Taking on billion-dollar companies in year one

Hello again my friend,

I’ve been getting many questions related to starting a business / building a product when there’s serious competition already in the game. And I get it. It’s scary to go up against businesses with millions of dollars, hundreds of employees, and decades of history. But it’s not impossible.

I actually don’t think it matters if a company/competitor is worth billions of dollars. At least, not as much as people might think (a hot take, I know).

A brand new player in the market can take them on and win. It’s obviously not easy (it’s insanely difficult), but it’s doable. Even with just a small, but maniacal crew of co-founders.

I’m sure it’s true because that’s literally what beehiiv did. We didn’t have billions of dollars like some competitors, nor did we have hundreds of people on the team (some of our competitors had thousands). No, they had all those advantages, yet here we are.

Want to know how?

This is the new “Product Building” section of my newsletter where I dive deep into how winning products and companies succeed. beehiiv is the first.

Let’s lock-in.

beehiiv did not enter an empty market. Email was old. Newsletters were old. Email marketing platforms had existed for years (maybe decades).

Mailchimp had sold to Intuit for $12B in 2021. Substack had raised $65M and was already the company most people associated with independent writers. Twitter had bought Revue. Facebook had launched Bulletin. Then you still had ConvertKit, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, AWeber, and plenty of other tools with customers, revenue, and years of product development behind them.

From the outside, this was not an obvious category for a tiny startup to enter. It looked mature, crowded, and probably “solved” already. I mean, Mailchimp sold for $12B…what more was there to do?

The question was not"how big can this get?" It was "why would anyone switch?" People had the tools already, and even when those tools were annoying, they were familiar enough that switching was hard for them, which made winning their business hard for us.

We’ll cover early product building, and early product marketing.

beehiiv’s co-founders built and scaled Morning Brew to 4M readers and an exit, where the newsletter was sold for $75M or more. A wild sum for a newsletter at the time. It’s critical context.

Who better to build a newsletter platform for people who want a business like Morning Brew, than the people who built/grew Morning Brew? The founders knew the industry, product, customer, challenges, and everything else so well.

They just knew, which features sounded important but didn’t matter yet, and which boring workflows actually made newsletter businesses grow. If someone asks about “intuition” and “taste” (i.e. knowing what’s good or bad to their market, off the cuff), it’s this.

Have to admit it, the competitors above (except Substack), were in email marketing. beehiiv was specifically for email newsletters.

And while Morning Brew was growing and scaling, none of the incumbents built the features. In fact, it looked like they didn’t even see the opportunity. It was frankly a miss on their part.

Sometimes leaving out details nobody really cares about (even if it makes you look unpolished) is worth it. Yes, there were more bugs than we wanted sometimes. Yes, it meant the experience was not as refined as it could be. But remember, it worked.

And people couldn’t stand it. I remember telling people about how we operated and got so many critiques.

Yeah, it was chaotic. We shipped more in a week than some companies shipped in a quarter. Our quarters looked like their annual roadmaps. We always went back to the bugs, but we did leave things out on purpose in exchange for making the bigger, better releases faster.

Those people who said those things? I rub it in their faces now and I love every second of it.

This will come up again when we talk about product marketing, but to be clear, the entire team was close to the customers, including the engineers, co-founders, and senior execs.

Tech had a lot of stereotypes. People starting at 10am and leaving at 4pm. More time on meetings than actual work. Millions of dollars spent on people who don’t actually do anything. I don’t know if it’s true, but I know that nobody was even close to our work ethic.

But it wasn’t obviously all building product. Marketing matters.

In the early days, every signup was visible. As users came in and got access, Tyler (our CEO) would personally follow them on Twitter. This was not just a handful of people. He followed thousands of early users.

That may sound small, but online, small signals can feel bigger than they are. A new user might see major creators talking about beehiiv, see Tyler connected to those people, sign up for the product, and then notice that Tyler followed them. It made the product feel less like a faceless tool and more like something built by people who were paying attention. It made these users feel closer to the influencers in their lives by being directly tied to Tyler (who they spoke very highly of) in the most endearing way possible.

This is one of those early-stage advantages that is hard to quantify but easy to feel. A large company can send polished onboarding emails. A small company can make you feel like the founder saw you and appreciates you.

Of course, this does not scale forever. Eventually there are too many users, too many mentions, too much volume. But in the early days, doing things that do not scale can create the emotional foundation that later growth builds on.

Today, Creator Spotlight reaches hundreds of thousands of creators, media professionals, and builders. But in the early days, it was not what it is now. It started as a way to highlight our users and tell better stories about the people building on beehiiv.

