[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I am Brian Morrissey. This is an episode that was recorded live last week as part of our TRB Live series.
This is something we just kicked off.
It's an ongoing series of interactive conversations about how publishers are adapting to this fragmented, decentralized, and increasingly changing [chuckles] everyday media landscape.
We gathered at Morning Brew's studio for this session on how TechCrunch rebuilt its email strategy.
It features Tyler Denk, who is the co-founder and CEO of Beehiiv, which is a partner of the Reboot Initiative, as well as Matt Gross, the VP of Digital Initiatives at Regent, which not so long ago acquired TechCrunch from Yahoo.
And we speak about how publishers are moder-modernizing their email infrastructure, balancing traffic-driving newsletters with inbox-first products, and what it takes to turn email from a distribution channel into a core product.
My biggest takeaway from, from this discussion was how TechCrunch really faces some of the challenges that every legacy media business does, and that is running the old model while trying to build the new one, all under the weight of accumulated tech and organizational debt.
I mean, as Matt put it, when he arrived at TechCrunch, you know, there were a lot of things that were, in his words, just not configured well.
He said the te-tech debt was so massive that it was easier to move off to something where we know right away how to configure everything to make it work. And I believe that is the reality for most modern media companies.
Modernization isn't just about the technology, but it's also about rewiring the culture and the systems that grew up around the old model. So I love these conversations. Hope you enjoy this.
I'm gonna be sharing some of these in this podcast feed, but it's going to be coming to you twice a week now. Hope you enjoy them. Always like your feedback. My email is brian@therebooting.com.
Now, here's the conversation with Matt and Tyler. [upbeat music] All right. We are, we are live. Welcome, everyone, to the first edition of TRB Live. I wanna thank the team at Morning Brew.
They have been gracious enough to let us use this lovely studio today, and really thankful. And I think it's actually fitting for a couple of reasons.
One is, you know, Morning Brew, I was, like, walking through these offices, and it's like, you know, there's bustling activity. There's, like, a merch shop, like some kind of boutique, like, in the lobby.
And it was all built by, by email, and we're gonna be talking a lot about email today.
And I re-- I can remember when Austin Rief came into our, our Digiday studio, which was a-also a wellness room, and he was trying to convince me that he was building this, this media company on email, and I was, like, incredibly skeptical.
And here we are. Look at us now. And here we are. And Tyler, Tyler Denk with Beehiiv. He's, he's the found-- co-founder and CEO of Beehiiv, who was, what? Employee two- Yeah...at Morning Brew. Yep.
This is a little bit of a homecoming. This is... You did not have this office back- We did not have this office.
We were at Eighty Five Broad Street down in a WeWork for the first few years back when they actually served beer at WeWork, so the fun days. Yes.
Moved to a new office, and then, yeah, I left before I ever had an in-office studio. Yeah. And I can remember I met Tyler during the pandemic and in Miami, I think it was. Yep. And- Where there was no pandemic.
There was no pandemic, so we went out to dinner with a bunch of Morning Brew people. And you were talking about email. And it was funny 'cause I, I wasn't sure what...
You were asking a lot of probing questions about email news-- my use of, like, email newsletters and whatnot, and it turned out you were, you were building something new.
So we were gonna get into, like, why email is so important, and we've got Matt Gross here from the parent company of TechCrunch, Regency.
We'll get into the Regency strategy when it comes to having these different publications, including TechCrunch.
But just to set the, the stage, what is it you wanted to build with Beehiiv, all the tools that you ended up building for Morning Brew as employee two? Yeah. Yeah. So a, a bit of context.
When I joined Morning Brew, we were on some WordPress website. We were using MailChimp. Neil, who you met ear-- Well, you met him before, but he was just in here. Yeah.
Every night at, like, seven or eight o'clock, we would copy and paste content from Google Doc to WordPress to MailChimp, and we would copy and paste till ten, eleven PM. We would accidentally delete something.
The email would get messed up. We'd have to start over. We'd go to one or two AM. That happened probably once or twice a week.
And so from that experience, I was like, how do we build an actual, like, CMS that's built for email specifically?
And a lot of the CMS off-the-shelf, whether it's, like, a WordPress or Piano, all built for, like, this WordPress ecosystem of... that most publishers were publishing to the web.
And we kind of viewed ourselves as we're an email-first newsletter company. We saw the Skim and Axios and, and saw ourselves as different.
And me being a twenty-three-year-old, young, self-taught developer, super naive, thought, "I don't wanna use an off-the-shelf software that's kind of built for web but for email, so what if we just built our own CMS for email specifically?"
So that's kinda the first thing that I built at Morning Brew, went on to build an ad management platform. We built the referral program. We kinda built this own, our own bespoke custom ecosystem of tech.
And so Morning Brew, the content, which is, like, probably why we were super successful, but somewhere second or third reason why we were successful was this totally bespoke ecosystem that allowed us to grow very quickly, understand our audience, and publish to email and web simultaneously.
Right.
And now you're helping publishers do that, and I think what's really interesting to me is we, we had a breakfast earlier today with, with a bunch of great publishers, is how critical email is now to these businesses.
It's not like there's email, just email businesses, but I think every publishing businessHas to get closer to the audience, has to have a direct connection with the audience and build from there.
And a lot of them were not architected that way. And that's where I wanna bring in [laughs] you, Pat, like, a little... You know, it's funny because I remember... This is what happens when you get older.
I remember these, a lot of publishers who were, you know, the kind of disruptors of their time that are now almost legacy. Let's be real.
Because they were built for a completely different era, and the in- a completely different incentive structure, and now you need to reorient these businesses.
So give, give us a background on Regency and, you know, the properties under Regency alongside Tech- Sure. So that's... I mean, we should say it's Regent. Regent. Sorry. Regent LP- Sorry...
is a private equity company at the top of this whole pyramid, and we own a lot of different things. Fashion brands, automotive manufacturing, but there's a whole group of media brands as well.
So TechCrunch we acquired at the beginning of May, along with the Foundry, which is Macworld and PCworld and some B2C brands like CIO.
And those joined our other media companies like Sunset Magazine, Sightline Media Group, which is a bunch of military and defense publications, Military Times, Army Times, Navy Times, Defense News. We own Cheddar.
We own ratemyprofessors.com. So it's, uh, the whole sort of media constellation, and I'm the VP for digital initiatives across a lot of that, which is kind of everything except for coding, and a lot of email.
Like, I, I focus a ton on email. And so when we acquire these new brands, one of the first things I do is just kinda figure out what they're doing with newsletters and what they should be doing. Yeah.
So let's get, let's get into that. I want to encourage everyone to use the Q&A function. I'm g- I wanna, like, I've, I've got a laptop in front of me, and so I'm gonna work in some of those questions.
But let's talk about, like, the email strategy at TechCrunch, right? Like, when you got in, what was the state of it, and what, what are you trying to accomplish within the overall strategy of modernizing TechCrunch?
Sure. So when we... When I found out we were getting TechCrunch, I looked at all of their email products, and they're doing a decent amount of email.
