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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to another episode of Lunch with Jamie. On today's episode, I'm joined by Tyler Dank, CEO of Beehive. Now this is a little out of the box for me, but as a proud member of Beehive, when I got the opportunity to talk to Tyler on the day of a bunch of new releases for Beehive, I just got really excited and wanted to invite him on the show. We covered so many topics. You know, this guy started at Morning Brew and then ultimately launched Beehive. With he and a couple of partners, they've now built it into an amazing business. I'm really excited to be a part of the network. Beehive ultimately is more of an operating system for the content economy as opposed to a newsletter platform. They have thousands of newsletter ranging from Oliver Darcy to Arnold Schwarzenegger to Scott Galloway to Time magazine and of course, Jamie's list. Tyler has his own newsletter called Big Desk Energy, which talks about being a founder. And it was an awesome conversation. Conversation. We talked about can. We talked about the creator economy. We talked about his lack of knowledge of LA food, which I'm hoping to change for him. And I think you'll enjoy the conversation. So here's my conversation with Tyler Dink. Well, thank you for joining. I really appreciate it. I. As you know, I think you know, this is called Lunch with Jamie, which is, although we're not eating lunch, food is really important to me. It's a core tenant of my newsletter, Jamie's List. And I always start off with the same question for my guests, which is, if I was meeting you for lunch in your new home of Los Angeles, although you could pick another city if you want, where would we be going for lunch?
- [01:44]
B
It's a great question. It's honestly something I always struggle with in general when people ask for recommendations. So I would selfishly choose a place that I want to try that I haven't been to yet. It's a little risky. I can't take credit for whether it be good or bad, but stake 48 has been pretty high on my list.
- [02:01]
A
All right, there you go. I'll always take a stake, so good call, good call. I like that. I actually have not been to stake 48 yet, which is surprising since it's been here for a while. I'm sort of just mourning the loss of Wolfgangs in Los Angeles still. And I like, refuse to kind of go back to any of the other stake places.
- [02:22]
B
I live right down the street from Baltaire, which is also pretty great. That's usually my go to when people are in town.
- [02:27]
A
When did you move out from New York?
- [02:29]
B
Four and a half years ago. It's actually like one to one with when we launched the company. So we launched Beehive November of 2021 publicly. And that's the first day that my lease started. So easy to remember.
- [02:40]
A
That's really easy to remember. So you and I, you may not know this, but you and I just got back from someplace not that long ago, which was can Cannes lion, which to me I was there last year. But for some reason this was like a real light bulb moment for me being back at Cannes. All anybody wants to talk about, obviously is this creator economy. I think I'm someone who's been in Hollywood for over two decades now. I think I've in some ways pushed away from the creator economy, but I think to the average Hollywood person, they still don't really think about the creator economy as something they're a part of on a day to day basis. But as you see the numbers, and I talked about this as my newsletter with, you know, the creator economy reaching a half a trillion dollars almost in the next couple of years, in some ways we're all a part of it, in some ways, if you're creating anything. And so I guess my, my question to you is sort of what was your biggest takeaway from this year's Cannes lion?
- [03:47]
B
Yeah, I hate to repeat kind of the same thing, but it was like, it was overwhelming, right? It was so in your face. Everywhere I looked, whether it was in person at the different events and who were on the different panels to who I followed on Instagram that were also there promoting their panels and the parties and the events that they were going to. So it's not much of a hot take because I think everyone's kind of in consensus with this one. But it did feel as someone who I went to my first Cannes last year, so this was my second year. And the contrast in the number of content creators there, the panels, the events, the parties, all centered around the creator economy was pretty large juxtaposition, I would say.
- [04:25]
A
What's interesting and I talked again, something I talked about in my newsletter is that, you know, Hollywood, really, Hollywood has its birth in sort of branded content, sponsored content. You know, I think a lot of what the creator economy is is obviously branded and sponsored content. I think the, you know, the Lumiere brothers in the late 1800s created a 42nd short film that was financed by a soap company. You know, if, if you know, Paul Thomas Anderson created a 42nd, you know, branded, you know, short film, branded by a soap company. That'd be called a commercial, wouldn't be called a short film. So I think in some extent it's like semantics slash, just sort of this feeling that I even had of sort of the once you've put a brand on it, once you've sponsored something traditional Hollywood kind of has this aversion to it. Whereas you know, in many ways to me it seems like that's the obvious place for where, you know, the funding for so many things are going to be coming from, whether it's, you know, traditional film or TV or it's newsletters or it's a podcast or it's, you know, micro dramas or whatever it may be. So you know, I think to me I'm actually really excited for how Hollywood kind of folds into this kind of new creator universe. I'm not sure some of my friends will be as excited, but I am.
