Transcription
Hey, what's up Troy? How you doing?
Daniel, what's up buddy? I'm good. How are you?
I'm good. I work at Beehive. A lot of people know this. And Beehive is a an email web ad monetization audience development platform. Kind of your all-in-one content creator operating system. And we did something really, really exciting recently. It was called the winter release event.
First time we've ever done this. It was something we did very like Apple style keynote where Tyler and some of the team came on stage and dropped a suite of really cool products that I think totally changed the game and I wanted to talk about some of those products today with you. You being a Beehive customer, me being a Beehive employee and Beehive customer as well. I use Beehive. I dog food my own product. But how does that sound? We can walk through some of those releases together.
Yeah, I want to know more about it. one. And then two, I think I said this last week, I want to talk to you offline because I know you're killer at helping people out with beehive newsletters. And then three, I'm doing this whole content thing on TikTok and it's slowly blowing up. So, it's kind of like it's a little relevant to me. So, right now, it's it's an amazing time to hear this pitch.
Yes, we launched a lot yesterday. So, let me give some backdrop of what Beehive is, kind of what led us to this place four years after we've launched and now the space we're entering. So, Beehive is about 4 years old. We just had our fourth anniversary launched in November of 2021. And early on, it was really just email distribution platform. The three co-founders of Beehive were early employees at Morning Brew, and they really built the tools that Morning Brew used to scale to 4 million subscribers and ultimately a $75 million acquisition. And that was the Temppole proof of concept that a free newsletter could be worth eight or nine figures if done properly. And they used tools like ad placement with native copy. They used native referral programs to incentivize early adopters or super fans to really share and be that kind of word of mouth marketing tactic. They did a lot and they did it really well. And now fast forward a lot of people in the last few years have been trying to launch morning brew of blank ecosystem or niche market. And we've seen a lot of that. We've seen a lot of that in finance. We've seen a lot of that in AI. Now, what we're seeing is email evolution continuing to evolve for legacy media and businesses and people want everything to exist under one umbrella. They want their media company to be simpler. What's happened in the last 30 years is technology has just made it so outrageously difficult to configure and integrate everything internally with the data that a lot of these larger companies need and externally providing some of the resources that your users want you to provide courses digital products podcasts like where is the distribution happening email is still important but there's so much more and so this next evolution of beehive is what comes Next, we're still an email first platform. We are doing email forever. That is email is not going anywhere. But now, and I'm just going to list off some of what we launched yesterday. Digital products, websites for your podcast, which we've done with two dads and tech. You go to two dads.com, you can see a beautiful landing page of our YouTube podcast, our Spotify podcast, our Apple podcast. That's all built on Beehive. We have link in bio. Now, there are people paying for link in bio pages. $10 a month. They're just paying for this little landing page to ingest all of their different links. You can do that on be.
So, like a like a link tree competitor kind of right there.
Exactly. Okay. Exactly. Got it.
We have dynamic content. So, if you have a list of 10 million subscribers and you have people in New York and you have people in Asia and you have people in South America and you have people who are moms and you have people who are dads and you want to send a piece of content that shows visibly specific items to each of those different cohorts all in one editor, we have that now. We have our native ad network and totally overhauled what advertisers experience on their advertising dashboard and what publishers experience week to week with the opportunities that we're providing them. We have AI web builder tools. So you can literally right now today go on Beehive and tell Beehive in a chatbot what you want your website to look like and it will build you the landing page just like Levelable. We talked about this. No need to use Levelable anymore. do it right in Beehive. We have web analytics. G4 is a terrible experience. I've never met a person that loves G4. So now you have your web analytics in Beehive for your Beehive website. We have templates for your website, for your link in bio, for your web builder, for your newsletter. We have automations. So all these people out there using all these different tools to create a cohesive experience for their users do it right in Beehive. paid subscriptions, you can payw wall, you can visibly pay break different content sections, you can gate your entire page based on whether they're a paying user. The list goes on and on and on. And what we're doing is we're putting our feet in the sand and we're saying Beehive is the operating system for the content economy. People are all always familiar with the creator economy, but what's happening right now is a shift to content first media companies, businesses, creators, solarreneurs. The content economy is the next biggest thing and Beehive is going to live in the very center of it.
