How beehiiv Grows: Becoming The Sweetest Newsletter Platform

Tactical lessons from 0 to a $100M startup in 2.5 years

👋 Welcome to How They Grow, my newsletter’s main series. Bringing you in-depth analyses on the growth of world-class companies, including their early strategies, current tactics, and actionable product-building lessons we can learn from them.

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Hi, friends 👋

It feels good to be back into the full swing of things and like a productive member of society again.

I’ll sheepishly admit it: as much as I love writing and working on this newsletter, it took me a minute to find my regular daily writing rhythm after a complete month off. I procrastinated a lot, and have embarrassingly quick become pretty solid at the new Call of Duty Zombies mode. Did I get a headset to play online…who’s to say. 🤷‍♂️

But while writing this week’s deep dive, I definitely felt myself find that flow again and thaw the ice off my fingers. Oi, that’s a cringe analogy.

…yes, it certainly was my friend….

Anyway, this was the perfect piece to help return to business as usual because I picked a company that was just a ton of fun to learn and write about.

I’ve know about beehiiv—the all in one platform for newsletter creators—pretty much since they launched in 2021. I’ve been the guy awkwardly watching from the sidelines as the beehiiv party has become hotter and hotter, while hanging out over at the Substack one across the street that hasn’t.

beehiiv is rapidly becoming the most compelling place to write and monetize content on the internet, with innovation and improvements coming out the wahzoo at breakneck speed. All the while, Substack feels like things have been stagnating—feature launches are few and far between, and writer needs (things we routinely ask for) often feel like they don’t get acted on quick enough, with business ideas coming first.

All that being said, I wasn’t expecting to write about beehiiv anytime soon. In part, because as you may know I like to write about products I use and have first hand experience and insight into. And also, because beehiiv is much smaller than the usual suspects we pull lessons from (Notion, Miro, Canva, Roblox, etc) who typically have cracked billion dollar status.

But on those two points, here’s why we’re talking about beehiiv today:

1. The FOMO was very real. After dinner last week with a friend who happens to be one of their investors, I made the decision to at least tease the idea of switching to beehiiv by taking their platform for a spin.

2. Consider me teased.And while playing around with my trial, it quickly obvious to me—beehiiv is playig very well in this space. And I’ll bet founder/CEO Tyler Denk and his team drive this thing to surpass Substack and reach $60M-$100M in ARR within 5 years.

Here’s this young startups impressive resume:

via beehiiv website

According to beehiiv’s number guy, Edward W, they’re currently at $6.5M ARR and have grown more than 10x between 2022 and 2023 across customer, revenue, and MRR.

Their raise in July 2022 with Lightspeed, with $3M ARR, put them at a $65M valuation. So back of the napkin, I’d guess they’re probably somewhere around $100-$120M valuation at the moment. Basically I’m predicting 10-15X in growth in 5 years.

Okay, let’s take a look at why that’s so doable.

Here’s what to expect in today’s analysis:

• How They Started: Bee-lieving in a better way 🐝

  • The market: The $8B newsletter niche

  • One tool to rule them all: Stacks vs Hiivs

• How They Grow: Becoming the sweetest hiiv for creators 🍯

  • The hook and wedge: Going to market with two killer features

  • Velocity, insane customer focus, and building in public

  • Stellar content marketing, making customers the hero of the story, brand design, and community

  • beehiiv’s Product-Led Growth Iceberg: Easy onboarding, the reverse trial, flywheels, and more

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Actionable insights 🧠 🛠️

If you only have a few minutes to spare, here are just 5 of the many tactical takeaways from beehiiv— from a building perspective.

• You don’t have to be first, you just have to be right about a different point of view. beehiiv entered a very saturated market, but with a unique insight, has been able to win market share.

• Counter positioning yourself against an incumbents belief is a great way to differentiate. Substack is very public about their belief in the B2C subscription model alone. beehiiv is very public about the opposite—writer revenue diversity.

• The art of crafting a pitch for your MVP is to have enough of a hook to grab people’s attention, and that boils down to having one or two critical killer features. Scope creep, especially when you have a good idea of what your product needs to ultimately be, can be very appealing. But V1 should focus on launching 1 or 2 main things that you believe set your apart. If you’re right, go and build more.

• Niche down in your market to find your wedge. AKA, your beachhead. When you’re laser-focused on a specific niche, it becomes easier to built deep empathy for them, develop a true understanding of who they are, and go deep on their pain points. They key is having a specific niche that helps you break into an adjacent larger niche later.