- [05:44]
B
Well, I mean you've seen like in the box office some of the recent films, right, led by and directed by those creators on a sub million dollar budget and the commercial success that they had. And then I also remember reading an article not too long ago of how many studios are actually casting creators to be either extras or like not the main character but characters in these different films, knowing that they'll get the added distribution of those content creators promoting on Instagram and the different channels. So yeah, I, I, I tweeted last week, I, I said that I think the creator economy is the future of media. Whether you're seeing these journalists go independent and leave these large legacy media companies, whether you're seeing these YouTubers and TikTokers building their own scripts and going to Hollywood directly, whether there's some combination of how you're consuming content today, whether it's YouTube, newsletter, podcast, like in all of the news, the reports are like where people and Americans are getting their news primarily through social media, which has been like that stat that's been circulating for the past few years. And a lot of that news isn't coming from the New York Times posts. Like are their pages on social. It's content creators covering right wing, left wing politics or on the ground reporting local news. So yeah, I'm very bullish on the creator economy. I think we're actually like really much in the first inning and think that there's going to be a lot more developments and just content being created from not these institutions.
- [07:08]
A
No, I think you're totally right. And to be honest that's, I think for me what excited me and has been exciting me most about Beehive is, you know, I was someone who formerly was on Substack. I moved over to Beehive primarily because I felt like I wanted something that had more customization, something that had, that could, could create this whole community for me that ultimately had, you know, not only a podcast, but a community size section and something with flexibility on what you're building and can personalize it. And again, it felt like it was mine because ultimately for myself and for the, you know, if you're a content creator again, whether you're an auteur filmmaker or you're Mr. Beast or you're Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, you have your voice and only you can really be the one to express that voice. And so if you have to, if you have to, if you're limited by and confined by sort of parameters set by, you know, a tool that you're using, it makes you hard to really express, you know, your vision and your voice. So I think that's one of the things that makes Beehive special for a lot. For people who don't really know Beehive, which in many ways is sort of. I've heard you talk now on podcasts, is actually not, you're not, you're not mad at people not knowing Beehive in some ways because, you know, that's your sort of want to power everybody as opposed to be the front brand. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what Beehive is and, and how it began?
- [08:44]
B
Yeah, for sure. And we definitely do want people to what Beehive is, but at a different angle. Right. I think the point that you're hitting on is if people visit your website, they might not necessarily know that you are using Beehive. And that's intentional. We don't want to intermediate between our content creators and the end audience. We want to be the tools and infrastructure in the background to empower these content creators to create that content, to engage with their audience, to extract revenue, whatever it may be. The backstory on Beehive I think really starts my previous job. I was at Morning Brew. I joined as the second employee back in 2017. And if Morning Brew is a daily now, a daily newsletter goes out Monday through Sunday covering business news. The scam was kind of like the first big like newsletter at scale. Morning Brew came slightly after and the thinking was just creating more relevant business news outside of the Bloomberg's and Wall street journals of the world. Morning Brew ended up being a massive success. We scaled it to 4 million readers and eventually got acquired by Business Insider. But along that way, in that journey, I built all of this internal infrastructure. I built the content management system that the writers use to create content. We built an ad management platform, which is how we monetize the newsletters through sponsorships and all these dashboards and analytics that we created to make Morning Brew a success. During that journey, we would get hundreds of replies every single week of people asking, how did you build the newsletter? How did you style it that way? How are you scaling so quickly? And the answer was, I knew the answer to all of that because I had built that myself. So that was kind of the impetus for Beehive. It was can we build a morning brew in a box? Back in the 2020, 2021 time when everyone wanted to be Morning Brew for X, there was Morning Brew for Crypto, Morning Brew for AI, Morning Brew for Politics. And having that experience, me and my two co founders, who are two engineers, early in the Morning Brew days as well, we kind of tools and infrastructure took to make that possible. So that's where Beehive started. It was primarily a newsletter platform. We had the same referral program that we built at Morning Brew, available out of the box. We wanted to build an ad network. We saw at Morning Brew that we had 30 people in the ad sales team. You know, you, Jamie, you might want to sell sponsorships, but like, you're probably better creating content. Like you don't want to do ad sales. We have a lot of writers who are amazing at writing about sports and politics, but that doesn't mean that they want to sell ad sales to Nike and whoever wants to sponsor these other newsletters. And so being able to solve the monetization problem, similar to what YouTube did for video, was always a core tenet of what we wanted to do. And then of course, substack entered the market like three to four years before us. They believe that paid subscriptions were the only way to monetize. They take a 10% cut of any paid subscription. We don't believe in like the predatory take rate model. We have 0% take rates across the business on subscription and digital products. So to kind of sum like where we are today, we're kind of like this all in one creator platform. We started with newsletters. We have a website builder. You can build a beautiful custom website. You can use AI to do that. We allow you to sell digital products so you can sell courses, webinars, templates, coaching, et cetera. We recently launched podcast hosting three months ago and so you can actually host and distribute your podcast directly on the platform and then depending on when this airs. Thursday, July 16th, at our summer release event, we're announcing community as well. So you can actually go deeper and build a space for your audience to engage with other members of the community kind of as like this final missing piece of what we think it takes to be a total creator platform.
