How To Make $1M So Fast, Your Accountant Gets Nervous.

Shaan Puri

"How long did it take for you to get to **$1,000,000** in revenue?"

Tyler Denk

It took us about a year to get our first million.</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

"If I copied *step-by-step* what you did, could I do the same?"

Tyler Denk

I think most people could replicate the same strategy that we use.

Shaan Puri

Tyler, what's up, man? How are you?

Tyler Denk

What up? How's it going?

Shaan Puri

Did you see the YouTuber — I think his name is *Lab Coats* — who figured out the Coke formula from scratch after two years of testing? Did you see this? No? Okay. So the Coke formula — the flavor for Coca-Cola — is top secret. There are, like, I don't know, a handful of people in the world who have ever known it at Coke. They never patent it because if you patent it you publish it, and then other people can clone it. So this YouTuber, after two years of scientific flavor testing, made a chemically identical formula for Coke. He literally got it exactly right. People are worried for this guy. They're like, "Dude, you need security — Coca-Cola does not take this lightly." But it's a pretty remarkable thing. I feel like what you're giving us right now is the **sauce** — just like that. It's a brick-by-brick way that you can build: forget those first 100 users, then those first 1,000 users, then that first $10,000 of revenue, and get to the first $1,000,000 of revenue. Then now you're at $30,000,000 of revenue. I'm kind of wondering if we can remix what you did. How long did it take for you to get to $1,000,000 in revenue?

Tyler Denk

"It took us about a year to get our first **$1 million**."</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

"Okay, so it took you a year to get to a **million** in revenue. By year two, where were you at?"

Tyler Denk

About **5,000,000** in revenue [dollars], so **5x** in year two.

Shaan Puri

"And now, where are you?"

Tyler Denk

We just did about $30,000,000 in revenue last year, which was our fourth year in business.

Shaan Puri

"Yeah, your growth is bananas, and you're one of the investor updates I like to open up. What I thought would be cool — and we were talking — is what would be fun to talk about here. Do you really think it's about growth? I have this book on my bookshelf called *Steal Like an Artist*. The book argues that most of what we think is original is a remix or a straight-up copy of something that came before it. I feel like your story is kind of like that. You were at Morning Brew and you helped make Morning Brew the fastest-growing newsletter. It got to $75,000,000 in revenue, it exited, and all this good stuff. Then you took the learnings from that and remixed them into a product so that anybody could grow their product. I'm wondering if we can remix what you did and extract the basic principles so anyone trying to get to that first $1 million in revenue can copy what you did. I want you to walk me through: what did you do to grow? Not the high-level stuff like "build a great product," but the real, specific things that actually worked."

Tyler Denk

"Yeah, let's get into it."

Shaan Puri

> "What was the first thing that worked? You're *ground zero* — you have no customers, no revenue. How did you get going?"

Tyler Denk

Yeah, I actually think you already hit on it a bit: I think about **founder-market fit** a lot. The *Morning Brew* story — and you've talked about this before — is about taking something you did at a company, or something you learned previously, becoming an expert in a low-risk way as an employee, and then applying those learnings to start a new business. I think, in the founders I've backed and seen become extremely successful, there's typically a through-line between what they did previously and then launching. A quick story I've never actually told before: while I was at *Morning Brew*, crypto between 2017 and 2020 was the biggest thing ever. I didn't even own any Bitcoin; I had no business starting a crypto business, but I wanted, as a founder, to get into crypto. So I found this open-source library of a 3D model for a cold-storage wallet. I went to find someone in China who could make them, bought 1,000 of them, shipped them to New York, and then, on day two, started trying to sell cold-storage crypto wallets. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

"Now, I'm the *crypto guy*."

Tyler Denk

I didn't know a single person who owned Bitcoin. I didn't know crypto at all. I wasn't in any Discord channels. The arc of that story is: I thought I could will myself into being a founder in this space that I had no credibility in whatsoever. I had no connections. I just wanted to be a *crypto guy*. Lesson learned—I sold three of those, and I still have 997 in my basement at my house. In complete contrast to that, what you alluded to with the Morning Brew story: when I joined Morning Brew as the second employee, I had built the referral program and the growth mechanisms. I'd seen what success looks like from the inside of that business. Morning Brew became this golden child of the newsletter ecosystem, and as newsletters became more and more popular, I became *the newsletter person* out of experience and credibility. So I prefaced all of that to answer: what is the first step? One was actually having the experience at Morning Brew and being able to lean on that credibility—*I have done this before*—and now I'm building something that I think we could, quote-unquote, democratize: access to the same tools that Morning Brew had.