• Velocity, combined with excellent prioritization and sequencing, is how you built trust and win. Keep reading to see how beehiiv is pulling it off…👇

→ More on those, and many more insights inside.

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1. How They Started: Bee-lieving in a better way 🐝

What is an email newsletter worth?

Good question, so real quick, I want to chat about the creator ecosystem, specifically, zooming in on the category of online newsletters.

The market: The $8B newsletter niche

I remember writing online in 2018 and 2019.

At first I used a janky Wordpress site stitched together with Mailchimp. It did the job, but even the simple act of writing and publishing a post was a pain in the ass, having to continuously copy and paste stuff over between the newsletter and blog. There was also SEO to try figure out. And at this stage of writing, I wasn’t even thinking about monetization. But, if posting content was a mission, best believe payments were way worse.

RIP old piecemeal blog.

Then I got wind of a slick new platform called Medium. Medium was great because besides a simple and easy UI for writing/publishing (which has now become table-stakes for all tools in the space), Medium offered distribution to their network of readers. And for a young writer, the promise of eyeballs on a post was everything. Quite simply, because distribution = growth.

And it worked. I got all giddy when I saw my follower count on Medium climb. Medium also has a native way to make money on their platform, and I lost my marbles when I got my first payout from them—my first dollar for writing something. Thanks to a viral post, it was a handsome $800 or so. In that moment, I saw how internet writing was a viable business to people without huge social followings.

But despite many of the issues Medium fixed, they had two big flaws that I only came to terms with when I discovered Substack in Jan 2020.

1. Followers are just a vanity. And followers on tools like Medium, Instagram, or Twitter belong to those platform, not you as a writer. I didn’t realize how much that meant—the ability to export your subscribers off platform, to not be locked into one tool forever, and to reach out to readers who’ve entrusted you with their emails directly. Oh, and of course, to actually have insight into who your audience is.

2. You can’t control monetization there. Medium called the shots with how you got paid, and if you wanted to do paid subscriptions etc, you just couldn’t.

Substack then became the darling of online writing for four main reasons:

• They made writing and publishing easy. They offered beautiful SEO friendly sites out the box with no copying and pasting needed between the newsletter and the blog.

• They offered some level of distribution (which has overtime become their biggest value proposition and moat).

• They gave writers ownership of their subscriber base.

• They made it dead simple to accept payments for your newsletter.

I only joined Substack in October 2022, but in just 15 months, their platform has helped me scale from 172 subscribers to over 15,000. I think something like 50% of my growth has come from their network. And for that, I will always be infinitely grateful to Substack.

Broadly, this can be attributed to Substack’s biggest accomplishment. A success that the entire newsletter industry owes a great debt to. Simply, Substack made newsletters cool, and proved out the opportunity of being an independent online writer.

Substack didn’t just start winning in the existing market and stealing writers from Medium, Mailchimp, etc, but they grew the whole thing. Folks who never had any intention of writing joined the market and became creators—many who have since found great success. On the flip side, many professional journalists left their prestigious full-time jobs making five figures, joined Substack, and have gone on to make well over 7 figures as a one-man shop.

Substack showed that it was possible to turn your passion into a paycheck. And they also ushered in a new era of news journalism: a shift in narrative from what is happening, to the more interesting why it’s happening.

For those reasons, the past 3-ish years have seen both huge increases in the number of newsletters out there, and also the number of people who have turned to newsletters as their main source for information.

• Creators have the opportunity to completely own their audiences, share their knowledge, and build new income streams, and;

• Readers follow the topics they care most about, absorbing opinions and info from the writers they trust, are entertained by, and build connections with.

In short—2024 is an incredible time for email newsletters.

Everyday, over 4 billion people open their inboxes multiple times a day. Social media gets a lot of the glory for being the best way to reach people, but email continues to be king.

In 2020, the newsletter market was valued at about $7.5 billon, and it’s expected to hit $18 billion by 2027.

And in this explosive and lucrative market, I’ve made the bold claim that beehiiv will win. So let’s talk about that…

One tool to rule them all: Stacks vs Hiivs

There are other players in the newsletter space like Revue, Ghost, Mailchimp, and Covertkit, but I think the biggest battle for the #1 spot is between Substack and beehiiv.

Before we unpack how beehiiv specifically is growing so well, I first want to chat about the 10,000 foot view of Substack vs beehiiv from a more existential and philosophical perspective.

Philosophy, you say?

