How beehiiv Sold the Morning Brew Playbook to Everyone

At 2 am in his parents’ basement, Tyler Denk drafted a message to Morning Brew cofounder Austin Rief saying he could not complete the work he had accepted. But he never sent it.

A few weeks earlier, Rief had offered him $3,000 to build social-sharing and referral features for the young newsletter startup. Denk had done some coding, but he had never built anything like this. Still, he accepted. Now he was stuck fighting PHP and WordPress. In his latest retelling, he says he had 49 cents in his bank account and approximately $120,000 in student debt.

In three weeks, the feature worked. The assignment got him into Morning Brew as its second employee, where he would help build the referral program, acquisition systems, content-management software, audience analytics, and advertising infrastructure behind its growth. Four years later, he and two other Morning Brew engineers would begin selling a version of that infra to everyone else.

beehiiv entered a crowded category. Substack was reigning king in the public eyes while old-fashioned newsletter tools like MailChimp still controlled most of the market. beehiiv took that borrowed legitimacy and slowly converted it into an origin story of its own. While Substack’s public identity centered on independent writing, beehiiv focused on growth, monetization, and entrepreneurial control.

Tyler Denk himself became the proof of the positioning: he used media, product launches, investor updates, conflict, and his own newsletter to demonstrate what the software promised.

I. Tyler’s businesses before Morning Brew

Denk grew up in Owings Mills, outside Baltimore. He liked physics in high school and studied mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland, with a minor in technology entrepreneurship. This technical education was broader than the self-taught-programmer account he gives in most profiles. In 2014, he worked with the HP Scitex research-and-development team in Netanya, Israel, designing and testing industrial-printer components. Two years later, he researched multifunctional wings that could harvest solar energy for the University of Maryland’s Robo Raven III.

Soon after, he founded his first startup with his friend Taylor Johnson. They wanted to create a mobile music-discovery application but lacked the software skills and could not find a student developer to join them. When they heard the same complaint from other aspiring founders, they abandoned the music product and started VentureStorm, a service matching entrepreneurs with technical talent. The founders hoped students with ideas could find students who wanted money, equity, experience, or a portfolio project.

The problem was that the founders still had to build the product themselves. Denk taught himself to code, wrote on Medium and Quora, bought ads, secured university partnerships, and went directly to hackathons. He and his cofounders drove from Maryland to events at Harvard, Michigan, and Toronto, sometimes sleeping on classroom or auditorium floors to reach student developers.

The company changed its business model and widened beyond students, but the underlying economics remained poor. Its users had little money. People did not need a new cofounder every month. The team had not resolved whether it was running a freelance marketplace, a recruiting platform, or a relationship-matching service. VentureStorm wound down by the summer of 2017.

The failure taught Denk several of the ideas that later made beehiiv work: serve customers with an urgent recurring problem; choose a market with money; build where the founder has earned insight; and be precise about the transaction at the center of a marketplace.

He did not apply those lessons consistently. Later, while working at Morning Brew, he ordered 1,000 cryptocurrency hardware wallets from China after finding an open-source design. He did not own Bitcoin, had little knowledge of cryptocurrency, and had no network in the industry. He sold three. The other 997 ended up in his parents’ basement. Denk now tells the story as a warning about founder-market fit.

These failures are interesting because beehiiv can look inevitable in retrospect. A former Morning Brew employee saw a gap in newsletter software for creators, assembled his old colleagues, and built the obvious product. The actual path was murky and unclear. Denk tried a music application, a student marketplace, freelance e-commerce work, cryptocurrency hardware, and a music website before his technical skills, commercial knowledge, collaborators, reputation, and a recurring customer need finally converged.

II. Joining Morning Brew

After delivering the $3,000 work order, Denk stayed with Morning Brew as a contractor, sometimes working 50 to 60 hours a week. He had a full-time position in mind and had accepted a position at Deloitte. He even had an apartment and a girlfriend waiting in Washington, D.C. A friend helped him decide by stating the obvious: Deloitte would make him one of tens of thousands doing the same job; at Morning Brew, he would be the only person doing his.