They didn't have a really aggressive acquisition strategy for getting new addresses, and their emails were generally...
They were using essentially BeFree, which is a sort of visual template builder, connected to HubSpot to send almost all of their emails. And they were using MailerLite to a degree for one of their email products.
But these were sort of, you know, the, the team spent a lot of time building these emails every day and sending them out and not necessarily getting a lot back in return.
So when we came in, one of the first things I always do is just try to understand what are we even trying to accomplish with email in the first place? Like, what is the point of sending any email at all?
[laughs] Are we trying to get traffic back to the website, or are we trying to send an email full of marketing messages that are gonna hype our events, or are we trying to get people to, like, sit in, you know, a bathtub with a glass of red wine and enjoy reading a nice, beautifully written email- [laughs]...
just all on its own in the privacy of their own inbox? So, you know, we looked at what they were doing with the emails that existed and tried to sort of sort them into those different buckets.
So there were two emails that were very much, you know, inbox reads, and there was about a half dozen other emails that were, you know, really just existed to get people back to the website.
TechCrunch pub- publishes a lot of stories every day, and we just wanna make sure that people who really care about that stuff actually read those stories every day. There's a lot of them.
So from there it's like, okay, what are the platforms that we're using on the other brands that are gonna make sense, or are there new platforms that we need to bring on?
And, you know, for the most part, our other brands were using a m- were already using a mix of Sailthru for traffic-driving emails and Beehiiv for those inbox reads.
So it was a f- fairly simple process of saying, "Okay, well, let's move these ones over to Sailthru, move these ones over to Beehiiv." You know, there's a lot of f- infrastructural stuff that you have to adapt to that.
How are you getting new email addresses?
How do you send people, you know, when someone, uh, some- someone's on techcrunch.com and a little thing pops up that says, "Please subscribe to our email," how do you get that email into the right place?
How do you [laughs] get them subscribed to the right email? So there's a little, you know, automation and pr- infrastructure work to do there.
But, you know, it's a relatively straightforward process after that because Sailthru and Beehiiv are fairly decent products. Fairly decent. There you go. Fairly decent. Heard it here first. But reasonably good.
That's gonna go on the landing page later today. Yeah. [laughs] That's right. [laughs] Um, but talk to me strategically, what is the job that email is doing for, let's just zero in on TechCrunch. Like, what's the job?
Because, like, a lot of publishers were treating email as a way to drive traffic back to the website, and it has that job still, right? Yeah. But at the same time it has a larger strategic role. Yeah.
Well, it's gonna keep people involved. I mean, the people who read TechCrunch, I mean, TechCrunch is this, you know, i- it's a, it's sort of a niche publisher in a way.
I mean, it's, it's decently big, but, you know, it's covering, like, the startup world, the tech world, this, you know, world of funding and- It's a trade publisher. Yeah.
It's a kind of trade publisher, but with appeal to- Yeah... a broad audience. But the people who are really interested in the stuff, you wanna rope them in.
You want them to stay involved and not just sort of casually come across you on Google News, right? Like, I mean, that's a decent part of our traffic too, but we want them to stay.
We want them to come to TechCrunch Disrupt, our big annual conference, which is taking place next week, and I think you can still get tickets if you're listening to this and you really wanna go to Disrupt- A fairly decent conference, I've heard.
Yeah. Fairly- If you go to TRB. [laughs] I'm gonna stop using the word decent. [laughs] We're gonna, we're gonna get in- It was the fairly I think that was the trigger, Tyler.
[laughs] I like to, I like to manage expectations, right? Yeah. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna hype things too much.
But, you know, these are our...Audience are subscribers, are customers, if you wanna take that route, and email gets to them. And it helps us identify what they're most interested in.
They're our most devoted readers, really. The people who are gonna hand over their email address are entrusting you with their email address, right? Like, we don't wanna spam them with too many messages.
We don't wanna send them stories that they don't care about. So we care about them, and hopefully they care about us in return. Yeah. Tyler, when you talk with particularly larger publishers, right?
I mean, 'cause, like, I think a lot of times people think of, of Beehiiv i-as, you know, people like me, you know, that are, are, are, I hate the word creator, right?
But like that are not like large publishing organizations an-who don't have the infrastructure that a lot of these organizations have, which in some ways is actually an advantage these days 'cause you don't have a lot of that, that legacy infrastructure to deal with.
What are the challenges that they end up facing when it comes to modernizing their, like, infrastructure?
Yeah, I think it's a lot of some of the stuff that you were just talking about, where their primary purpose of email has been for such a long time to drive traffic back to the website. Yeah.
And trying to fit this paradigm of editorial-based newsletters where the newsletter, in theory, could be the product. You might not click out back to the website. You might be monetizing the newsletter itself.
It might be top of funnel towards something else. So I think it's more of a strategy thing for the first thing, once the-- once we get over that hump.
The other thing is Beehiiv has an all-in-one solution for email, and website, and ads, and a lot of these legacy publishers are in, deep into the WordPress ecosystem, or they have different workflows and have trained their team accordingly.
And so we've come a long way in where I think we initially started off kind of for this solopreneur creator who just wanted to publish and, and have a newsletter or, like, the very scrappy, like, kind of like Morning Brew for X, so Morning Brew for crypto, Morning Brew for AI.
That was a lot of, like, our early cohorts of users.
As we've gone up-market to Time, The Ringer, Texas Tribune, Newsweek, different sets of problems, but I think what they're used to is kind of this paradigm of fairly antiquated software that hasn't been updated in a while and doesn't move at which the pace that we move, which is very fast Silicon Valley startup who listens to customers.
We, we, we will have a sales call, and they will explain, "I need XYZ feature 'cause our team's taking forever to do this," and we can have that done end of week.
And so I think that's kind of really been our competitive advantage. And then, like, how we've evolved is we never launch with, like, an RSS ingestion or, like, a send API- Mm-hmm...
where you can actually use your own CMS but just, like, send emails via an API.
And as we've gotten more involved with these larger, more established publishers, kind of understanding it's not, like, our way or the highway, but we actually need to understand where their workflows are and build around those, has been something that we've been doing a lot of these past years.
Yeah. Matt, how do you end up thinking about email as a standalone product versus the traffic driving? Because, like, you're trying to operate them both, right?
And it feels like more of the weight has moved towards treating the email as a product unto itself. You know, I mean, there's a lot of people publishing on, on Beehiiv, on other email platforms sometimes. Rarely.
Rarely, but sometimes, weirdly. And those are, like, they're treating it like the product- Mm-hmm... itself. And those are the newsletters that have, that have kind of, I think, gotten the most traction.
It takes a lot of buy-in, right? It's one thing to do it if you're a really small organization, where maybe there's, you know, you have the flexibility to just sort of start doing that.
But, you know, for us, it's making... finding people on the edit side who understand that and wanna do that, and finding people on the ad sales side who are gonna be able to sell the newsletter that way.
