Tyler Denk had $2.50 in his bank account when he told the Morning Brew founders he could build them a referral program for $3,000.
He had no idea how to build a referral program.
Nineteen months after launching beehiiv, his newsletter platform was doing $500,000 a month. This year it crossed $30 million ARR. This is the story of how Tyler Denk built beehiiv, pulled from a 2-hour interview he did on The Brett Way, and it's the most complete product-led growth playbook I've heard on a podcast.
Watch the full conversation here, then let's break down the numbers.
The $3,000 job he lied his way into
Austin Rief (now Morning Brew's CEO) asked Tyler if he could clone theSkimm's ambassador program for $3,000. Tyler was freelancing from his parents' basement with $120,000 of student debt.
He said yes. Then he spent three weeks at 2am almost quitting five separate times, because he genuinely did not know how to build it.
He finished it. Morning Brew paid him, kept sending him contract work, and eventually offered him a full-time role as employee number two. At the time they had 50,000 subscribers and an NYU dorm-room office, and Tyler had already signed an offer at Deloitte.
A friend gave him the line that settled it: you'll be one of 50,000 people doing that job at Deloitte, or the only person in the world doing this one.
He took the equity (a few percent) and moved to New York.
Three and a half years later, Morning Brew had grown from 50,000 to 3.5 million subscribers, with Tyler building the internal tech: the website, the growth systems, and the referral program that drove over a million of those subscribers. The list of readers with three or more referrals alone held 100,000 people.
Morning Brew sold a majority stake to Business Insider for around $75 million in 2020. Tyler had left a few weeks earlier and found out from the news like everyone else.
The 10-month Google pit stop
Here's the part most people skip when they tell this story.
Instead of jumping straight into founding something, Tyler spent 10 months as a product manager at Google. On purpose. He was a self-taught developer who second-guessed every line of code he wrote, and he wanted to see how the biggest company in the world builds product.
What he took from it: the PRD process. Before Google builds anything, someone writes a full product requirement document (the what and why), then an engineer writes a technical scoping doc (the how), and smart people poke holes in both before anyone writes code.
That exact system, minus the bureaucracy, is how beehiiv ships today. Any feature over a certain size gets a PRD, a scoping doc, sign-off, then build.
Self-taught scrappiness plus big-company process. That combination shows up everywhere in what came next.
Nights, weekends, and a waitlist from one tweet
Tyler started building beehiiv in the fall of 2020 while still at Google, together with Ben Hargett and Jake Hurd, two engineers he'd worked with at Morning Brew.
The pitch was simple: Morning Brew in a box. The same referral program, growth tooling, and monetization stack he'd spent three and a half years building internally, for $99 a month, with no cut of your subscription revenue.
He tweeted about it once. He had roughly 3,000 followers. About 450 people joined the waitlist from that single tweet.
In October 2021 they closed a $2.6 million seed led by Social Use, and only then did all three quit their jobs. Term sheet signed, money in the bank, then resign. As de-risked as a startup gets.
beehiiv launched publicly in November 2021 as, in Tyler's own words, the worst product in the market. Fewest features, least polish, competing against Substack (then valued north of $600 million), Twitter's Revue, and Facebook's Bulletin.
Two of those three don't exist anymore.
The launch playbook: make your investors your first customers
This is the move I'd steal first.
Beyond the lead check, beehiiv took money from 15 to 20 strategic angels who each had one thing: an audience. The best example is Litquidity, the finance meme account, whose Exec Sum newsletter had 100,000 subscribers on a competing platform.
As an investor, he was financially motivated to make beehiiv win. So he migrated his entire list over at launch.
Overnight, 100,000 finance readers saw a better-looking newsletter with a "powered by beehiiv" link in the footer. A percent or two got curious and clicked. Some of them started newsletters. Their footers created more clicks.
Multiply that by 15 investors with lists, and that was the whole marketing budget: $0 spent on growth for the first 12 months.
The rest of the early playbook, in Tyler's own framework:
- Ship what competitors get complained about. He watched Twitter for complaints about other platforms, and that became the roadmap. Five missing features, one month, build them all.
- Announce everything, loudly. Every two weeks, a product announcement email plus posts on every channel. The narrative became "they don't have that feature yet, but they ship so fast they will soon." That narrative buys patience.
- Retweet every milestone. beehiiv's dashboard has a very recognizable pink growth chart. Users screenshot it when they cross 10,000 or 20,000 subscribers, Tyler retweets it, and the feed slowly fills with proof that people win on beehiiv. Dozens of milestone posts a day now.
