The Next Chapter of Liight Work

Hello again, my friend,

Earlier this week, I found out beehiiv crossed $30M in subscription revenue. We are now approaching $45M overall as a business when you include the ad network and Boosts.

Even typing that feels a little surreal. The times when we used to aim for a few upgrades a day are long, long gone.

I always believed we’d get here. We all did. That belief is part of why the company moves the way it does. But there is a difference between believing something is possible and looking up one day to realize you are standing inside the thing you used to talk about building.

The outside version of this story is clean.

Company grows fast. Product ships. Revenue goes up. Team celebrates. Everyone claps.

The inside version is much messier.

Priorities changed. Plans got rewritten. People left. Some bets worked. Some did not. There were weeks where everything felt obvious and weeks where nothing did. There were launches that looked smooth from the outside but took a ridiculous amount of pressure, coordination, and sheer force to get over the line.

I remember specifically when we were behind on a project, our CEO called for a daily standup at 6am my time. He told me I didn’t have to go, though I still did. I remember waking up to find out that almost the entire growth team had been let go. It wasn’t always smooth sailing by any means.

Every time it felt like we were on the wrong path, we would pivot with all hands on deck, working late into the evenings and super early in the mornings. Calling it extreme barely covers it.

And through all of it, the focus kept coming back to the same thing:

Ship great product.

Actually ship. Learn. Adjust. Do it again.

That is the part I want to write more about.

For almost two years now, Liight Work has been where I process ambition, career, technology, work, and the strange emotional weight that comes with wanting more from yourself. That is not going away.

But seeing beehiiv hit this milestone made something obvious to me: there is so much more I could be saying.

People ask me about this all the time. How we do what we do. How decisions get made. What it takes to get hired at a company like this. What the work actually feels like when the company is moving fast and the expectations keep rising.

I think there is value in going deeper now.

beehiiv is at a point in its journey that most people only get to read about in polished case studies after the fact. I am living through it in real time. I get to see what happens when a company is growing fast, when product quality has to keep rising, when AI is changing the way teams operate, when the stakes keep getting bigger, and when everyone is still expected to execute.

There is a lot to learn from that. And if sharing the lessons can help others find their own way, the way I found mine, then I think it is worth doing. There is also a lot people do not usually say out loud.

So I am changing the shape of this newsletter.

Starting now, I will be adding a second post each week on Tuesdays.

The Thursday post will become the main thread, a broader reflection across the things I am seeing, learning, and thinking about. Tuesdays will be where I zoom in.

Those Tuesday posts will alternate between two lanes.

This is about the personal forces behind commercial success.

Ego. Discipline. Politics. Taste. Resentment. Trust. Timing. Reinvention. Dealing with people who did you wrong. Knowing when to keep your head down and when to make noise. Learning how to read a room. Learning how to not become bitter when the road gets ugly.

Some of these posts will come from what I am seeing now. A lot of them will come from things I have been through personally.

Because the more I work around high-performing people, the more obvious it becomes that success is not just strategy. It is emotional control. It is judgment. It is stamina. It is knowing what part of yourself is useful and what part is quietly getting in the way.

This lane will be about building.

Product at beehiiv. AI. Execution. Feature releases. Internal lessons. Deep dives into tools from the best in the world, but also the ones I’m building myself. How I’m learning what great builders do differently. What speed really looks like when the bar is high. What makes something useful instead of merely impressive.

Some of this will be tactical. Some of it will be observational. The goal is to give you a first-hand look at what it feels like to build inside a company that is moving quickly and still trying to change the game.

From someone directly on the inside. Not a spokesperson.

That distinction matters to me.

I do not want this newsletter to become corporate content. I do not want to sand off the edges or turn every lesson into a neat little framework. The point is not to make the work look cleaner than it is.

The point is to show more of the truth.

I think that matters especially for the curious, entrepreneurial people who are trying to understand what it actually takes to build something meaningful. People interested in product, AI, media, startups, careers, and the messy human layer underneath all of it.

There are plenty of places to read the sanitized version after the outcome is already decided.

I want Liight Work to feel different.

A view from the trenches while the story is still being written.

And if this week reminded me of anything, it is that the story is getting bigger.

$30M in subscription revenue is a milestone worth appreciating. Nearly $45M across the business is a moment worth sitting with. I am grateful to be close enough to see it, contribute to it, and learn from it.

But it does not feel like the finish line.

It feels like the start.

The next chapter is going to move faster. The lessons are going to get sharper.

And I want to bring you closer to all of it.

Thanks, as always, for reading.