← Marketing Against The Grain
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- [00:00]
Tyler Dink
It was successful on a personal level because I made $10,000 for 10 minutes of work. And that's like the power of an owned audience. It's the craziest ROI positive investment you could possibly make.
- [00:09]
HubSpot Host
Today I'm talking to Tyler Dink. He's the founder of Beehive. He has a personal newsletter that over the last few years, he's gotten to 130,000 subscribers. He is now turning that into a multimillion dollar pipeline for his company.
- [00:21]
Tyler Dink
Beehive, former CTO of Time, stumbled into signing up to Big Desk Energy before even knowing what Beehive was. He read my newsletter. He aligned with how and going about building the business. He pitched Time on moving all of their emails over to Beehive. And Time is now one of our largest enterprise customers.
- [00:37]
HubSpot Host
The funnel of it is very simple. He's got a newsletter that sends people to a lead magnet. He had a thousand people buy that lead magnet and half of those became customers of his product. We're going to take you behind the scenes on what it's like to build and run an email newsletter for your business, how to actually make money doing it. And you're going to want to stick with us because we're going to give you the exact marketing strategy and principles that Beehive and HubSpot are using to grow with content. You are a founder of Beehive, but you're also a creator. You got this email newsletter. 130,000 people take us behind the scenes. Like, how does this all work?
- [01:12]
Tyler Dink
So prior to even launching Beehive, I was the second employee at Morning Brew. And so I saw up close and personal one, the power of email. The amount of money you can generate as a business, the amount of loyalty you can earn from an audience who builds this habit of wanting to come back to your content day and day again. That led to a $75 million acquisition by business Insider. So that's kind of like my backstory of how I even got into the email space. And Beehive's built on like a lot of those same principles. Can we quote, unquote, democratize access that Morning Brew had so anyone could, like an individual like myself scale a successful newsletter and I'd even expand anyone to any business because we're actually seeing a huge surge of businesses find this content marketing muscle and invest in newsletters to drive customers. So I think it's a really exciting time for email.
- [01:59]
HubSpot Host
What's happened is that like search, traditional Google search, has been disrupted and so people are moving to email. They're moving to LinkedIn and they're moving to YouTube as a place to kind of own and manage their kind of core, high engaged, niched audience. And email is a terrific platform for doing that.
- [02:14]
Tyler Dink
Yeah, I'm a huge fan of YouTube. It's, you know, the biggest in the creator economy. But the thing about whether it's Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, it's all algorithmically driven, right? And so you can post a video and you might have a hundred thousand subscribers to your YouTube channel, but not 100,000 people are actually going to get the notification or see that video. Everything's algorithm driven where that's really the value of email. I think there's so few places on the Internet that's a true owned audience and owned distribution. And when I send my newsletter Every Tuesday to 130,000 people, 130,000 people receive it directly in their inbox. And I think that's super powerful and something that other content creators and businesses should think about.
- [02:51]
HubSpot Host
Email is like one of the last frontiers of ownership, right? Like even the websites being disrupted. I just saw Cloudflare just posted that you now have more bot traffic than human traffic on the Internet, right? And so websites are getting disrupted, but email and the intimacy of an inbox is still like, I'd say more important than ever.
- [03:07]
Tyler Dink
I think it's something that every professional comes back to day to day to engage with their coworkers and other people outside of their business. Whether you're booking flights, booking reservations, or reading content and newsletters, it kind of all lives in the inbox. And so, yeah, obviously I'm very bullish on the space, but I've also just seen up close and personal, how many businesses and content creators have actually changed their lives or changed the trajectory of their business by overinvesting into email. And so there's enough case studies there where I think there's a strong reason to be bullish for it.
- [03:35]
HubSpot Host
I couldn't agree more. Let's get into it.