The original vision was Tyler’s, and it existed before I joined. After I started, I helped pull it together by interviewing creators, writing the pieces, organizing the story, and working with a small team on graphics. At the time, it did not feel like some giant media operation. It was much simpler than that: find interesting users, talk to them, write about what they were building, and make them look good. That last part matters.

Most company case studies are boring because the company makes itself the hero. The customer becomes proof that the product works, which may be useful for sales, but it rarely creates something the customer is excited to share. Nobody says “hey check out the case study they made about me where they’ll try to sell you on their product for 30 slides.”

Creator Spotlight worked better because it made the creator the focus. The product was part of the story, but the person building the audience was the main character.

That made the content useful in multiple directions. The featured creator got a polished story they could share. beehiiv got social proof. Prospects got examples of real people building on the platform. One Creator Spotlight article worked in marketing (users shared it), sales (case-study), and education (new users see workflows from these existing users).

And over time, beehiiv built an owned media property in the same world it wanted to win.

Every tweet mentioning or tagging beehiiv would get pulled through an API and printed into one giant Slack channel. It was not complicated. It was just a feed of people talking about us, and everyone could see it.

People on the team would make time to go into that channel and engage. If a user launched their newsletter and tagged beehiiv, we would all like it, reply, retweet it, congratulate them, or answer a question. If someone shared a win, we might amplify it. If someone was confused, we might jump in and help. Every employee at the time was on this.

For larger creators, that was probably a nice touch. For smaller creators, it could mean a lot more. Imagine you are just getting started. You do not have a huge audience. You post that you launched your newsletter on beehiiv, and then people from the company show up in your replies. Maybe the company account engages. Maybe someone from the team retweets you. Maybe Tyler sees it. Suddenly your post gets more attention than it would have received on its own.

Maybe you’re stuck, stressed, it’s not working, and someone on the team DMs you on Twitter, sends you a meeting links, and sets everything up for you within an hour (all from a Tweet). Insane value, and a true story. That happened between myself and Alex Garcia in my first couple months (he’s still on beehiiv).

Over time, users learned that tagging beehiiv had upside. If they mentioned us, we might show up. That made more people mention us, which made beehiiv appear more active, which created more moments for us to engage. It was not some perfectly designed growth strategy. It was a small team paying attention in public, and it worked because most companies are too slow or too careful to do that consistently.

There was a button at the bottom of every email that said “powered by beehiiv” and we wouldn’t let users remove it. They offered to pay, we said no to the money. This button was driving over half of our new sign ups at one point. It’s classic product marketing. Some users didn’t like it, we didn’t care. Because the growth we got with it was worth way more than the $100/m we were charging at the time.

Good product, amazing price, together, mean you can do things like this.

This ties it all together. There are some incredible creators who promoted the business in the early days. People like Shaan Puri (co-host of the My First Million podcast), Codie Sanchez (the boring businesses influencer) and Alex Lieberman (Morning Brew) were all mentioning us because their involvement wasn’t just passive. They had real incentive to see beehiiv win, and many of them helped create early distribution and credibility

That early distribution was huge. It made the business feel massive, got a ton of attention, and added immediate credibility to a brand new business. How much did they get? I have no idea (sorry, wish I did).

Who else is doing that, plus everything I described in product building, for several consecutive years?

A lot of companies do one or two things well.

They might ship fast, but they are not close enough to the customer. They might have a good product, but no distribution. They might have influencers talking about them, but the product is not good enough to keep people around. They might get early attention, but then move too slowly and lose the trust they built.

beehiiv worked because all of it was happening at the same time.

The founders understood the market because they had already lived the problem at Morning Brew. The product team shipped fast enough that users could feel the platform improving underneath them. The support team was close enough to customers that bugs, requests, and pain points did not get buried six layers away from the people building. Marketing was not just “content.” It was Creator Spotlight, Twitter engagement, powered by beehiiv, strategic investors, customer wins, and making users feel like the company actually saw them.

Most companies stop. They get slower. They make the brand too polished. They hide behind process. They stop talking to users directly. They start optimizing for looking like a real company instead of doing the things that made people care in the first place.

beehiiv did not win year one because it had more money, more people, or more features. The team cared about the right things before the market fully understood why those things mattered.

Before beehiiv, I had worked with plenty of small companies. Good companies. Smart people. Real businesses. But this was the first time I saw a small team walk into a market full of giants and make the giants look slow.

A great product is not just what you ship. It is how fast you learn, who you listen to, how close you stay to the customer, how well you use the attention you get, and whether people believe the product will keep getting better.

It’s what I spend so much time focusing on and why I added this new “Product Building” section to the newsletter every Tuesday in addition to the weekly Thursday email.

That is what beehiiv had in year one.

And it is why the company was able to take on billion-dollar competitors before most people even realized it was happening.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Darwin