And that is, you know, that's a cultural shift. I mean, TechCrunch has been around for a long time doing what it does, and, you know, this new ownership hopefully will show new ways of doing these things, right?
We have to start doing email in a new way. I mean, this has been our process over the last six months of sort of acquiring TechCrunch and shifting its systems.
And now hopefully we're in a position where we can start to experiment, try new things, and show people that, yes, we can do email as its own thing, and it can lead the way. But we have to show that now.
That is the challenge, right? And it requires, you know, not just me to say this, but other people on the team to jump in and say, "Oh, yeah, right. We can do this thing. I have this idea.
Let's come up with an email product around it." So it takes time. [laughs] So what are the... Walk us through, like, what are the main email products? 'Cause one of the- Sure, sure...
one of the topics that came up at, at breakfast today was how a lot of publishers have email sprawl in some ways. Mm-hmm. And that they're, they're... Everyone seems to want a newsletter these days. Right.
You know, there, there was, there was talk of one, one publisher that, you know, she has a, a queue of writers that want their own, like, newsletters, and she wants to keep them happy.
[laughs] And she doesn't want them to break off and go to Beehiiv on their own. But at the same time, you know, another publisher talked about really focusing on what is the job this, this is doing. Is this- Right...
is this actually adding to the strategic purpose? Yeah. So I mean, I can talk about the... The traffic-driving ones are sort of easy to explain.
There is a daily email, which is actually twice daily, and that's links to all the stories that we've been publishing. Comes out in the morning, comes out in the afternoon, comes out on Sunday.
That's just sort of basic flagship, here's what we've been up to. Two other traffic-driving ones are Startups Weekly, weekly
traffic-driving email about all of our startup coverage, and another one that's Week in Review, which is really just like, you only wanna get this once a week, here's, like, the important stories for the week.
Those are sort of straightforward. They're easy to curate, easy to get out, easy to design, and, you know-They're, they're pretty much turnkey.
It takes five minutes for an editor to curate them, and they're out the door. And, and how much curation is being done versus programmatic interest space where it's actually personalized to the recipient? Yeah.
So the emails tend to have about nine stories in them, and the editors basically go into Sailthru and they'll pin maybe one to three stories at the top to make sure that everybody's getting what an editor decides is the most important story.
They'll tend to pin one at the bottom. We have one slot that's like, "Here's...
Last but not least, here's a cool, fun story," and they'll paste something in there that has, like, a good visual or is a just fun, you know, kicker for the email.
And then, uh, Sailthru's big thing is personalization based on tags and click and browsing history. So we really just let the robot decide what's gonna be kind of in the middle zone of that email.
So going to that kind of setup has, you know, taken their process from, you know, half an hour or 40 minutes, maybe more, to, you know, pop in, see what the stories are, put this one here, that one there- Yeah...
and they're all done. Tyler, are you agnostic about that as far as, like, whether people want to have a curation of s- of stories that link back to, like, the website or treat them as, you know, an owned product?
I mean, you have, you have your own newsletter, right? I consume it, like- Yeah... on my phone in the email. Everyone should get it. Big Desk Energy. Yeah. Sign up, mail.bigdeskenergy. [laughs] Yep.
But I think of Beehiiv more around that kind of email versus the more traditional email, which I think Matt is, is describing. Yeah. Even with the personalization.
And, and I think Matt would agree 'cause that's how they siphon their email, right? They went to Sailthru for this, like, hyper-personalized, interest-based email, and then they use us for more of the editorial.
I would say, again, as we listen to users and as we, as we've gone up market to chat with the TechCrunches of the world and a lot of these other publishers, like, that there's still clearly a massive business in this personalization, so if anyone at Sailthru is listening, that is dir- definitely the direction that we are- [laughs]...
that we are going in. We are launching in a few weeks dynamic content, which is, like, the first step of that, which is if you live in New York, you get this type of content.
If you live somewhere else, you get a different type of content. If you open all of the emails, you get this special offer. If you don't open emails, you get something else.
And so opening up dynamic content from the perspective of audience attributes, engagement, demographic data is what we plan to launch in a few weeks.
The evolution of that is going to be the full personalization where you...
we know that this reader always clicks on links about startups and politics, and they're a male in the Northeast, and, like, how do you personalize that email different from someone who is interested in health tech or something different?
Th- like, that type of personalization at scale where we can kind of imitate what he just described is very much on the roadmap and something that we think about. So to answer your question, very agnostic.
We've, we've built the business very agnostic from a monetization standpoint. We have the Beehiiv ad network. We have paid subscriptions. Mm-hmm.
But if Brian Morrissey has a different way to monetize his audience, we aren't opinionated in, "You can't do that because we don't have the features or we don't support that."
Our standpoint has always been, how do we get publishers to have success on the platform however? A- and any tools that we can provide and build to support them, we are fully supportive of that.
So if the market wants to pull us towards hyper-personalization, that's 100-something that I think we're best in class with product, and I think we can build an incredible product to support publishers. Yeah.
So Matt, tell me when yous were... When you, when you took over, like, TechCrunch, I'm sure there was a lot of tech debt from, from Yahoo. Mm-hmm. I'm just, like, going with a crazy idea.
I'm pretty sure there was a lot of tech debt, right? Sure. What were the main challenges that you had to just, like, weed through? I'm sure you had a list that hadn't been cleaned in a long while.
Just give me the [laughs] give me the top three. I mean, just getting off HubSpot was a big deal, and seeing- Hey, we, we got shots fired at, at Sailthru and at HubSpot. No. I mean, no.
It's not about- We're an honest podcast. We're an honest podcast. [laughs] It's the, you know... It... There were just a lot of things that were just not configured well, right?
Like, things had been set up and left in a default state. So I think the HubSpot default is that if you miss 11 emails in a row, you get automatically sort of disconnected, disengaged.
So our TechCrunch daily email goes out twice a day on weekdays and once on the weekend, which means if you go on vacation for a week, you miss 11 emails in a row, and you get automatically unsubscribed from this email.
So there wasn't really anybody who'd set this thing up to, like, maybe take that into account, maybe have a re-engagement campaign. It was just, like, n- not set up that way. So I didn't...
You know, that's not a HubSpot thing. I don't know if that's a Yahoo thing, but, like, there were just these holes where it's like m- no... You know, people weren't paying attention to this thing in the right way.
So maybe if it had been set up differently, if it had been really a fully functioning email ecosystem that had been running through HubSpot and BeFree and MailerLite, then we might have left it that way.
But i- it was not. You know, the tech debt was, you know, so massive that it's just easier to move it off onto something where we know right away how to configure all the stuff to make it work.
So that's what we [laughs] did, you know? It took two months to change email platforms. Yeah. Could've been a little bit less if we d- really hurried it, but two months isn't too bad. Yeah.
And are you, are you doing subscriber-only newsletters? Not yet.
So I mean, that's really why we wanted to do some of these ones on Beehiiv is so that we could evolve them to become, you know, subscriber only or have paid tiers.