Shaan Puri

Right, right. So you needed a story at the beginning. I was given a talk and I call this the **marketing kill shot**. Some guy stood up and I go, "Tell me about your business," and he says, "We're a marketing agency for CPG companies, usually D2C CPG." I was like, "Bro, this guy's throwing alphabet soup at me." Then he goes, "You know, we help with copywriting, packaging design, you name it — we could do it, we do everything." I was like, okay, so you threw six acronyms at me and then said, *we do everything.* Alright. I said, "Let me ask you this: when you're pitching your company, who are you trying to get on board? A new brand you want to work with?" I said, "If you couldn't tell me all that junk and you only could say one sentence — and off that one sentence I had to want to work with you — what would that be?" He started with, "We do marketing for consumer companies," and I was like, "Cool. You and a thousand other companies out there did that." That didn't do it for me. I go, "What's the most impressive thing you've done?" He goes, "Well, we helped launch..." and he named, like, Poppy or some huge consumer brand, "We did all of Poppy's initial branding, marketing, positioning." I go, "Why didn't you say that?" Because that's the kill shot. If I'm a new consumer brand and I meet you and all you say is, "We help brands like Poppy launch with their packaging, positioning, and copywriting," then I'm like, "Oh, I want to be like them — so I'm going to work with you." It's immediate credibility and proof that no general marketing claim could ever touch. I feel like credibility and proof are so massively underrated. I like this forcing function of coming up with your kill shot. For you, I think one of the stories — the kill shot — is: **"I ran growth for the fastest growing newsletter in the world; now I'm building a tool for you to grow your newsletter."** Sign me up, right? That's a very, very powerful story. Now, somebody listening might be like, "Well, I didn't do that." What you're offering is two things. One is: go get credibility and track record in a low-cost, low-stakes way. Go join a fast-growing company, go join a company that has high potential, and go kick ass there. That's one path. But I do think fundamentally a story can work. For example, if you didn't say that you worked at Morning Brew, you could say, "I spent a thousand hours studying how Morning Brew grew and all the tools they built internally, and I've built them now so that anybody can use them." That would also work. You could just create that. So I think it all starts with story, and story is so underrated. So how did that story work for you? What did you actually do with that story to get the word out there?

Tyler Denk

Yeah — whether you raise capital or go at it bootstrapped, I think it's important to know: in the early days, all you really have is that **story**. When I'm pitching investors, I say, "I did this at Morning Brew, and I believe I can do it again — and do it for more people." **Storytelling**, I think, is the biggest asset as a founder, especially in the early days, because that's before revenue, before customers, before attraction.

Shaan Puri

I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money—about how to build a money-making skill, how to leverage your time and energy. The team at **HubSpot** actually went through the video where I explained all that and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on **my four rules of how to make money**. This is not get-rich-quick advice; it's core, foundational principles about building wealth—things I wish I knew when I was just getting started. If you want to download it, it's in the description below. It's totally free. Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document, and making it available to you all. Alright—back to this episode. Can I tell you the story I used to grow my newsletter? After you launched Beehive, I launched a company called **Milk Road**. The Milk Road story is simple: I was very interested in crypto and had been for a number of years, so I wanted to create the best crypto newsletter in the world. In one year we grew to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world, and we sold for $4 million. This was probably the easiest and fastest business I ever built, and I needed a story to start it. I started manufacturing stories. One of them was a kind of *anti-credibility* story. I would open with: > "Can I tell you about the stupidest moment of my entire career?" People lean into that—they expect you to tell them about a huge mistake. I would say, "This mistake cost me more money than every failed investment I've ever had, than every failed company I've ever had," and people would be like, how could that cost you more money? I told the story: It was 2017. My technical co-founder—the smartest, most technical guy I know—was supposed to come into a meeting. I was like, "Hey man, come on, the meeting started five minutes ago," and he goes, "Hang on, I gotta buy this." I said, "Buy what? What are you doing?" He was on eBay buying the Ethereum presale—back when it was about $0.17 a token. I should have leaned in and asked why the smartest, most technical guy I know had to go sign up to buy this crypto token. Instead I was like, "Ethereum—weird name, dude. Come on, we gotta go do some real business over here in this meeting room." Of course he made hundreds of millions of dollars off that, and I made zilch. I basically vowed not to make that mistake again. When there's an explosive new industry with lots of growth potential, I might start as the dumbest guy in the room, but I'm going to ask a lot of questions, learn really fast, and figure things out even as a non-technical person. That's what Milk Road was as a newsletter. I told that almost anti-credibility story as the opening—a gateway to get people interested in my new thing.

Tyler Denk

Yeah, I mean, I could have used that back when I was starting my crypto company and sold three of my cold-storage wallets. 100%. **Credibility is huge.** The other thing — and it's the greatest thing about being online and creating content — is you can find people who are interested in the same things you are. As I'm doing this year—building *Beehive* as a side project on nights and weekends—I'm on Twitter just connecting with everyone who has a newsletter, whether they are a known newsletter, an up-and-coming creator, a writer, or an operator. I'm trying to understand what the pain points are that they're experiencing. So I'm doing consumer research, essentially just using Twitter. For example: "Hey, I'm using Substack but it doesn't let me customize x, y, z," or "They don't have a referral program like Morning Brew has," which became one of our big value props in the early days. As my co‑founders and I are building, I'm basically lurking on Twitter, trying to see and connect with people in the industry. I think that's incredibly important because when you fast forward to how you get your first users — in complete contrast to me not knowing a single person in crypto — because of the credibility I built at Morning Brew and because of the people I've been connecting with for the past year on Twitter, I already had hundreds of people who I knew had a newsletter. I knew what their newsletter was about, what they're interested in, and what their pain points are, and that became the initial early outreach. Early days, I think that's an **underrated aspect** of getting around and surrounding yourself with those types of people.

Shaan Puri

Were you just **cold-emailing**, **DMing** [direct messaging], or what were you doing to get in touch with those people? So, let's say—how many people roughly do you think you talked to? Was it like **50**? **100**? **200**? Something in that order of magnitude, right?

Tyler Denk

Directly in a few hundred.

Shaan Puri

Okay — a couple hundred? How did you get in touch with those couple-hundred core people?

