When we last left Tyler Denk, he and the entire beehiiv team were just recovering from the tragic loss of their co-founder and CTO, Andrew Platkin.

To honor Andrew, they made the (easy) decision to accelerate his equity, making his mother a shareholder in the company.

As Tyler puts it:

Tyler was more motivated than ever to give the company his all.

By the end of 2022, beehiiv was making $90,000 in revenue, and not spending a dollar on acquisition. To get the traction they desired (and needed), the next year would have to be different.

And different it was…

Unfortunately, before we can tell our happy ending, Act III picks up with yet another blow to the company.

As it turns out, if something can happen at the worst possible time, it will.

Missed Part 2? Read the full article on our website.
Missed Part 1? Read the full article on our website.

What a ride the last six months has been.

We just hosted one of our largest events yet - a tech festival with a live afterparty performance capping off Figma Config. And at the beginning of June, we unleashed AI Day at NY Tech Week, with firesides during the day, a dinner for AI leaders, and an afterparty to close the night.

So far this year, Unicorner has hosted in San Francisco, Austin, Boston, and New York. We’re coming back bigger and better in the second half of 2026.

Here’s to a great start to July!

Ethan and Arek 🦄

The GoDaddy nightmare occurred in February 2023. 

Tyler was in Cabo at a friend's bachelor party, the second time he had taken days off since starting the company. 

He woke up to Slack messages and support tickets about websites going down, which the engineering team seemed to have under control. 

Six hours and 10 beers later, it was getting worse. He opened his laptop and found an email from GoDaddy saying beehiiv's account would be shut down on 24 hours' notice. 

To say this was bad is an understatement. 

Why was this existential? beehiiv hosted beehiiv.com through GoDaddy. But GoDaddy also hosted the websites of all of its users on their behalf. GoDaddy going dark meant both beehiiv and thousands of user websites would disappear with it. 

For a platform whose entire promise to creators was that their audience and livelihood were safe in its hands, this was indeed an existential crisis and a totally ok reason to freak out.

24 hours. The clock was ticking.

In a panic around 11 p.m., Tyler tweeted into the void, sent a code red email to everyone on his investor update list, and had the team track down the contact details of every GoDaddy executive they could find.

After two hours on hold, and the clock hitting 1 a.m., he was finally escalated to emergency support, whereupon he pleaded for the account to be reinstated. 

And… it was. 

The first thing the next morning, the team moved off GoDaddy and never looked back. 

In addition to this, the team has dealt with countless crises that don't have a name or a date… Founders will know what we’re talking about. 

Tyler summarizes this lesson succinctly. Building a business doesn’t get easier and the problems don’t disappear as it grows. That is a myth. It just gets a different kind of difficult. 

Soon, the team would face just that.

Until this point, beehiiv hadn't spent a dollar on acquisition. But to reach the scale the team was after, that eventually had to change. And that moment was now. 

So, still in early 2023, they created a free 14-day trial, giving every new user access to all premium features. Remove every reason to hesitate, and let the product do the rest. 

As beehiiv shared its milestones publicly along the way (more on that soon!), investors reached out with interest. Tyler was ignoring all of them because taking more outside money conflicted with this goal. 

And up until this moment, he was being deliberate.

He had believed that raising venture capital was a means to an end, not an accomplishment in itself. The goal was to build a profitable business without leaning on outside capital as a crutch. When he did raise, it was with intention, like the seed round that let him go all-in on beehiiv and leave his full-time job behind. 

Then, sometime in May 2023, one midnight, it hit him.

Why was he going out of his way to make an already difficult thing harder than it needed to be? 

The team was stretched thin, the roadmap was full of ideas nobody had the bandwidth to execute… and people were willing to give him money to scale his business. 

In other words, being a founder is a challenging enough game, and he was playing it on hard mode.

He realized that he was misinterpreting his own principle, "don't create disadvantages that don't need to exist." 

Burning through runway while refusing capital that was offered on good terms was precisely that kind of unnecessary disadvantage. 

He wrote a one-page note to himself on a Friday asking a simple question: if they had ten million dollars in the bank tomorrow, what would they actually do with it? 

He read it again Saturday morning and found the answer so obvious it embarrassed him. 

By Monday, he had replied to a handful of handpicked funds, because he didn’t want to waste time with drawn-out back-and-forths. He only wanted to sit across decision-makers and quickly move things forward. 

It was a singular week in May 2023. 

Monday through Thursday was eight partner meetings.

