Email newsletters have become popular for creators to connect with their audience, share updates, and promote their work. While tools like Mailchimp and even Substack generally dominate the newsletter platform market, Beehiiv
If you're a serious content creator looking for a fresh and user-friendly platform to launch your newsletter, Beehiiv is your best bet. It might be time to switch if you're a creator with an existing newsletter on a competing blogging platform.
We're strongly endorsing Beehiiv, so let's get into our Beehiiv review, a leading newsletter platform for creator.
Beehiiv Review: Everything You Need to Get Started Founded in 2021, Beehiiv
At a high level, the Beehiiv platform is dead simple to get started and manage your newsletter. They have many customizable templates, allowing you to choose the perfect design for your newsletter. Whether you prefer a clean and minimalist look or a bold and vibrant aesthetic, the Beehiiv website has a template that will suit your needs.
For creators in 2023, a platform having a clean and crisp user interface and experience feels like table stakes, and Beehiiv does a good job here. The platform is actually fun to use. We doubt anyone would say Mailchimp or CampaignMonitor are fun. Beehiiv goes beyond just providing templates and providing a great user friendly interface here.
The platform also offers a variety of features to help you create engaging and compelling newsletters. With Beehiiv's drag-and-drop editor
So whether you're just starting out or a seasoned creator, Beehiiv is worth a look.
Founded in 2021, But Growing Like Wildfire We've been praising Beehiiv profusely, but before we go past the user experience and the specific features, let's talk about the company's background. Understanding this helps understand why the product is so killer. Skip this section if you don't care about the beehiiv free founding story and want to jump into the product.
Beehiiv was founded in 2011 by Tyler Denk Benjamin Hargett Jake Hurd. bought by Insider for $75M
The company raised an initial $4m $12.5M Series A
Shaan Puri - One of the hosts of My First Million Scott Galloway Alex Lieberman - Alex was one of the MB founders, speaking to his belief in what the Beehiiv team is building if he is willing to invest.Ankur Nagpal - Another prominent founder-investor, Ankur, is the founder of Teachable That's an all-star cast of angels and VC firms to propel Beehiiv for the years ahead. With their Series A, the company likely is still worth around $50M, which pales in comparison to Mailchimp being sold for $12B Substack being valued at $650M
Tyler posts regularly on LinkedIn about how Beehiiv has been growing rapidly. He'll share product updates, but he's also shared stats about Beehiiv's growth trajectory. As of August 2023, Beehiiv is at $4M annual recurring revenue (ARR), an essential metric for SaaS companies like Beehiiv. More impressively, based on these growth stats, it's taken Beehiiv 15% of the time to get their 4th million in revenue compared to their first. Put another way, they're growing 7 times as fast as about half a year ago. That's impressive for any start-up, let alone one in such a saturated space with highly entrenched competitors.
Beehiiv's Growth Chart
We're not the only ones who think Beehiiv is promising. The founders were listed on the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Marketing "The 15 most promising advertising and marketing tech startups of 2023, according to VCs
Bonus : Tyler shares his journey with Beehiiv thus far on the Founder's Secret podcast.
What is Beehiiv? At its core, Beehiiv
If, as a content creator, you've ever wanted to sell something to your audience, building an email list is a good idea. A newsletter is a great way to communicate if you ever want to share your thoughts, reflections, learnings, or any other content with your target audience. Finally, having access to an email list also means increasing your brand deals exposure (and charging brands more) and even running affiliate offers to your audience.
All creators, from lifestyle creators and teachers to musicians and fashion stylists, might have their very own website, landing page and email lists. Small businesses that are less than 10 people may consider creating a weekly newsletter to stay in touch with their audiences.
However, historically, creating an email newsletter was a big lift. Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor, the incumbents in this space, are more geared towards serving large corporations than individual creators. Their platforms focus on features relevant to enterprise companies and not single creators. Beehiiv's focus on the casual creator gives their product a different look and feel -- it's much more intuitive and straightforward.
Similarly, because the founding team comes from Morning Brew, where they were focused on experimentation and figuring out how to grow their subscriber base, Beehiiv seems to prioritize this more than the incumbents, as you'll see from their feature list.
If you're a creator and think a newsletter makes sense, Beehiiv is where you should start.
What are Beehiiv's Key Features that Differentiate It? Beehiiv's features are categorized into 4 key areas of product development: Publish, Grow, Analyze, and Monetize.
This is intuitive enough if you consider the key functions of what a good newsletter platform should be able to provide:
Publish Features related to creating and pushing content to your audience.Grow Features related to growing your audience.Analyze : Diving deeper into your data to pull insights like what content resonates with your audience and where you get new subscribers.Monetize : Features related to helping creators turn their following into income.Let's dig into each of the different tools in these sections and what the specific features Beehiiv offers to support these general goals.
Beehiiv: Publish Beehiiv makes it easy to publish
Likewise, every newsletter on Beehiiv gets an automatically associated website created. This is useful as a way to have a landing page to collect new subscribers.