- [03:37]
Tyler Dink
So here, this is the Beehive dashboard of my newsletter. This is what mine looks like. It's Windows 98 themed intentionally. And this was me covering our company off site a few weeks ago. So it's kind of like A day in the life or A week in the Life. So this is the newsletter. So leading up to all of that, the other thing that we do at Beehive is we also allow you to create your own website. So again, this is intentionally Windows 98 theme. It could look a lot better if I wanted to. But this is a website that I built. The reason why that's important is because this is the foundation of the lead magnet that has helped drive a lot of growth for us.
- [04:10]
HubSpot Host
Hey, guys, we are covering a ton of ground, and I know you're probably feeling a little overwhelmed and you want to learn even more. Well, good thing. We've got a ton of resources for you. You can scan that Q QR code or you can click the link in the description below, and we'll get all of those for free.
- [04:24]
Tyler Dink
We launched something at Beehive called Digital Products, and it's exactly what it sounds like. You can sell templates, guides, courses, like, whatever you want digitally, even, like, consulting. And so this is the form. This is all it took. So I show this because it took me less than 10 minutes to set up this digital product. And what the digital product actually looks like is this. So this lives on my website. If you're familiar with other platforms on the Internet that sell digital products or lead magnets, it's very similar. You can kind of go through and what this one actually is. Basically, I took all of my learnings from taking my newsletter from 0 to 130,000, and I built a slide deck. And then I went one step further, and I created a video of me going through the slide deck. So giving the context and color commentary of how I've been able to scale my newsletter. And if you take a step back of why that's so powerful, you know, I've sold a thousand of these, so $10,000 in revenue. It's, like, very easy. Higher. Oi. For 10 minutes of work to put this together. And then everyone who has purchased this product should be in our pipeline, if not already a Beehive user to use the platform.
- [05:30]
HubSpot Host
People are gonna be like, oh, he sold a thousand of these. Well, that's essentially like, a little less than 1% of your subscribers would have bought this.
- [05:38]
Tyler Dink
Yeah, totally. And so from this email alone, this was my inbox. So I literally couldn't open my inbox for two days because I had so many sales coming in.
- [05:48]
HubSpot Host
The other thing, I think that's really fascinating. You charge for this thing. A lot of people would've been like, oh, well, I'm launching Digital Products on Beehive. I'm gonna create a guide. I'm gonna give it away for free. I'm gonna get a few thousand people, then I'm gonna go and sell them. But instead you said, hey, this is $10. This is really valuable. And you still had a lot of people buy it. Like, what's the rationale there, is it to set a line of value and actually make some money or is it to filter for people who actually want to do this and have real intent to maybe be a beehive customer?
- [06:17]
Tyler Dink
I'd say all of the above with the added one of I wanted to demo the paid product feature and so I'm like dogfooding the product myself.
- [06:27]
HubSpot Host
Love that.
- [06:27]
Tyler Dink
Obviously it was successful on a personal level because I made $10,000 for 10 minutes of work and that's like the power of an owned audience. It was successful from the business lens because 55% of people who purchased this product became a beehive user. That is crazy, right? Like if you and I could probably go one more one layer deeper in Claude and actually do the analysis of those 55%. So roughly 550 people that purchased this became a beehive user. What is that? Mrr. And I would assume it's north of a million or ARR, it's probably north of a million. So like that is pretty exciting. And I'd even say the flip side of that coin is the 45% of people who purchase this product that did not become a beehive user. That's just an opportunity to do more re engagement campaigns, reach out to them, give them a discount and get them into our pipeline. Because we already know there's an interest of them launching a newsletter. And I've cross referenced that they're not an existing beehive user so they're either thinking about getting started or using one of our competing companies products. And so yeah, I think there's just so many layers to this.
- [07:25]
HubSpot Host
Let's assume there's a lot of people who are kind of inspired right now. They're like, wow, okay, Tyler has like got this audience. He can just make a video and make some money. Like that's pretty awesome. How long does it take? Like if you're just saying like, hey, I want to go and do this tomorrow, like how many days, months, weeks am I looking at till I have like a real audience to actually start to do some of this stuff with?
