🏔️ beehiiv Growth

Today’s edition is brought to you by Reply — the AI-powered sales engagement and cold outreach automation platform to create new opportunities at scale, automatically.

Hey there,

Welcome to the SaaS Hill, a weekly newsletter that tries to predict the future of SaaS.

Let's discuss beehiiv’s growth ⚡️.

⭐️️ Intro

beehiiv is a new-generation newsletter platform that I've been following for a while. It's a really cool product (it has an interesting approach to growth and brand positioning) and a rising star in an extremely competitive category (email marketing software, which is probably one of the oldest SaaS categories) that supports a larger meta trend - the creator economy.

Recently, I watched an interesting podcast with Tyler Denk (cofounder/ceo @ beehiiv) and Brett Malinowski on YouTube. During the podcast, Tyler shared his story about how they built and grew beehiiv, as well as insights on growing newsletters and more.

So, I decided to dive deeper and learn more about how beehiiv grows.

Here is what we will discuss today:

• beehiiv’s metrics

• How beehiiv grows

• 4 useful links

• 4 related trend reports

🔢 Metrics

beehiiv is a new-generation newsletter software that has raised $16.7 million in funding, generating an ARR of $5 million from 8.000 customers and maintaining an average revenue per account (ARPA) of $53, supported by 40 employees with an ARR per employee of $126,000.

📈 Trend Chart

Recently Tyler Denk (cofounder/ceo @ beehiiv) shared their $5 mln ARR milestone on LinkedIn. They were at the $1 mln ARR milestone on Jan 2023 (5x growth in 10 months).

• 14 months: $0 → $1m

• 3 months: $1m → $2m

• 2.5 months: $2m → $3m

• 2 months: $3m → $4m

• 1.5 months: $4m → $5m

🚀 How beehiiv Grows

Here are some growth strategies and GTM ideas that fuel beehiiv’s growth:

1. waitlist before a launch

2. product-led growth

3. strategic investors’ network

4. powered by links

5. beehiiv’s domain watermark

6. ship features fast

7. focus on features that competitors are lacking

8. user-generated content

9. build in public

1/ Waitlist

The first thing Beehiiv's founders did, even before launching the MVP, was to gather a waitlist of users who were willing to try the new product once it went live.

As a result, they managed to build a waitlist of over 500 early adopters and beta testers.

2/ PLG

beehiiv has implemented PLG (Product-Led Growth) GTM model from day 1:

• simple onboarding

• migration services

• growth loops

• freemium model

• usage paywalls

• feature paywalls

3/ Strategic Investors’ Network

Strategic investors are also a part of beehiiv's early-stage growth.

Some investors who have invested in beehiiv run popular newsletters. So they migrated their newsletters to beehiiv, and as a result, thousands of people noticed these changes and wanted to learn about the new tool they use to run their newsletters.

What a great way to leverage the investors' network to acquire first customers!

4/ Powered by Links

This is one of the most impactful growth loops for beehiiv. Every email sent by beehiiv users to their subscribers includes a "Powered by beehiiv" link.

beehiiv users have already sent over 3 billion emails through their platform.

With a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.5-1%, that's 15-30 million clicks to their website and even more impressions.

It appears that this strategy has helped beehiiv generate tens of thousands of sign-ups.

Btw, this is how I discovered beehiiv almost 2 years ago when I was reading Milk Road’s newsletter.

5/ beehiiv’s Domain Watermark

This is another interesting growth loop used by the beehiiv team.

Users can use the product for free for as long as they want, but this freemium version has certain limitations.

One of them is that you can't use custom domains.

As a result, all landing pages hosted on the platform will include beehiiv's domain.

So when they share a new issue on social media, everyone will see their domain.

6/ Ship Features Fast

The team launched beehiiv with a limited number of basic features, significantly fewer than well-known products in this space offer.

They positioned themselves as a company that ships new features fast, and this was an intentional strategy. They want users to feel that they will get something new and cool soon, so there is no need to change the platform.

I have to admit, this strategy worked. I remember when Substack introduced their recommendations engine, and I thought, "Hmm, maybe I should switch to Substack." Then, all of a sudden, beehiiv launched a similar feature within a few months or so.

7/ Product Roadmap

beehiiv's team also made a smart move when it comes to the product roadmap. A significant portion of the product backlog is focused on features that their competitors currently lack, such as AI, a referral program, recommendations, magic links, analytics, and newsletter monetization, among others.

As a result, content creators won't need to purchase additional tools to grow their newsletters.

8/ User-generated Content

The beehiiv team knew that content creators were more likely to share their newsletter growth milestones, so a pink chart of active subscribers is the very first thing users see when they log into their accounts.

When a user reaches an important milestone, they can take a screenshot of that chart and share it on social media. Consequently, even more users will discover beehiiv.

To push things even further, beehiiv’s co-founders are liking and reposting such posts to incentivize other users to share their “newsletter milestone posts”.

9/ Build in Public

beehiiv’s team build their product in public (X and LinkedIn):

1. share new product features

2. company milestones

3. company and team updates

4. customer stories and testimonials

5. customer milestones

Check out Tyler Denk (cofounder/ceo @ beehiiv) Linkedin profile.

🔗 Useful Links

1. How To Make $500,000 A Month In SAAS by Brett Malinowski

2. beehiiv overview by Sacra

3. Beehiiv, a newsletter platform, gets $12.5M in its inbox by TechCrunch

4. How Beehiiv Used Growth Loops to Reach $100k MRR in 14 Months by Marketing Examined.

🤝 Related SaaS Trends

1. 🏔️ Newsletters 2.0 > how newsletters redefine creator and media landscapes

2. 🏔 Creator Economy > raise of small businesses built by self-employed creators

3. 🏔️ Solopreneurship > start and run your business independently

4. 🏔️ Viral Loops > unlock low CAC growth opportunities

Thanks for reading. See you next time 👋
Best, Vlad

Three ways I can help you scale your SaaS business

💻️ List of 18.000 SaaS companies for cold outreach, VCs and marketers
🚀 List of 170+ SaaS growth tactics to never run out of ideas
📝 20 Curated SaaS lists to expand the horizons of your curiosity