Denk withdrew from Deloitte and moved to New York. He joined Morning Brew as its second full-time employee and moved through roles in growth engineering, product, and product leadership. The job eventually gave him experience with the publication’s editorial, marketing, sales, and technology systems.

Morning Brew’s publishing process was primitive when Denk arrived. Each evening, a writer had to transferr the day’s stories from a shared Google Doc into a saved HTML template. The process took more than an hour, regularly introduced broken formatting, and sometimes forced Denk to start again late at night. Hiring another writer made this process untenable.

For Morning Brew, the email was the primary product, while most existing content management systems focused on webpages. Instead of adopting an off-the-shelf system such as WordPress, Denk proposed building a newsletter-first CMS. Naturally, he had never built one before. The process was brutal and he was anxious throughout it, but a few months later Morning Brew launched Oslo, named after a Brooklyn coffee shop. Writers could create and rearrange story blocks, format an issue, and produce the styled HTML that went directly into Mailchimp with no changes.

Denk proceeded to fix other company issues. Morning Brew’s sales team was coordinating more than 30 sponsors in some weeks, with individual placements worth as much as $50,000. Assets, copy, links, approvals, and publication dates lived in a Google Sheet. Denk and Benjamin Hargett built Comet to collect the material, manage advertiser revisions, secure final approval, and place the finished advertisement directly into Oslo. Denk says the system helped Morning Brew’s partnerships operation scale to $20 million in revenue the following year.

Other newsletter operators used to ask what software Morning Brew used. Most of it did not exist as a product, Denk and the engineering team had built it just for one company. He suggested making parts of the system available to others, but Austin’s response was that Morning Brew was a media business, not a software vendor.

Denk says his impulse to publish operational knowledge began at Morning Brew. He took dozens of calls explaining its referral program, became tired of repeating himself, and wrote a Medium post that “open-sourced” the system. Publishing began as a way to scale his explanations.

By 2020, Morning Brew was approaching the stage that Denk said he enjoyed least, with several dozen employees, more formal management, and an acquisition on the horizon. He expected experienced executives to join above him. Curiosuly, he did not leave to start his own venture immeidately. Instead, before Insider acquired a controlling stake in Morning Brew, he joined YouTube Music as a product lead and spent 11 months there.

Denk said he wanted to learn how professional product management worked at enormous scale. COVID confined him to his New York apartment during the week between Morning Brew and Google, and he used the time to begin mapping the product that would become beehiiv.

III. Starting beehiiv

Denk recruited Benjamin Hargett, the first full-time engineer he had hired at Morning Brew. Hargett brought in his friend Jake Hurd, who had joined Morning Brew as its fourth engineer around the time Denk departed. The three began working in late 2020 and built for nearly ten months while waiting for financing before committing full-time.

In a 2025 essay about founder anxiety, Denk wrote that he worried daily about being sued out of existence over non-competes and non-solicits he said he had violated with his former employer. No case between Morning Brew and beehiiv appears in the public record, though.

Andrew Platkin became the fourth engineer. Platkin had informally advised Denk during Morning Brew, often stepping in without pay when the self-taught engineering lead broke something he could not fix. When Denk contacted him in 2021, Platkin was considering another CTO role. That opportunity fell through, and he agreed to work with the beehiiv team for two months without salary while both sides eyed each other. Denk later credited Platkin with much of beehiiv’s engineering velocity . When financing closed, Platkin accepted a substantial pay cut and became the first CTO.

Before beehiiv had a product, Denk tweeted that he was building “Morning Brew in a box” and placed the offer in conversations where people were criticizing Substack. The tweet produced approximately 450 signups from an audience of only 2,000 followers.

