BeeHiiv - The Hive For Creators

Company & Team Introduction

BeeHiiv is a platform offering creators a powerful suite of tools to build out their email newsletters. Founded by domain experts, a group of ex-Morning Brew employees including CEO Tyler Denk @denk_tweets, Ben Hargett @hargettly, and Jake Hurd @JakeHurd_. The trio had the vision to bring the internal tools that helped their team scale Morning Brew to over 3 million subscribers and a $75M exit. The company is quickly rising to the top of the newsletter industry and is responsible for powering many of the biggest newsletters in the world, as the industry takes notice of its vision, focus, and rapid product development. BeeHiiv’s remote team now consists of ~25 people and is headquartered in New York City, New York.

Product Overview

BeeHiiv offers newsletter creators a suite of highly customizable tools to help them grow, monetize, and analyze the performance of their newsletter. The team’s rapid product development has allowed the company to differentiate their offering from the industry competition as the most complete and customizable solution. Key platform features include a highly customizable writing editor, referral program, SEO optimization, Ad network, recommendation network, strong analytics dashboard & audience segmentation.

Total Addressable Market

The email newsletter market is massive and growing rapidly. Businesses and creators alike are flocking to newsletter platforms such as BeeHiiv to inform, interact with, and monetize their audiences. The estimated TAM of email marketing was 7.5 billion in 2020, expected to grow to 17.9 billion in 2027.

Business Model & The Numbers

BeeHiiv has multiple revenue streams. The company derives the majority of its revenue from their freemium subscription model to their core newsletter platform, where creators can start building their newsletters for free but must upgrade to a $49 or $99/month paid plan as their subscriber base scales or are interested in additional features. The company has unlocked multiple other monetization opportunities including boosts, which creators pay to be recommended their others newsletter and pay per referred subscriber, an ad network that connects relevant advertisers and publications, and courses on how to improve your newsletter. BeeHiiv is currently at a $4M revenue run rate, growing 40+% MoM. Projecting to hit 12M by the end of 2023.

Traction

BeeHiiv’s platform has displayed strong product-led momentum with ~90% of the company’s growth coming organically. BeeHiiv’s team has fostered an incredibly strong & helpful community to support their platform, which is already powering over a quarter billion emails per month. Their comprehensive product suite has attracted multiple top newsletter publications such as MilkRoad, The Boston Globe, What Do You Meme, Superhuman, and ExecSum. BeeHiiv also boasts an impressive network of advertisers including Hims, BetterHelp, Morning Brew, and Chartr.

Competitors

BeeHiiv’s main competitors are Substack and ConvertKit. Here is some diligence on each:

Substack is another free, easy-to-use newsletter platform. Founded in 2017 by a strong team of Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi, and Hamish Mackenzie. Best was a co-founder of KiK messenger where he worked with Jairaj, who was head of the KiK platform. Hamish previously worked at PandoDaily as a tech reporter. Their platform has Strong traction with many high-profile journalists joining the platform such as Glenn Greenwald, Matthew Yglesias, and Andrew Sullivan. Substack also takes a multi-product strategy for their creator platform ranging from newsletter and podcast tools, and their Twitter competitor Substack Notes. They also utilize a different business model than BeeHiiv, charging a 10% cut of their creator’s revenue, rather than a subscription model. The company is backed by a16z, YCombinator, and angels such as Emmett Shear (co-founder of Twitch).

ConvertKit was founded by Nathan Berry in 2013. They offer a freemium newsletter platform with powerful automation and customization capabilities. ConvertKit recently acquired SparkLoop, a leading newsletter referral software, enabling newsletters to build and automate referral programs. They also have a large partner network where newsletters can pay to be recommended by other similar newsletters. ConvertKit is generating substantial revenue and has raised very little capital. ConvertKit is currently valued at 200M with 30M in revenue, 500k+ users.

Deal Terms

Congratulations to the team at BeeHiiv as they recently announced their 12.5M series A, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Creator Ventures, Social Leverage, Contrarian Thinking Capital, and Blue Wire Capital. The company will use the funding to double their team size over the following year (see open roles here), continue to upgrade its platform, and invest aggressively in larger marketing and user acquisition campaigns. Beehiiv is a company to keep on the top of your watchlist for a series B!