- [12:26]
A
So yeah, so this, this is coming out, this is, we're talking, it's Thursday. You have a lot of new features that are coming out. I think I want to stay, let's stay high level. But what are, what are the couple of things that you're most excited about?
- [12:39]
B
Yeah, so I already hinted at community. Community is like the big bet, I think. And selfishly like, you know, I have my personal newsletter goes to 130,000 founders. I've done a good job of curating an audience and a network of founders who are like minded and interested in startups and tech. For me to launch a community to bring all of them together and learn from each other, I think is like a massive opportunity, one for them and also for me as like an additional revenue stream. So it's like an example of why I think community can be so powerful, both like what it actually is and what it unlocks for the creator for like monetization. We're also launching something called a Copilot. So we launched like three, four months ago in mcp. It allows you to interact with Beehive essentially through Claude or ChatGPT. People who are using like AI in their workflows have been raving about it. Copilot basically brings that directly into the platform. We are launching Programmatic Ads right now. With the ad network you can choose from like a library of available offers and with Programmatic Ads you just add the block and we will automatically fill the newsletter with the most relevant ad at the highest price. And then the visual editor is kind of the last thing I'll hit on. The editor is kind of at the core of the entire platform, what our writers use to actually create content. We basically rebuilt the entire editor from the ground up. It's what you see is what you get. It's collaborative, it's more powerful, there's more customization. It's just like a better writing experience. It's really hard to describe a better editor over text. It's like one of those things you just like, you use it and it just feels so much better. So those things I'm all like very excited to share. Yeah.
- [14:10]
A
As a user they all Sound really exciting to me. Now I want to take a step back. I. As I told you, I was on Substack for a while. I was on. You know, it's interesting as I've prepared for this and listened to you. I started off with an email to friends that I sent out of my inbox, you know, just because I wanted to get some things off my chest and talk about restaurants. Then I. Then I put it over to mailchimp and fumbled my way through that. And then I made it over to Substack and got a little more serious about it, although still kind of a side project. Then finally came over to you guys because truthfully, because of customization, that was really the number for me. And I also didn't like the fact that Substack was kind of going, you know, they. Ultimately I was just a part of this substack network. It wasn't Jamie's list, it wasn't my own thing. I was part of Substack. But the irony, and we talked a little about this in branding is that Substack now has become Kleenex or Band Aid, right? It has. People come up to me all the time. I love your substack. And I used to be someone who would say, well, it's not on Substack, it's on Beehive. And then finally I was just like, this is. This is not worth the energy to try and explain to people what the difference is. But I guess the question is if I was. You know, there are a lot of people who are considering starting a new newsletter. Why? If I'm listening to this right now and I'm thinking of starting a newsletter, why would I started on Beehive?
- [15:29]
B
Yeah, there's quite a few different reasons. One I think is like, we have a very different business model. Substack is trying to build a social platform. And going back to your point, you were complimented on your substack. Like, not Jamie's list, not your media company, not your newsletter, not your website. We use the Amazon Shopify analogy. A lot of there are millions of third party sellers on Amazon. Most people don't know them because they just type in whatever they want to buy and that's what that's like, their interaction with that merchant. But really you're going through the Amazon website, the Amazon app, it shows up in an Amazon box. Everyone associates you with Amazon. In that case, Shopify is the complete opposite. Whether you're shopping for shoes or whatever. I used to use Allbirds as an example, but it's no longer A good example because I don't know that they exist in the exact way anymore. But when you go to Allbirds, you don't know that they were actually built on Shopify. It's Allbirds brand. It's their website, it's their customer support. And so I think it's important to understand like whether you want to be a part of this network and associated as a substack or if you want to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger and build Arnold's Pump club, like that is a standalone media property that is associated with him. So that's like one big differentiation and that I think that's a philosophical differentiation all the way down to the features and capabilities. Substack is very limited in customization and design. We want every brand to be unique and bespoke to themselves. There's business model considerations. So substack takes a 10% take rate of everything you earn. I don't believe in that predatory business model. I think that if you can convert free readers to paid readers, you are entitled to earn, to take all of those earnings. We also have digital products so you can sell, like I said, templates, guides, coaching, webinars, all of that. It's a 0% take rate on our end. So I think as far as like, capabilities and breadth of what you can do on a platform, it's far more expansive, philosophically. Very different in terms of like are you building a substack or are you building your own brand? And then as far as like revenue opportunities, like I said, we have digital products, we have paid subscriptions, we also have an ad network. So in two to three clicks, anytime you're creating content, you can add Premium sponsors like RAMP, Kalshi, AG1 Nike directly to your newsletter and get paid out accordingly. So we offer a very large breadth of 1, features and functionality and 2 ways to monetize. And so when you, when you kind of sum it all up, I think they're two totally different philosophies. I think they're going for a closed walled or a walled garden closed platform that you're building on their turf and your subscribers kind of find you through substack. We are building an open platform that can integrate with any third party platform that you can customize and make your own and monetize however you'd like. And we are not confining you to just our platform. And so I think there's a lot of philosophical and technical differences there and