Tyler Denk

Yeah, either reputation, because you see that—they are, you can just search "newsletter" and see everyone who's talking about or promoting their newsletter on Twitter. I'd follow them and kind of see their story. DMs primarily. What I eventually did, as we were approaching launch for Beehive: I was never a content creator. I had 5,000 followers on Twitter, so when you're giving tactics on how to scale your business, everyone always looks to, "Oh, but I don't live in New York, I don't have that network, or I don't have tens of thousands of followers." At the time I had 5,000 followers. I was not big by any means, but I posted a tweet sharing what we had been building. I talked about that we have this waitlist—“limited time only”—complete lie. We had zero people on this waitlist, but you try to build some urgency. I called out that there's only a few spots remaining, even though obviously there were unlimited spots remaining. I started from studying the people in the industry. I already kind of understood where the frustration points are with other competitors. Who are the people who have a newsletter—who is my target customer—and what are they already complaining about on social that they can't do with their current solution? I worked that into the narrative: we have a custom website builder, Substack takes a cut of revenue—we won't do that. We are totally writer- and creator-friendly. Then comes the credibility: "Oh, and I built this at Morning Brew and I'm giving you access to the exact same tools that Morning Brew had. Do you want to sign up?" Again, not a large content creator, but I got 400 people to submit to this waitlist, and that really became my lead list for being able to go out and target these people.

Shaan Puri

So, if we break that down: **step one** was *story* — either a story of credibility or almost an anti-credibility story: pain. Right? A problem you had, a failure you had, and that's what drove you to get smart about not making that mistake again or fixing the problem. Okay, so story was component one. **Component two** you said was you went and talked to a couple hundred people who were potential customers before and during — while you were building, kind of nights and weekends. That gave you, it sounds like, almost what a politician gets: talking points. *"We don't take a cut."* It was kinda like, *"we're no tax on tips."* So: what are the three or four messages that seem to always get people to nod and their eyes to light up? Cool. I know when I go out there talking about our thing now, in three months I'm going to stack those messages one after another so I get nod, nod, nod — okay, gotta check this thing out.

Tyler Denk

Yeah, no — **100%**. It's doing customer research and really leaning into where your customers are, and understanding that story and narrative.

Shaan Puri

And then three was the *false urgency*—the *false scarcity*. So saying "wait list," "few spots left," "limited time"... You know who wants it. You're going to get the early-adopter types: the people you want early on. They like trying new products, they're okay with things that aren't perfect, and they love to give feedback. They're enthusiastic and they share once they find something cool. So, that's what they want. What was the result of that wait list?

Tyler Denk

Yeah, so we had about 400 people sign up initially. In the questions that we asked, one of them was, “Why are you interested in using Beehive?” They basically put a silver platter in front of us, showing exactly what intrigues them—whether it's limitations with their previous platform or that they love Morning Brew, whatever it is. Now, as a team of three, I have this 400-person list I can go after. I have their email, I have their social handle. It's like the Paul Graham essay: **"Do things that don't scale."** It's the non-sexy work at the beginning. Everyone glamorizes the “zero to a million in my first week of business” story, and now there are these AI companies with straight vertical revenue. I think the truth is: for most startups getting off the ground, it's a lot of dirty, gritty work—doing the cold outreach yourself. One thing I've always found a competitive advantage is that people try to go too far toward “let me automate everything.” They build this 15-step automation funnel or use AI to make sure messaging hits at the right time for the right person. I didn't use HubSpot—I couldn't afford it at the time. I was just doing cold outreach via email once a week, every week, to all 400 people, and I got 25% of them to convert in the first few months.

Shaan Puri

Wow. So this year's thing you're showing here is literally the back end of the form they filled out. The most important one is **"what got you interested in checking this out?"** You're basically trying to figure out what's the *burning itch* for you. If I was going to sell to you, how would you like me to sell to you?

Tyler Denk

"This was my CRM, yeah."

Shaan Puri

It's an underrated question. In our sales—whenever I try to help our sales team in one of our companies—it's always: dude, you gotta ask, **"What makes this a win for you?"** They just sit there and the sales guys want to tell them all about us: our pricing, our packages, our features, our benefits. But you don't even know what they want. You have no idea what their dream outcome is from this entire interaction. So, as I said, just ask them, **"What would make this a huge win for you?"** You start with that, right? Or you open like this: "Hey, I know you're a busy guy. You booked a demo or you wanted to check out what we're doing. I'm curious—what's the pain? What made you want to do that?" Because I know you wouldn't just... you're not just kicking tires for no reason. You set them up with a reputation: "You're a busy guy, you don't waste time. There must be a reason that you're here. Why did you walk through our door? Tell me the problem," and then, "I know exactly how to sell you," if we're a fit for what you do. I think people don't really use those two core discovery questions to get that. Is that kind of how you felt as you were asking these questions? And, sort of, were there features that came out of this or marketing messages that came out of this? </FormattedResponse>

Tyler Denk

Yeah. A lot of the feature work and research was done in a prior stage. But, as you alluded to earlier, you figure out the messaging points that really resonate — whether it's **"we don't take a cut of your revenue; that's your revenue, we don't touch that."** Back when I was at Morning Brew, the first project I ever built was the referral program. We saw TheSkimm [the newsletter company] — they were taking off. They had this massive referral program; everyone was raving about it. Austin Rief came to me and said, "We're gonna copy them and do it better than they do." So, before I was even a full-time employee — while I was on contract — I built this referral program. We refined it a million times, and it was a massive success: it led to over a million subscribers.

Shaan Puri

Wow, that's a **huge** number.

