Hello again my friend,
I joined beehiiv when we were making around $300k/year.
Today, we’re over $30M/year, 110x in less than four years. We’ll probably hit $40M by the start of 2026.
When people ask me how we do it, I typically say “work insanely hard and have the right priorities,” which is correct, but vague and a bit lazy. There’s obviously more to the story.
What are we actually doing?
100s of initiatives each year.
Product releases every week or two.
Most companies stretch to do 5 per year.
Thousands of small improvements
How is it that companies with thousands of employees can’t do this? They either go so fast they break everything, or so slow that nothing gets done.
There’s one internal strategy that’s quietly changed the game. One that we started out of necessity, and is now a core part of our workflow.
It’s called a cooldown, and you’ve heard of it if you’re in tech. It’s a key week of our workflow and business cycle that helps manage burnout, stay on top of loose ends, ensure quality, and scale the speed.
Today, I’ll break it all down.
Let’s lock in.
Context
In our industry, there’s an old motto: “go fast and break things.” Build so quickly that things naturally go wrong (by design). A bug gets shipped. A customer’s order get mixed up. There’s some miscommunication. Things happen. It’s a cost of doing business for fast-moving companies.
Done is better than perfect, right? Provided those mistakes are fixed just as quickly.
Why go through the trouble in the first place, though? Why not just slow down?
Because speed is a major competitive advantage.
Just imagine competing with beehiiv and all of our regular updates while you’re shipping one new thing every few months. It’s tough to compete, so you go faster and take more risks, and leave smaller, less important tasks on the side. It creates a debt you’ll have to pay later.
The issue is that some companies never pay off that debt. You know what happens when debts aren’t paid. They lose their customers, their reputation, and can’t recover.
So why is it that beehiiv made it work when so many other companies failed?
Introducing Cooldown
Here’s how it works:
One week that immediately follows the latest sprint.
No new feature work (that’s the ideal, but we keep a few people on new features if needed).
Just bug fixes and catching up with smaller tasks we left behind (like cleaning up code).
Review the last sprint and plan the next one.
We started doing this because we needed it, and it’s become one of the core parts of our workflow. And they work. Users pay us faster, stay longer, and overall have a better experience. It improves the brand and our reputation.
Cooldowns are my favourite week every month.
During sprints, our team doesn’t get bogged down with every little issue. Of course, major bugs get fixed right away. But:
Icons that aren’t perfectly aligned,
Emails that sends in 2 minutes instead of 2 seconds,
Text that’s just one shade too dark
These can all wait.
I get flak saying that, but ultimately, these issues do not stop someone from working. They should be fixed, but are not a deal breaker.
What makes a cooldown work?
At first, we literally had a project called “polish everything,” and it worked. We had a cooldown that lasted 3 weeks at one point. The standard is one week, but when you’re moving fast, it’s fine to take more time if you need. Shipping polish instead of new features is worth it. The same applies to any business.
The big thing is managing the workload.
The last week of a sprint as new features complete is when our team of five (product managers, CEO, CTO), search the entire company for good cooldown tasks. We list and split them up between the team. Every single task for every engineer is accounted for before we start. Our last cooldown had over 160 individual tasks/tickets.
We track the entire cooldown in a separate project. We’re always aiming for 100% completion, but stay flexible. New items get added mid-week. Someone taking time off on Thursday has their work moved to someone else who has the capacity to take it on.
Some people I talk to at other companies treat cooldowns like a break. It’s not.
When to use cooldown?
When we were the new player in the market, there was no cooldown. Every day was war. We worked like psychopaths. We won then, and we’re winning still. But then we had to scale.
More customers, more support tickets, more requests, more bugs, it was all adding up. We needed a method to manage everything. Cooldown was our solution.
When the smaller tasks turn into debt, and you’re worried you may not pay off that debt, use cooldowns. In tech, we literally refer to this as tech debt.
Until then, it’s always a sprint, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We started cooldowns well after the $10M/year milestone. Cooldowns are traditionally engineering led (and our engineers are amazing about this), but any team that accumulates a list of side-lined tasks can use cooldown weeks to scale their speed.
Cooldown’s not just for work
For the entrepreneurs reading, cooldown is a great way to manage life.
Those smaller tasks you have to get done but fall to the wayside? A cooldown week is a great way to make sure they get done, without throwing off every project. I use cooldowns to manage personal tasks, do the bookkeeping for my side-hustle, and catch up in general.
You don’t need a whole matrix or complex workflow. Just three weeks sprinting on the key priorities, and one week for the pesky tasks we put off. I put off so many little things that cooldown has been incredible for me.
I hope it is for you too.
Thanks as always for reading!