Honestly, I’m not phased or caught up in the moralistic arguments leveled against Substack for stuff like content moderation. I believe in free speech and I think it’s a great discourse, and Substack is going a solid job here. I’m more interested in their business viability and platform longevity. And to that point, Substack’s biggest two-prong flaw is this: (1) they need to get better at monetization, but concerningly, (2) they don’t believe they do.

For context, writing online can basically be boiled down to three things:

1. Content

   1. Writing

   2. Publishing

2. Growth

3. Monetization

via beehiiv

As a newsletter platform, enabling writing and publishing are the table-stakes. All the players do that fine.

Growth is where you can start to differentiate, and Substack’s biggest move that every one of their creators is grateful for and applauds is their innovation with the writer recommendation network. It’s been a wildfire that has propelled growth, and is the main wall Substack is using to try keep writers inside.

Then there’s monetization. Growth in readers (at least for full time writers making a living this way) is only as great as a creators ability to translate that to dollars.

Platforms can make huge strides in helping them do that, especially considering all the different ways you can pull the monetization tap. Except, Substack has a rigid obsession with only B2C paid subscriptions. This is a massive miss, and there’s no good reason why they don’t facilitate things like courses, one-time digital products, and sponsorships which will help attract and retain more creators.

Not being married to the subscription-only business model would drive their value in so many ways. Monetization is the ultimate honeypot for a creator platform. Fortunately for Tyler and the beehiiv crew, Substack’s rigidness here in this critical layer is beehiiv’s wedge into the market and a key value differentiator.

Substack’s growth and business model is also very much tied to the scale of their creators. They don’t charge per creator, rather, they take 10% of a creator’s gross revenue. Thus, they have made themselves particularly vulnerable in two ways:

1. They are relying too much on content. If a big name leaves (for instance, imagine Lenny did), there goes a fat share of revenue. I am certain that the top 5% of creators on Substack drive over 80% of their revenue. Honestly probably more. And remember, switching is easy thanks to ownership of subscribers. (p.s, I would not be totally surprised if in the long-term, Substack started limiting this.)

2. They are relying on newsletter authors a) opting to make money via premium subscriptions, and then b) also being able to grow their newsletter to a scale where they have enough paid subs to offer any meaningful cash flow based on their 10% take rate.

Those are two very clear risks that beehiiv has plugged and capitalized on nicely.

1. Their business model is tiered subscription based, and capped at a very reasonable $100 a month for 99.9% of creators. If a big wig creator leaves, the impact is basically nothing. They lose $100. No biggie.

2. Writers can make money in all sorts of ways on beehiiv, yet only pay a flat fee. Lot’s of folks are far more interested in lucrative B2B advertising. This increases beehiiv’s value to creators, which in turn means there is a much higher % of their users contributing to revenue.

Outside of beehiiv’s brilliant innovation around Monetization, they are also solving a wide range of core problems and quality of life improvements across the Content and Growth stages of the writing machine at an insane velocity.

In part, that’s because Tyler Denk came from building Morning Brew where he got an inside look at what it takes to build a successful newsletter/media business. beehiiv is really his vehicle to bring those critical capabilities to the masses and help power the next generation of Morning Brew’s. And he’s fucking crushing it in the most humble way—truly, no other platform is thinking about the writing machine as holistically as Tyler and his team.

Rightly so, the market has been rewarding them for it. Just consider this chart below showing some ludicrous growth. My ambitious claim doesn’t seem so crazy, does it?

Okay, let’s zoom into the tactical things that beehiiv are doing to drive this growth. 👇

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2. How They Grow: Becoming the sweetest hiiv for creators 🍯

Here are my observations on how beehiiv has done so well over the past 2.5 years, going from a nights and weekends project that entered an extremely saturated category, to the fan-favorite in the space accelerating past $1M a month with no brakes.

The hook and wedge: Going to market with two kill features

When building out the first version of your product, the balance is always between (1) shipping enough of a product to grab people’s attention and engage them, (2) getting it out quick enough to learn<>iterate so you don’t waste your own time and money, and (3) holding your ego at bay and sending something into the world that you know isn’t fully there.

That last part is where a lot of founders and greener PMs get eaten. They have big visions for their product, and there’s always a mermaid-siren calling to wait and send something you’re more proud of that represents that vision for your baby out there.

But, scope creep, like those mermaids, will drown you.