Tyler Denk

Huge. People would reach out, and I kid you not — maybe a thousand a week would reply to the email and ask, "How did you build this referral program? What software are you using? How are you able to build this? I want to do it for my newsletter." These were either independent journalists and writers or people who worked at another company. That was the signal that what we built at **Morning Brew** was actually valuable, because other people who had newsletters wanted what we had. One of the biggest hooks was that **referral program**. After being asked and forwarded emails hundreds of times during my days at Morning Brew, I thought, "You know what? I'm just going to write an article." This is where my *building in public* started. I wrote a Medium article and broke down exactly the back end of how we built that referral program. It got thousands of claps [on Medium]. That was the signal I used: what I had personally built was valuable to other people who wanted this tech. Another thing to lean into in those early stages is: what is the core differentiator? A lot of founders try to run away from competition. We entered one of the most competitive spaces — I could name 25 competitors that existed and still exist today that are infinitely bigger than us. But what we had was that case study: I already knew what had worked at Morning Brew, and I had thousands of people using our competitors asking about this very particular feature. When we launched **Beehive**, one of our value props was this referral program — the same one that Morning Brew used to scale to **4,000,000 readers** and get acquired by **Business Insider**. You got that out of the box for free by signing up for Beehive. That was our edge into the market.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. That was your "Big Mac," right? That's the number-one thing on the value meal that people want. I have a couple of related stories I want people to see. The first is Ryan Hoover from Product Hunt. He did this a long time ago. I think Product Hunt is probably a little underrated now, but there was a time about ten years ago when Product Hunt was the shit. It was the most talked-about product in Silicon Valley—your favorite founder's favorite founder was Ryan Hoover. One of the things he did to get off the ground: he had no marketing budget, but he realized really quickly there's only so many times people are going to care to hear about Product Hunt because that's about us. If he made it about other people, they'd care. What he did was write a guest post for Fast Company called *"How we got our first 2,000 users: doing things that don't scale."* He doesn't even tell you what his company or product is. He targeted anybody who was launching a product. He would personally email or DM founders saying, "Hey, this is really cool—I just downloaded it. It looks awesome. You should consider putting this on Product Hunt because there's a community of people who like discovering new products there." Then when the product launched, he would retweet what they were doing. He created that engine. He used to go to Philz Coffee every day at 6 a.m. His work looked completely unproductive—he was just on Twitter and cold-emailing random people—but that's what it took to build that initial user base. He was religious about it. I saw him do that, and it reminds me of what you're doing. The second example comes from Emmett at Twitch. When we got acquired by Twitch, I asked Emmett—who's the founder—what he did in those first three to six months to make Twitch work. At that point, the company was years into its existence and already big, but he said he went and talked to 100 streamers who were on other platforms. Emmett is not the most sociable guy, so I asked, "What did you do? You don't strike me as an anthropologist or a thoughtful researcher." He said the interviews lasted about seven minutes. He only asked the same three questions every single time. He sent me the Google Doc of what he asked and all their replies. The three questions were: - "What do you like about your current platform?" - "What do you dislike about your current platform?" - "What would it take for you to switch to Twitch?" Most streamers hadn't even considered switching, but a few mentioned specific missing features. Emmett would go build those features, then go back to the people who asked for them and say, "Hey, we built it—the thing you said you would switch for." Sometimes there were two or three objections, but they would eventually cave to his level of ferocity. One of the biggest features—and the number-one revenue driver for Twitch—came from those conversations. There was a streamer Emmett wanted to get on board who said, "I want to be able to make money." Emmett replied that with such a small audience, ad revenue would be tiny. The streamer said, "I want them to be able to pay me $5 a month." At the time, subscriptions to individual creators weren't really a thing. Emmett thought it wouldn't work, but the current platform didn't have it. If he built it, the streamer said he would move. He built the feature. The streamer moved. The streamer didn't make big money at first, but even $5, $10, $17 in a month—amounts that translated to cents per hour—gave creators the sense that "there's a path for me here if I just keep going." It immediately changed their behavior. Subscriptions today drive, you know, close to a billion dollars in revenue for Twitch, and that was a feature he never would have built had he not had those conversations.

Tyler Denk

Well, which is more or less the exact—when I'm emailing these 400 people, those conversations are exactly that. Even though they showed the slightest bit of interest by filling out this Google form, the message is: "I'm kind of good on my platform and you don't have automations, you don't have X, you don't have Y, you don't have Z." I think that's the other trap a lot of founders fall into: *perfection over progress*. They see existing competitors or startups who are already "successful" and assume they always just showed up that way. Like they came out of the womb polished and perfect. One thing I've really honed in on is, in addition to the things that don't scale, the importance of shipping and being comfortable shipping things that are 80–90% of the way there. Get them in people's hands to collect feedback, then iterate as quickly as possible. If this thing is going to work out, assume where you are now is the smallest you'll ever be. So pissing off—and having a less-than-ideal first impression on—your first hundred users is nothing if that means you can take feedback from those 100 people, make the product ten times better, and give the next 100 and the next thousand a much more polished product. So many people get stuck not wanting to release an unpolished, unsexy feature until it's exactly right. For example, another thing we did in the early days that didn't scale: email is ripe with spam and abuse, and there are security complaints and concerns. When we first launched, we couldn't just have anyone sign up and start blasting out emails, because we'd be overrun with spammers. We could have spent three to four months building an automated security check. That was discussed as an option, but it would have delayed us months and taken time away from other features we already didn't offer. So we went the manual route: we had the highest-friction sign-up of all time. You would sign up and have to submit your name, what platform you're using, all this other information, including your Twitter handle and your LinkedIn. You couldn't do anything—you couldn't send emails or use the platform—until I approved you on the back end. We had a dashboard where everyone who signed up populated a list, and I would go line by line: click on their Twitter profile, their LinkedIn, try to look up their newsletter to see if they were legit, and manually click a button to approve them. Then they would get an email saying they could now use the platform. Yes, that goes against everything in terms of a hyper-growth startup—we were preventing people from using the product in the name of security. But the way I flipped that into a growth thing was this: when I would go to their Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, I would follow every single person who signed up. I would send them a DM like, "Hey, I'm the co‑founder at Behive. Thanks so much for signing up. Here's what we're working on—let me know if there's anything I can do to improve your experience." I turned someone who was initially probably pissed off that they couldn't use the platform into someone thinking, "Wow, it's pretty wild that the co‑founder and CEO just messaged me and followed me on Twitter." As I amplified what we were launching—whether new features or users having success—I now had all these people who followed me back as super fans, following the journey and engaging with the content. So it hits on a few things: one, don't let perfection get in the way of progress—be okay shipping a suboptimal sign-up flow if it lets you learn. And two, turn that into a growth lever: connect with people, have them become fanatics of what you're building, and then they help amplify the journey as thousands more follow along.