- [07:47]
Tyler Dink
It depends on like what your business is. If you're listening to this and you are a founder or you work at a company that has much higher acv, right? Like you only need a few hundred people that are very engaged. And if you can convert one of a hundred people, but that one person's paying you $50,000 a year, like the math is really simple in terms of like what the expected ROI is and like how much you need to grow. And so I think even like ignoring the business side and going to strictly the newsletter side of things. When I was at Morning Brew, the skim came before us. The hustle was around the same time as us as well. And they had a very clear business model which was like, go for scale. Like what we sold advertisers, which is how we made money, was we have 3 million readers between 18 and 34 and this is the audience you want to get in front of and we can sell advertising to that. But there's been this whole explosion now with like Beehive and other platforms that have made it easier and lower the barriers of entry to launch a newsletter where you could have a CMO focused newsletter with 2000 CMOs. And the value of that audience is so incredibly high. Incredible because. Because you can sell HubSpot to those CMOs, you can sell any like. And HubSpot would be willing to spend a lot of money to get in front of 2000 CMOs that are very engaged and verified and work for, you know, the Fortune 5000 or whatever. And so there was a world where everything was scale and volume, but there's so many niches now that have exploded. And if you can get in front of a smaller but very qualified audience, the answer doesn't need to be you need 10,000 or 130,000 readers. It could be you have a thousand readers of a very narrow focus and that's an extremely valuable audience.
- [09:28]
HubSpot Host
That's the real power of what you would call like the creator economy. Right. Like, you know, Kieran and I have written this book called Loop that comes out in September. Well, we can link up the pre order down below and we did a whole chapter on the creator economy because it's so important. And we have an example of you might be trying to reach somebody like me and you're sending me cold emails, you're advertising on Google and I'm ignoring all of it. But I will listen to David Senra every week. I love David. I love founders, I love his other podcasts. And if you're on there, I'm probably going to understand who you are and what you're about. And that's essentially the argument you're making right now where once you have a high quality audience that trusts you, there's almost endless ability to monetize that audience. Right?
- [10:11]
Tyler Dink
Totally. And that's why I'm so bullish on what Ramp has done with David Senro and because you can't listen to any of his podcasts and not Know what RAMP is. And rampus has done such an excellent job of knowing who their ICP is, what type of content and media that they're consuming and where. I think we've matured in the creator economy. We see it on our end as well. And we're participating in this is it used to be find someone with a lot of followers, give them a lot of money because they warrant a lot of, you know, high upfront costs because of the vanity metric of followers, and you would do like a one off buy or like a video or like an Instagram story. And what I think we're maturing to now is finding more niche audiences who actually speak to your ICP and doing a long term partnership. We call them creator partnerships. Yeah. So we don't sponsor any of our talent or creators for a one off email send or like a one off Instagram post. We do a lot of diligence and we decide that we actually want to go deep and we want to sponsor their newsletter for a quarter and their podcast and their social. And so anyone who interacts with this content creator over the course of a quarter knows exactly who Beehive is because we've hit them from a few different angles. I think that's kind of like the maturation of what it means as a brand to invest in the creator economy.
- [11:18]
HubSpot Host
Yeah. I think that's why you're seeing more people being creators and starting newsletters. Right. Because it used to be like, oh gosh, it feels so daunting. I need to have hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people for me to make any money doing that. And that's just not the case anymore. Like you said, you can have really high quality, two to five thousand people and make a ton of money. For example. Something I'd recommend everybody doing is like, think about the thing, you know, most in the world. Think about the highest leverage audience on that topic and use Claude ChatGPT, your tool of choice, to go research what the average like advertising rates to reach those people are. And you can quickly know if it's worth your time to kind of be a thought leader or to be somebody who can reach that audience in a meaningful way. And I would say 9 out of 10 times the math is pretty overwhelmingly positive that it's worth it. When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, do you know if you're showing up or not? At HubSpot, we've got a great product that actually helps you get discovered in AI search. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in these moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click, before the first fill, that's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Go check out HubSpot AEO. You can trial it for free and it's going to help you understand how you're showing up in AI search and how you can show up even more.