And when looking at how Tyler and his co-founders introduced beehiiv to the world, we get an excellent playbook of how to think about launching that V1 and keep it lean. Simply, you should always have a clear:

• Insight: What, categorically, is unique about your idea?

• Hook: Why should people care?

• Wedge: What will your tactical entry point to the market be?

Insight 🤔

As I said, beehiiv entered a competitive and saturated market. Substack had already raised tons of money (at an overpriced valuation), Mailchimp was acquired for billions, and Twitter and Meta were both investing in micro-bogging plays.

Any investor would have asked, “Why beehiiv?”

The answer: because success isn’t predicated on who’s first, rather, who has a more interesting and true insight about how things should be. And thanks to Tyler’s in-the-trench experience coding and building out Morning Brew’s powerful tech stack, he saw an opportunity:

• All of the existing products were generally just one part of the tech stack that had helped Morning Brew scale, and creators were still using (and expensing) multiple services.

• beehiiv could be successful by bringing creators the entire tech stack of Morning Brew (and then some). And by doing so, they could get people to see the platform as a revenue driver vs as an expense.

Hook 🪝

Building out “the entire Morning Brew newsletter stack” is a lofty vision. Tyler could easily have said, “Guys, the market is crowded. Our differentiator is being the everything-platform. I know what features we need, and to win, we must build it all and show our value”.

AKA, they could have waited to have the ultimate pitch.

But with an MVP, it’s not about waiting to have the ultimate pitch. The art of V1 pitch crafting is to have enough of a hook to grab people’s attention. And that boils down to having one or two critical killer features.

Here’s what beehiiv did:

• They studied the market and leant on their own expertise, and found two key things:

  • One of the bigger complaints Substack writers have is the lack of customization and ability to create any real brand identity. Substack is style light. And if you’re trying to stand out, clear branding matters.

  • Referrals was how Morning Brew grew so well, and folks knew it. But, none of the email platforms offered them and writers who wanted a growth program like it had to find other tools to embed.

• So, they decided to differentiate by focusing on those two gaps as their killer feature duo. The hook to writers was clear (courtesy of the Wayback Machine):

  • “Your newsletters shouldn't look like everyone else's - we provide the tools to make your newsletter yours with flexible no-code solutions.” And;

  • “We'll handle referrals, attribution, segmentation, insights, cohort analysis...you get the point. You just write.

So, despite no doubt itching to build out everything across that Content, Growth, and Monetization stack, they built the table-stakes with one differentiation point across each:

• Content

  • ✨ Write with style heavy, no-code, customization

• Growth

  • ✨  Get a built in referral program

• Monetization

  • ✨  We don’t take anything off your premium subscription revenue

That’s how you craft your hook in a crowded market. You laser in on what matters most to your ideal customer, and you solve it differently (not better) compared to your competitors.

Wedge 🧀

So, beehiiv was armed with a big vision for where they were heading and a differentiating hook to grab people’s interest. The next part of any successful go-to-market is about audience and market focus.

And that is really just about niching down: the art of zooming in and being very specific about who you will start positioning your product for, while also having a strategy for how that segment will help you keep pushing into the larger market. Here’s how Tyler put it:

The email marketing industry is absolutely massive, and maybe one day we’ll lean in there. But right here and now we are owning the niche of email newsletters and going to do it better than anyone else ever has. There are countless newsletters being run on platforms built for email marketing.

— Tyler Denk

AKA, within the broader market of email marketing (a $100M TAM) beehiiv found a beachhead. They initially ignored the opportunity of email marketing for things like courses or other media formats like video and podcasts. Rather, they made beehiiv the place to go if you wanted to build the next Morning Brew-style newsletter.

Even within newsletters they started by niching down, with as far as I can tell, a focus on writers with newsletters in the tech and business space.

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As an aside: Watch this video by Steve Jobs talking about his strategy for NeXT computers — he articulates this idea of a beachhead so perfectly.

Plus it’s an 18 minute masterclass on clarity and strategic communication. To me, this sits at the heart of not just go-to-markets, but marketing and strategy.

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I think this next part is probably the bedrock of their growth that has compounded itself so well off beehiiv’s initial V1 foundation. 👇

Velocity, insane customer focus, and building in public

My POV: beehiiv will win because:

1. They are shipping faster than anyone else in the space.

2. They have an excellent prioritization framework around what they build (and why)

3. They have high levels of community communication, and use their velocity as free marketing

Need for speed 🏁

Tyler is running a team executing at a world-class level, and yes, even for startup standards. I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone build and ship faster (although, that could be because of #3 above).