Shaan Puri

Right, right. What's the *advantage* that's buried inside this disadvantage? There's usually one. So, okay—if I have to manually approve them one by one, well, I'm already here. Might as well shake their hand, might as well say hello, might as well connect with them, might as well get them to follow me because I followed them. And then, all of a sudden, you have a bit of a relationship with all those early users.

Tyler Denk

And I think, again, the theme seems to be that it's hard to build a startup. The **things that don't scale** — the things no one wants to take the time to do in the early days — are the things that really compound and get you off the ground to achieve escape velocity. I think it's actually even more impactful later in the company when I'm still doing those things four years later. That becomes our **competitive advantage**. I read something recently: > "In a world where a lot of features are commoditized, it's the stories and the narratives and the people behind the company that actually become the competitive advantage." That's an early competitive advantage that I think anyone could take advantage of.

Shaan Puri

We just had this guy on the podcast, Tommy Mello. He's built this billion-dollar thing from starting with zero. He was painting garage doors himself day by day, and then realized he was painting doors that other guys installed — and those guys were making more money. He started becoming an installer; he learned how to be a technician. Now he's built, like, one of the biggest ones in the country (a "one garage" [unclear]). He was telling us what he has his team do, and he's like, **"You gotta pet the dog."** I just love this. I feel like I want to put that on a poster: **Pet the dog**. It's basically like, when you go to someone's house you don't just give them a quote and hand them a bill. No. You go there, you pet the dog, you say hello, you smile, you make eye contact. He always has them use this script: > "Hey, I'm just picking up a coffee. Can I get you anything?" > > "Oh, don't make me guess — tell me. What do you like? Do you like it black or with sugar?" He said, "We want to bring something into the relationship because it's a relationship. I don't want to just be one vendor that people choose based on the lowest price. People buy from who they trust and who they like." It starts with whether they even know you. So what you're talking about is basically: how do you get them to know you, how do you get them to like you, how do you get them to trust you? Before I even—before I invested in Beehive—I was listening to your Spotify playlist. I don't know if you have that in here as one of your growth hacks, but you made one of the best work-music playlists called "Big Desk Energy," and I used to listen to that every day. By the time we met, I felt like I was indebted to you. It was this little thing that I would never have thought would work, but it totally worked on me. I don't know if it worked on others.

Tyler Denk

I hope so. I mean, we seem to be doing okay. But yeah, *big desk energy* might be my greatest accomplishment to date.

Shaan Puri

"Alright, give us—give us more of the *sauce*. What's next?"

Tyler Denk

I'm constantly listening to users... and I eventually become a user myself. I also have my own newsletter, called **Big Desk Energy**, on the platform — you should sign up. I guess I'll set the stage: there are **25+ current competitors** in this space. When we first launched, we had nothing. For example, we only set up a way to send an email two weeks before launch. No automations. You couldn't customize anything. Basically, the table stakes features that every one of our competitors offered were not available on our platform. So what we decided to do was ship **one marketable feature every single week**. We had a core team of engineers, and our core competitive advantage was going to be **product velocity** — it was the only option. I would be reaching out to all these people on the waitlist, convincing them to sign up for the platform. I'd do all this hard work and they'd be like, "Bro, I can't do anything on this platform — nothing works." From the earliest days, we did a great job selling, but the product wasn't caught up to the expectations of what you were supposed to deliver in this industry. In addition to shipping one marketable feature every week, we turned each product release into *a moment*. By that I mean we figured out what would be the most useful thing to prevent churn and also be flashy enough that, when I announced it on Twitter and LinkedIn, people would say, "Oh — that's super interesting. The platform I have doesn't even offer that." When you do this repetitively, week after week, it becomes a narrative: yes, maybe they don't offer what I want today, but if they're shipping something new every single week, it's only a matter of time until they offer exactly what I want.

Shaan Puri

And it sounds like you—when you said you didn't just say "make the product better, build features"—you're saying **build one marketable feature every week**. I like the word *marketable* there. It reminds me of Amazon's "work backwards from the press release" idea. > "At Amazon, you don't get to build a feature until you have written the press release: how would we announce this to the press now?" A press release feels outdated, but the reality for you is probably: *what's the tweet?* What's the short announcement? Why are we building this if there is no tweet? If nobody's going to care when we tweet this, why are we building it? That simple forcing function—starting with the tweet and working backwards to the product—is going to eliminate about 30% of wasted effort on pet projects or things that sound good on paper internally but that users don't care about.

