Arming the rebels

Hello again my friend,

Earlier this week, beehiiv celebrated 4 years. Another chapter of growth, chaos, fun, and the thrill of building something for the rebels. The everyday people who had the ambition, focus, and drive to compete, but lacked the tools or the means to do so.

The original promise of the internet for digital entrepreneurs was all about taking the tools used by the world’s biggest companies, and making them available to everyone. It was about evening the playing field.

Your local artist could create amazing paintings from his bedroom. A business could be born from a garage and succeed. People without means, or parents to let them use their garage, could compete in a meaningful way because all those tools changed the game.

beehiiv is doing the same for the content economy, while competitors are focused on algorithms. Before, it was with newsletters. Today, it’s with so much more (see the video of our event here).

But what’s rarely talked about is the business of this. I talked about my biggest individual takeaways I had after 3 years of working here (mostly on content).

But today, it’s about lessons I think any business can learn from from us, straight from the trenches.

Let’s get into it.

The right priorities require hard work. But you can work hard at sweeping the floors and make zero dollars.

At beehiiv, we compete in so many different industries. Email, websites, advertising, and dozens of other tools. In many cases, there are entire companies dedicated to just one of our features. But we pursue them all. And it works, but how? How is it that we can chase so many things when it feels like no one else can?

Because we solved the hardest problems first. Email is the most difficult tech stack of all the things we do. For a website company to start competing in email is very, very tough. But for another company to start making websites (the way we do) is not as hard. It all comes back to priorities.

I’m convinced. Any business trying to build something amazing, grow fast, and deliver major impact thrives or dies because the top brass (the leaders in the business). In our case, we have leadership that’s taken us from $300k (when I started 3 years ago), to $35M today. But not every business is this lucky.

Nothing is more important. People may not be perfect, but the effort, culture, and priorities that go top down define the business. In almost every situation I can think of where we made big things happen, leaders were leading, and the team stepped up into that energy. Not the other way around.

Looking at beehiiv, it feels like the best way to turn $100k into $1M is hiring an employee that creates these returns.

In general, some employees are worth 2x. Some are worth 100x. What other move can a company make to generate this kind of a return in less than 4 years?

It’s why Facebook/Meta was offering top AI researchers compensation packages of $100M.

It’s also why previous companies I’ve worked for hit major bottle-necks and stopped growing.

Does that mean a company can just hire people, and then the leadership team sits back and watches them work? No. In fact, doing that just makes talent expensive (but without a return on that investment). It’s still a team game.

I’ve talked about this before so I’ll keep it short.

A fully remote team works when everyone is in the arena, not on the sidelines.

Our CTO still resolves bugs. Our head of support answers customers. Head of sales takes sales calls. There is no management position that just manages. Everyone is active in the work.

There is no “annual review.” We do “replays,” which focus on reflection, planning, and progress. Yes, there is management, but with a fully remote team, and trust in people to do their work well, it’s not like we have people looking over shoulders checking on progress every day.

This doesn’t apply to every business, just the ones that grow fast. It’s not just beehiiv. I hear it from so many owners, executives, and employees at companies like ours. Chaos is part of the game. So is pain.

But it’s important to clarify that priorities, by definition, mean you’re accepting certain problems every time you fix others.

When we fixed a bug where customers couldn’t log in to their accounts, we’re also deciding not to fix a bug where a customer’s email is the wrong shade of blue. This is an obvious example, but you get the idea.

It’s choosing one kind of pain over another, and chaos follows naturally because there are problems.

If we listened to the loudest voices early on, we would have built the wrong things, showed people they can be loud and get what they want, and then spent even more time fixing the mistakes.

All of this is directly from what I’ve seen and done working at beehiiv. There’s no fluff, no AI, nothing that can repeat what someone on the inside has lived (at least not yet).

If you’re curious about beehiiv’s story more generally, CEO’s written it here if you want to read it.

Thanks again for reading!

See you next week.