- [18:25]
A
that makes total sense. And as a user that tracks, it feels like in some ways right Everybody has a newsletter now, but it's barely scratcher surfaces. I think you said you have a lot of casual people who are starting newsletters. I know I heard you quote sort of something along the lines of one of the most important things is growth and the next thing is kind of monetization. I think that however, there are a lot of people who are just passionate about something and that's sort of where I started from, is that I just felt like there's a lot of stuff I loved and wanted to talk about and it was just a way to get sort of a creative aspect out of me that excited me. And that was food, culture, politics and sports really, and music as well. And truthfully, growth and monetization actually really were really low on the totem pole. And at the same time I was really, although I'm tech savvy, I definitely did not understand a lot of the technical aspects, things you're kind of talking through. So if you're someone who's just an amateur or someone who's a hobbyist, is bi the right place for you? And how do you, what do you say to kind of encourage people to kind of take that first step of starting a newsletter?
- [19:38]
B
Yeah, I mean, even my newsletter, like growth and revenue wasn't really my main objective either. Outside of I wanted to be a case study of what could be the platform. I wrote because I wanted an outlet to share the behind the scenes stories of what, how we're building the company both as like a journal and an archive of everything that we've built and the experiences that we've been through as far as like getting started. Like, there's a reason why we have one of the more generous free plans like you can go up to 2,500 subscribers without ever spending a dollar on the platform. So we want to encourage people who are just kind of kicking the tires and experimenting that this is a platform that should be beginner friendly without having to put up cash and have a subscription towards the platform. We have invested a ton in templates from websites to newsletters to quick start your journey and make sure that you can get started as quickly as possible without going through the nuances of styling every last detail transparently on the product side, which is what I run. It's the hardest part to think through. We have power users who are spending hours a day on the website builder and the newsletter building all of these custom integrations and designs and we want to encourage that. But we also don't want it to be intimidating for brand new users to come in. And so finding the right balance of someone who just wants to write and have a beautiful template and website that they spent 10 minutes putting together like that should be very possible. And we have made that possible. And then for those who pick up momentum and there's been so many stories of people like you who started with they didn't care about revenue, they didn't care about growth, but they found a niche and people who really cared about that content all the way up to them, like quitting their jobs and going full time a year or two later because they did find an audience and they were able to monetize eventually. That's kind of like the beauty of the platform. I think we've made it very beginner friendly. But when you're ready to take the plunge and you want to start monetizing, you really want to focus on growth. We have the largest public publishers from Time, TechCrunch, Newsweek, Sinclair, like running their content business through us. And so it is meant for enterprise all the way down to beginners. And that's kind of the fun of it.
- [21:38]
A
Talk me through some of the stats on newsletters. Obviously you know this business intimately. How many newsletters are there today?
- [21:44]
B
We have like an active metric which is they've been sending frequently. It's about 55,000 actively sending on the platform today.
- [21:51]
A
Sorry, not on Beehive, on in the universe. Do you have it? Do you sort of just the big size scale of the market and the size of the market.
- [21:58]
B
Yeah, I have no idea what our market penetration is. So like multiples of that. I mean at least. How can I make an educated guess here? I'd say at least like million. It's hard because. It's hard because so many companies are also launching newsletters, right? Like there, there are small medium sized businesses that have a bulletin to reach their customers in their community. There's churches that have newsletters for their, for the people who attend their church. Like so newsletters, such a broad category. I, I send million just like shotgunning, that's like way undershooting it which is why I think the market opportun so big. So I think one like the bull case on Beehive is, is that we're at like a tiny, tiny fraction of a percentage of market penetration of like people who are sending and consuming emails. And then two, we know that emails aren't the end all be all which is why we've also expanded into podcasts and websites and community. So we're kind of just going after the creator Economy pie. But to answer your question, I have no idea of how many. How many?