I mean, first and foremost, that's huge. That's an amazing winter release and I hope it went well. I didn't see it. That's on me.
It did go well. I know the recordings you suck. You suck. You suck. recording and was it was it was he up on a stage and
No, it was it was in person. It was virtual event though. So, we should we'll put it in the link. The link will be in the YouTube channel and in the show notes. Go check it out. The winter release event. You can see the recording. And you can also sign up for Beehive. If you're interested in checking out these tools, we'll put a link to sign up to Beehive in the show notes. Check it out. I mean, I really can't I can't go through everything that we have there in the short period of time we have, but hit me up. Danielbeehive.com. That's a plug. Usually I give you my two dads and tech email, but hit me up at Beehive if you have questions. I'd love to help you out.
Yeah. And that's B E H I V, not Beehive, the normal spelling. And if you capitalize the B, you're going to be in trouble. We've gone the Doyally. That is true. But that is a big So last weekend I was I think I told you this. I created this whatever this little content channel, this Tik Tok channel of like I'm just going to go find the best wings and XYZ in in Wisconsin right now, but hopefully all around. So anyways, I started a build. I used a template which was really easy to use. I did not know that there was an AI builder in there where I can almost use it like a lovable where hey this is
there wasn't yet that just went live yesterday. Uh well at the time of recording. So now you you're listening to this on Wednesday. This happened last week
and it just went live. So when you were building
Friday, November 14th, everyone.
Yes. It was probably just before that went live.
Wow. Oh, I did see the templates cuz I didn't I never have messed around with the website builder until last weekend. This is good. So, I have some stuff to play with. Actually, I think my wife has a girls night tonight after the kids go down and I want to spit up a decent looking site. So, I'm going to play with it. That's huge.
Consulting. I mean, the digital products component, you can connect your calendar and have people book paid time on your calendar just like you would with a paid Calendarly link or paid HubSpot link. It's all right there in Beehive now. So, it's everything. I mean, we are and this is V1. We're going deep. We're just getting started.
So what you're saying is it sounds like a lot, which to many people is challenging and it sound and and they hate change, right? The cost of change. There's always a cost of change for anything. There's al there's always a cost of learning as well.
Y
so because it's so much,
how do you get started? I think like even when I log into Behive, I'm like, "Okay, there's a lot of tools that I can play with here. There's a lot of things I can do." Where should someone start if they're looking into Beehive?
Yeah, you know that is something that we put as a responsibility on ourselves. User onboarding is maybe the most important part of a SAS product is the customer should not have to wonder what's next. They should start an account and they should be walked through here is the part of the platform you should start on. Here are the different elements and functionalities available. We recommend implementing your website first and having a landing page. you. Here's some templates available. Here are what the definitions of these different products mean that you might not be familiar with already. So, transparently, we did release a lot at once. And we're already fielding some of the different power users we have who reach out and they're like, I want to know how to do all the different things you just said yesterday. I mean, this changes the landscape of my entire company. I'd love to implement all these as fast as possible. But with that user feedback, we're of course going to develop and and implement changes in the onboarding flow. But we really do take onboarding very seriously. So the kind of built-in productized onboarding is pretty good and it's gotten better and it will continue to get better as we continue to release new counterparts.
Yeah. So who, this is going to be a very tough question. It's probably going to be a broad answer as well. Who is the ICP for Beehive? who's like actually someone that's a good fit and and then even to add on to that, who's a bad fit?
I'll start with who's a bad fit first. There are tools like Instantly and Apollo and Sales Loft that are very good at sending emails targeting cold outreach. It's what they're for. That's what they were built for. That's how they profess this is what you use our product for. BI is not meant for cold outreach. We are meant for warm email sending to people who have raised their hand and said, "Send me the emails. I want to receive the emails. I read the emails."