Tyler Denk

This comes from talking to users from the beginning and being really embedded in these communities on Twitter. The framework I would use for prioritizing what to build is a three-part framework: 1. **Preventing churn in the earliest days.** If we had 10 users, and one user churns, that's 10% of our revenue. So if someone says, "Hey, you don't have X, and if you don't build X I'm leaving," I can't take that 10% hit. That has to be top of the list—we have to ship that first. 2. **Unblocking growth.** As I'm trying to convince people to leave their perfectly good platform and come to ours, someone might say, "You don't offer this feature, thus I can't move over until you have that." Once I hear that two, three, four times, it becomes a pattern that needs to be prioritized to bring new people into the ecosystem. 3. **Maximal hype.** This is the sizzle. Some combination of things—whether it's the Morning Brew referral program or an X, Y, Z feature. When we first launched the AI writer into the editor, at the peak moment (about a year after ChatGPT), I knew AI would hit. We don't want the people we've worked so hard to get on the platform to leave, so we focus on: - Anything that prevents churn, - What opens the door and casts a wider net for more people, - And what's that sizzle at the end that we can add that will spread when we tweet it—working backwards from the tweet and the press release that we know will resonate because it solves the problems of the people we want on this platform. That's how we think about product releases. We do a few things with the product release—probably what we're most well known for today is that we turn each product release into a moment. We have the email that goes to every user. This comes from a place of insecurity—I wake up every morning, and in the early days you were one of them, thinking, "If you don't ship this, I'm out of here"—so the email goes out to all of them.

Shaan Puri

"You sending users some threats because it was early users? I don't know what happened. Like... you know, roughly we were in the first... what?"

Tyler Denk

"We'll call you the first few thousand users."

Shaan Puri

Yeah. I remember we needed *automations*. It was like, "Hey, when somebody signs up I need to be able to automatically send them this email first, then after a day this one, after two days this one," and so on to see these sequences. You guys did not have that, and we were like, "Yeah, we need this." The funny thing is you had pitched us for an investment and I said no. I was like, "I don't know—newsletter seems... isn't that a solved problem? It's kind of a small market. How many creators are there really that create newsletters?" Dumb in retrospect, but at the time I didn't understand the market, so we passed. We still wanted to be users. I liked the product—I was a user—but I just didn't know how many people like me were out there. Then, as we were using it, you had this crazy story where your technical co-founder passed away. We were sitting here badgering you about features, and I felt like such a jerk when you said, "Hey, here's why we're just a little slow these last couple weeks to get it back to you." After that you guys picked up velocity like crazy. I thought, "Man, this guy's a force of nature. If he's going to do this, he's going to solve our problems this fast and this well. I have to make this bet." I actually didn't change my mind about the market at all. I still thought all those bad things about the market, but I started thinking new things about him that would trump that. I've seen founders with that sort of force of will create an avalanche of momentum—whether with product or marketing. They get many shots on goal. That leaves a lot of room for error, and you can recover from shortcomings; you can overcome them that way. You've parlayed that with your investor updates: the company does well, you talk about how well the company's doing, and that makes the company do better. That flywheel is powerful. I've always been hesitant to do that because it feels exposing—you're naked, vulnerable—putting your numbers out there for the world to see. But you've done this. So show your investor update here: how does this work, and why does it work?

Tyler Denk

Yeah, I mean, I'd even take a step back in the sense of, like, you know, *building in public*. Everyone talks about it now on **Twitter**, and that's something I've been very intentional about. There's an altruistic view of it: entrepreneurship's great, and there are a lot of people who are successful who don't share their secrets about why they're successful. That is to the disadvantage of everyone else who wants to build something. Then there's the more selfish reason: I could tweet and post newsletters all day long and there's probably a few thousand people who would love that content. But if I were to post all day about, "here's how we hire, here's how we built this feature, here's the strategy and tactics to get us from 1,000,000 to 2,000,000," then all of a sudden the addressable market for that content is ten times bigger. It's anyone who wants to build a startup. It's anyone who's at a small- or medium-sized business. It's anyone who's an early startup employee who's thinking about maybe going off on their own. So I made a very intentional decision from the very beginning: *I want to share everything that we do* — the ups, which are, you know, from zero to a million and one to five in the second year; and the downs. Obviously, you hit on the worst moment of the entire journey, which is us losing our co-founder, and all of the different things along the way. Again, I think people follow people and they want the story and the narrative. Also, if I can turn that into useful tactics that other people can take and use for their business, now I become someone that they look to and trust.

Shaan Puri

"Yeah, do you have data on how these get forwarded around? Or how many people sign up from this email—from the *investor updates*? Do you know anything about that, or do you not track that specifically?"

Tyler Denk

So, the **investor update** — it says very clearly at the top: "You're not supposed to forward these." People do. Yeah, it's like... it's kind of private-ish, right? And so, yes. They hit on the investor update — like whether it started on Twitter when I would say, "Here's our first 100 users," "Here's how we got a million dollars..." Eventually I turned that into sending an investor update to all of our initial investors. I also have everyone who passed as an investor — you were on this list as well.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think I got a few of those, and that gave me some **FOMO**.