- [22:56]
A
Well, I guess one of the questions is, you know, and I talk about this in the, in the movie business, right? Like when we're creating a movie, you know, it seems to me could be heading towards a place where every movie that comes out has a newsletter and has a podcast and has a community and has a subscription model and has merchandise to sell, right? And at the end of the day, there's a chance, even the most expensive movies that cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if you can create a robust community that's dedicated to your product for 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, you know, it, which is sort of the lifespan of a movie. If not, you know, in theory, longer. I mean, you know, the, you know, I guess, you know, but at the same time, that's a short term product to some extent, right? Like, so is that the, is that the A24 newsletter or is it the Mari supreme newsletter?
- [23:52]
B
Right, that's what I was going to say. Maybe it's the studio, right? Like, maybe it's a 24 and you're the, you get the, the latest up to the date. Like, like trailers and. Because like the hardest thing is getting people's attention. But that's why email works so well, right? Rather than waiting to go to a certain website or hearing an add on on Spotify or the radio or whatever, like newsletters allow whoever's creating that to push that out at the cadence that they want and get in front of their audience. So yeah, Is it an A24 newsletter that goes out every week and with the latest like trailers and movies that are in the pipeline?
- [24:21]
A
Yeah, and I think that's, that's a, you know, if people can subscribe and pay for, to be a part of a community and be a super user, that's a real revenue stream that ultimately can be used for growth in a different way that I think people are really thinking about it. Do you think at this point, can you have just a newsletter really, do you need to have some form of community, some form of additional,
- [24:52]
B
you know,
- [24:52]
A
elements if you, if, if you do want the right growth, you know, even if, even just, you know, even just if numbers aren't your sole thing, but the right users are and subscribers are your thing, do you think you need to be offering a Discord community or a WhatsApp community or a, you know, a podcast or do you think that opportunity works to just be a newsletter?
- [25:15]
B
Yeah, well, we don't need to use Discord or WhatsApp anymore because we just launched community and so you can do it natively on the platform. Platform, which solves that problem. Yeah, I think we have so many people that are newsletter only and having a ton of success. Like I put myself in that bucket. Like I, as of right now just have the weekly newsletter and it's paying me more as a side project than Beehive pays me. So it's a great side project. That being said, I think the reason why our roadmap looks the way that it does is because the most successful content creators today are going multichannel. When you look at a Colin Samir, Cody Sanchez, when you look at Jay Shetty, like they have a newsletter, they have a podcast, they have YouTube, they're on social as well, and a lot of them also have a community. And so I think our roadmap and what we have built matches one to one, like the top quartile of content creators and like what their needs are, which is going multi channel and finding multiple ways to engage with their audience across a few different channels.
- [26:13]
A
You know, for me, what I've tried to build at Jamie's List is something that has a really thoughtful user base and that everybody who's a subscriber is somebody who can ultimately be almost a contributor to the community. And that it's not about. I heard a quote once where it's not about the size of your congregation, it's about how many people show up to church on Sundays, which I love. I think it's about people who are really want to get in deep with the community. And that may just mean open the newsletter. I mean, it doesn't mean they need to do much more, but they're really using it and they really appreciate it and they're really getting something out of it that's meaningful in their life and that's ultimately the podcast. I've added some IRL events, which I love. I added a physical book, which I love and I love all these different aspects of it is what kind of gets me so excited. You know, it's hard. It's a lot of. It's a lot to do.
- [27:13]
B
It's hard.
- [27:14]
A
You know, it's even hard to put out a newsletter every week. So it's. But it's. That's one of the. That's probably one of the most fun parts about it is the sort of all the different elements that go to it and building a community. How do you sort of talk to people about this idea of just growth versus the Kind of the right growth or growth of kind of active people really committed to the, to the community and totally.