The team surveyed several hundred prospective users and asked about their existing platforms, publication type, and audience size. In July 2021, Denk began fundraising. The deck initially sought roughly $1.3 million. The company finished with a $2.6 million seed round led by Social Leverage, assembled over about five weeks.

The founders entered a crowded market. Substack had established the independent-newsletter category. Mailchimp, ConvertKit, and established email providers served millions of users. Twitter had just acquired Revue and Facebook was building Bulletin. Investors questioned why beehiiv would be the next big thing.

Morning Brew’s story became their answer.

Axios covered the round as former Morning Brew employees launching a Substack competitor. The angels included media operators, investors, and newsletter founders who could lend credibility, provide feedback, and distribute the product.

After launch, beehiiv asked angel investors who operated newsletters to become customers and promoters. Litquidity moved a list of roughly 100,000 subscribers onto a product Denk described as “janky,” giving beehiiv a flagship customer and placing its footer branding in front of that audience. The cap table doubled as the initial distribution strategy.

The first public version of beehiiv was essentially an editor, an email-sending product, a basic web archive, and a subscriber-capture form. The native referral program central to its Morning Brew legitimacy arrived shortly afterward, in December, and kept evolving in January.

Denk has since called the first version embarrassing. Every new account created another opportunity for disappointment. Customers threatened to leave unless beehiiv added features available elsewhere, and the team raced to ship.

IV. Using the media

Tyler Denk is one of the clearest examples of the go-direct-era founder. But he does not rely solely on social media, and he has not abandoned traditional media. Instead, he uses each channel for a different purpose.

Traditional media provides what it always did: independent attention and institutional credibility. Denk has repeatedly taken company news to Axios, TechCrunch, Adweek, Inc., and built relationships with these authors.

He then uses his own channels to extend the story and keep it circulating. X allows him to engage in conflict and react to customer feedback. LinkedIn is the place to share company milestones, management lessons, recruiting messages, and a more polished version of the same founder journey. Podcasts give him enough time to repeat the stories that establish his legitimacy.

Denk used each funding announcement to sharea new set of numbers: publications, emails sent, revenue run rate, publisher earnings, and product releases. He used feature announcements similarly. Each one reassured current users that beehiiv was addressing its flaws and gave blocked prospects a reason to reconsider. Because of this, missing features didn’t matter as much: the company showed it could catch up.

First, Axios covered the $2.6 million seed in October 2021. Its headline, “Ex-Morning Brew employees launching Substack competitor,” established the company’s initial position in a single phrase. The company’s announcement said a native referral program and analytics were among the products it intended to build.

In September 2022, beehiiv raised a $1.6 million extension that received no substantial independent coverage. The company announced it in its own newsroom, claiming more than 30% monthly revenue growth and plans to pilot an ad network.

TechCrunch covered the $12.5 million Series A led by Lightspeed in June 2023. The story was considerably more extensive than the launch coverage and emphasized beehiiv’s survival after Meta and Twitter abandoned the newsletter products that had made investors skeptical of the category.

Both Axios and TechCrunch covered the $33 million Series B led by NEA in April 2024, tying the round to beehiiv’s emerging advertising network and rapidly increasing email volume.

The company then opened roughly $1 million of the Series B to its community. Wefunder hosted the campaign and records $1,008,943 from 889 investors. Early and active customers received a chance to buy preferred shares. The financial stake was small, but the communications value was large: beehiiv could turn publishers into owners and advocates.

Denk cultivated investors who had previously said no by sending them detailed monthly updates. Before the Series A, Lightspeed asked him to describe what beehiiv would do with $10 million. He wrote the plan, and two competing term sheets arrived within roughly a week. The updates allowed Denk to turn private operating data into a continuing proof of momentum without repeatedly pitching the company from scratch.

V. Tyler as the company’s media franchise

In a 2024 interview, Denk said building in public grew from the insecurity of launching an incomplete product and needing to create “whatever narrative that you can that people are actually using this product.” When a customer announced a move to beehiiv, Denk, his cofounders, and the company account amplified the post. A few migrations, made repeatedly visible, could create the impression that everyone was moving.

