at me for crypto advice. And so it was a total uphill battle to try to build that business. I ultimately went nowhere, which was like pretty predictable. And I think that was a great lesson in understanding like what are the core competencies that I have and the unique value that I could bring? At Morning Brew, it was I was naive, but willing to out hustle anyone and learn anything. So I joined Morning Brew without knowing a thing about email. I taught myself. I took meetings all day with people who are at larger media companies that were doing email really well. And then I think the parallels between Morning Brew and Beehive are pretty transparent and obvious, right? Like what we built that Morning Brew is really what we're trying to democratize here at Beehive. So I think to the people who are thinking about building and launching something, it is what is like the value that you can provide, whether it's something you've done at a previous job or just like a hobby and passion that you are very passionate and knowledgeable about. I think it's where I'd start. I think the second step would just be really understanding what you're doing it for. Are you doing it as a hobby because you love the Baltimore Ravens and you just want to create content about Baltimore Ravens and you have an Instagram and you want to post newsletters and you want to like get closer and follow the team because that's a passion of yours and it's something you want to follow. Like I think that and that could turn into a great business, but I think it's important to know what you're doing it for. If you're doing it to make money, then you also have to back into like how would this eventually monetize? And to I'll just keep you using the Ravens example. Like do you think you'll be big enough where eventually you can monetize with like advertisements from like the local Baltimore area? Do you think that there's like die hard fans that would be willing to pay $10-$20 a month to get your weekly or biweekly newsletter or content that breaks down like whatever you're covering with the Ravens? Do you think there's like an IRL component where you can organize tailgates that are paid for only for paid members who can come and so you can get creative are like the different ways to extract revenue from this audience? But I think if you're going in with the business mindset, you should think about how you'll eventually be able to monetize. One thing that we're seeing in the newsletter space is there are so many AI newsletters and I think that is like with the times obviously there's like so much going on in the space and there's new news dropping like every day and every week and so there's a lot to cover. But the reason I all of these AI newsletters are making so much money is because they're getting sponsored by all of these AI companies that are raising billions of dollars. And so when anthropic raises $30 billion and they want to catch up the chat GPT, they could go to these dozens and hundreds of top AI newsletters pay them $20,000, $30,000 per cent to be able to promote clawed co-work or whatever. And it's a great business to be in because the people who would fund your newsletter or your content business has more or less unlimited money right now. And so I do think there's a level of understanding like how you monetize and how you back into that that whole business model. Yeah, that's good insight. It does follow up and imagine a little bit of the power law effects here too, that the biggest newsletters get the most attention and then therefore they get the most funding and they grow the fastest and then the ones that are sort of kind of in the the tail have a bit of the challenge because the space is very noisy. That's sort of one of the challenges even the eye face, which is that you know there's so much noise people say like yeah, I subscribe to these newsletters but we don't read them and are you hearing anything about sort of like this content fatigue, especially when content creation is easy despite sort of the subscriber numbers that many people may have. Yeah, so I think ever since we raised our seed round back in 2021, investors told me no back then because we're at peak newsletter and there's already enough of them and like how many can you actually like they saw the model of Morning Brew and the hustle and they're like how many more are there? And the answer is a lot. And I was like actually just this morning listening to a Stratekery podcast with Ben Thompson who said tech forever underestimates the size of the internet and like what is the limit of the analogy he uses like you don't really want to swim in his pond and do his beat because he does it really well but there are so many different ponds that are possible of content that you can be creating and because the internet is so massive in the world is seven eight billion people and it's becoming more and more easy to get connected online and find different content and LLMs play a part of that but so does the proliferation of everything else. I'm actually very bullish on the like thousand true fans model and the way that you can actually make a living on the internet by being passionate and knowledgeable about some sort of content. So I don't think we're at newsletter fatigue. I like the thing that I always say is no one ever says we're at like Netflix fatigue or like premium video fatigue like no one's complaining about too many movies or too many YouTube videos or too many Netflix or like too many maybe too many podcasts but I think I have a different theory on podcast but yeah I think like people don't bring that into like oh there's way too much content. I think we're living in a world where there is more content than ever both on the premium scale and on like the AI generated and like making it easier to proliferate different content but I also think email has the lindy effect of it's been around for so long and every professional more or less logs into their email to