Friday, he was in Mexico City. Two verbal offers on term sheets arrived that evening.

Saturday, the next morning, he put in his AirPods and walked around the city for hours, making calls. On a park bench alone in one of the most beautiful parks in Mexico City, Bosque de Chapultepec, he negotiated the fine points of one of the most important decisions the company would ever make. 

Lightspeed would lead beehiiv’s $12.5 million Series A. 

beehiiv didn't need the money; the business was okay. Tyler explains this was about momentum, something that is fragile and rare. So he took the capital and accelerated faster toward their mission.

To be frank, from that point on, the company kept hitting milestone after milestone. 

One of the first and most important decisions that followed that Series A investment had nothing to do with product, funny enough. It was making their first HR hire, Isidora. 

In Tyler's words, they would have entirely imploded trying to double the team without her. 

That same summer, something curious happened. 

An intern named Brenda had been brought on to create content for beehiiv's social channels. Sometimes, that newcomer mentality brings with it the most genius ideas. Perhaps you were that intern, once. 

Anyway, she blurted out, “There’s literally no consistency or brand in any of these posts… what am I supposed to create?” 

She was right. 

When beehiiv launched in 2021, co-founder Ben had thrown a gradient over a freelancer's logo, and Tyler thought it looked good enough. They had a product to build and users to win. Branding could wait. 

Remember, they didn’t even overthink the company’s name. You can imagine then how much thought went into the visual identity. But two years in, it was time. 

Brenda led the initiative alongside their designer, Laura, and what came out of it reflected a brand with actual values, a voice, and a visual identity that matched the ambition of what they were building.

Then, in September 2023, beehiiv made another significant move. 

By that point, the platform had 800 million monthly impressions and was home to some of the most influential writers and publishers in the newsletter space. 

Running a successful ad sales operation as an independent publisher, however, was a time-consuming process. So, beehiiv launched its Ad Network, connecting newsletter operators directly with brands like Netflix, Nike, and HubSpot, handling all the complexity on the backend and taking a 20% fee on the revenue generated. 

Within just a few months of launching, the network had already paid out nearly half a million dollars to publishers.

By the end of 2023, beehiiv had 45 full-time employees across eight countries, and was on pace to nearly $7 million in revenue. 

By all means, the year was a blowout success, despite starting with such an existential threat. After so many difficult times, the team more than deserved it.

Take the capital when it accelerates the mission, and decline it when it doesn't. That’s what 2023 was all about. 

And if 2023 was the year beehiiv stopped playing on hard mode, 2024 would be the year that made it impossible to look away. 

There is a version of building a company where you share only the wins, with the funding rounds, the milestones, the partnerships, and the awards. 

From the very beginning, Tyler shared what was happening in the beehiiv blog, even when the company was doing just $1,000 a month.

Today, we have a phrase for this: building in public. 

In 2024, that public presence took on a new form. 

Tyler launched Big Desk Energy, a personal newsletter where he shares the torturous, unglamorous path of building a company. Unsurprisingly, his most-read writings are the ones about the hardest moments. 

What Tyler didn't anticipate was how directly that public presence would translate into business. One of the largest deals beehiiv has ever signed, worth several $100 thousand a year, came through the newsletter, not a sales team. 

Time Magazine's CTO happened to read Tyler's personal newsletter and recommended internally that the company should be using beehiiv. The entire organization migrated its newsletters over in 2024. That’s 13 newsletters with more than 2 million subscribers. 

The lesson Tyler draws from it is that the founder is a distribution channel, and that channel compounds over time. 

Every milestone shared, and every public admission that something didn't work the way it was supposed to, builds an audience of people who are connected to the mission, and some of those people will eventually become customers, investors, or advocates.

It was also in 2024 when beehiiv raised a $33 million Series B round led by NEA with participation from Sapphire Sport and Lightspeed (again). 

Just like with beehiiv’s Series A, it’s not like they needed it. beehiiv had over $10 million in the bank and was growing steadily.

But the company had two choices: play it safe, monitor spend, and stay close to breakeven. Or, hire into the gaps, accelerate the roadmap, and push harder while the wind was at their backs. 

Remember how we mentioned momentum is one of the most fragile things a company can have? The question was whether, in a competitive and fast-moving market, slowing down made any sense. It didn’t. 

And the bet is paying off. 

And it’s working so well that Tyler even managed to sleep eight hours one night. 

He would need the beauty sleep, because 2025 was the year this beast would get its moment to truly shine. But for that to happen, it demanded almost everything he had.