The amplification created an incentive for users to praise beehiiv: a favorable post could earn instant promotion. In exchange, beehiiv received a continuous supply of social proof. Denk made early momentum feel larger than it was, helping that perception become self-fulfilling.

For most of beehiiv’s rise, Denk performed work that would usually be divided among a CEO, CMO, communications head, product marketer, and corporate publication. The company’s 2021 seed announcement listed him as the media contact. He wrote product histories and fundraising posts, appeared on podcasts, published investor updates, replied to customers, displayed milestones, and attacked competitors. His voice matched the product’s promise: fast, direct, commercially ambitious, and impatient with incumbents.

Then he became a power user. Big Desk Energy became an in-house publication and a live demo of beehiiv for the users. The name originally had nothing to do with newsletters. Denk created it in 2019 for a Spotify playlist and retro website after spending time in a Hamptons share house. In January 2024, he revived it as a weekly newsletter about startups, beehiiv, and his life as a founder.

The writing is difficult to separate from him. It is raw, direct, detailed, and personal in ways that polished executive ghostwriting never is. Only the founder himself could write like this.

Big Desk Energy became beehiiv’s most complete product demonstration. Denk used the editor, website builder, analytics, referrals, lead magnets, Recommendations, Boosts, advertising tools, automations, digital products, and AI features. He added a store, resource library, referral rewards, founder trips, ads, and a chatbot trained on his writing and the beehiiv knowledge base. By early 2026, he said the audience had passed 130,000 and that some of beehiiv’s largest enterprise customers had begun as readers. Every issue shows aspiring publishers what an ambitious operator can build on the platform.

The newsletter also lets Denk control the interpretation of beehiiv’s history. He has written about Platkin’s death, his fear of legal action, the early product’s deficiencies, anxiety, the firing of the growth team, and a possible sale. These stories usually appear after he can turn the crisis into a comeback. The disclosures are genuine, but he controls the timeline.

Denk’s account of the growth-team firing offers a great example. In late July 2025, he fired a third of the team, removed its leadership, paused the growth program, and cut spending by 90 percent. He did not disclose the decision while growth was stalling and potential acquirers were circling. He waited roughly eight and a half months. By the time he published “We Almost Sold” in April 2026, beehiiv had rebuilt the team, reduced monthly burn from $1.5 million to $200,000, completed its Winter Release, and recorded what Denk called its best quarter ever, adding nearly $4.5 million in ARR. The essay is written as a comeback: early success, strategic drift, a brutal intervention, investor doubt, and vindication. The delay allowed him to present the firing as a painful but ultimately successful decision.

There’s generic advice going around to “be vulnerable online.” But publishing during the crisis would have created only uncertainty. This isn’t the way to convert customers, investors and followers. By waiting, he was able to show himself as the winner.

Denk was already used to communicating with a delay like this. He made beehiiv’s investor updates available to the public through an automated newsletter sequence, but kept them two years behind the company. Readers can experience beehiiv’s development month by month while current information stays protected and Denk retains control of the frame. The growth-team essay shortened the delay but followed the same principle: disclose the crisis after the outcome is known.

VI. Turning the product roadmap into a story

beehiiv’s product roadmap defined most of its positioning. The referral program turned readers into distributors. Recommendations allowed publications to exchange audiences. In April 2023, beehiiv introduced Boosts, which added money to the exchange: publishers could pay for verified subscribers or earn revenue by recommending another publication. Paid subscriptions offered reader revenue without a platform percentage, while the Ad Network gave smaller publishers access to advertising before they could support their own sales teams.

Together, these features validated the “built for growth” claim. Each translated part of Morning Brew’s operating system into features: acquire readers, encourage them to recruit others, understand their behavior, and monetize the resulting audience. beehiiv was selling the possibility of running a sophisticated newsletter business without writing a line of code. And a dream of independence, of course.