And it makes sense why. Again, beehiiv is in a competitive space. At launch, they had a great killer feature combo to differentiate, but there was stuff missing that Tyler knew many creators in the market would view as a non-starter to even consider switching. I for one was in that camp…the MVP wasn’t enough to pull my attention seriously away from Substack.

So, velocity became somewhat of a tenet of their strategy. Basically, I imagine some pep talk from Tyler going like this:

“Guys, we know we have some obvious gaps toward of vision of the ultimate newsletter stack. But if we build so flipping fast and continuously make sure our market sees and hears about new features, not only will we be closing the gap, but we’ll also show anyone on the fence that even if we don’t have something, we’ll most likely have it soon.”

This need for speed is how they’ve created trust, which is how they are winning over writers who are already established on other platforms.

Who knows what they’ll build next? I for one don’t want to miss out on it though!

That is a powerful and underrated force that’s pushing beehiiv forward.

Going deep and wide on problems writers face 🏗️

Of course speed is only as good as the direction you point the team in.

And beehiiv is executing on a roadmap that is very clear:

• Solve core problems we know exist across the writing stack and vertically integrated them together.

• Don’t neglect the quality of life features everyone else is ignoring. These have compounding benefits of ease and delight.

• Leave plenty of room for real-time customer feedback

Tyler defines their prioritization approach for the roadmap in the following way. I love this, and think it’s a simple and universal way to approach your order of operations:

a) What are the features we are missing that are preventing users from migrating to beehiiv?

b) What features do we offer that are either missing functionality or frustrating users?

c) What are splashier features, unique to beehiiv, that we can launch and market to differentiate ourselves?

As their product functionality expands, so does their addressable market. I’m a case in point. Everything I’ve needed and asked for during my time at Substack, beehiiv has created, and created well.

• An ad network to make monetizing via sponsorships easy

• A referral network to help grow

• Better tools to analyze and understand my audience and posts so I can create better content for you guys

• The ability to A/B test emails and optimize engagement

• The ability to customize my landing page, subscription page, and onboarding flow

• The ability to have paid newsletter content without having to paywall content

As I’ve tested out their tool, it’s clear that across the Content, Growth, and Monetization stack—beehiiv is already the most comprehensive in their offering to writers with the most flexibility.

Simply, beehiiv really works. Not only that, but it does so with an elegance that can only come from obsessive devotion and exacting standards. From design to functionality, every aspect of beehiiv’s suite seems to have been worried over, honed, and polished. Which is insane given their team size and shipping cadence.

That boils down to everyone clearly really, really caring.

Takeaway: When you’re laser-focused on a persona or niche (newsletter writers), it becomes easier to establish deep empathy for them, develop a true understanding of who they are, and go deep on their pain points and motivations.

Why building in public is a growth function 📢

Speaking of empathy, one of my favorite things about beehiiv is how they feel like your pal—your good friend who’s in the trenches alongside you as you build a newsletter. Truly, the feeling is like “Yeah, we get it bud! This stuff is damn hard work. We’ve done it before and we’re grinding it out as fast as we can to make your life easier. Check out this new thing we just did to help out with this problem.”

Few companies pull that type of customer relationship off as well as they do. All their building in public announcements consistently hit two notes:

• They are candid.

• They are not there to sell

On that last point, The Category Pirates describe it perfectly

When you market your product, I think you want my money. When you market my problem, I think you want to help me.

And beehiiv, almost every week, are announcing on all their social channels (and newsletter, of course) the new problems they’ve just solved. Again, this plays such an important role in:

• Motivating the market to pay attention to you

• Building up trust in beehiiv to deliver

• Customer acquisition

• Driving word of mouth growth

• Attracting new talent for hiring

• Exciting prospect investors

There are lots of product folks out there who believe in quieter feature releases. Where you release, test it out in production for a while with real users, iterate, and then make a broader announcement with something more polished. In some cases that makes sense, and who your customer is is an important consideration, but generally, I love the beehiiv way—it’s far more exciting and it shows your customers you are actively making their life better.

Plus, by building in public, you just build this body of work where people are following your narrative or journey for a while so they already feel like they know you more than if you're starting a relationship from scratch.

All of this boils down into something few companies are every able to achieve:

They create FOMO! 👀

If you’re a writer on another platform, it feels like you’re at one party but you keep hearing the music get louder at the one next door.

More people are bustling in, and you keep wondering why your party doesn’t have a keg.

