Founder Spotlight: with Tyler Denk

As the media landscape continues to evolve, creators, journalists and publishers are finding new ways to build direct relationships with audiences—and turn those relationships into increasingly sophisticated businesses. As founder of beehiiv, which he calls the “operating system for the content economy,” Tyler Denk is an entrepreneur at the forefront of this evolution. Our latest Founder Spotlight explores Tyler’s journey from helping build Morning Brew to developing the infrastructure behind a new generation of creators and publishers—and his perspective on where the creator economy goes next.

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When and why did you decide to launch beehiiv? What did you see as the market opportunity at the time, and how has your vision for the business changed since then?

beehiiv really came out of my experience at Morning Brew. I joined as the second employee in 2017 when the newsletter had around 100,000 subscribers, and over the next three and a half years helped scale it to 3.5 million. I worked across engineering, product and growth, building a lot of the infrastructure behind the business, including the referral program, website, CMS, analytics and ad management tools.

What stood out was how often people asked us what we were using. They wanted to know how we built the referral program, how we were growing and what software powered everything behind the scenes. In most cases, the answer was that we had built it ourselves.

At the same time, we were experiencing many of the same fragmented workflows we saw across the publishing industry, stitching together different products to publish, grow and monetize a newsletter. There was clearly an opportunity to build something to solve those problems.

I left Morning Brew in October 2020 to join Google, and a couple of weeks later Morning Brew was acquired by Business Insider. I couldn't stop thinking about the opportunity in newsletters and the infrastructure we had built to make Morning Brew successful.

Ben Hargett was the first engineer I had hired at Morning Brew, and as I was leaving, we hired his friend Jake Hurd as the fourth engineer on the team. The three of us reconnected later that year and decided to start building what would become beehiiv. We all still had full-time jobs, so we spent nights and weekends working on it for nearly 10 months.

By the summer of 2021, we had built the initial product and I started raising money while we continued working on beehiiv as a side project. We closed a $2.6 million seed round at the end of July. I left Google to go full-time in August, and Ben and Jake joined me in early September.

What started as an idea to solve problems we had experienced ourselves has become much bigger. Newsletters are still at the center of beehiiv, but we've expanded into websites, podcasts, community, advertising, subscriptions, and digital products. We're building the infrastructure for creators and publishers to build, grow and monetize all on one platform.

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What specific experiences from Morning Brew or YouTube helped prepare you for launching and scaling beehiiv?

Morning Brew was probably the best practical founder training I could have had. I joined as the second employee when we were still a very small team, and I worked across product, growth and a lot of the infrastructure we needed to scale the business.

If there was something we needed that didn't exist, we built it. The referral program became one of Morning Brew's most important growth engines and ultimately drove well over a million subscribers. We also built our own CMS, analytics, ad management and other tools.

That gave me a really specific understanding of the relationship between product and business outcomes. A feature wasn't successful because it was technically impressive. It was successful if it helped us grow faster, operate better or make more money.

I went to Google and YouTube Music because I wanted almost the opposite experience. I wanted to understand how one of the largest technology companies in the world built products: how product worked with engineering, marketing and growth, how teams approached product requirements, and how decisions were made at massive scale.

I learned a lot there, but I also learned what kind of environment I personally thrive in. I like smaller teams, a lot of ownership and moving quickly. I was also at Google during COVID, which gave me firsthand experience working remotely at a very different scale and reinforced my belief that remote teams can be incredibly effective when they're built intentionally. Morning Brew showed me how much you can accomplish with a small, fast-moving team; Google showed me how product gets built at enormous scale. I've carried lessons from both into beehiiv.

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What has been most surprising about your entrepreneurial journey with beehiiv thus far?

How quickly the problems change.

In the early days, the job was whatever the company needed that day, whether that was answering support tickets, working through a product decision, recruiting someone, talking to an investor or helping a customer get up and running. As the company has scaled, my job has increasingly become about building an organization that can do all of those things really well without me being involved in every decision.

The people side has probably been the biggest learning curve. At one point I had 18 direct reports, which obviously isn't sustainable. As we've built out the leadership team, I've been able to reduce that substantially and spend more time again in areas like product and growth where I can have the greatest impact on the business.

I've also learned that you can't separate how you're doing personally from how you show up as a founder. I've dealt with burnout, anxiety, grief and uncertainty at different points throughout this journey, and during some of that time, I wasn't taking care of myself the way I should have. Over the past year, I've made my mental and physical health a real priority. I sleep more, exercise regularly, meditate and am much more intentional about how I start and end my day. I feel healthier and more focused, and I'm a better leader because of it. Taking care of myself has turned out to be one of the best investments I can make in the company.

One of the biggest lessons for me has also been the importance of ownership. If something is important to the company, there needs to be someone who wakes up every day responsible for making it great. That has influenced how we structure teams, how we hire and how we operate.

The job keeps changing because the company keeps changing. I think I've had to grow and change along with it, both as a CEO and as a person.