In March 2025, beehiiv made its first massive bet on brand awareness. It sponsored podcasts and newsletters and bought ad space across the New York City subway system. For a company that had grown almost entirely through word of mouth and product loyalty, this was new territory.

It paid off. The campaign set several records for daily signups and added tens of thousands of dollars in net new MRR.

And from here on out, it’s a story of beehiiv picking up speed and never letting it go. 

Back in the summer of 2024, beehiiv had acquired Typedream, an AI-native website builder, with the goal of rebuilding the technology natively within the beehiiv ecosystem. After six months of intense work, the beta launched in January 2025. It was, by Tyler's own admission, buggy and missing a lot of features. 

The months that followed were about listening to the audience, and by July 2025, the full website builder launched to all users. The result was, as Tyler described, a group of beautiful, professionally designed websites built on beehiiv appearing everywhere. 

What had started as a newsletter platform was step-by-step becoming a full ecosystem where creators could write, build their own websites, and grow their audiences, all without ever leaving beehiiv. 

And then came December 2025.

At beehiiv's first-ever Winter Release event, Tyler spoke the words that changed the future of the company: beehiiv was becoming the operating system for the content economy. 

Among the announcements, one stood out as the centerpiece: digital products. Tyler described it as one of the biggest features the company had ever launched, letting creators sell guides, templates, courses, and 1:1 services directly to their audience. And, with that, came an AI-powered evolution of the website builder, now allowing anyone to build an interactive site by chatting with AI. There were still other features for creators, with Tyler positioning the platform as a full creator toolkit.  

What had started as a buggy beta in January had become, by year's end, an entirely new category of platform. 

But wait… AI? Inside a written content platform?

If AI can produce writing at scale, instantly, for almost nothing, what exactly is left for human creators to do? Would people even want to keep consuming or creating long-format content? 

This is a question Tyler is asked frequently during interviews, and his answer always comes back to the idea of trust because trust is something that no language model can accumulate on its own. 

He explains that the internet is already filling with content that was generated at a pace and volume no human writer could match, and what readers will search for will be directly in the opposite direction:

This is where the idea of a thousand true fans becomes a business model. 

A writer who owns a niche deeply enough, who has cultivated a few thousand readers who really care what they think, can build something financially meaningful without ever competing for mass attention. A thousand people who trust you and are willing to pay for what you produce.

In fact, AI just raises the ceiling for what authentic writing can be worth. The scarcer trust becomes, the more valuable it is. 

In other words, give individual creators access to the same infrastructure that major publishers have always had, and let the quality of their voice and the depth of their relationship with their audience do the rest. 

Today, beehiiv is a fully remote company with 110 people spread across the world, building something that keeps getting bigger and more demanding, and still moving faster than ever.

Now, Tyler even manages to sleep 8 hours a day (most days, at least).  

From a Baltimore basement with $0.55 in his bank account to a platform sending 3 billion emails a month and surpassing $30 million in ARR in June 2026, beehiiv has come a long way. 

Tyler Denk isn't shy about being proud of what he's built. And he shouldn’t be.

Here at Unicorner, watching and supporting this one from the very beginning, it’s been one hell of a ride.

1. You’ll never feel ready. Tyler had no idea how to do what Morning Brew needed when Austin offered him that $3,000 contract. He said yes anyway and taught himself what he needed to know along the way. If he had waited until he felt qualified enough, beehiiv wouldn’t have existed. 

2. Derisk everything you can before you leap. The mythology around founders celebrates the reckless jump. Tyler did the opposite. He kept his day job and only made the jump once the company had a seed round in place. If you're worried about rent and food, you can't think clearly about building. Work on whatever is within your control to create a more stable foundation before things get crazy, because they will.

3. Build in public from day one, not from the day the numbers look good. Tyler was sharing with the world when beehiiv was making only $1,000 a month. By the time it was making $30 million in ARR, he had an audience that had watched the whole journey unfold. That trust is not something you can manufacture after the fact.

4. It doesn't get easier. Every founder is told the hard part is the beginning. Tyler knows the problems never go away, they just change shape. The early days demand everything from you as a builder. Later, they demand everything from you as a decision-maker and a public face. The skill set required keeps shifting, and the only real preparation for that is accepting it upfront.

5. Your early users are your best product researchers. The 400-person waitlist was a research tool. So was the first version of the website builder. In both cases, the people told the team exactly which problems to solve first. Don’t underestimate them.