🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week: beehiiv

✍️ Notes from the Editors

This week, we’re excited to bring you the company that makes our weekly Unicorner emails possible! We learned about beehiiv in early 2022, after several friends began newsletters on the platform. We were impressed with what the relatively new startup had to offer and met its co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk soon after. Almost eight months later, after much back and forth with Tyler, we migrated Unicorner to beehiiv in April of 2023.

beehiiv has helped us take Unicorner to places we couldn’t previously imagine. In the two months we’ve been on beehiiv, we’ve grown our community by thousands and have been able to better engage with you through our weekly content.

It seems fitting to now cover beehiiv’s Series A as a testament to the unique tools its team is building. We hope you enjoy this week’s cover!

- Ethan and Arek 🦄

Next-gen newsletter publishing

beehiiv is an email newsletter publishing platform. Founded by ex-Morning Brew engineers and product leaders, it markets itself as “the newsletter platform for growth” and offers a unique set of tools to aid newsletters on their growth journey. beehiiv also has a relatively simple pricing structure which separates it from competitors.

🔗 Check it out: beehiiv.com

💰 Business Model

beehiiv’s revenue comes from its monthly subscriptions. It operates on a three-tiered system: a free plan, a Grow plan ($42/month billed annually), and a Scale plan ($84/month billed annually). Enterprise options are available for newsletters with over 100,000 readers.

📈 Traction and Fundraising

• Raised $12.5 million Series A from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Social Leverage, Creator Ventures, Blue Wire Capital, and Contrarian Thinking Capital

• Over 75,000 newsletters on the platform with 35 million unique readers and 350 million monthly impressions

👫 Founders

Tyler Denk, CEO

Immediately before founding beehiiv, Tyler Denk was at Google, serving as a product lead on YouTube Music. But his claim to fame comes from being employee #2 at Morning Brew, one of the most prominent online newsletters out there. While at Morning Brew, he sat at roles across growth, engineering, and product, building and extending many of Morning Brew’s core growth functions. It’s this experience that’s applied directly to the tools beehiiv offers its customers.

Benjamin Hargett

Benjamin worked at Morning Brew as a senior software engineer. Tyler hired him while at Morning Brew, and Ben became the first full-time engineer working there.

Jacob Hurd

Jacob was also at Morning Brew at the same time as the rest of the team, where he worked as a software engineer. He previously worked at the marketing-focused N2 Company as a developer using Ruby on Rails, which is one of the core technologies used in beehiiv’s newsletter stack.

💼 Opportunities

P.S. These are all fresh, fully remote openings! If you’re thinking of applying, please reply to this email instead and we’ll connect you directly with Tyler and the team.

• Account Executive

• Email Deliverability Lead

• Full Stack Engineer - Internal Tools

• Sales Development Rep

• Senior Data & Infrastructure Engineer

• Senior Frontend Engineer

• Senior Software Engineer

• TikTok Creator

🔮 Our Analysis

Many more people are writing newsletters than ever before—including us! For some, writing a newsletter is a hobby. For others, it’s a side hustle or even a full-time job. This is largely due to the innovations in the newsletter space that make newsletter writing accessible. Responsive drag-and-drop newsletter builders, A/B testing, and email automation are just some of the features that we take for granted today. While Mailchimp popularized the freemium model of writing newsletters, and other platforms like Substack are known for enabling writers to create paid newsletters, beehiiv incorporates all of these and more.

beehiiv is taking the features that make successful newsletter giants like Morning Brew and giving them to the masses. One of these is referrals, which allows readers to earn rewards for referring their friends to the newsletter. Another is its strong customization experience, which is one of the ways we were able to keep our distinct Unicorner design style when we migrated from our old platform. Finally, beehiiv prioritizes newsletter monetization with its fee-free paid subscriptions and ad network, which connects creators with sponsorship deals.

Where will beehiiv go from here? Denk has a vision of making it the “most robust platform for content creation and the largest advertising network not named Google or Facebook.” Given our stellar experience with beehiiv so far and the platform’s impressive track record, we subscribe to the belief that it will continue to deliver exceptional results.

📚 Further Reading

• Beehiiv, a newsletter platform, gets $12.5M in its inbox [TechCrunch]

• beehiiv Raises $12.5M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners [beehiiv]

• The beehiiv Story: Chapter 1 [beehiiv]

Written by the editors

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Made with 💜 by the Unicorner team 🦄