- [12:38]
Tyler Dink
Yeah, I think the cold start problem continues to get easier for a few different reasons. One, again, like the plug Beehive, it's free to get started, but even if a newsletter feels too daunting to write a thousand word essay or come up with the design and everything, I started my build in public journey just posting on LinkedIn and X. Whenever I had an idea about the business, when I was excited about a new feature we were launching, when we made a big hire, when we did something a little bit out of the ordinary that I really believed in, I wanted to share my opinion of like, this is what I think it means to company build as like a new startup. And I built this audience on primarily Twitter and a little bit of LinkedIn of just sharing my thoughts in like very short bits of information. It only took refining that over the course of two to three years and getting like a little bit of a following there. Before I was like, I think I have something more to say where a tweet doesn't really justify, like I really need to go deeper. And that's what really led to me launching this newsletter. So I say all of that because like if you're in this like paralysis of where do I start? Obviously for everything that we talked about earlier of owning your audience and distribution and posting on X doesn't mean that your followers actually see that content. Same with YouTube, same with LinkedIn and newsletter does. There are bite sized ways to test content and kind of find your tribe on the Internet before going all in.
- [13:50]
HubSpot Host
I love the test before, before you go all in the kind of follow up to this. It's like one of my early lessons as a marketer is that the founder is really the CMO and your job as a marketer is to help the founder be the cmo. You are truly the CMO because you are taking a very founder led marketing approach. If you weren't doing this like what haircut would you give to Beehive's revenue?
- [14:14]
Tyler Dink
So give the caveat that we actually as of a few months ago do have a CMO and he's incredible.
- [14:18]
HubSpot Host
So he's doing you for all intents and purposes still are the CMO he has the title, but like his job is to bring your vision to life, right?
- [14:26]
Tyler Dink
For sure. And up until that point, yes, I think I would agree with you that I was a quasi CMO of doing product marketing through my social channel, through the newsletter and everything else. The power of the newsletter too is I get hundreds of replies every time that I send my newsletter each week. And the amount of people who have responded saying, hey, I had an issue getting set up with my account, but I love your content so much and I trust you as the founder behind this company, I would never give up on like this platform or like I would never consider going to a competitor. So we've gotten like a lot of that. This newsletter has also driven some of our largest enterprise deals. And so funny enough, the former CTO of Time somehow stumbled into signing up to Big Desk Energy before even knowing what Beehive was. He read my newsletter for several months and then ended up because he aligned with my thesis and vibes and kind of how I'm going about building the business and like the direction for the product roadmap. He pitched Time on moving all of their emails from whatever legacy infrastructure they were using over to Beehive. And Time is now one of our largest enterprise customers. And that all came top of Funnel just because he somehow stumbled into Big Desk Energy and signed up for that newsletter. And so I think that speaks to quite a few things. One of like the product, the founder led growth, the building public, the product led marketing. And just the more opportunities and like the larger the surface area you have of creating content on the Internet and being in my angle is very transparent and very relatable. It just increases the odds that other people can find you, that they have more trust and faith in you. And ultimately it's like a shitty way to kind of view the world. But like if everything's a pipeline, right? We're both marketers here. Like, you want to build that pipeline as much as you possibly can.
- [16:06]
HubSpot Host
When you have trust, it is actually how you retain customers and build on that customer base in a really meaningful way. And I think that matters more today in the post AI and high digital world than it ever has.
- [16:20]
Tyler Dink
Yeah, I'm a huge believer in that.
- [16:23]
HubSpot Host
Well, I think that as the world gets more AI first and more digital, the counterintuitive things happen that humans start caring about more emotional things. They care about empathy, they care about people who care. They want to trust the companies they're working with. And I think what's interesting is if you were doing a P&L, you know, a profit loss statement for tiny desk energy. There's a lot of intangible value that you would assign to this email newsletter that would never show up in the $10 digital or advertising earnings or even beehives like revenue numbers that are just like the long term customer trust bank account goes way up every time you send a really good email newsletter.