So the, the two that we're doing on Beehiiv right now are TechCrunch Mobility, which is all about transportation, cars, planes, trains, automobiles, that kind of thing, and the sort of evolution of that, and that's very much like a written-through kind of email.
It's essentially an article with, you know, other elements that make it into-An actual newsletter one of the shifts there was doing it so that it comes out in email form a day or two before it comes out on the website, right?
Like, [chuckles] that's a major thing is if you're gonna be publishing articles, real editorial content in an email, give people a reason to subscribe to the email rather than just, like, you know, lots of the-- lots of times you see this stuff on the website at the same time as it comes out in an email.
Why am I gonna subscribe to the email? What's the advantage of doing that, of cluttering my inbox when I could just go check on the website?
No, I'm gonna give it to people before, give them a reason to really get this thing. So we've done that, and that thing is up and running, and it's going smoothly.
And, you know, maybe now the thing to do will be to figure out what can we add to that? What are the most loved parts of that?
How can we add in, you know, elements that w-people would want to pay for, people would, like, absolutely want this in their email, whether they're paying for it or not? Like, how do we make that more attractive?
And then the other one that we're doing on Beehiiv is Strictly VC, written by TechCrunch's editor-in-chief, Connie Louizos, and Alex Gove, and that's five days a week, and it's, like, all of the info that you would wanna know about the VC world, what's getting funded, what's not getting funded, where the money's going.
And I would love to see that evolve into something that, you know, has some kind of paid tier to it or exclusive tier to it, just to say, "Here's a product and here's how we evolve it." I don't know what that's gonna be.
I don't know what that's gonna look like.
We're just getting to a point of stability right now, so you know, over the next six to twelve months, maybe we'll figure that out, or maybe it will stay the same, a popular email product full of information that people love.
Yeah. We just, uh... I just, uh, put up a poll about, you know, how would you describe your organization's current email setup? I, I guess this is the opportunity for you, Tyler- Yeah... as you fix your- Yeah, trying...
your microphone. [chuckles] Modern and integrated was only twenty-two percent.
The, the biggest, the most common answer with thirty-eight percent was functional but fragmented, and another thirty percent said it was outdated or manual. I guess, does that speak to...
That, that speaks to the situation that you had sort of- Yeah... originally found? Like, where would you- I think we're somewhere between-... your hands are in that?... what is it?
Functional but fragmented- Functional but fragmented... and modern but integrated. I mean, the challenge with running multiple email systems is, you know, deduping, right? Deduping in a sort of meta sense.
People subscribe, people unsubscribe. Well, no one likes the list getting smaller, I notice, organizationally. [chuckles] Like, it's just really hard to come in to, like- Sometimes you have to do it though...
the meeting and be like, "So here's what I did for everyone. I took," and, and go to the sales team too at this. "I took our email list and made it forty percent smaller." Well, I deleted- Or, "Look at..."
[chuckles] I deleted five thousand bots that were subscribed to our email because- But nice to hear it...
ten years ago, some marketing company signed up ten thousand bots, and they just stayed on our email list for who knows how long. I mean, that's not TechCrunch, but it might be one of our other brands.
You know, there's... You have to clean those lists. You have to cut people out who are not reading, who are not even people. When I first... It's funny you bring that up.
When I first joined Morning Brew, my first title was growth engineer, just 'cause I did engineering in... I don't know if that's a real title.
[chuckles] I just did engineering in college and wanted engineer in the title, but my goal was to grow the, the, the newsletter.
And up until that point, it was Alex Austin and then a writer who, like, stumbled into about a hundred thousand emails over the course of, like, college and a few years. [chuckles] And I knew nothing about email.
I knew nothing about newsletters, nothing about email, so I took calls with, like, people like you, growth leaders at, like, The Skimm and, like, wherever else.
And once I understood email deliverability and saw that, like, twenty percent of our list was opening, the first thing I did as growth engineer was actually cut the list in half, which as someone who joined the company, like, three weeks prior was, like, a very- Bold...
difficult sell. Yeah. Especially 'cause I'm not even, like, the expert in this space. I, I just figured out what email deliverability was a few months earlier. Well, you can go in and be like, "I'm a growth engineer."
Um, it was, it was at the time when the 76ers were, were tanking, and it was like, "Trust the process." Oh, yeah. And so I literally have to sign off every email, "Trust the process," and it worked.
We got up to fifty percent open rate and never looked back. But yeah, no one likes cutting the list. We got a question from my favorite attendee, which is anonymous attendee.
They always bring the heat, anonymous attendee, I notice. It's a good, it's a good, uh, archetype. Hello. Asking about the acquisition at the top of the funnel, anonymous attendee wanted to know did, uh,
is the landing page most important, or are there other, other things, you know, you an-you had to go through? I think anytime...
Like, I feel like email acquisition has gone through a lot of different phases, and, like, you've been, like, at the forefront of many, Tyler.
I think some, some of the most effective, like, email acquisition tactics, I think you've, like, [chuckles] pioneered.
You had, like- We- You had, like, a viral- We've, we've, we've done- You had a viral post back in the day, I believe. Um- The, uh, referral program? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, a lot of that credit goes to The Skimm.
I think The Skimm was, like, the originators of this referral program with, like, the Skimm ambassador program. There was, like, sweepstakes, then it went on to referrals.
There's al- We, we definitely innovated the, the MacBook Pro giveaway, which was incredible. W-we, we...
So I guess to give more context, w- The Skimm had a referral program where once you reached a certain amount of referrals, you became, like, a Skimmbassador, and you got, like, your name at the bottom of the newsletter.
Like, kind of silly stuff- Yeah, yeah... but then they had, like, tote bags and T-shirts. And The Skimm was, like, the one that we always looked up to.
Like, we were this upstart, you know, five hundred, seven hundred thousand subscribers. The Skimm was, like, making milestones, three, four million subscribers.
That's also when we started talking about, like, vanity metrics in the industry and, like, where actual unique opens is what matters, not the number of subscribers, but separate point.
But anyway, The Skimm was crushing it, and so we took a lot of inspiration from them. We built our own referral program, the Morning Brew referral program. We gave away... What was it?
At three, you got, like, an exclusive Sunday newsletter, which was actually the most sought-after out of all the rewards that we gave away. We gave away T-shirts, hats-Coffee mugs at different levels of referrals.
The free newsletter on Sunday that we sent if you had three referrals had a hundred thousand people on it.
So if you do the math, you know, over three hundred thousand people had to be referred just to get onto this newsletter. That was super effective. Yeah, that worked super well for us. But what about today, right?
Like, so everyone, I think the biggest problem in all of digital media is the growth engineer might come up with, you know, the, the latest and greatest growth hack, and then it quickly becomes well-known and it loses its efficacy.
It always happens everywhere. And I think what Alex is actually, it, it is the anonymous attendee, is wanting to know is like what today are the best ways to grow like an email list? You wanna take this? Uh- Yeah.
Like how are you growing- [laughs] Like what are the best ways? How are you... Yeah. How are you growing your email list? So you, you cleaned out a lot of like, you know, junk- Done a lot of bots, yeah.