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Tell us about your transition from product lead to founder and CEO. Lessons learned?

I'm still a product person in a lot of ways. Product and growth are naturally where I gravitate, and staying close to customers has been a huge part of how we've built beehiiv.

When we launched, I answered every support ticket myself because I had to. But it also gave me an incredible feedback loop. I knew exactly where people were getting stuck, what they loved and what we needed to build next.

As CEO, the job obviously becomes much broader. A lot more of my leverage now comes from hiring exceptional people, making sure they what they need to succeed, and giving them the ownership to execute.

One philosophy that hasn't changed for me is progress over perfection. We've always preferred getting something useful into customers' hands, learning from real feedback and improving it quickly rather than spending months trying to perfect something in isolation.

That's a big part of how we've been able to ship as quickly as we have. But as we've grown, the bar has gotten higher. We're still moving fast and launching new things, but we're equally focused on going deeper and perfecting the core products our customers rely on every day. Speed matters, but so does making sure what we've already built keeps getting better.

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Looking ahead over the next 12 to 24 months, what trends do you expect to see in the creator economy? How do you see beehiiv evolving to maximize its performance and impact as the creator space grows?

I think you're going to continue to see creators, journalists and subject-matter experts build increasingly sophisticated businesses around their audiences, while major media companies adopt many of the same strategies around direct audience relationships.

We're seeing both happen on beehiiv. Independent creators and journalists are building businesses from scratch on the platform, while major publishers including TIME, Newsweek and TechCrunch are using beehiiv for newsletters. The Washington Post also launched Verified, its creator-economy newsletter, on beehiiv this year. That breadth is important because the underlying need is increasingly the same: build a direct relationship with your audience and have the tools to grow and monetize it.

Ownership becomes even more important as distribution changes. Social platforms are incredibly powerful for discovery, but you don't own those audiences. Algorithms change. Search is changing. AI is changing how information gets discovered. A direct relationship with your audience gives you something durable regardless of what happens to any individual distribution channel.

That's also why beehiiv is expanding well beyond newsletters. At our Summer Release Event, we introduced Community and the beehiiv Agent alongside major expansions across podcasts, websites and monetization. The early customer response has been a strong signal that we're moving in the right direction. Podcasts became the fastest-adopted product release in company history, hitting our quarterly adoption goal within 24 hours. Our MCP, which lets users connect beehiiv to AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to analyze and manage their business, had previously been our fastest-adopted feature. Agent goes a step further, bringing that AI directly into beehiiv to help users analyze their audience and take actions across their business, and it's being adopted at roughly twice the pace of the MCP. Demand for Community has also significantly exceeded our expectations, putting us on track to reach our 90-day adoption target within the first 30 days.

The way we're building AI for our customers reflects how we're using it inside the company: to give people more capability and help them do more. We've put AI tools in the hands of every employee, not just engineers, and created a culture around actually using them. We hold weekly AI Office Hours where people can demo what they’ve built using AI and provide a chance for others to learn from it and ask questions.

We took that even further at our company offsite with an AI hackathon. In 28 hours, 42 teams built and demonstrated working prototypes, from tools for enterprise sales and customer support to advertising and pricing. Some of those projects are already in production and part of how we operate the business today. It was hands down one of the best days of the year for me. That's what excites me most: people closest to a problem now have the ability to build solutions themselves, regardless of whether they're engineers or not.

We’re seeing the same thing happen with the products we’re building for customers. Just this week, someone on our QA team, who isn't a designer or engineer, used our MCP with Claude to build a working website in about 30 minutes simply by describing what she wanted. It was absolutely beautiful. The distance between having an idea and actually building it is getting dramatically smaller.

That's ultimately what we're trying to give our customers through products like the MCP and beehiiv Agent. I want both our employees and our customers to be enabled by AI, not replaced by it. A creator or small media team should increasingly be able to operate with capabilities that once required a much larger organization, just as a small team inside beehiiv can accomplish things that previously required significantly more resources. Our opportunity is to build the platform, and the company, around that idea.

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What does success look like for beehiiv in the near term? What do you see as the biggest potential hurdles to achieving that success?

Success means making beehiiv the platform of choice for anyone building an audience or content business. We’ve already established ourselves as a category leader, and we’re just getting started.

A big part of that is staying ahead of where the market is going while continuing to make our core products exceptional. AI is changing how content gets discovered, for example, so last week we rolled out new tools to help publishers optimize their content to be found and cited by AI, while also giving them control over which AI crawlers can access it. Our job is to anticipate those shifts and make sure our customers have what they need to be successful as the landscape changes.

As beehiiv matures, I don't want us to lose the things that got us here. We need to keep moving fast, keep hiring A players and stay really close to our customers. The expectations only get higher as more people build their businesses on beehiiv, and we have to keep getting better along with them.

We've accomplished a lot in five years, but I still think we're at the beginning of what beehiiv can become. The opportunity in front of us is massive, and that's what makes this next chapter of the company so exciting.