Historically, companies ran newsletters, so they might have had a sign-up form on paid subscription and pricing page of their site. However, if you're a creator and your only medium is a newsletter, you need a website to share your sign-up form. Beehiiv works for a 'just-a-newsletter-creator' type creator through their sign-up page.
The website functionality offers some features, too, like a similar level of customization, SEO-optimized pages, a custom domain name domains, the ability to filter through posts, and charging for select content. This is a lot of great functionality for an added feature.
Bonus: If you want to create graphics for your blog post, something Beehiiv does not offer, consider editing tools Microsoft Designer Glorify
Beehiiv: Grow Beehiiv's growth features
These growth features differentiate Beehiiv from all the other newsletter platforms by a long shot. This makes Beehiiv a fantastic choice for many creators, especially creators who care about growth, which ideally should be most creators.
Referral Program Major newsletters like The Skim, The Hustle, and Morning Brew grew significantly using integrated referral program loops. Building these tools requires engineering, product, and marketing support to figure out all the features and logistics of how to run the referral program feature and ensure the technology matches the flow and can handle scale. The Beehiiv team, having worked at Morning Brew, knows how valuable these referral programs can be, so they've built this feature into Beehiiv. Its features like this being part of the product from the start make Beehiiv a modern solution for creators looking to start a newsletter.
With this feature, creators can create milestones (e.g., drive 10 new subscribers) and rewards (e.g., get a free trip to the Bahamas), embed form share the referral module in their newsletters all in one solution and click, and then let readers do the rest. With this paid plan, creators can sign up for additional software, configure that, and pay a separate fee.
The complete list of features built into the Referral program includes:
Custom Rewards Native Integration Into Your Newsletter No Code Customization Dynamically Generated Links Fraud Protection Reward management Insights and metrics On-Brand Look and Feel Fully Automated This is a robust product offering and an intelligent way for content creators, to grow their newsletter following.
Recommendation Network Beehiiv's Recommendation Network is a simple but effective way to acquire new users organically. For all purposes, it's a built-in native advertising network for newsletters. If you opt into the network, an ad for your newsletter will appear in other creator's newsletters as a recommendation. This is akin to how native advertising networks like Taboola and Outbrain work. Applying this to the modern newsletter platform space is a new twist and shows the innovative and forward-thinking the Beehiiv team approaches their product.
Boosts We could write a whole article about the Boost feature. For now, you can think of this as similar to the recommendation network, but instead of joining the recommendation network and letting the system recommend paying subscribers for your newsletter where it makes sense, you take matters into your own hands and pay for new subscribers. Since you can charge brands to sponsor your newsletter, paying to acquire new users may make sense for select newsletters, especially in high-value niches.
In this setup, there are two newsletters: one being paid plan be promoting and one being paid plans be promoted. The one being paid plan be promoted pays the one being paid plans be promoted on a CPA basis for every new subscriber. It's a closed-loop ad network working on a CPA basis for Beehiiv-exclusive customers.
The team built this partly because they realized from their time at Morning Brew that subscribers from other newsletters tended to be high-value and highly engaged. This functionality allows content creators to take into this phenomena at scale if they are willing to spend some ad on acquisition.
Magic Links One delightful aspect of the recommendation network is that users can subscribe to a recommended newsletter with the same account with one click. This likely makes this channel higher converting than if the user had to go to a webpage and input their email. Beehiiv calls this Magic Link.
Final Thoughts on Beehiiv's "Grow" Features Beehiiv deserves commended for building these growth features into their core product. These features differentiate Beehiiv from its competitors.
Generally, as a newsletter creator, you need more on how you can grow your audience. Before the Beehiiv partner program built these features, allocating paid spend toward acquirer newsletter subscribers was rare and challenging. By signing up with a referral program feature Beehiiv, creator unlocks more tools at their disposal to grow their paid newsletters further, something that's unique to the Beehiiv network.
Beehiiv: Analyze Beehiiv's Analyze tools
Advanced Segmentation Beehiiv gives newsletter creators the ability to segment subscribers based on a variety of engagement metrics. This can help creators make decisions around acquisition, content strategy, etc. This segmentation also allows creators to conduct bulk actions seamlessly. Basic but essential features for newsletter hosts focused on growth.
One-Click Polls Similar in tech to the Magic Links feature, one-click polls allow creators to make pools and collect data from subscribers right inside the email. This will enable creators to collect feedback and understand more about their target audience intuitively and seamlessly.
Subscriber Attribution Beehiiv keeps track of where users are subscribing to a creator's newsletter. This lets growth-focused creators know what's working and where to double down. Especially if you are allocating time and money to growth, as a creator, you want to see where you can most efficiently acquire new subscribers. The Subscriber Attribution feature gives creators this detailed visibility -- akin to a Google Analytics dashboard but for their newsletter. This is powerful for creators who choose to lean into it.
Beehiiv: Monetize Beehiiv's Monetize product
Selling premium subscriptions Finding advertisers through the ad network Profiting from Boosts as a publisher Selling Premium Subscriptions The ultimate business model in the newsletter space: selling premium subscriptions directly to your subscribers. Many large newsletters make most of their revenue from direct sales. For the right creators, this is the best way to go. Beehiiv makes this simple for creators to implement. Given the company's business model of charging a monthly SaaS fee, unlike SubStack, Beehiiv scales well for prominent creators who would rather pay a flat SaaS fee than 10% of all subscription revenue.