It’s not fair…why do they get to have a tiger?!

And because of beehiiv’s velocity and building in public ethos, you watch this party next door becoming rapidly cooler than the one you’re at.

Another way they help create FOMO and keep on connecting with their audience is with this. 👇

Stellar content marketing, making customers the hero of the story, brand design, and community

Outside of product, beehiiv is crushing it across social media and using content (both internally, and user-generated) to drive people into the top of their product-led growth funnel.

Real quick, here’s a rundown of all the things I’ve seen beehiiv doing around content (besides the building in public updates we’ve just covered). Take note, folks. 💡

How to do content like beehiiv:

• They educate over entertain, yet, they still manage to do both.

• They are super active on LinkedIn. From what I’ve seen, Tyler (or someone from beehiiv) reply to almost every post or mention of their brand. And they are always witty, which I love. Plus, everyone on the team is building their own brand on LinkedIn as newsletter experts, with little bee icons next to their names. Sure, a small detail. But it shows unity, consistency, and broadcasts their brand across all networked contacts

• Tyler also does the work. He gets on the podcasts and does the pieces to get the beehiiv brand out there. It’s always tempting to just build and do what you’re comfortable with, but getting on podcasts and doing interviews drives a nice earned media flywheel.

• Generally, beehiiv has excellent support material. They have Loom videos and written docs for everything, which makes discovery of the product much easier. Always always invest in good support docs from the beginning.

• Above regular support docs, they built their own course—NewsletterXP. This both serves to help existing users, as well as become a lead magnet for people thinking about writing online.

• They have their own blog that various folks on the team contribute to, all around newsletter strategies and case studies.

• They invest in TikTok. They post consistently, and they have TikTok-only content that works on that platform.

• Speaking of case studies, beehiiv continuously uplift their creators by doing deep dives on up and coming (and very successful) newsletters. This plays into an important marketing concept: make your customers the hero of the story.

• beehiiv also have top-notch brand consistency across all touch points, and their brand design is catchy, fresh, and very different when compared to their competitors. It’s very clear when something is from beehiiv. Just look at their gorgeous website. Expect folks to copy.

• And my favorite…they tap into the power of their first-party data to make stunning, informative, and viral content. For example:

  • They have an annual “State of Newsletters” report. Who doesn’t love an inside peak at market trends from an authority in the space?

  • Likely inspired by Spotify Wrapped, they have a Year In Review roundup for each writer. How cool? Of course everyone goes and shares this, driving nice virility.

Never underestimate the long-term benefit of investing in a content strategy.

And also never underestimate the value of community. beehiiv certainly isn’t:

How to do community like beehiiv:

• They make genuine connections as a brand with people in the industry, and play the longer game of earning their trust. Aim to avoid asking for anything for a long time, rather, overwhelm with value. That’s what beehiiv do, and it’s paying back.

• They have a private Slack community for all newsletter creators. It’s a great way for (1) writers to connect with each other, (2) beehiiv to connect with writers, and (3) beehiiv’s product team to be right in the weeds of what writers may be asking for or struggling with.

• I have no doubt beehiiv has some sort of writers feedback group, with a few folks who’ve opted in to beta test features and to just bounce ideas around with. These kinds of coalitions with users are a great way to build alongside your customers.

Now, both content and community play important roles in generating awareness and sending interested people to beehiiv. Let’s close out today’s analysis with probably the most tactical section—how beehiiv turn that traffic into MRR. 👇

Product-led growth: Gorgeous onboarding, the reverse trial, flywheels, and more

Let’s turn to my favorite concept. I coined it when I wrote about Canva, and it seems to resonate very well as a framework for evaluating how well a company is nailing PLG.

It’s called The PLG Iceberg, and it looks like this.

Here’s what I wrote in How Canva Grows:

Layer 1 and layer 2 are the easy to see non-starters. It’s what will visibly causes a PLG company to fail, and it’s essential to have right if this is how a company is choosing to grow.

That’s why most PLG companies end up getting this right. Every single iceberg (even a baby one) has a tip.

But layer 3 and onwards are not technically essential and are harder to perfect. But, the companies that do nail each layer become bigger and more formidable icebergs — meaning they will stick around for a lot longer.

And it’s this hidden depth is what will sink naive and overly-optimistic competitors passing through. 🚢

Let’s quickly skim over what beehiiv is doing at each layer:

The tip → Communicating their value (L1 and L2)

Here’s how beehiiv emphasizes to users that they solve their core problem. Notice the right mix of information to help to-be customers make an easy decision to hit “Get started”.