do work to check emails to check their flight receipt to sit at their desk all day and have to communicate with other in the business world. And so I do think that unlike Netflix where nothing is really pulling you back to it, there's always something pulling you back to email. But I do think that quality will always rise to the top. And what AI does do is it doesn't introduce more people taking swings at trying to launch content and newsletters and podcasts and everything else. And so I think it shifts towards the highest quality, the most trusted, the most reliable, the most transparent, the most valuable content creators of the ones that will crew most of the value. And I think that's kind of always been true. But more so now than ever. Yeah. Trust and relationship always comes down to that. And I love the thousand true fans. There's a lot to be said for that. And you know, focusing on sort of that audience and making them happy rather than trying to serve everybody. And then therefore you're serving nobody to definitely have been there. Done that myself a few times. Well, I'm going to be mindful of Tyler's time here because he does have that all handsmaning coming up with all those employees that he's trying to multiply and you know, increase. But I do what we have with these rapid fire takeaways that we always do on the podcast. We ask the same three questions to everybody. And I would love to get sort of your feedback on something that's always tools, processes, and tips. So let's first talk about tools that you're using. What is one AI tool or automation that you absolutely can't run your business without the one that gives your team the 10x leverage every single week. Yeah. So, recency bias here, but I've definitely taken the plunge into the cloud co work and cloud code. I'm going to have just been building really cool things to surface data that I know we have an incredible data team. They've built hundreds of dashboards. The problem is you have to go to those dashboards every day and click through every single thing to be able to extract insights. And even then you're balancing Slack messages and everything else. So I think actually just building these different workflows to surface the most important data and giving it access to your database to be able to pull those insights has been really valuable for us. Yeah. Actually, I'm kind of curious when you're building those those dashboards with cloud, how are you getting it? The dashboards in front of people. Is it email? Is it web? Is it Slack? And how are you doing it? Yeah. So this is like a very new initiative as of like two weeks ago. So we're still kind of figuring out the right form factor. For me, it's just like a report that I want to get every week that I can then communicate out to the company. And that's like the current form, but it being like actually like a more dynamic dashboard or that surfaces these things. I think it's probably like a future iteration. I don't say real quick to other things when the AI tools that work really well from us. We have like a great like a linear is what we use for product management. And linear has like an incredible MCP that's plugged into Slack. And then we also have another Slack bot called Unblocked. And so you can just like tag linear whenever we're in a conversation about some bug or some issue, you just tag linear created ticket added to this project. So you don't actually have to go into linear. And then you can use unblocked to add a lot of context from other conversations happening within Slack. So we actually think like on the day-to-day basis, these like Slack integrations and MCPs have actually been the most valuable to the team. Oh, that's highly valuable. So now let's talk process because you've been here before. I think one of the great things about interviewing you Tyler is that of course the Ravens mentions are kind of nice, you know, University of Maryland grad right there. But like also you've you've started businesses multiple times before. So you've seen the story at the good endings and the not so good endings. So when you're thinking about process method, what is one system or process that every lean leverage first team should have in place by the time they hit their first million dollars in revenue. Basically the process that separates people who are just grinding from the people who are actually scaling. You know, maybe what's something you should tell them to stop doing that they're doing now or maybe something that they should start doing today that they may not be doing. Yeah. So one of my favorite business books, it's not the most enjoyable, but it's been one of the most impactful. It's called traction and it's kind of like an operating system for running your business. And it's a very simple philosophy of I think so many companies are especially in the early days are flying blind. And we did this early days at Morning Brew and we did this at Behi for the first year or two as well. It's like we know what better is. It's more revenue and more users. But like are we on pace or behind pace and like are we hitting our goals unless you measure those things. There's no way of really knowing that. So traction to oversimplify you have like a five year goal. You have a three year goal. You have a one year goal. And then it bottles down to quarter the rocks essentially. So every quarter we have five company rocks. Rocks you can kind of think of like OKRs. We have like an revenue target. And then each team has their own rocks as well. And then it goes at one layer deeper to a weekly scorecard. And it's basically and it's the whole point is like if you know where you're supposed to be in five years, you can kind of extrapolate where you should be in year three. And if you know where you're in year three, you should know how what you need to get done this year. And if you know what you need to be getting done 12 months from now, you can kind of break it down even more. And once you get