Knowing Your Customer by Being Your Customer
Beehiiv’s Tyler Denk on Knowing Your Customer by Being Your Customer
The founder and author of the Big Desk Energy newsletter shares his thoughts on how to write an amazing email subject line, and more.
Photo: Getty Images
Tyler Denk. Photo: Aleksey Kondratyev
Tyler Denk is off to a fast start this year. His newsletter company, Beehiiv, has already announced a new website-building tool and is putting together a creator collective in a bid to compete with rivals like Substack. And to get this interview with him, I had to find a window late last week in among a board call and a flight to Bogota (because why not live a little?).
Though Denk, like any founder, is constantly operating by the seat of his pants, he clearly relishes every aspect of the founder life: his aggressive schedule, jampacked product release roadmap, and status as a very online founder. Inc. readers got to know him when we profiled him in December. And what impresses me about Denk, in addition to his happy warrior attitude, is his understanding of just what truly motivates his customers: growing audiences and a path to making consistent money.
So I decided to double-click on this, and the result is a pop-up content series focused on how to strengthen your customer relationships through email and otherwise that Inc. and Beehiiv are partnering on this week. Over the next few days, you’ll hear from some of the major voices in the Beehiiv creator community, including entrepreneur and talent expert Bill Kerr and founder-model Ashley Graham. But first, to kick us off, I wanted to chat with Denk about how Beehiiv itself has converted a strong point of view and intimate understanding of its customers into a growing business. Here’s our conversation.
Inc.: You co-founded the business in 2021 with Ben Hargett and Jake Hurd and are on track to do $35 million this year. How do you build a product—and a product roadmap—that makes customer loyalty a reality?
Tyler Denk: It starts with just genuinely understanding our customers better than anyone in the world. My co-founders and I were all early employees at Morning Brew, and I helped build its audience-acquisition strategy, internal tools, monetization engine, and almost everything in-between. I knew that business like the back of my hand and was as deep in the weeds as you could possibly be. I’d argue that almost every newsletter on the platform aspires to be some version of Morning Brew—and I know that playbook better than anyone.
In early 2024, I launched my own personal newsletter, Big Desk Energy. I had always wanted to launch a newsletter and share the behind-the-scenes stories and strategies we were leveraging at Beehiiv, because I think there’s a lack of useful and transparent information for founders from founders who are actually in the trenches building. It also doubled as me becoming a true power user of the platform, so I don’t just understand our users—I am the end user.
Lastly, it sounds simpler than it is, but we genuinely listen to our customers. We have a community Slack channel and are extracting insights and sentiment from our users at all times. We are also incredibly active across social channels doing the same. When users ask for new features, we prioritize them and build them (and quickly). Being able to do that again and again and again is what builds loyalty and buy-in from our customers. They know that we have their backs.
People talk about peak newsletter or peak email, the notion that digital marketing has become oversaturated. Has it? I assume you would disagree–if so, what do those folks get wrong about consumers?
Have we seen peak TV, peak music, peak social media content—or do those content mediums all continue to expand considerably without the same criticism? What’s ironic is that email is actually the only one of these that is almost semi-required to use on a near-daily basis for work and life.
The difference, I believe, is that email actually comprises many different things—it’s multi-utilitary. In addition to the useful emails and newsletters that I receive and look forward to, I get hundreds of cold emails per day, tons of receipts, and recurring notices. Depending on the volume of bullshit in my inbox, it can make the email experience as a whole less enjoyable. That’s different than say, Netflix, where there is an overload of mediocre content that you can just browse right past without it impacting your experience.
Email isn’t going anywhere, and more creators and businesses are starting to take notice of how effective of a channel it is. Many quote it as being their most performant channel, bar none. Beehiiv is helping to make email great again.
OK, so then what is your secret to writing an effective subject line? What makes people click?
There’s no one size fits all, but there are two trends that typically hold true. First, ambiguity is better. It’s hard to measure ambiguity, but you want to prompt some level of curiosity without it being total clickbait. If the subject line summarizes the email effectively, what’s the need to open it? At Morning Brew, one of the best performing newsletters we ever sent had the subject line “Jeff Leaves Amazon”—it was so shocking and sudden. Why would Bezos leave Amazon? It prompted one of our best open rates ever—and Bezos didn’t leave, it was Jeff XXXX. And second, shorter is better. For the past two years at Beehiiv, we have run an analysis on open rates relative to length, and the shorter the better.
What business-building content do you read and subscribe to, and why?
Most of the newsletters that I read are news and analysis, ranging from business to politics to tech. While none are pure play business-building content, just being informed on the latest stories and trends is incredibly useful. If you want specifics: Morning Brew, Axios, The Information, Stratechery, Pirate Wires, and tons of more niche content from dozens of different creators and publishers (mostly on Beehiiv).
I also read a lot of biographies—Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, Shoe Dog—and probably consume about 10 hours of podcasts per week, like All In, My First Million, Acquired, Invest Like the Best, and Pivot (at 2x speed of course). Hearing other people share stories and insights about building cool things serves as a good bit of inspiration—I want our journey at Beehiiv to be story worthy.
You brag a lot online about your ARR. Each time it has taken a step, do you have a good sense of why it has taken that step?
It’s funny that I’ve never once considered it bragging—we’re still a nascent startup, an underdog, in an industry full of incumbents. I share the milestones because a lot of people have been following the journey since we onboarded our very first beta users. I hope the posts serve as inspiration for other founders so that they too can push forward and find success in their own right.
When I tried raising our seed round in the summer of 2021, investors didn’t want to touch it. They thought the space was too crowded, that our roadmap was too ambitious, that we weren’t a team capable of accomplishing much. So publishing the milestones are also a bit of a fuck-you to everyone (which was almost everyone) who had doubted us.
I’ve always shared the Beehiiv journey, both the good and the bad, from the earliest days. The building-in-public approach has worked well for us—if I wasn’t open to sharing insights and milestones, I don’t think I’d have 80,000 people reading my newsletter, or that I’d be answering these questions for Inc. right now. The updates have also helped a ton with social proof, hiring, and raising capital.
As for why our ARR continues to grow, it’s simple: customer obsession and loyalty.
If you could ask your customers a question or two right now, what would it be? What are you still seeking to learn from them?
The same two questions I always ask, and the only two I really care about:
What can we be doing better at Beehiiv (i.e., what’s missing, what’s not good enough, etc.)?
And what is the number-one problem you’re facing in general?
The first question helps us improve our current offering to better serve our users today. The second question helps me better understand our users more broadly and where there’s opportunity to expand or offer additional value in the future.
Over the life of the company so far, in what ways has your understanding of your customer base changed?
It hasn’t. We launched the business because we had a very clear thesis and saw an opportunity to build a best-in-class product. We’re still operating based on that same thesis. The increasing revenue is just a reflection of our ability to execute.
Great Advice....... Plus
We encourage our clients to copy the mystery shopping form we develop for the and have their employees shop the competition. It's also a great exercise to give a new employee so that they can better understand what it's like to be a customer.
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