A lot of bots are gone. I don't think we're doing anything super sophisticated, right? We're using... People come to the website, right? Like, that is kind of the fundamental thing is like- It's a funnel...
we're publishing- How much, how much do you optimize, like the, the landing pages, the pop-ups? Do you do like email gates where you can read half of the article, but you have to- We haven't done that yet.
We- we've mostly been using Hello Bar. Do you know them? They're a modal pop-up thing that's really designed to acquire email addresses, and they've got really pretty good targeting, right?
So you can target by WordPress tags, you can target by referrer, you can, you know, target by simple things like URL keywords and things like that.
But like, you know, if someone comes to us from, you know, Y Combinator, right, we can say, we can have a popup just for them that's like, "Hey, Y Combinator, why don't you subscribe to our emails and actually get this story next time before, you know, two days later it hits Y Combinator," right?
Like, those are the things that we can do with that. And that's, you know, that's actually really effective, right?
It's people who are already interested in your content coming to you, and you target them appropriately for the things that they're reading and how they've come to your site.
But that funnel is gonna get more challenging, particularly as you get less, like, organic- Oh, yeah... traffic through- It's already challenging. I mean, that is always the challenge is like how do you get people
off premises, right? And, man, social isn't so great for that. I'm trying to push collaborations with, with ad partners, right?
Like, are there things that we can do together where we all collect email addresses and share them? Because they can reach people that we can't. I'd love to see that go on more.
I remember the good old days of exit intent. Remember exit intent- Yep... with the bounce exchange? And then it was like negging the lay- it's like, "Oh, I don't wanna cure cancer. I don't wanna be more informed."
And I always thought those were, you know, really low mark. And then, like, you look at the data and it's, like, super effective. Yeah. They would, like, confidently- It's definitely effective.
[laughs] I remember the most effective thing at Digiday, they came and, and the product guy was like, "Yeah, we wanna just say, we just wanna run it by you.
We're gonna have an envelope with, like, a yellow one on there, and, and people are gonna click it thinking they have a message, and then, and they're actually just gonna get a modal to enter their email address."
I'm like- That's brilliant. Yeah... "This is ridiculous." I hate it. So effective. Yeah. I'm about to build that later today. [laughs] That's really smart. No, for, I mean, for a...
The, the real thing is, like, you have to create great content, right?
Like, I think the, what Morning Br- what came out of Morning Brew was a lot of wannabe Morning Brews who thought that they could do the growth hacky stuff that we kind of, like, pioneered and, like, innovated without doing actually quality content.
Yeah. And then you're just getting q- like, trash subscribers in that are churning out way too high. For my personal newsletter, I do quite a few things. So I do, like, the hard email gate. So- Yeah...
ev- ev- what I do, I publish every Tuesday morning.
Monday night, I promote what I'm, like, what I'm going to be writing about on all of the social channels, so LinkedIn, X, I don't really use Threads or Blue Sky, but I'll post it there anyway, with, like, a hard, like, "Here's what I'm writing about.
Be the first to find out when I send it tomorrow." So I do that. I publish it.
If you land on the website, you have to put in your email to read at beyond the first paragraph, so, like, it's a hard email gate on any content for my newsletter.
I then, you know, post on all the different social channels as well. Beehiiv has an internal recommendation engine, so you can recommend other newsletters in the ecosystem. They can recommend you back.
You can figure out, like, what that looks like in terms of creating pods of other similar but not competing newsletters that are all kind of boosting each other up.
We have what we call the Boost Network, which is, like, basically co-reg, so paid- Yeah... recommendations where you can say, so for me, if you want to promote my newsletter, I'm paying, I think, $2 a lead.
So any newsletter in the Beehiiv ecosystem can apply to promote my newsletter, and in exchange for every email that they send me, I send them $2, minus, like, the 20% that Beehiiv takes.
So that's, that's a revenue stream. [laughs] This is, this is like Trump suing the government. [laughs] The, the... Yeah.
We, we, we have the, the, the referral program that I talked about earlier that we built at Morning Brew is built directly into the platform. We have some distribution partners.
It, it's kind of like what, what I think everyone struggles with in the newsletter space is they want the silver bullet of, like, Morning Brew did X, and, like, this is where I'm gonna invest all of my time and effort and growth.
And the truth is, I do 15 different things for growth, and I'm not even doing enough there. I could take my content, turn it into video, post that on TikTok.
There, there's more to be done, but I think it's just finding distribution, and it all comes from creating actually quality content. Yeah. It's funny, w- I, I did a, a poll here about replatforming.
Are you open, are you evaluating a new email platform in the next 12 months? And half said either actively or possibly.
So I think there's clearly a appetite to, like, up the game in email from, from a lot of people out there.
And I think- I think the two things that I think almost every publisher cares about, and every creator as well, is how do I grow faster and how do I make more money? Yeah. Right?
Like- But that is just the old, like, the Morning Brew simple formula, right? If, if, if you could just solve those two problems for anyone- Write, grow, sell. Yeah. Write, grow, sell is what we said at Morning Brew.
And then for me, from, like, the, the founder perspective of building Beehiiv is, like, what can I wake up and build that helps our users grow faster or make more money?
And so we have, like, I, I mentioned in, uh, when I was just chatting about, like, the different ways I've grown my newsletter, I think maybe 80% of them are homegrown Beehiiv features using network effects or email capture on the website or whatever else f- that we can help accelerate growth.And then monetization, we have paid subscriptions.
At, yeah, at any day you could wake up and decide to make one of those newsletters- Oh, yeah... paid, and we don't take a cut of subscription revenue. Yeah.
So you could take a free email list and, and flip it into a subscription-based product fairly easily.
And then we have the Beehiiv ad network, which is home to Nike, Netflix, Roku, tons of lifestyle brands, AG1, et cetera.
And so the thinking is, if we can just stack as many chips in our favor in terms of how do we help publishers make money off the emails that they're sending, and I think that's kind of the paradigm that we're seeing and hopefully reflected in that poll, is traditionally email platforms have been solely sending emails.
In the Morning Brew days, we would copy and paste into MailChimp and then Campaign Monitor and then Sailthru, but it was just sending email.
And now there's this paradigm of tools launching, and hopefully Beehiiv at the forefront of that, is can this tool actually help me with audience acquisition and growth and monetization, where it's more than just the pipes to send email, but it's actually driving growth and revenue for the business?
And I think people are starting to take notice of that. Yeah. Matt, let's talk about monetization- Yeah... real quick. How are you making money off of these emails? [laughs] Primarily direct sold advertising, right?
Across all of our brands, we have ad sales teams who sell sponsorships of these newsletters, whether on Sailthru or... Yeah, and on Beehiiv, I mean, that is, that's the gold standard for us.
It's an extension of the, you know, ad sales that they do for the websites. So that is, you know, probably 95% of it.
But when we started using Beehiiv, which is probably a couple years ago for Cheddar, you know, having that ad network was a way that I helped sell this to my colleagues of, like, saying, "Hey, yes, we're doing direct sales.