- [27:38]
B
Yeah, I think it depends on like who you're talking to and what their objective is. There's a lot of people in the newsletter ecosystem that followed the Morning Brew story and some of these other like Milk Road came onto our platform in 2022, eight months later got bought for north of a few million dollars. So like an 8 month to like a 8. What's the math there? 7 figure exit. Like when you see stories about that. The newsletter ecosystem invites a lot of people who are finding ways to get subscribers for as cheap as possible. Whether it's like Facebook or different types of ads, getting them onto the newsletter, whether you're doing paid subscriptions or ads and finding a way to scale as quickly as possible to eventually get an exit. So there's like these like newsletter operators that are just optimizing for business outcomes and profit. There's other people like myself, like you, that are actually doing it more for I think the craft and like being able to curate an interesting group of people in an audience that care about the content that we're creating. And in itself those members of that audience are valuable because they're all interesting people. Most of the people that respond to my newsletter are founders themselves and they're building different companies. They're asking me for tips on how to fundraise like people I would want to be in my network. And so I think there's different ways to go about it. I think for us as a platform, it's just important that we can adhere to both of them. If you are a pure hobbyist, we don't want to shove monetization opportunities and hyper growth down your throat. But if you want to scale your newsletter as fast as humanly possible, like we're building integrations with meta, we're building new advanced dashboards, we're building like this recommendation network. Like there's a lot that we can do to help serve faster growth and more monetization. So the answer is both like I think that's like the big. That's like. I think what's cool about the creator economy is there really is no one size fits all. There's YouTubers that have a certain strategy towards the way that they create their content and then youtubers who are having just as much success doing the complete opposite. And you see that in newsletters, you see that in podcasts as well. So yeah, I think it's like really exciting and I think like our job as a platform is just to facilitate whatever we can. So no matter what shape or size content creator you are or what your goals are, we should be able to support you with the platform.
- [29:52]
A
And I think that's true. From being user I, you talk about something a lot which is kind of this idea of building in public. And I had a friend who once was at Google who kind of told me the same kind of concept which was a big unlock for me because for years I was, I was over analyzing everything I was doing that related to this sort of my newsletter and podcast kind of side of my business. And then one day I was like, I'm just going to try stuff. Like just try stuff, see what happens and hopefully learn from it and hopefully figure out how to fix it and make it better. What's your sort of take on that model and how did you kind of discover that?
- [30:31]
B
I mean even how I run the company in terms of like when we ship features and we've gotten better at this but like early days we would ship something that's 8, 80% because I would much rather get it into users hands and tell us what sucks about it rather than us guessing what sucks. So from like a pure like engineering and product philosophy I've always been very loose with let's get it to the end user and they will tell us what to fix. Or we could spend months just debating internally what we think that they're going to want. And it's so much harder to do that and more time consuming. And so I'm a big fan of not letting perfection get in the way of progress for across any medium, whether it's product and engineering, whether it's content, whether it's even in your personal life. Right. Like I think where the people who have the most success are typically those who are willing to be uncomfortable and try new things and are not afraid of criticism. And I think that you build that muscle over time. I share my newsletter every Tuesday. A lot of like personal things about like my life and the journey and how difficult it's been to build this company. And I'm okay knowing that there are VCs who are, you know, are looking at this and like think a lot of for me like the advantage of my newsletter and the content I create is that most founders keep all their secrets themselves because they think if their competitors were to know about their trade secrets that they would be at a disadvantage. I just have like a very high degree of confidence in like our ability to execute. And I've never been scared of Sharing like our roadmap and what we're building and thinking that we can out execute other companies. And then I share like the personal side and like the ups and downs of the journey because a lot of founders are on this VC flywheel where they think that they're always going to have to raise another round and that if they show any signs of weakness that investors won't believe in them or their company. And it's kind of total bullshit because building a company is extremely hard and there's obviously lots of problems and things that you go through. I'm just comfortable sharing them and that's kind of been my alpha in terms of creating content is that I'm transparent to a level that most other founders aren't and that's been my niche. But I think it's the same thing underlying theme that you mentioned which is really just trying things, being okay with putting yourself out there, not over indexing or being afraid of feedback from others and realizing that the best way to get to and the fastest way to get to a better final destination is by trying things and seeing what works and what doesn't, taking that feedback and then iterating from there.
- [32:57]
A
Do you have sort of a motto as a founder? I mean, you know, separate from this idea sort of, you know, you're trying things in public but that that's sort of been the thing that's helped you grow beehive to where it's at today.
- [33:09]
B
Yeah, I'm super competitive. I think that most founders are right. Like I have on our investor update that I send every month now every quarter. I have every investor who passed on us on that list from the very beginning so they can read our updates every month and see that they, they messed up and not investing in us. Us. I enjoy what we do. I think that's really important. It's actually the thing that I probably struggle the most with is actually like enjoying the journey. I think it's so hard and it's so messy and it's always easy to daydream of some future state where we have more employees who can delegate more things where it's less stressful or maybe we get acquired one day and then life's a little bit different. And I think a lot of founders fantasize about that. But you're in the mud for so long and you have to find ways to actually enjoy the process. And so I have to constantly remind myself to enjoy the day to day even if the day to day is putting out fires from 8am to 8pm and solving problems, which is really what it is most of the time.
- [34:05]
A
What are some of the things you're most excited about? Kind of looking forward with Beehive and obviously we talked about some of the announcements of the new features, but are there kind of big macro things you're excited about or that you're focused on or hoping to build?