Tyler Denk

Right, exactly. To me, being exposed and naked—yes, that's kind of where I think I thrive. I want the accountability and I want the pressure. No matter what happens at the end of the month, I'm going to send an **investor update** to 500 people who trusted me with their money—or passed—and I don't want them to get the gratification that they were right in passing. I know that we are going to be exposed and share our revenue numbers, and I want those numbers to be up, to the right, and green. There's an inspirational, motivational tactic behind it. There's also a very tactical point: time is your biggest resource, especially as a founder when you're being pulled in a million different directions. We went down the venture‑backed route, and as you're *building in public* and sharing milestones, there's always investors reaching out on Twitter—“Hey, wanna grab coffee for 30 minutes? Hey, you wanna do this?” My time's too valuable for these coffee meets, but I do need to nurture those relationships if I want to raise a later round. So the **investor update** became the greatest life hack: *No, I'm not going to spend 30 minutes meeting for coffee, but I'll add you to our investor update, and you will learn far more about me and the business—how I think about this and how we're growing month over month—by reading three to four months of our investor updates than you would ever get in a 30‑minute coffee meet.* By using these investor updates, we actually raised our **Series A** in one week—we raised $12.5 million in a week. I don't know, with AI companies maybe that's not as impressive, but it was amazing for us.

Shaan Puri

Love it. Was there anything else, as you were reflecting on what worked—how you guys grew to a **million**—that you're like, "Oh, I gotta share this. This is a good one. This thing works"?

Tyler Denk

I mean, again, it's the little things. We built into the company a **very social-first culture** where *everyone is distribution*. What I mean by that is when you get hired at Beehive, our social media manager shows you how to use social media, engage with our content, and promote different initiatives at the company. Starting from the top—me actually building in public—I have a constant stream of content out about the business. We have several employee programs internally. Every week we give an award we call the "social media girly of the week" for who was the most active and engaged on socials. There's an incentive built into that. We also have a Slack channel called "pump" (or "pump channel"). The whole purpose of that channel is: anytime one of our users says something positive about Beehive—whether they're having success, hit a milestone, or say it's so much better than their old platform—someone drops it in that channel. Then the entire company gets that notification, jumps in, engages, retweets, and likes. We've been able to build this narrative. In the early days it seemed like everyone was moving to Beehive because every time someone said anything remotely nice about us, they'd get a retweet and like from me, the house account, and about 15 of our other employees. It's a very grassroots method we've been able to scale—now to over 100 employees—in the sense that we utilize every positive thing we can get and have all employees help amplify the different messages.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's frustrating, because everything you've said here so far is so simple. When I run back through an audit of stuff we did in any of my startups, I'm like, "Oh, yep—didn't do that, didn't do that. Yep, left that; left that low‑hanging fruit right there; didn't grab that either." It's annoying, but it's also a good reminder—a good kick in the butt to, like, *dude, stop searching for the genius strategy*. Stop searching for the one thing that's going to cure it all and just look for the obvious. It's like: people are saying good things about you and you guys don't even reply. Do you think they're going to say another good thing? You don't engage, you don't spread the fact that there's this amazing thing, and nobody saw it. You launched this feature but you didn't think about what the tweet would be in advance, so you kind of spent a month on something that nobody really cared about. Everything you're saying is straight from the **department of common sense**, and that's why I love it.

Tyler Denk

Yeah, which is why I'm always self-conscious about sharing the tactics. It's because, to me, it's second nature. If you want to build a business that people love—and have people love you as the founder and the person behind it—**engage with them**. *Listen to their complaints.* Build and prioritize the things they want to use on a day-to-day basis. Solve their problems when they run into them. It sounds so simple and intuitive, but I feel like a lot of people overcomplicate the startup-building journey and don't do the little things right.

Shaan Puri

We want it to be complicated because, if it's complicated, then that's why we're not doing it yet — we just didn't know this advanced thing yet. But when the answer is that you're not doing the obvious, simple, no‑brainer, brick‑by‑brick tactics, you have to look in the mirror: **you're the problem**, right? Go look at the best investment advice. Go look at what Buffett says. Buffett doesn't open a spreadsheet; he doesn't do any of that stuff. He says, "We invest in companies that are well managed, that have a good brand, make products people like, have been around for a long time, and make a healthy profit — but not too much where they're gouging their customers." It's stuff you could fit on the back of a cereal box. It doesn't take a PhD to understand it, and yet so few can actually execute it well. I'll chase the next Dogecoin or whatever, trying to do something fancy — like you're showing this thing on the screen right now. It's literally a little button, a little badge at the bottom of probably the free email tier, which is like, "Hey, this email newsletter that you just saw — this nicely formatted thing — is powered by Beehive." There's inherent virality in every single email that gets sent out. When you're sending — how many emails are you guys sending a day?

Tyler Denk

No idea a day, but about *3 billion* a month today.

Shaan Puri

Okay — you're sending **3 billion** a month, so you're getting **3 billion** mini billboards at the bottom of those emails saying that these emails are "powered by **Beehive**," right? That type of stuff adds up.