to that level of granularity every week, you should say like if you're supposed to add 10 million in revenue this year, then you should be able to calculate whatever 10 divided by the 52 weeks. How much revenue you should be growing every single week. And unless you're tracking that on a week by week basis, you don't even know if you're on pace or behind pace. And so the whole traction framework is one like setting up everything I just said, but it's also like a 90 minute leadership meeting where you are able to track these and anything that is off track immediately gets action item as like a discussion topic that you have to figure out and solve. Because if you go five straight weeks of missing a revenue target, then you're going to look up a year from now and you're going to miss it. And you know, like you kind of have to get ahead of those things. And so I think the traction framework has been extremely valuable for us. That's good. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. So reference it. Maybe Amazon affiliate in there for the books. But I even wrote one I wrote a newsletter on traction as well. So I like the book is written like the nine years. It's very like old school business examples. I kind of like you can retrofit it to your own business. And so I kind of wrote about that I can share as well. Well, that's what I'll share then in the show notes. So I mean, that after I tell I will get that up and we will link to that in the show notes. People can read more. I do like a good TLDR when I can get one. And then for sure. Yeah, the last sort of rapid fire here is just general tips. You know, if you can give one piece of advice and you're given a lot of advice already here, but if you can give one piece of advice to a founder who's running a small team, a dinner's table size team right now, who wants to scale? You know, what advice would you give them? Yeah, so mine's maybe not what you would expect. It's especially as we've been talking about like AI and multiplying so much, but it's actually transparency. I've run the business incredibly transparent internally and externally. So it just an hour ago I posted on X and LinkedIn. Like we just hit 2.1 million MRR. I'm very open about revenue, hiring milestones, things that are going well, things that aren't going well. Part of that, I mean, there's like a whole building in public narrative and the benefits of that. There's also just building trust not just with your users, but also your employees. And so every like we share dashboards, every the same dashboards that the leadership team looks at, every employee has access to see how much money we're burning, how much money we're making, what users are leading to the most revenue, signups, accounts, like everything. And so I do think being able to communicate from a place of transparency is kind of like all I've ever known while being and leading B.I.F. But people come from other companies and other cultures who don't do that. And they're always very shocked and appreciative of how transparent it is. I think if you're going to work, people very hard to build something big and have these very big ambitious goals. You get a lot more buy-in when they understand the full picture rather than being gate-kept from information. And so being transparent I think it's been like one of the biggest unlocks for us. Yeah, that's great. That's like that text idea of building in public to the sort of next level, which is there's what the public sees building public. But then it's also built in public inside. I guess it's 100%. And I will definitely vouch for Tyler's direct and raw posts on X and LinkedIn. Some love it. Some not so much. And who really cares? It's just like be yourself, you know. And let all of them let the chips fall where they where they might. So I think this has been a fantastic and very open podcast. So Tyler, I really want to thank you so much. And I'll say, Tyler, you've been fantastic of engaging too. You respond very quickly. You're very open. And I really appreciate that because I'll tell you not everybody's even like that. And people won't accept the podcast interview when I don't really know what the downsides are of it other than taking time basically. So I really want to thank you. Yeah, of course. I think that I mean, ideally, if that's how you lead, that's what the different traits that the team takes from you. And I think being able to lean in, being open and being transparent, something that I try to do all the time. And definitely being quick to respond to emails, right? Something that's like the little things of how you differentiate as both a founder and an employee. And so I try to practice what I've reached. Very much appreciated. So I'll give you this little outro here for for those who are listening. I'll say, here's your mantra for the week. Find your expertise. Lean in and be part of this high leverage content economy seems like it's it's going and it's growing. So you should be part of it. So if you loved this interview with Tyler Denko, want you to hit that subscribe button, leave a review and share it with that founder friend who's still thinking that AI and automation are still optional because the answer is that if they're not on the trinket, it's going to leave that station without them and really be part of it. And platforms like behind, I'm just making it easier and easier every day. So the excuse has really become a shorter list. So I want to thank you all. I want you to think big, stay lean and scale smarter and join us on the next exponential scale podcast. Oh yeah. Micro teams aren't the future. They're the now. If this episode got you fired up, hit that subscribe button, share it with your crew and join the movement over at scaleabrate.com. That's SCALEB-R-A-T-E. Until next time, think big, stay lean and because you're not a tiny team, you're a micro team with mega potential. So get exponential and thanks for tuning in to the exponential scale podcast.