- [34:18]
B
Yeah, I'd say two things. One is even like what we were chatting about earlier just around the creator economy, like I think people, people are still just waking up. The fact that one, how big of an opportunity it is and then two, how everyone can be a creator. I think where we really differentiate, it's kind of like three things. We are an open platform where most platforms are not. We really are the most creator friendly. Other platforms lock you in to the platform and they. It makes it hard to leave. Other platforms also take a percentage of your earnings. We don't do that. So I think we're like rightly on the right side of like, like what makes a better platform. And I think as more people come online to realizing that they can be a creator, creator sovereignty and not being tied to a specific platform is really important on like the, the roadmap side. The thing that really excites me is almost like flipping it on its head is not the tools that we're building for creators, but the tools that we're building for advertisers. Because in my mind, if you have ad dialers and if we can attract the Nikes and the unilevers and like all these massive companies to invest in the creator economy, I really do think we could do what YouTube did for video, but for newsletters and podcasts and if we can build those tools, that money trickles down to content creators, which then gives them more ability to invest in their business to grow and also invites more content creators into the ecosystem knowing that they can monetize. The fact that YouTube has printed so many millionaires just from creating and uploading videos is crazy. And if we can do that same type of liquidity in our ecosystem right now it's newsletters primarily. Obviously we host podcasts too. There's a world where we have an ad network where you can serve both podcasts and newsletters. When Nike comes in with like a million dollar campaign because they want wellness creators who are publishing newsletters and podcasts on Beehive, like that money flowing down to them will make them more successful and invite more creators. So I think that's really exciting to think about.
- [36:10]
A
It's interesting you talk about the, the tools for the advertisers. But I want to just think about one of the tools that for. Well, this is for both and which you're launching a. I think, well, partially today, but in general sort of the, the, the AI tools that are playing into creators. I've just started to dabble with your. The Claude connector, which is pretty amazing. Are you scared at all about
- [36:39]
B
how
- [36:40]
A
people can start using AI when it comes to actually generating newsletters themselves and content? Maybe scare is not the right word, but I think for me, what is the thing? You know, this is my newsletter. It's very personal. That being said, Claude's read every one of my newsletters before and I've had it spit out its version of my newsletter and I'm kind of scared by how good it is. But at the same time it's also missing my, in my opinion, the special sauce that makes my newsletter what it is. But obviously at this point you could in 10 minutes have, you know, 10 newsletters about 10 different topics and just send them out and they'd be really generic and probably pretty bad. But do you think that's a, Are you excited about that tool and how people use it? Are you nervous? Are you? What's your take?
- [37:29]
B
No. So I mean I think your special sauce is the fact that you went to Sunny's in la, tried a New York sliced pizza and like were able to write about it with your opinion and like that's why people sign up and like yes, AI could pull a bunch of restaurant reviews and create their own list, but it's actually not your authentic list. I think the best content creators and the ones who are really going to shine moving forward are those who have a unique perspective, who have some sort of expertise or experience that they can speak to. So when I write my newsletter about building the company, like Claude doesn't know like what the meetings I've had and like what the takeaways are and how we're prioritizing different things or like, like the, the emotional side of building a startup. I listen, I, I love reading Ben Thompson's strategy. I read him not because I could get the same like high level news from Google or ChatGPT about how Facebook or Meta's earnings are. But I trust his opinion because he's been in the industry so long and he has such a unique take and perspective on tech. Like that's what I'm paying for. It's that expertise and that taste and, and that, those experiences. So I'm not really concerned. I'm I'm sure people will use AI to create newsletters. I think subscribers will vote with their feet and with their dollars of if it's good content. I also think people will sign up to AI content. I think if it's good and it's valuable and it serves a purpose, I don't think it's necessarily going to displace human content creation. But if you just want to know what happened in crypto in the past 24 hours and there's some AI generated text that hits on exactly what you want, I think people would pay for that. So I'm not worried about total displacement. I think there's going to be different types of content available where AI is really exciting to me. Like, as you mentioned, the mcp, the anecdote I always use is I was on this panel and this content creator next to me was talking about how she spends two days a week creating content and five days a week doing all of the admin work around her business. And I think that's the opportunity for AI. It's like, how do we augment all of the admin and manual task around creating a newsletter or a podcast or doing the data analytics or understanding who you should invite to your IRL event in la? I think that's the stuff that AI is really good at and it actually shifts people's time more towards what they want to be doing, which is actually creating content.
