Welcome 

Whats up! Welcome to Wouters blog. It’s Wednesday! That means i’m going to be covering:

• 💰 Media Business Breakdown (Beehiiv)

• 🔥 Giveaway time… (Media Kit!)

Today i’m covergin the Behind-the-scenes of Beehiivs rise from Idea to $50M Acquisition Offers.

I spent 10 hours researching how Beehiiv is (seemingly) taking the reigns of best ESP software.

P.s, I’m building this newsletter in public! If you want to see the behind the scenes, follow me on twitter..

Follow me booty here lad.

BREAKDOWN
From $0 to a $50,000,000+ Company

Good morning. We all know Morning Brew. The insanely big Newsletter-first company valued over hundreds of millions.

Well back in Mid-2021 3 early Morning-Brew employees Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett and Jake Hurd started Beehiiv. I don't know why they spelled it wrong, it's cute though.

Since 2021 they have:

• Sent over 3 Billion Emails

• Have over 7.5k Active Newsletters

• Received (and denied like a boss) acquisition offers for $50M

• Achieved >1M+in revenue in November alone

• They're now at over $500k MRR. Now that's hot

Hooked yet? Well let the deep-dive continue....

How tf do they make money?
The Monetization Strategy Behind Beehiiv

Beehiiv let's folks like me design, write, send, promote and monetize a newsletter. Super easily. Their plans vary from $49/mo to $500+/mo with different support and different feature access.

One of the best things about beehiiv is the simple ui. Their wait until automation is one of my favorite, it lets you create a specific flow for subs to follow. The biggest thing beehiiv is currently working on is creating and releasing new monetization features.

Beehiiv will offer more formats for ads to be inserted. That's a big reason they bought media-marketplace Swapstack recently.

Other Products like the Ad-network:

• It allows creators to connect with brands and earn by featuring ads in their newsletters

• The network allows owners to sell ads in an easy and timesaving way.

• In Nov of this year, $1.2M was earned by newsletters thanks to this feature.

• They have this calculator to show you how much you can earn from their ad network

  Personally it's good. But you still need a tool like Open Rates to really get things crankin ;)

Boosts

• If you want to monetize your newsletter on beehiiv, you can apply to boost other newsletters and get paid for every new subscriber.

• This is v. similar to Sparkloop and is a good way to get high quality subs / offset some of your paid growth from other channels.

Examples of current offerings

• The Publish Press Earnings per lead: $2.40 | Max payout per email Boost: n/a

• Agent.ai Earnings per lead: $3.20 | Max payout per email Boost: $800

• irl Media NEWS Earnings per lead: $1.60 | Max payout per email Boost: $160

• Creative Automation Earnings per lead: $2.40 | Max payout per email Boost: $799

Beehiiv also lets you create paid subscriptions, this is gonna get a huge overhall soon. The biggest thing that beehiiv does (or actually doesn't do) here is take a cut of the money. Substack takes a %, Beehiiv doesn't. Makes it super attractive for big players to move to Beehiiv.

Ok but how fast are they growing (newsflash: fast)

ARR stats (how fast is the company growing? Time to reach each milestone)

• 14 months: $0 → $1M

• 3 months: $1M → $2M

• 2.5 months: $2M → $3M 

• 2 months: $3M → $4M

• 1.5 months: $4M → $5M

1.5 months: $5M → $6M

Growth

CEO Tyler (big dawg) Denk joined Morning Brew in 2017, mainly to build the back-end infrastructure.

What he did at Morning Brew helped grow the newsletter from 100k to 1M+ in a year.

After this success, they saw other newsletters were not going well. They were piecing together a WordPress site, copying and pasting content, and with not a very good sense of business.

Tyler left Morning Brew in 2020 and started working at Google. During this, he started talking with his co-founder Benjamin Hargett (who was the first full-time engineer at Morning Brew).

July 2021 they raised a $2.6M seed round with a team of 4 engineers. They now have 45 full time employees, from 8 different countries.

Exit when?

Beehiiv reached profitability only roughly 2 years after launch. They raised money from startegic investors meaning they didn't have to spend money on customer acquisition for the first year.

Beehiiv has already declined offers of $50m+ and recently brought their total money to $16M.

They're going big. Think MailChimp (bought for $12B!)

They’ve taken the industry by storm, largely though superb marketing, great and intuitive product building and community building. How much do you think they end up selling for / getting acquired for? Or do they IPO?

GIVEAWAY
Want a great Media Kit reference?

Giving away one of the best media kits i’ve ever seen, it’s TLDR’s. Love it so much i recommend copying the format for your own NL!

Get the free media-kit here.

Need Help?
Time to help. Need Sales Advice? I got you..

Are you running a newsletter right now and are looking for an external sales-experts opinion on wtf is going on?

I’ve helped sell millions of dollars worth of newsletter advertisements. IF you want consulting advice i’m available for calls.

Reply to this email if you’re interested with your problem(s) + budget.

wait…
BEFORE YOU GO!

Don’t forget

Don’t forget to come back for Fridays newsletter where I will cover:

• The weekly newsletter media breakdown. This week i take a deep dive about the Nick Huber model for building companies. it’s something i’m taking personal influence from!