Like, that's what we want most of all," but, like, direct sales are not every single day, not every single newsletter. We need to be able to monetize this thing in between those direct sales events.
And so having that ad network has just made these things, you know, at least break even, which is really nice [laughs] and in some cases profitable. So, like, having that available is, is huge.
We haven't really, you know, gone that deep into paid subscriptions yet, though. Yeah. That's something I'd like to see more. But talk, talk about the... Just a quick aside before that. Yeah, go for it.
Like, I do, like with Cheddar, 'cause I have to mention this anytime Cheddar comes up, I did pay, play a small but pivotal role in getting Cheddar on gas pumps all over the country. Oh, you got us on gas station TV.
Thank you. Yes.
I joked on Twitter back when Twitter was much more useful about how Jon Steinberg was cutting distribution deals with, like, everyone from nail salons and that it was only a matter of time before he was on gas pumps.
Yeah. And he said that's a great idea, and Sean McCaffrey... It, it happened through that. [laughs] I send emails to the gas station TV people every single day.
They're automated emails, but they get emails from me every day. So yeah, there's that. I have that going for me. But on, like, the event side, right? Yeah. Like, talk to me about how you...
'Cause, like, a lot of publishers are going hard into events, right? Mm. And there is, and this came up at, at the breakfast today, there is an interesting nexus between, like, email and event.
And I think with events, like, people are, are really sleeping on the importance of that particular data, and this also speaks to how a lot of these organizations are just still very siloed. Yeah.
I mean, there's two parts of it. One is just, you know, getting people to sign up for your events, and email just tends to be the best, easiest way to do that, right? Like- That's why I'm B2B.
Like, email is always the workhorse because you send out email, people take out credit cards and spend thousands of dollars. Yeah. I mean- Amazing... it's, it's, it reaches people.
You know who you're reaching generally, and people react to the stuff, right? It's very clear. It's written. It's got clear links to where to sign up. It's not something that flits by on your Facebook or Twitter feed.
This is like the, the, the, the crossover is just super, super natural. Not supernatural, but super natural. Yeah. And so yeah, we do a lot of that.
I mean, all of our brands, almost all of our brands do a large number of events, and we get people to sign up by sending them emails with links to how they can sign up. I mean, it's just, it's really straightforward.
And then the second part of that is building editorial emails that connect with the events themselves.
So over at Sightline for all the defense and military events that we're involved with, we send out emails that are called, like, the Digital Show Daily, which I guess has evolved from back in the days when you would do, like, a print publication every day of a particular conference.
Yeah. So there's the digital version of it, and it's really just a simple email of like, "Here's all the stories that came out of this event today." It's like a pop-up newsletter.
Yeah, it's a pop-up newsletter, and we've done that on the defense and military stuff. And with TechCrunch Disrupt, we have one launching with Disrupt starting on Sunday.
So it's for event and attendees only, so hurry up and buy your tickets, please. [laughs] You get the email newsletter. You'll get the email newsletter with, you know...
We launched this one, although it seems like it's a traffic-driving newsletter, we launched this one on Beehiiv partly 'cause it's a little bit easier to spin up, but also because we know that there's gonna be photos that we take on the convention floor.
There's gonna be social posts. And, like, putting that stuff into a daily email for, you know, five days is gonna be a lot easier to do on Beehiiv.
We can just drop those, you know, Twitter URLs in there, and it's gonna appear and be really nice, and we'll be able to get that out to everybody who's going to the conference really easily. Fairly frictionless. Yeah.
Fairly frictionless. [laughs] Fairly frictionless. You know, as an editor, I always say you just take out all the adverbs, so we'll just take out the fairly part.
[laughs] So I actually asked, I asked, I did, I did a survey, little poll here about, you know, what does your organization primarily define success for email? And it was just about...
It was exactly split in the top two results between driving site traffic and engagement and retention. So- Yeah... that speaks to, you know, the fact that you have to do two different jobs.
What, what are you seeing across your client base w-With, you know, things like pop-up newsletters and using, using email for, for more than, than just the typical daily like or weekly publishing cadence.
Yeah, it's hard to say because as you know with email, there's so much you can do with email, and, and every day I kind of stumble across a customer- But give me some new use cases that people- You put me on the spot here.
I'm, I'm, I'm ill-prepared for this. [laughs] Um, new use cases for email. I, I think like similar to driving to site, there's like this paradigm of driving to community and community-based- Yeah...
content, whether the community is custom hosted or hosted on some third party.
You kind of like earn the trust of the reader over time and identify the highest value readers and then kinda push them typically to a paid community or like a paid digital product of sorts.
I think that's pretty interesting. We see like in like the digital entrepreneur space and like some of these newer age publishers really experimenting with paid communities as like that next evolution of engagement.
Paid subscriptions are huge. I think that wasn't... I mean, I, I grew up, grew up...
Like five, six years ago, I was introduced to Ben Thompson and Stratechery, who I think is kind of like the OG of like the paid newsletter space.
And since I've seen a lot of niche publishers have a ton of tremendous success by offering a ten to twenty dollar monthly subscription. I mean, some, like and very niche, too.
There's a real estate newsletter who's doing three to five hundred thousand dollars a year. It's a one-person shop. Yeah. Just because, you know, niche audience, and it charges twenty, thirty dollars a month.
These are like the information entrepreneurs. Yeah. Like, I went- I think that's like a great way of describing them... I went to like an email growth summit that Matt McGarry- Yeah...
put on, like, he's a bit of like an email guru of sorts.
And it's funny 'cause I went there, I was like a total outlier in so- some ways, 'cause I mean, most of my experience is in the more like institutional media world, and in this world, it's totally different.
Like- So, and, and on this like spectrum, I would say there's like pure journalism- Right...
reporting, and then there's like outcome-based, like, entrepreneurs or, like, organizations that are like, the journalism is like a means to an end. Right.
Or the content's a means to an end to get them into your paid course- Yeah... your paid community, a paid subscription, click on ads, like whatever it is. They're internet native businesses. Right.
And like, I feel like that energy is completely different and also just like that kind of like event, it was just interesting the kinds of things that people talk about there.
I thought, you know, you should be talking more about the content, but then when I'm like, you know, with the sort of capital G- With all the content people, they're trying to figure out how to do- I'm like- Yeah....
you have to figure out, they had entire sessions about a landing page. You're not thinking about that stuff at all. And so it's always one of those situations where both sides sort of need to learn from the other.
And I think you guys are in an interesting position because a lot of the sort of internet native business people, the information entrepreneurs, are using your product, right?
And I think that there's a lot to learn from, from them for, like, more like legacy publishers or institutional. Right. And, and we have the other end of the spectrum, too.
So Oliver Darcy, who left CNN and went independent with Status, like one of our, our great case studies who I think is making over a million dollars a year in his first year in business, all through paid subscription.
So he's very much on the end of the spectrum of like pure journalism, the daily newsletter, breaking news, et cetera. So we see both.