1. Clear and consistent messaging. Just skim through beehiiv’s site and you’ll see no useless or cringy jargon. They lead with what they do, and don’t mince words about it. Even the big dogs sometimes over index on their brand and just use absolute nonsense as hero copy. Like Slack, with: ”Made for people. Built for productivity.”

   Love you guys, but, okay…what is it that you do?

2. They have an eye-catching rundown of features. But, not just willy-nilly. It’s all told as a story across each layer of the writing stack. Also, each feature is positioned around how it helps the writer, not the brass-tacks of what it does. Remember, value over function.

3. Across the site, they use social proof. Logos of big newsletters, as well as testimonials linked to customer success stories, drive home the point that other people are already winning by using beehiiv—isn’t it time you also did? FOMO.

4. They show a live count of revenue earned by creators. This just emphasizes why writers are there in the first place—to make money—and proves beehiiv is delivering. Again, FOMO.

5. They communicate pricing upfront, with paid plans for all types of customers. If you’re just getting started, beehiiv is free. Quite simply, you only pay up as you begin to grow. An easy decision.

6. They use feature comparison pages, both for SEO, and to communicate differentiation. During consideration, you’re probably sizing up between two tools—beehiiv understand that, and help with that decision point.

7. They make clever use of interactive widgets tied to their core value. My favorite little top-of-funnel PLG tactic is a curiosity-evoking module that shows you how much money you could make through their ad network (and paid subs). You just plug in some numbers, and they give you an estimate. (see below)

Removing hidden frictions (L3)

Now that beehiiv have made self-serve discovery of their product informative and clear, the next step is moving you below “the surface” of the iceberg and inside their product.

This is where the boys from the men start to get separated when it comes to the quality and depth of product-led growth driving a company.

Success here is all about identifying where there is obvious and non-obvious friction, and then knowing which of it is healthy or not.

Here’s some standout things beehiiv is doing:

1. Their onboarding is quick. Every question is absolutely necessary, and they personalize onboarding based on your experience level. From here, beehiiv can tailor how they plan to move the user towards their activation moment. For example, a newbie/curious user should truly be active once they post for the first time, whereas someone with a newsletter should be considered activated once they import and publish (IMO). Each goal requires different info and nudges from beehiiv, which is why this step is so key.

2. They know the biggest friction is migrating to beehiiv, so they make importing from other tools a first-class experience. This is such a crucial step to winning market share from existing players. With extensive documentation, support, and built in steps to make importing both subscribers and content secure and painless, beehiiv is investing heavily in this onramp to remove a writer’s biggest obstacle.

3. Their onboarding avoids any paywalls. All users are moved into a generous trial that requires no credit card. This eliminates any hurdles along the way and gets folks into the platform as smoothly as possible.

Value discovery and Aha! moments (L4 and L5)

With creators now inside beehiiv, the next layer of the PLG motion is to make beehiiv as an all-in-one writing stack easy to learn, and minimize the crucial Time-To-First-Value metric.

AKA, getting people towards their activation event—that first key benefit they’re hoping for—as quick as possible.

And just to reenforce, this is all still part of onboarding. Even seasoned PMs make the mistake sometimes of thinking that onboarding is done and dusted after the typical “sign up” wizard.

Excellent onboarding is actually a long game. Ideally, it’s adaptive to where a user is in their journey and guides them towards activating, forming a habit, and finally, converting to paid.

Some SaaS tools are built in a way where they can provide value to their users as soon as they’re inside the product. I don’t think beehiiv is one of them given the nature of writing and publishing, so here is what I’ve noticed beehiiv does to move people along their slightly longer learning and adoption curve:

• They double down on educating users both about using beehiiv, and newsletter building. This happens both across the platform, through docs, and with helpful sequence emails. I actually looked forward to the onboarding emails I got because each one was value additive and encouraging.

• They focus on platform usability. Overall, their admin dashboard is just intuitive. Plus, each page or sub tab has helpful copy and links to videos and extra docs if needed.

• They make use of great defaults. beehiiv differentiates on enabling lots of customizations, and thus their editor and design studio are more involved than Substack’s. To make them less overwhelming, smart default options are set for users to reduce cognitive load.