Finding Advertisers Through the Beehiiv Ad Network Publishers can join Beehiiv's Ad Network, where they can find brands to collaborate with. This referral program is not the most inspiring or original aspect of Beehiiv since there are competitors in this area, like Paved Swapstack
Update : Beehiiv acquired Swapstack
Boost (as a Publisher) They already make up for what Beehiiv needs to improve in originality with their Ad Network with their Boost Product. Creators can monetize their newsletter by joining the Boost marketplace as a publisher. By showing recommendations for other newsletters active subscribers that are also active subscribers or subscriber willing to pay, creators can uniquely make incremental revenue from existing site without creating a poor user experience by posting irrelevant ads.
Like Beehiiv's Growth features, Beehiiv shows promise in its monetization features and roadmap. This is likely one of the least developed aspects of their product, but for a company that's been around for a few years, they've done more for newsletter creators than incumbents have in 5x the time.
Beehiiv Pricing Beehiiv's pricing
Each of these price points unlocks additional features. For instance, the free launch plan still does not allow for custom domains, similar to most products that offer custom domain options. Likewise, Boosts is only available to brands on the launch plan or the Scale plan. There is also an enterprise option that can get highly custom and would require going through a sales team to negotiate pricing and SLAs.
Beehiiv: Sign-Up, Login and Own Website Signing up for the Beehiiv free plan is a simple process. You can get started login here
The actual sign-up process is pretty simple and consists of 3 questions: the name of your newsletter, some information about you, and a password. Once you put this, your account is created, and you can start designing and publishing your newsletter.
Beehiiv vs. Mailchimp MailChimp has been around since 2001 and was acquired for $12B a few years ago. This alone tells us a lot about Mailchimp. They are a legacy player in the email service provider space. They service large corporations, so their priorities likely include ensuring 99.9% uptime, Single Sign-On (SSO), and API integrations. For casual or starting creators who are not corporations with heavy security and technical requirements, Mailchimp is an overkill for their needs. Unless you're Coca-Cola, we don't recommend Mailchimp. Beehiiv is the way to go.
Beehiiv vs. SubStack Substack is an interesting comparison for Beehiiv. Both platforms can be used to run a newsletter and potentially profit from your audience. So, they seem like competing products. Technically, they are, but they likely attract very different types of content creators and paying customers. Substack came to the scene, taking a stand for free speech and diversity of speech that they felt was potentially threatened on the internet because of social media platforms and their algorithms. As a result, many of SubStack's newsletters are more academic, political, or insights-based.
Beehiiv appeals to a different audience or values. Instead, Beehiiv is built for a more casual and mainstream newsletter creator. It's built for creators who care about streamlined creators, growth, and monetization -- all of which Beehiiv does an exceptional job of executing and providing value for customers.
Beehiiv is a better bet for the median creator, but not everyone.
Beehiiv vs. ConvertKit ConvertKit is yet another competitor in the saturated email space. It's an exciting option that could make a lot of sense for a segment of creators. Namely, ConvertKit offers a robust product with many features, including some comparable to what Beehiiv offers, like their sponsorship network and paid recommendations. However, the product does not feel as easy to use and intuitive as Beehiiv. Likewise, while the pricing may seem cheaper at first glance, at comparable amounts of subscribers, ConvertKit is significantly expensive.
ConvertKit may be worth considering for creators who may one day expect to have upwards of a couple hundred thousand or more creators. This is mainly because they strongly emphasize automation features, including a connection to Zapier, making it a powerful platform for larger newsletters. Beehiiv may ultimately build more into their product, but for more sophisticated newsletters, ConvertKit is worth considering.
Beehiiv AI Beehiiv recently announced a suite of AI tools and features to help creators. These features include AI Writing assistant, AI text tools, AI Image tools, and an AI Translator.
Are There Any Beehiiv Promo Codes? Beehiiv doesn't have live promo codes as of August 2023. Neither do they give affiliates promo codes to share with their audience. This could change in the future.
Note: Beehiiv may run select promos that are not public.
Should You Use Beehiiv? This brings us to the final question we've been trying to answer: Should you use Beehiiv? Our honest answer is a clear yes. The product is simple but compelling and a strong fit for most creators looking to launch a newsletter and more robust creators looking for a streamlined experience managing their newsletter. Unlike competitors, Beehiiv is focused on helping creators grow and monetize their subscribers. This product focus makes sense given the founder's background at Morning Brew, which grew to 4 million subscribers.
Beehiiv is hardly 3 years old. As someone considering starting a newsletter in 2023, we would bet on Beehiiv
![Beehiiv: The Newsletter Platform for Creators [Review Updated for 2024]](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/626be0409a74b1a1df7b7df5/6520fa8030e6e9cbf2aab95c_64f06d43ce477a416b301077_The%2520Creator%2520Investor_Beehiiv%2520Main%2520Pic%25202.png)