But again, that's why I said it was like a difficult question to answer because email is email, and there's so many different things you can do as, in the medium, whether it is as the editorial destination, whether it's top of funnel to drive traffic back to your website, your paid community.
There's a lot. And, and so we see something different kind of every day. Yeah. How do you s- Do, do you...
And we, we talked about this just at the end of the breakfast, but I'm like intrigued by new email formats, right?
Because I feel, and maybe this is just me as like content guy, like I just kinda feel like almost like the email format has gotten a little tired. Like, there's a f- couple different types.
You know, we're well into, past the sort of novelty phase of like an email newsletter. The ones that seem to work the best to me, you know, are when they're written more personally.
But at the same time, like I see what like The New York Times is doing with like The World and trying to introduce more multimedia types of content.
And I'm just wondering, do you see anything that you would point to that is like an innovative use of like email newsletters? It depends what you consider innovative, right?
Like I think, and, and this is how I answered at breakfast as well, which is being very design forward in the inbox.
I think a lot of traditional publishers have always viewed email, one, from the traffic driving standpoint, and then also from an email looking like any other email, where it's plain text, a few links, maybe an image.
And I think what hopefully our tool has democratized is the ability to add images, videos, GIFs, like really great design, interesting backgrounds, where it actually is something you look forward to opening in the inbox.
And so I think there's been like an evolution and like maybe Morning Brew played a, a small part. I still remember redesigning where we had like the drop shadows around the content in each of the cards.
But yeah, I, I think thinking as email newsletters as a product has forced people to think of like, if this is actually is the, the end, the end product, how do we make it differentiated both in the information that we're delivering, in the way that that information is delivered, in the aesthetic that it has in the inbox, and how is it different from the other types of content that I'm consuming on a day-to-day basis?
So design, I think, is like the area where we've seen the most like, quote unquote, innovation. Different formats, I agree with you.
I think, I think the e- the emails that stand out and are the most defensible, especially with like the age of AI, would be like the Ben Thompsons of the world, like my personal newsletter, which is really just like me building in public of like the, the behind-the-scenes of building the company.
Yeah.
I think those like narrative-based, personalized emails perform really well and have like this affinity and brand following, whereas regurgitating news, unless you're the one breaking the news, I think is like a little bit harder with like how the information- Yeah, the roundups...
is aggregated. Yeah.
Right, and we were talking about in breakfast too where, where we were talking about email fatigue and how most people haven't experienced it, but the one case that-The publisher gave an example is if you're just covering the, the, the daily business news, and you have six other daily business newsletters, right?
By the time you get to the fourth or fifth one, you're kind of reading the same story over and over again. Yeah.
Unless you have someone that you respect their opinion and they're giving a different analysis of the news, then it's... The news is the news, right? And so I think those are, like, the most likely to be disrupted. Yeah.
How do you end up, like, sort of dealing with... 'Cause you're- I mean, TechCrunch is kind of on both sides in some ways.
'Cause, like, I guess historically, I thought, like, I think of, like, the DNA of TechCrunch with Mike Arrington, extremely opinionated. It was his lens, right?
And then I felt like TechCrunch moved more into being almost like a n- I don't wanna say a newswire, but it was like anything that was ha- It was aiming to be comprehensive. Yeah.
I mean, we're still fairly comprehensive. Right. Like, you're probably- Fairly, sorry. We're comprehensive. There you go. We're comprehensive. As an editor, you just gotta, like, take out the LY. Yeah.
Yeah, we're very comprehensive. I mean, we certainly have people writing who are very opinionated. Connie, the editor-in-chief, writes some great stuff that is very...
has a strong perspective on what tech should or shouldn't be doing. Amanda Silberling is doing great cultural stuff as well, so there's definitely that aspect of it. But in terms of the business, it's very...
It's often very just scoop-driven, exclusive-driven, comprehensive.
We're trying to catch everything that's going on with this enormous, huge industry in America and the world, and so that is really one of the, you know, prime animators of what we do.
And that, y- you know, that's a tricky thing. It, it translates into a particular kind of email product, right? Strictly VC is, "Here's what's going on. Here's all the VC stuff that's happening."
So, you know, I don't know that we're doing yet in email what Tyler's talking about in terms of, you know, like an Oliver Darshi kind of thing or- Hmm...
sort of very strong personality l- So they don't come from a, a person. Well, no, they do. I mean, the TechCrunch Mobility is, is written by Kirsten, and- Right... she's- Does it say her name? Oh, yeah.
It's her name on it. Like, just sort of tactical, but it, it is important. Yeah, definitely. Strictly VC is coming from Alex and Connie. They are coming from those people. But these are people who- Yeah...
are, you know, they're, they're in some ways traditional journalists. They're very focused- Yeah... on the reporting and the writing of that reporting, and it is a different approach from someone who is- Right.
This came up today. I mean, 'cause it's a different type- Yeah... of... It has, at least to me, and maybe this, like, sort of way wears off 'cause it can be overdone, right?
But, like, there needs to be a conversational, like, element to it. And I think one of the things that was brought up today that was a good point was that it is still kind of a one-way conversation. And- Mm...
I mean, one of the great things about email is you get responses. You know? Like, I mean,
w- right or wrong, I think publishers gave up on the comment section of their websites, and now they're trying to fi- figure out how to get back into community that they've outsourced to a lot of platforms in some ways.
But c- the comment sections were abandoned for the most part, and email promises to be sort of two-way, but, like, often is, is, is still kind of one way. I mean, it's great because you do get responses.
Well, some of the little stuff that Beehiiv does, like the poll widget- Yeah... is just like, it's such an easy way of getting people to, like, tell you what they think, [laughs] right?
There's a really basic way of making it a bit of a two-way conversation. Yeah. I've gotten a lot of feedback from polls too.
I used to think no one would ever click on them, but I've, I have some posts where I have three, four hundred votes on a poll with, like, very good constructive criticism of what they didn't like about my writing or my take that I've learned from.
I think the challenge that you, that Matt was just kind of getting at, which was also discussed at breakfast, is, like, I think the personality-led newsletters or content in general adds a bit more narrative and has some fandom behind it where people, like, look for...
Like, I don't even call it st- Stratechery, I call it, like, I wanna read Ben's opinion, right?
But as a larger publisher, there's kind of this balance, especially as tools like ca- whether it's Beehiiv or Substack, make it easier to go independent.
There's kind of, like, this inherent risk in building a personality. Yeah, that, that came up. 'Cause it's, it's, you're like, you're kind of in, like, the talent business, right? And, like, you have to retain talent.
They know their worth. They know... They see the responses and the replies of how much people love their content and their beat and their opinions.
And once you build up this profile and you make them the personality of this particular newsletter or publication or column, and then they know their worth, like, is that not a risk of them eventually going independent?
I think that's what you hinted at with, like, Business Insider allowing them to- Mm-hmm... follow.
I think you need to figure out, like, a tactical way where you want them to lead personality-driven, 'cause you know that's where the fandom's created and behavior and, like, where it stands out and is more defensible, but you don't want them to become so big where they can just pick up and leave.