Typedream, announced that beehiiv had acquired it in June 2024 giving the platform a more substantial website-building product. In November, Axios exclusively covered the beehiiv Media Collective, a multimillion-dollar program offering independent journalists software and operational support. Digital products, podcasting, automations, and advertising pushed beehiiv beyond the category in which it had launched. “Newsletter platform built for growth” remained recognizable, but it no longer described the entire company.

Denk treated that positioning problem as a launch opportunity. During a founder retreat in Costa Rica, he heard another founder describe a webinar that had generated more than $1 million. Looking at beehiiv’s roadmap, Denk realized several major products would be ready at roughly the same time. He spent the weekend writing a proposal for an Apple-style presentation and, according to his account, aligned the company around it within 72 hours.

The Winter Release streamed in November 2025 and bundled an AI website builder, digital products, podcast pages, link-in-bio tools, web analytics, and a new automation suite into one event. It gathered separate roadmap items into a single act of repositioning and supplied reporters with a larger company story: beehiiv wanted to power the entire business around an audience.

TechCrunch presented the release as an attempt to give creators greater ownership and consolidate their tools. Adweek framed it as a move into competition with Substack, Squarespace, Patreon, Shopify, and Gumroad. The product event gave both outlets the evidence to describe beehiiv as something larger than newsletter software.

VII. A fight with Substack

A clearly defined rival gave beehiiv a sharper thesis. In its October 2021 coverage of the seed round, Axios called the new company a Substack competitor. The comparison was obvious to outsiders: both helped authors create their own newsletters. Denk later turned it into a philosophical dispute about independence.

Substack’s central product is increasingly a consumer network. Readers can discover writers, follow Notes, participate in discussions, watch video, listen to podcasts, and consume several publications through one Substack identity and app. That network can solve the hardest problem of finding an audience for an independent writer. But over time, the writer can become dependent on Substack’s identity and distribution, making that audience hard or even impossible to move elsewhere.

Instead, beehiiv’s platform emphasizes the publication’s own brand, website, email list, acquisition systems, audience data, and multiple revenue streams. There are no dedicated mobile subscribers. The company charges for software but does not take a percentage of paid subscriptions. Denk can therefore reduce the competitive argument to arithmetic: a publication earning $100,000 from subscriptions would pay Substack $10,000, while its beehiiv software bill could $1152 for the same year.

In his essays and posts, Denk has accused Substack of using its app and feed to take control of the audience relationship, called percentage fees predatory, and warned that in-app payments can make paid subscribers harder to move. He describes beehiiv as email-first and open, with APIs, webhooks, exports, integrations, and no platform cut of subscription revenue.

The opposition is imperfect. beehiiv also operates cross-publication networks, an advertising marketplace, and paid recommendations. It benefits as more publishers, advertisers, and readers participate in its systems. beehiiv presents its recommendation and advertising products as ways to increase the value of a publisher’s own business while keeping the direct audience relationship intact.

Substack has mostly declined to return Denk’s aggression publicly. In March 2026, cofounder Hamish McKenzie told Semafor he did not view beehiiv as a threat. He described beehiiv, Ghost, and other publishing services as fellow travelers giving creators more choice. Semafor reported mild annoyance inside Substack and a public posture of indifference.

The asymmetry suits both companies. Substack can behave like the incumbent that does not need to engage. beehiiv gets attention, a sharper identity, and a reason for ambitious publishers to reconsider the default.

VIII. Lessons from beehiiv

Tyler Denk borrowed Morning Brew’s credibility and personally pitched beehiiv’s announcements. With time, he has built a direct-media operation across X, LinkedIn, podcasts, and his newsletter. He used earned media strategically for validation and owned channels for speed, conflict, transparency, and product proof to become one of the go-direct era’s most effective founder-publishers.