We're really meant for a clean hygiene list, eye deliverability, you know, warm touches in an email newsletter or email flow. Now, ICP is a few buckets. On the one hand, you have Time magazine, and they're a current customer of ours, a power user. They have about 20 newsletters, millions of subscribers, and they're a newsroom, and they're a legacy newsroom. and they've been around forever, 100 year plus, you know, company with who knows how many hundreds of thousands or millions of articles written in that time. They are a perfect fit for what we call the enterprise platform on Beehive. And there's higher security, there's higher, you know, support touches, dedicated customer success managers. You have really more granular elements in the platform at that level. And so that type of sender is who I deal with every day. I'm I'm dealing with mass media companies, large businesses as well who have humongous email lists, and they know they need to be doing something more with the email list. They need easier access and usability. They need better growth systems. They need higher monetization tools and return on their investments.
And ultimately, they just need to readjust their strategy with modern tools. That's what I deal with. That's a great fit for Beehive Newsrooms, media companies. Now, as we just talked about with some of these new tools, another bucket of that ICP would be content creators, people who want the link in bio and a digital product or people who create courses and want that kind of automatic flow of subscribe, you know, course access, drip campaign, upsell, digital product, you know, consulting. Like that's
okay.
The the Justin Welshes of the world. that's perfect fit for the content economy and that category that we're carving out in the space.
And then you have your your typical just like SAS companies. Product Hunt and um I'm just trying to think of some different SAS companies. Wow, that's the only one that comes to mind that use Beehive. There's a lot of them though. I'm just being put on the spot and I I'm blanking here. But you know, people who are a SAS Beehive, I mean Beehive is a SAS. We also use Beehive for our own product newsletter and so that more warm touch like always on I don't want to say email marketing cuz that's a very broad term uh but email marketing more traditional email marketing but yeah, we're a newsletter first tool but that is evolving as we launch some of these new tools.
Awesome. Thanks for breaking that down. I feel I feel like a lot of people spend a ton of time and a ton of effort building out their email strategy and they're using things like, you know, the legacy tools that could be like Mailchimp or something like that. U maybe they're using something like Substack if they're a creator. What does that migration look like to go from one platform to another if they're already using something else?
Yeah. Well, it depends on what they're using. So with the larger massive media companies, you know, it could take months to really fully develop a beehive instance because,
you know, they might have dozens of newsletters. They might have five or 10 or 15 million subscribers. They might have hundreds of thousands of different pieces of content that they're trying to morph and and, you know, migrate or at least mask as a migration. A lot of complicated nuance there. Typically, it's not nuanced with a creator or a business. They'll they'll be moving from Mailchimp or Substack or Active Campaign or Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, even like a lot of different platforms out there where you export your data from that platform. You import your data into Beehive. We have a lot of importer tools for like a Mailchimp where you can also bring over your content. So, not just your subscriber data, but all the past archives that you've written on Mailchimp. So, in in general, it's straightforward for I would say someone with tens of thousands of subscribers. It's same day, same week for sure to just get it all set up. Now,
I always tell people it's going to be up to you how fast the post migration experience is because some people want onetoone. I don't want anything to look different. I just want what I have here. Okay. Well, that's one approach. But a lot of people take the opportunity during that migration to change everything. build a new website, build a new newsletter, redesign, you know, everything. And so, of course, that's not going to maybe take an hour. That could take days or weeks depending on how much time you spend on it. But in that case, the onus is on you to either either speed up or or slow down that migration process.
Got it. And so, if I'm just now starting a business, how do I is there a free version? Like, how do I get my how do I get my feet wet?
Yeah, there is a free version. There's also a 30-day free trial of the paid versions. The free version is going to be a great starting point for someone who has literally no revenue, has no idea what that strategy looks like, and really wants to experiment and play around with the platform. You're going to be limited on some of the tools I've mentioned, which are gated to the paid only tiers, but we make it as easy as possible for you with that free trial and also the paid tier component. So, the price for a paid plan for up to 1,000 subscribers is different than for up to 200 or 2,50. 2,500 subscribers is different than five is different than 25. So, you're not paying for a ton that you don't need. You're paying for what you need at first. And in that case, you can kind of trickle in and experience some of those paid products. I will say Beehive is one of the only platforms that genuinely if you're using the product well, you will profit from the product. That's not a promise because a lot of people, you know, there's nuance there, but a lot of people do profit from the product. And so if you're implementing some of these ideas, you shouldn't be in the red with the payment to the platform itself.