And so where does the broader organization support them to be quasi-independent but still part of the larger umbrella company? And I think that's to be determined. I've seen different companies try different things.
Yeah. Real, really good health insurance. Yeah. Could, could be. Yeah, that'll help. I mean, the, the health insurance premiums are set to skyrocket. Yeah. Who wants to go independent and have to- That's... Yeah...
pay triple premium? I'm in the Obamacare marketplace, so yeah, we can do a whole podcast on that. Got a tactical question here, Tyler, for you.
Were you affected, was Beehiiv affected, or were you personally affected by, by the AWS outage? Yeah, but I ha- I've grown in maturity- [laughs]... leading the company where in ear- Fetal position...
in earlier days, I used to be in fetal position in my bed while customers are texting me and calling me why their websites are down.
I had meetings all day on Monday, and I, I was aware of it and just kind of, like, kept on with my day. But yeah, we were, we were impacted. Yeah. Okay, so Alex has a, has another question. He said, "Great exchange."
Thank you, Alex. He says, "Recently, I was really into the TLDR tech newsletter that exploits the paradigm of link you'd send to your group chat.
It's quite effective criterion to choose what goes in and what's not, if you ask me.For Alex's newsletter, he's, he's often thinking about what other paradigms and approaches to use.
Value to a reader is understandable one, but it doesn't have the network effect like share to your group chat does. Any thoughts on this, Matt? I mean, [sighs] share...
The link you'd share to your group chat is a great concept if you don't have that many links, right? I mean- Yeah. TechCrunch has, you know, 30 links a day. Are we just gonna choose one or two of them to send?
Yeah, I think this is more a curation newsletter type, like- Yeah. I mean, I think that's great. I mean, in some ways that's what we're doing with that sort of final spot in our traffic-driving newsletters.
It's like, here's, you know... And by the way, here's this one thing that you should definitely check out. Yeah, I think it's like- It's not coming from like a personality.
It's not coming from like a person saying, "Oh, yes, it's me. By the way, you should-" Yeah. I'm always biased to like, you should have a lens. Like, I think what you're talking about with, like, Ben Thompson.
Ben, Ben has a lens on a business.
I mean, sometimes it's like, it's a little overdone for my taste, but like, you know, I don't need to go back to something he wrote from twen- two thousand and twelve, but maybe that's me. Yeah.
But like, you know, I think one of the advantages, first of all, of having a lens is, like, you literally just point it on like an industry or whatever, and everything that goes through it just goes through your lens, and so it's very repeatable format.
But like just having interesting link that you would share to a group chat, I think that's a tough, I think that's a tough place to be these days- It's- To be honest.
I mean, if you could build a whole company on that, great, but that's- But it's- But I think curation is like i think becoming more and more important, right?
Like, when, when information now with AI and everyone has ChatGPT, it's so easy to get what happened in the news. Like, what does this mean? Yeah.
I think, like, I know taste is a thing that everyone likes to make fun of now because, like- It's- What's, what's taste? Like- People are making fun of taste? Well, because everyone shifted from- Having taste.
Ha-ha- well, yeah. Having taste is like the new paradigm of, like, what people want, right? If, if everything's available to everyone, then people who have taste as, like, tastemakers are the ones who kind of like...
Basically curation, right? I think they wanted aura. Yeah, ei-either or. [laughs] Yeah. Deep keepers. Um, yeah, we're, we're all saying the same thing here.
[laughs] But what, what, what's interesting about, like, Matt and TechCrunch is, like, they have a problem that, like,
some publishers do, a lot of the publishers on Beehiiv don't, which is they have, like, too much content, right? Yeah.
They're publishing dozens and dozens of stories per day, which makes the, the whole, like, automated personalization of these emails more interesting potentially.
But we, we would always go back and forth in my Morning Brew days about that, where in theory, you know, Austin's very analytical and he'd be like, "Well, if we know that these people like politics content more, 'cause we have all of their link data and, like, what they're clicking on and whatever, why would we not just serve them more politics content?"
And we actually went on the other end of the spectrum, which is Neil and our editors have a finger of the, on the pulse of, like, what our audience wants, and, like, it's up to the editor to determine what they think would resonate most or what's the most valuable on any given day.
And so the whole curation versus hyper-personalization I think is always, like, a really interesting debate for- Yeah... publishers. I'm, like, laughing 'cause I think, like, Austin caught astray here with the in theory.
I mean, that's like fairly- No, no... in theory, in theory he's analytical. No. No, no. He, he is very analytical. Okay. [laughs] Well, we are, we're about out of time, but I just wanna, like, when we wrap up, can...
Just give me, like, sort of for those who are thinking in the seventy-eight percent of, of the people responding about, like, upping their sort of email strategy, just give me one or two pieces of advice.
Matt, I wanna start with you. Figure out what you want before you do anything. Just do you need ad dollars? Do you need traffic? Do you need event signups? Do you need engagement?
Like, let that first decision about what you actually want from your business, from your publication, from your endeavor. Once you figure that out, then all the other pieces are gonna fall into place. Okay. Tyler?
I think I'd start with, like, what your value prop is and, like, why your audience comes to you for the content that you create.
And I co- I co- I come from, like, a different per- like we know that TechCrunch's content is great, so, like, it's a different problem of you optimizing for audience growth or revenue.
Because I deal with a lot of the, like, you know, independent journalists, digital entrepreneurs.
They are, as you mentioned at that conference, hyper-optimizing around growth tactics and, like, how to scale their audience and squeeze every dollar out of an open or a click, where a lot of them overlook, like, what is the content where I have a competitive advantage that people would even sign up to this newsletter or be a part of this publication in the first place.
So I think you... It's like the yin and yang, right? Yeah. You kinda need to have both, and I think most operators or publishers skew on one end of the spectrum.
And try, try to take the best practices of each, I think, is, like, how you have to succeed. Yeah. My, my one thing would be don't just look at dashboards. Like, talk to the people who are in your audience.
They will tell you. And what you hear from people when they respond to you and, is way more important oftentimes than what you see in a dashboard.
'Cause a lot of times the data will lead you into all sorts of areas, but nothing really replaces talking specifically to the audience and really understanding what they, what they need from you and what they want from you.
I, I'd also double that and say that a lot of people think because you're kind of like sending this email into the void, that it feels more one-way when it really should be two-way.
And so when people would ask me, "How do I grow faster?
I have this, like, recommendation network and this referral program," I always recommend just, like, asking them at the top of the newsletter, if you've enjoyed this newsletter, to share it with one other person. Yeah.
And that's always the most shares that they've ever received, and it's so simple. We, we have a thing like that at the top of Cheddar's Need To Know newsletter, which is- Yeah...
on Beehiiv, that says, "If you like this email, please share it with a friend. If you didn't like it, why not share it with an enemy?" Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There you go. Awesome. Thanks, guys.
Appreciate it, and thank you to our friends at Morning Brew. Thank you, Morning Brew, for hosting us. Thank you. All right. Bye. [outro music]