Riding the Waves

With Beehiiv, Tyler Denk built a buzzy newsletter platform and a brash online persona. Both are lucrative.

- BEN SHERRY

Tyler Denk has a migraine. His doctor says he's working too late, staring at screens too much of his day. Denk gets it. He's still figuring out an optimal work-life balance. But when that screen shows Beehiiv, his email newsletter platform, shooting past $1.5 million in monthly revenue, he doesn't feel like taking a break. He'd rather keep building.

Denk has been a fixture of the email newsletter world since 2017, when his former middle-school basketball teammate Austin Rief hired him to lead engineering and growth efforts at the business-focused newsletter Morning Brew. Denk moved from his home state of Maryland to New York City for the job, just when the newsletter format was starting to gain popularity through outlets like the Skimm and Axios. Denk learned that newsletters are, he says, "a very compelling medium and business model to build a company around."

Beehiiv, the platform he founded in 2021, is designed to help creators build and profit from their online followings. Users pay a monthly fee to gain access to a robust suite of tools, enabling them to design websites and newsletters, grow a community of readers and subscribers, and make money through ads and premium tiers, and even by boosting the popularity of other newsletters. Unlike, say, Substack, Beehiv is explicitly designed to convert readers into revenue, a process Denk helped revolutionize earlier in his career.

Rief had launched Morning Brew as a newsletter because the medium is cheap and easy to set up, but he and Denk realized that newsletters have a unique power: They free writers from relying on algorithms or needing to pivot toward whatever format social media is prioritizing. There's just a direct relationship between creator and subscriber.