- Defend the growth loop. Big customers offered extra money to remove the footer branding. He refused for 16 months, because two conversions from that footer were worth more than the $200 upgrade. Data over feelings.
Then Milk Road happened. Shaan Puri's partner Ben Levy DM'd Tyler asking how to buy a domain, started a crypto newsletter from zero on beehiiv, used the stock website, the default templates, and the referral program (about 50,000 subscribers came from referrals alone), and sold the whole thing for millions 10 months later at 250,000 subscribers.
You can't buy a better case study. Around ten newsletters that started on beehiiv have been acquired since.
The ad network was the plan all along
The subscription software was never the endgame. Tyler says it plainly in the interview: from day one, the plan was to build the largest ad network in email.
The logic runs backwards from the prize. To build an email ad network you need billions of impressions. To get billions of impressions you need tens of thousands of top newsletters. To get those newsletters you need the best growth and monetization tools in the market. So you spend years shipping the tools, and the tools collect the data that makes the ads valuable.
At 19 months in, beehiiv was already serving 400 million impressions a month, and advertisers could spread $100,000 across 30 niche newsletters with real first-party data instead of gambling it on one big send with self-reported open rates.
For the writer, it works like YouTube AdSense: five ad offers appear in your dashboard, you pick the one that fits, you get paid. No outreach, no invoicing, no sales calls. The whole machine is a lesson in lead nurturing: own the audience relationship, collect the data, and the monetization compounds on its own.
I ranked the newsletters worth reading as a founder in my best newsletters for SaaS founders roundup, and it's not an accident how many of them run on beehiiv.
Where beehiiv is today
The interview was recorded when beehiiv was at $500K a month, a team of 20, and a $50 to $100 million valuation depending on who was guessing.
Since then:
- April 2024: a $33 million Series B led by NEA, taking total funding to $46.5 million, with the platform sending over a billion emails a month.
- 2026: Tyler announced beehiiv crossed $30 million ARR. His public breakdown of the climb: 14 months to $1M, 12 more to $5M, 9 to $10M, 6 to $15M, 5 to $20M, 5 to $25M, 4 to $30M.
- He's said he expects revenue to reach roughly $50 million this year.
Each jump is coming faster than the one before it. That's what happens when the growth loop is built into the product instead of bolted onto it.
What I'm stealing from Tyler's playbook
→ Say yes, then figure it out. The $3,000 referral program he couldn't build became the skill his entire company is based on.
→ Raise from people who ARE your distribution. Strategic angels with newsletters beat one big check from a fund with none.
→ Your competitors' complaint threads are a free roadmap. Build what their users are publicly begging for.
→ Shipping speed is a marketing channel. The announcement matters as much as the feature.
→ Know your endgame before you write a line of code. beehiiv looked like a subscription SaaS for years while quietly assembling an ad network.
The pattern rhymes with how Noah Kagan built AppSumo: start embarrassingly scrappy, compound one loop relentlessly, and let the boring repeatable thing make you rich.
FAQ
How did Tyler Denk start beehiiv?
Tyler Denk started building beehiiv in late 2020, nights and weekends, while working as a product manager at Google. He co-founded it with Ben Hargett and Jake Hurd, two engineers from his Morning Brew days. They raised a $2.6 million seed led by Social Use in October 2021 and launched publicly in November 2021.
How much money does beehiiv make?
In the interview (recorded 19 months after launch), Tyler says beehiiv was making about $500,000 a month. In 2026 he announced the company had crossed $30 million in annual recurring revenue, and he has said publicly that he expects roughly $50 million in revenue for the year.
What did Tyler Denk do at Morning Brew?
He was Morning Brew's second employee and built most of its internal technology, including the website and the referral program that drove over a million subscribers. During his three and a half years there, Morning Brew grew from 50,000 to 3.5 million subscribers, and it later sold a majority stake for about $75 million.
How did beehiiv get its first users?
Three ways: a waitlist of about 450 people from a single tweet, 15 to 20 strategic angel investors who moved their own newsletters over (including Litquidity's 100,000-subscriber Exec Sum), and the "powered by beehiiv" footer link in every email sent through the platform, which turned every customer's audience into a customer acquisition channel.
Tyler's story is what intentional compounding looks like: one loop, fed by every feature and every retweet, for five years straight.
Every week on the podcast I sit down with bootstrapped founders running their own versions of that loop, from first PayPal button to real revenue, and get them to share their actual numbers.