• They use checklists. It’s always a good idea to have some sort of “getting started” checklist to guide users toward outcomes that lead to activation and habit formation

• The also use product tours. The more places there are for a user to click and navigate to within your tool, the more you should consider a “show me around” tour.

beehiiv’s checklist and guided tour

All of this makes early discovery of the tool quick, but still sets users up to go deeper with functionality as they get more comfortable. 👇

Finding repeatable—and new—value (L6)

For PLG to really work, the product has to be setup in a way where users are routinely benefiting from the product without the need for human intervention.

Here’s how beehiiv pulls it off:

• They support habit formation. Writing is something that is notoriously hard for many people to stick with. This will always be a challenge for beehiiv with newer writers. So, they use levers like daily post stats to motivate people, success stories, those yearly round ups, advice on writing well, etc. The idea is regular touch points to motivate people to keep publishing.

• Most significantly, beehiiv is vertically integrating the value chain of newsletter writing. This is their entire pitch: one place for everything. So, the more that writers use beehiiv at the Content stage of the stack, the more likely they are to unlock and enjoy the value of the Grow and Monetize stack. This is why going deep on multiple problem areas is so valuable.

• They have plenty of advanced features. Things like their API and integrations add to the core value of beehiiv, but gives power users more to learn over time. This creates “level up” Aha moments.

In short, by (1) solving a ton of newsletter writing use cases, (2) vertically integrating across the stack, and (3) always evolving their product to meet writer needs, beehiiv has created one very sticky ecosystem.

Monetization (L7)

As I said earlier, beehiiv is monetizing their writers much better than Substack. Their model is just better and more sustainable. So, let’s zoom in on beehiiv’s revenue layer, otherwise dubbed pricing & packaging. 

1. They have an extensive and lifetime freemium plan for new writers. This helps a big segment of their market see value upfront, where beehiiv back their product to help writers engage and retain for long enough so they convert themselves into paid customers that are less likely to churn.

2. Related to that, they tease the promised land with a 30 day reverse-trial. Here’s what that means: All new users get unlimited access to all of beehiiv’s premium features. If after 30 days they don’t want to retain them, they are just downgraded to the always-free plan.

   • This tactic blends the idea of the free trial and a freemium model together to get the best of both worlds. Instead of starting everyone on a thinner free version and hoping they eventually upgrade to try out pro features (like Canva or Spotify do), the reverse-trial puts people in the pro seat first for limited time to actually experience them first-hand, but then unlike traditional trials, instead of blocking all access, users just get less when it ends.

3. They use Grow and Monetization as their main upgrade levers. From what I’ve seen, beehiiv isn’t really in your face about always upgrading your account. It looks like they generally just let it happen, leaning on the fact that people who use the product more frequently will organically land on the paywalls (like turning on premium subs, using a custom domain, running ads, referrals, etc) sooner, and that those people who make their own way there probably have a) the highest conversion rate, and b) the lowest churn rate. I like this approach—you don’t feel like you’re just being sold to.

4. They use sales for enterprise. If you have over 100K subs and need extra tooling, beehiiv send you into a product-led sales funnel where you’ll chat to an account exec. For massive accounts, it’s always valuable to layer in some direct relationship.

Flywheels (L8)

The last and deepest layer of The PLG Iceberg is naturally both the hardest one to pull off, but also the one that is the strongest signal of longevity: do you have free acquisition being driven by existing users; supported by the product?

In beehiiv’s case, they do:

• The Writer → Reader → Writer virility loop. Quite simply, every newsletter on beehiiv becomes a free billboard. Already over 4.5 billion emails have been sent on beehiiv, and most have a little “made on beehiiv” stamp (like the TikTok watermark). This converts readers from each creators network who also want to become writers to beehiiv users, who in turn, go on to billboard the beehiiv logo again to a new network of people.

  • This loop works beautifully with the referral network, where readers are given an incentive by the writer to share posts with people in their network. This just brings in more net new readers who again see that beehiiv logo.

• Writers drive word of mouth. Writers who grow and make money on beehiiv tell other writers and make it very public on platforms like LinkedIn.

• They have an affiliate program. For existing writers on beehiiv, they get kickbacks for each new writer they refer that converts. This ties nicely into their word of mouth growth.

Really, all of beehiiv’s core growth loops boil down to this: they have an extremely symbiotic relationship with creators.

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Adios 👋

And that’s a wrap folks on beehiiv!

Thanks for reading! If you learned anything new today, you can sign up here for more issues. Also consider sharing this post, perhaps becoming a paying subscriber to support my work, or if you are a paying subscriber already, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member.

Until next time.

— Jaryd ✌️

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