- [17:07]
Tyler Dink
I think business building is as much art as it is science, but there's a lot of intangible things that we do and spend money on that doesn't make sense financially. But there's a halo effect around investing in certain things. An example of that is we have something called the Beehive Media Collective where we take independent journalists who want to leave their large, whether it's cnn, New York Times, Fox, whatever, they want to go independent. But going independent means you no longer have an editor, you don't have legal coverage, you don't have health insurance, you don't have Getty Images. And there's a lot of things that these institutions like CNN provided all of their journalists that you don't get going independent. But we are again, a big believer in entrepreneurship and a big believer in journalism. And so we created this media collective where you get all of that for free. You get the platform for free, you get health insurance, you get a legal review up to like a certain allotted hours every month, you get giddy images. And so like, we basically covered them legally, health, etc. And we have this group of about 35 incredible independent journalists. And like, when you look at the PNL like, there's zero money being generated from this initiative, it's a cost. But the amount of press that we've been able to generate, the amount of success that these users have had independently, and the amount because they are also reaching an audience and people are interested in their work who ask them, hey, how have you built this company? How are you supported? How have you been able to build this business? And they can point to Beehive as the company that went out of their way to build a program that didn't have to exist. I think there's a lot of hidden ROI in all of that. That's very hard to calculate. And so that's one of many examples of when we do things where there is an art to what we do that's not a spreadsheet and very quantifiable.
- [18:48]
HubSpot Host
I think that is an incredibly valuable lesson. I would encourage Everybody to click 30 seconds back and to listen to that again, because this is how you make and build Remarkable companies. One of the best books I've ever read in my life is a simple book called how to Lie with Statistics. And it shows you just how math can be misleading. Everybody thinks like spreadsheets and math is very objective, very binary. And it's not. It's just as much art as it is science. And once you understand that, then you start applying art and science to everything you do. And you're like, okay, well this might not show up in the spreadsheet, but I know as a human being that this is a valuable thing to do. And I'm going to go and do it because my audience cares about it and values it, right?
- [19:27]
Tyler Dink
Totally. And to double click on what you were saying earlier around trust and like, that's one of my big theses. Not just from like an individual creator economy lens, but from like a business lens. When you can vibe code a solution and be a competitor and have like, you know, an equal feature set with a bunch of other competitors. Where do you actually differentiate in this new AI generated world? And it is reputation, it is trust, it is the people behind it, it is like the storytelling and narrative, which is why so many of these non media companies are investing in media. I'd love to hear the HubSpot media angle because I'm sure you oversee that. And it's like a huge bet that HubSpot takes, which I think is really interesting. But to that point, like when you're saying I'm buying trust with our users, which leads to retention, I had an investor tell me before that people aren't buying the product for the product, they're buying it because you have created an engine that you listen to feedback and you will continue to build things for their future needs. And so it's not like a static, like this is what the product is today. We have this track record of launching three to five features every single week. And if you have an issue on the product today, odds are that we'll address it, fix it and make it better and ship new products by next week. And so if you do that over and over again, and this is the story that I constantly tell in my newsletter, you're not just buying Beehive, you're buying an engine that can solve your problems. And trust in me that I'm willing to prioritize that feedback can do that, which I think is really powerful in this age of AI.
- [20:48]
HubSpot Host
Regardless of what problem you're trying to solve, you want whoever you're working with to care deeply and have a depth of expertise and be Learning and iterating, just like you said. Because if that's the case, you're never going to get left behind. And I think that's what everybody's actually scared of, that they're going to spend a bunch of money on anything and feel left behind and be left behind.
- [21:06]
Tyler Dink
Couldn't agree more. And I think a lot of the conversation has been around content creators and individuals. And I'm kind of curious, maybe if you, like, want to talk about the Hustle and like the HubSpot Media Network, like, why is that a bet worth taking?
