They Built It for Someone Else First
Tyler Denk was Morning Brew's second employee. He built the referral program that took the business newsletter from 100,000 to over a million subscribers. He built the custom ad management tools, the data pipeline, the subscriber analytics. He watched Morning Brew reach 3.5 million subscribers and $20 million in revenue before getting acquired. He was not a co-founder.
That experience gave him something more useful than a title: a blueprint. Every week, newsletter operators would email Morning Brew asking how they built their growth engine. The platforms available to them - Substack, Mailchimp, ConvertKit - could not replicate what Morning Brew had built internally. Denk saw the gap and recognized it as a business.
In late 2020, Denk reconnected with Benjamin Hargett and Jake Hurd, two other ex-Morning Brew engineers. The three of them started building beehiiv at night and on weekends while keeping their day jobs - Denk at Google, the others elsewhere. Ten months of that. Brooklyn apartments. Late Slack messages. Version 1 of the app assembled across random Saturdays.
By July 2021, Denk was trying to raise money while the product was still a side project. Most investors passed. Twitter had just acquired newsletter platform Revue. Facebook had announced Bulletin. Few believed a small team could compete. He ended the month with a term sheet, a $2.6M seed round, and a decision to quit Google.
Not Just an Email Tool
beehiiv lets anyone build a newsletter, a website, a paid subscription business, a podcast page, and a monetizable media brand - all inside one platform. The free plan supports up to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends. Paid plans start at $39/month and add segmentation, automations, analytics, and access to the ad network.
The core difference from competitors is what beehiiv does not do: it does not take a percentage of subscription revenue. Substack's model takes 10% of all paid subscription income. For a creator earning $500,000 a year in subscriptions, that's $50,000 gone to the platform. beehiiv charges a flat SaaS fee and keeps its hands out of the creator's revenue.
"I ran growth for the fastest-growing newsletter in the world. Now I'm building the tools for you."
- Tyler Denk, CEO & Co-founderTwo Revenue Streams, One Flywheel
beehiiv makes money two ways. Software subscriptions - the SaaS tiers - generated roughly $20M of the company's $30M ARR in 2025. The Ad Network and Boosts marketplace contributed the remaining $10M. That 2:1 split has held steady through 2024 and 2025.
The flywheel works like this: creators use the platform to grow audiences, then activate the ad network to monetize those audiences. Ad revenue flows back into Boosts - the peer acquisition tool - which grows subscriber counts, which increases the value of ad placements, which generates more revenue for creators to reinvest. Growth funding growth.
By May 2024, roughly 4,000 beehiiv creators were actively monetizing - earning a collective $1.2M in that month alone. The platform had paid out over $1M through its ad network before its Series B closed.
"We switched to beehiiv and made $12K in ad revenue in our first month." A creator committed to building from scratch on the platform reported making over $250K in twelve months. A writer on an island in northern Scotland - population 191 - built a six-figure newsletter from there.
Four Years, Fast
49 CENTS IN HIS BANK ACCOUNT. FOUR YEARS LATER: $30M IN ANNUAL REVENUE. TYLER DENK IS NOT SUBTLE ABOUT THIS.
From Bodybuilders to Broadsheets
The roster spans an unusual distance. Arnold Schwarzenegger publishes Arnold's Pump Club on beehiiv. TIME and The Boston Globe use the platform for newsletter distribution. The Ringer is on beehiiv. Brex, the corporate card startup, runs newsletters on it. Dr. Jen Ashton, the ABC News medical contributor, publishes there.
After Washington Post layoffs in early 2026, Denk publicly offered a free year on the platform to any journalist who wanted to go independent. This wasn't a PR move - beehiiv has a Media Collective program for independent journalists that launched in early 2025, offering tooling and support for reporters leaving institutional jobs. Oliver Darcy, formerly of CNN, launched his media newsletter Status on beehiiv. Ex-CBS correspondent Catherine Herridge joined after leaving her network role. Dave Jorgenson, the Washington Post's TikTok Guy, launched Local News International there.
The platform draws independent writers alongside enterprise publishers because the product scales in both directions. The free tier is genuinely useful, not crippled. The paid tiers don't become exponentially expensive as subscriber counts grow the way Mailchimp's pricing does.