Tyler Denk

Yeah, it's like the quintessential Silicon Valley example of Hotmail, where they had at the bottom of their emails: "Get your free email at Hotmail." They went from tens of users to tens of millions in a few years just from that simple viral tactic. I'll leave with one last thing: I love the concept of *not making people think*. There's always friction. I just talked about how high-friction our sign-up process was, but prior to our sign-up process, all of our competitors had the most complex pricing models. You were limited on how many emails you can send per week and how many contacts you have—you had to calculate how much volume you're sending per month, which no one has any idea about. It's way too hard to even figure out the simple question: *How much is this going to cost me to use?* When we launched, we had an all-inclusive plan—every premium feature—for $99, and you could send unlimited emails. In retrospect, not the most scalable model and not the most optimal way to make the most amount of money. But going back to not letting perfection get in the way of progress: I could explain that in a tweet at any time, saying "For $99: unlimited emails, every feature you see here." I'm a big fan of *living to fight another day*. A lot of people get handicapped by trying to find the most optimal solution for the future. If I'm trying to figure out the most scalable pricing model that I can't communicate easily, I might never live to see that future day because we've already shot ourselves in the foot. So I'm a big fan of pushing some problems off to be solved later, under the assumption that "later" will involve us having more money, more revenue, and more people to help us solve that problem.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, you made it simple and you made it easy to understand. Even if it's imperfect and not yet optimized, it reminds me of Robinhood. Robinhood built a $100 billion company off of **"free trades"** — commission-free trades. Don't pay $9.99. I remember on E-Trade it was $9.99 just to buy and sell a stock, and Robinhood got rid of that. Now that's a single sentence: **if you trade on Robinhood, your trades are free**. They didn't have to stop there. Today they have banking, crypto, mortgages, personal margin loans, options and derivatives, prediction markets — they make tons of money. I think they have nine different product lines that do over $100 million in revenue. But the entire empire was built on a simple promise: free trades. It also tied in with the story — the name Robinhood suggests we're letting the little guy win. "We're stealing from the rich" — we're enabling the masses. They built the whole thing off that one simple idea, and at the time they forced the whole industry to change because the industry was based on the commission model. They realized, first of all, you don't even make that much money off commissions. It's not as necessary as it seemed; there's not that big of a cost to doing a trade. I heard an interview with the guy where he said because they did it for free, they had to innovate on the cost structure to make sure they wouldn't burn too much money doing this. Whereas the other guys never did anything because they were charging so much — they had 90‑whatever percent margins on that trading commission — so they never cared to figure out how to make their trades faster, cheaper, and simpler under the hood. We had to because we did commission-free trades, and that enabled the next layer of benefits to the customer. So, don't underestimate these things: that simplicity, that one idea anybody can understand. Don't make the user think too much. That simple story can build a $100 billion company.

Tyler Denk

That — and that's the goal: a hundred billion (100,000,000,000), right?

Shaan Puri

"I would enjoy that as an investor. I would very much enjoy when you guys get to **100 billion**. **Tyler**, this has been fun, dude. What—what, I guess, do you want to leave people with?"

Tyler Denk

I don't know — getting started is always the hardest part, right? I think if this journey I've been on shows anything, it's that I don't have... and where I always admire you is the *"work smarter, not harder"* approach. I think my advantages have always been different. The only two things I can control are my effort and my attitude, so I'm the brute-force type: I'm up at 5:30 in the morning and at my desk till 9:00. That's different from your preferred life. What I do, and what I've found works best for me, is just brute force — working hard and doing the little things right that start to compound over time. There's no secret sauce outside of the very applicable things that anyone could listen to this episode and actually start applying. Understand who your target user is. Get an MVP (v1) out. Start talking to your users. Figure out where they're dropping off and where you can improve. Getting started, I think, is the biggest thing holding back most founders: just focus on the little things.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I love it. You probably shared—I would say seven or eight of the little things. Any one individually doesn't seem like it's going to be earth-shattering, but when you start to stack them up and take this attitude of "I'm just going to do the obvious, common-sense, positive, one-unit-forward" type of mentality, you can get pretty far. I don't know if you've ever read the story of the South Pole—the guys who conquered the South Pole. It's one of my favorite stories. Back in the day there were a bunch of races between countries. In between the world wars, countries competed to reach places like the North Pole, the South Pole, and Everest. It was an ego contest—pride: who is the bravest, the fastest, the strongest, the smartest. I'll tell you the South Pole story because I think it's pretty crazy. There were two teams that went down to the South Pole. One team planned carefully: they bet on having the strongest animals to pull their sleds, they made sure they were fully stocked, and they built really sturdy camps so they could survive. They took a known route and were strategic. When the weather was good, they'd go all-out and try to cover as many miles as possible. When the weather was bad, they'd bunker down and wait it out. That seemed like the smart, strategic thing to do. The other team took the opposite approach. They said, "We're going to go in a straight line—that seems like the fastest path. We're not going to bring all those supplies; it'll be too heavy. We'll bring just what's needed and use dogs instead of horses. They aren't as strong, but we're not bringing so much weight, so it should be okay." Their approach was brute force: 20 miles a day. Good weather or bad, 20 miles. He would just march 20 miles on average. So one team had huge variance—very dependent on weather and conditions. The other had a steady, disciplined approach. People have taken this lesson as a moral: the idea of the **20-mile march**. If you start in New York and just commit to walking 20 miles a day, it's not an unreasonable amount—you can get to California. You'll be on the beach soon; there will be water between your toes if you stick to the 20-mile march idea. If you sprint some days and rest other days, or if you try to bring all the resources you think you need, you'll never make it. To me, your story very much embodies this **20-mile march** idea: wake up every day and do the next thing. Live to fight another day by doing the basics really, really well—the common-sense things. Alright, Tyler—thanks for coming on. Everybody should go listen to *Big Desk Energy* on Spotify—that's my plug for you. Great playlist. Subscribe to your newsletter because I think your newsletter is pretty fun; it's partly founder stuff about how you're building your company, and it's a pretty entertaining read.

Tyler Denk

Yeah. If you liked anything in this episode, my newsletter gets pushed out — so **subscribe to the newsletter**, *follow the playlist*, and thanks for having me.

Shaan Puri

Alright, that's it.