- [21:19]
HubSpot Host
Nonsense. A lot of what you're doing is what we did when, at the early days of the HubSpot Media Network. Right. The deal with the HubSpot Knee Network is like, we had this blog network before we did anything else. And lots of millions and millions of people were reading it and it was great, but it was a little hard to build connection with the audience. And how people were consuming information had changed a lot. Move past search, had moved to email, email newsletters had moved to social video, had moved to YouTube, all of the different channels, Right. And so what we did years ago now is we bought a company called the Hustle, and that was an email newsletter that got us into the email newsletter game. And there was also a podcast that was part of the Hustle called My First Million, which is now like a super famous business podcast that's part of our network. And that allowed us to build a podcast network, an email newsletter network. And now, and then subsequently, like, we turned My First Million into a video podcast. We've been on our YouTube network. And the reality is one, it's a cheaper way to reach people and a much higher trust, higher leverage way to reach people. Like, you could argue, like, my time's fairly valuable. And this is the thing I choose to do. I choose to do a podcast twice a week because I believe this is actually one of the highest leverage things I can do with my time. And most people believe the opposite. It's like, oh, that's, that's silly. That's just marketing. That's just like somebody doing that for their own ego. And that's not at all the case, you know, because you do this, you build this, right? And instead it's like, no, this is how, first of all, it's how you learn talking to people like you. It's like, oh my gosh, I would pay you to, to, to spend an hour with me and to teach me all the things you have about email newsletters.
- [22:58]
Tyler Dink
You can. And I will by the way, when
- [23:01]
HubSpot Host
I, when I start my email newsletter soon, I'm actually going to be like, tyler, thousand bucks, man. You got to talk to me. Like we're going to really do it. Maybe we'll record it for a second episode of the POD or something as you help me fix everything that I get wrong with my, my newsletter flow. But those are the things that I think matter and I think people get too lost in like, hey, I have this brand and I have these products and I'm just going to tell product driven stories, right? And you can tell product driven stories, but they can't be 100% of your marketing. And I think what you're doing, what we're trying to do at HubSpot is to connect with an audience deeply through stories and information they care about. And then as part of that relationship, they'll discover the products.
- [23:38]
Tyler Dink
Right. And I think what's so powerful about that is obviously you are very selective in the type of brands and creators that you take on. That speaks to a very specific ICP who if 1 in 10 of them purchase an enterprise HubSpot plan, it's the craziest ROI positive investment you could possibly make. And that disregards the fact that these media assets like the Hustle or like my first Million also sell advertising and are probably net profitable, if not break even anyway on like a per asset basis. If you can run these media properties profitable, it's net new revenue. And assuming going back to like, is it 2 or 3% of people who eventually convert into your product because every third ad is a HubSpot ad, then you know, the HubSpot's not a cheap product. The LTV is very large. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm such a big bull on the thesis around content marketing and creator led marketing from like a B2B enterprise persp to build this trust and brand affinity to eventually convert them into customers.
- [24:35]
HubSpot Host
Yeah, we've been doing it for 15 years and it still shocks me about how few people out there still do it. And I will tell you, to give you your due, I think you are one of the founders who are doing it the best and most consistently and across channels and have built a really great audience. And I hope everybody today learned what was possible in actually building an owned audience on email and how you can actually build a real business or expand the business you have with that audience. And Tyler, really appreciate you being on the show today.
- [25:03]
Tyler Dink
Thanks for having me.
- [25:04]
HubSpot Host
Awesome. Thanks everybody. We'll see you real soon. On the next episode of marketing. It's the crane. Let me tell you about a show I love hosted by my friend Ross Simmons. Each episode hosts an in depth analysis of some of the greatest creations and creators of all time with deep dive conversations on the creative process that went into building companies, brands, stories and more. If you like learning about history, learning about the creative process, you'll love this podcast. This podcast is perfect for anyone who wants to learn how to systematize their creativity but still be organized. Ross just did a fantastic episode about Reddit and AI distribution in the playbook that everyone is missing. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts, this
- [25:51]
Tyler Dink
data is wrong every freaking time.
- [25:53]
HubSpot Host
Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.
- [25:59]
Tyler Dink
Whoa. I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed HubSpot grow better.