- [39:36]
A
I think it's great. Yeah. And I mean, just even beginning to get the Claude connector to start analyzing Jamie's list and helping me to figure out what we could doing better and what we should be thinking about is invaluable and saving us tons of time and, you know, we'll see. Hopefully it leads, leads to kind of the right growth that I'm hoping for. Since I have you on here, I'm gonna take a few minutes more of your time. You know, I'm gonna take advantage of you as you know, since. Since I have the CEO and I have a newsletter here, If I was, you know, if you think of my newsletter of Jamie's list and some of the stuff we talked about and you don't know it intimately, but you've, you've seen it before and I've told you a little bit about it. Like what are things that you would tell me to sort of focus on. In order to kind of have it. Have the right growth that I'm talking about? Obviously everybody wants some monetization. It's not the driving force. The right growth is the most important thing for me, what are some key suggestions you would make?
- [40:46]
B
Yeah, I think you have a pretty good sense of who your audience is. I think what would be interesting, obviously you have your different places that you've ate with like the reviews and everything, kind of making it more bi directional where people could submit like the different restaurants and places that they've ate recently. Could be an interesting strategy where it incentivizes people to engage with the newsletter and also continue reading and check to see if they're going to be featured in an upcoming issue. I've seen quite a few companies, I think the Skim did that way back when when they would feature different responses. Or Milk Road did that as well. The AI newsletter where they, they use a poll at the bottom and they would always highlight like the funniest responses to the poll because you could like answer the poll then give like a qualitative response. And one, it was super engaging. Two, it encouraged more people to interact with the poll because you have the chance of actually like getting featured in an upcoming newsletter. And then those people always tune into future newsletters. So I think like making it more interactive could be interesting. You mentioned community a lot even before we talked about what we're launching today. I think if you know that you've done a great job of curating people who are the right people who are interested in this type of content and ultimately they sign up to the newsletter because they either like you or they like the content and knowing about the different restaurants. Like I signed up earlier just because like when I found out that you were based in LA and the restaurant like it might. Your first question obviously stumped me. Like I don't really know like my go to restaurant. I'm in my room seven days a week working and I'm a big doordash guy. But I don't know where we'd actually go out to lunch, which is why I struggled there. But I think actually creating a community where these people can interact with each other and if you have people who are like minded, they travel a lot and they love food, you're just one person who can only include three to four restaurant recommendations per issue. But if you have a community of 500 people who are all traveling and doing that now you have this really cool archive and database of recommendations that is crowdsourced and if you did the right, if you have the right people, they'll be valuable in terms of like they're not just recommending McDonald's or whatnot. And then I mean to take that to the Next level with our copilot or with the mcp, the Claude connector. If you did have a community, it could go through and actually grab all of these recommendations from the community that was sourced. And you can even create like a database of that which you could charge for. So there's like a lot of really cool things there. I think if food is like. Actually I'm kind of digging in the food example because I think it's so relatable to most people, but those are a few different ideas.
- [43:18]
A
That's great. I love it. By the way, what does MCP technically actually stand for?
- [43:23]
B
Model Context Protocol. But basically it's just an API to connect to Claude. It's basically just connecting software, whether it's Gmail or Beehive or whatever third party platform to Claude and giving it access to stuff.
- [43:36]
A
Cool. Well, listen, I really appreciate the time. I love what you guys are building over there and doing. I'm excited to be a part of of the Beehive family. I love the other newsletters on there and I love the new products you guys keep launching. I barely scratched the surface of what you have there, which is my fault more than anything.
- [44:00]
B
Very common feedback. It's actually like a stressor on our end. Right. Because people are like, hey, you guys launch six new things a week. I haven't even touched the six from the last eight weeks in a row.
- [44:09]
A
So I think you need like more Beehive Academy to make sure that work using Beehive properly.
- [44:15]
B
We're working on that as we speak, so.
- [44:17]
A
Okay, good.
- [44:18]
B
Great.
- [44:19]
A
Okay, cool. And we're gonna have to. I'm gonna take you to lunch somewhere since I need.
- [44:23]
B
Yeah, I need a better answer to mine. Although stake 48 could be great. I. Same way. Same when I lived in New York. Maybe it's just because I've been in the startup grind and like work is 99% of what I think about. But I panic when someone's like, hey, I'm in town, where should I grab lunch?
- [44:36]
A
Where.
- [44:36]
B
Where should we go to, like the bar? I don't really have go to's, so I have my go to's on DoorDash, which is. But outside of that. No.
- [44:43]
A
There you go. All right, good. Well, I owe you a lunch, so it's great to meet you virtually and I look forward to continue talking.
- [44:50]
B
Cool. Thanks for having me on.
- [44:52]
A
Thanks a lot, Tyler. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Lunch with Jamie. As always, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter@jamieslist.com for my thoughts on all things food, pop culture, politics and more. And remember to join these online conversations and ask my guests questions in real time. Sign up to become a paid subscriber. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Audible and be sure to leave a review. Thanks and see you next time.