• He moved from borrowed legitimacy to owned legitimacy. In 2021, the story was almost entirely “the Morning Brew engineers building a Substack competitor,” the framing established by Axios’s seed coverage. Denk gradually replaced that borrowed authority with product results, funding, customer adoption, public metrics, and his own audience.

• He turns company updates into events. He publishes “chapters,” milestones, investor updates, annual reviews, failures and comeback stories. This pushes beehiiv into the news and makes it feel like a series while most companies only reappear to announce fundraising.

• He makes his bio serve the company. The “build versus buy” essay turns VentureStorm, Oslo, Comet, and the referral program into an argument for beehiiv.

• He is transparent when it suits beehiiv. Denk has discussed things like legal anxiety, product embarrassment, Andrew Platkin’s death, a mass firing, investor doubt, and a possible sale. But these disclosures always arrive after he can explain what happened, show the outcome, and turn it into a comeback story.

• He uses conflict to define the category. The fight with Substack created a much sharper distinction and gave beehiiv an enemy against which to explain its choices.

• He uses metrics to create drama. ARR milestones are scoreboards, social proof, fundraising material, and a response to people who rejected him. Denk told Inc. that publishing the numbers was partly a “fuck-you” to doubters and said the updates helped with hiring and capital formation.

• He has cultivated repeat outlet relationships. Axios has repeatedly covered company news: the seed, Swapstack, the Media Collective, the Washington Post relationship, AI tools, and the communications hire. TechCrunch has validated the financing and product-expansion story. Adweek covers beehiiv’s advertising, positioning, launches, and marketing leadership.

IX. Can beehiiv scale Tyler Denk?

Many successful technology companies become institutional expressions of their founders. Shopify reflects Tobi Lütke’s product sensibility and belief in entrepreneurship. Stripe has extended Patrick and John Collison’s intellectual curiosity and obsession with developers across its products and brand.

beehiiv follows the same model. Denk is already more than the usual founder-spokesperson. He is its most visible customer, product demo, company historian, and competitive provocateur. His personality communicates the qualities beehiiv wants customers to associate with its software: ambition, speed, commercial aggression, and impatience with established platforms. The company’s opportunity is to multiply that advantage.

beehiiv hired C-level marketing leadership only after this identity had formed. Darren Chait, a former Calendly growth executive and the cofounder of a company Calendly acquired, became beehiiv’s first CMO in March 2026. Lance Frank joined a month later as its first Head of Communications, after overseeing communications for CBS News, Stations, and CBS Media Ventures at Paramount.

Frank told Axios that the “newsletter platform” label now undersells beehiiv and that his priority is to establish it as infrastructure for anyone with an audience. The company’s broader language around the “content economy” is intentional. Denk argues that “creator economy” excludes enterprise customers such as Time, TechCrunch, and Newsweek, along with companies hiring editorial teams and chief storytellers. “Content economy” instead places individual creators, established publishers, and corporate-owned media under one umbrella.

The new executives face an unusual assignment. beehiiv already has a powerful voice, and it belongs to its founder. Their job is to institutionalize that advantage: create launches with Denk’s sense of theater, supply independent evidence for his claims, develop executives as authorities for other verticals, and place customer stories beside the founder’s. Denk can remain the flagship while the organization builds a fleet around him.

The company has already begun turning the founder’s behavior into an internal practice. On a podcast, Denk said every new beehiiv employee goes through onboarding by building a newsletter on the platform, and many employees continue operating personal newsletters afterward.

There are risks in this structure. Denk’s conflicts become beehiiv’s conflicts. Other executives and employees can disappear behind the founder’s personality. A communications system built around one person also depends on that person continuing to publish, provoke, and perform at the same pace. The founder can be both the company’s greatest distribution advantage and its biggest risk.

beehiiv does not need to become larger than Tyler Denk. It needs to broadcast his worldview through more people, products, customers, and institutions than he could reach alone. If it succeeds, the founder will not be the company’s ceiling. He will be its source code.