Yeah. Yeah. To give people if you're listening, you're like, "Oh, like Beehive sounds kind of interesting." To give you some perspective, my wife just shares on on TikTok. She just shares interior design ideas and then she has a newsletter and she points people there. Her hope is at some point a company like a craton barrel will be able to be like, "Hey, can we pay for a placement on your newsletter?" So right now she's not using it. We have it set up. Right now she's not using it cuz she's not really pushing a ton of people there. Like I keep telling her post more Tik Toks because a lot of her Tik Toks will get thousands and thousands of views, hundreds of likes. I'm like point somebody to an email. Like just get get their email. I don't know what we're going to do with it. Just get their email. We will figure it out later. So I'm I'm pushing our harder on that. But I I genuinely think that anybody So if you did that or even what I'm doing right now, I'm just like reviewing wings around Wisconsin and I'm trying to point people to eatwithtroy.com host it on beehive. What's up? And then what I do is I I don't know I post like three or four different wing reviews in the last week. Yeah.
So I'll take that transcript, upload the transcript, create a whole newsletter with like chatbt, then I put my own voice to it, change the things, all that fun stuff. Then every Monday is like a full detailed review of that restaurant, of those wings, like a full score, everything like that. And then my hope there is kind of like the same thing kind of like what you're doing with Palmetto Parents. I bet is something along the lines of just like, hey, like I want to monetize this, so how do I get some restaurant placements in there? Maybe somebody's like, "Yo, I've got the best Buffalo sauce. Can you please put me in your newsletter?" Like that kind of stuff. That's my goal. And I think that I'm only scratching the surface with Beehive. I feel like I need to consult with you for 30 minutes to be like, "Yo, how do I monetize this?" But it's super easy. Like I I spun up the website. I got the domain and had it hosted on its own domain. I don't because y'all use entry which entry is an amazing tool back.
So simple
love entry. Love entry. It just essentially when you get a domain when you get behive it's like beehive.com/younewsletters like your website. When you get a domain entry just automatically will go to wherever you bought that domain and then make it only your domain. So mine's ew withroy but before that it was beehive.comroyro.
Shout out Jacob Wolf. I remember him building that maybe 18 months ago and it is a game changer because we used to do
Yeah. He he works at Beehive. is one of the employees here. But we used to have to do that manually and it was not an easy process if you weren't familiar with like CNAME and TXT records and registars and stuff. People were like how do I do this and it was I don't know how many support tickets we had. So yeah, now it is like just foolproof lit button.
Um I will I will say something you mentioned that I I want to because I'm on the spot here as and my reputation's on the line. Don't build an email list if you don't have a strategy to email them because I have this conversation. I know. I know. That's why you said that. That's why I'm saying this.
There are so many conversations I have and it is it is a bummer. I'll think of one. There's one person that came to me that comes to mind. I use this example all the time. They came to me with 1.8 million subscribers. They had paid with paid ads and acquisition and like a legitimate funnel over about two, three years. Never once emailed them. Came to me, hey, I'd love to start emailing these people. You can't do that. And here's why. From a high level, over that period of time, the number of emails on that list that don't exist anymore, that have never been emailed, and so will automatically land in spam because it's been so long since they've subscribed, who forgot you existed, in some cases, who died. I mean, people, oh, I've been collecting this list for 10 years, never cleaned it. I haven't emailed them in 2 years. It's like, well, you have to clean your list consistently. And there's list cleaning tools out there. That's not what I'm talking about. Those tools will scrape your list and identify, hey, here are the bounces, the hard bounces, remove these from your list immediately, and here are the valid emails. That's good to do and you should do that. What I'm talking about list hygiene is you're constantly emailing these people and then you're proactively removing those that aren't opening. The problem with acquiring emails and not emailing them is the propensity to kill your domain reputation and your deliverability on those first few sends goes up and up the longer you wait to email that initial list. So this is what I tell people in your shoes and in your wife's shoes. You mentioned start the email collection day one. Always do that. Have a welcome email tied to that email collection also day one. And in a perfect world, have a 4 to eight email slashweek plan where you can automatically send them emails. It could be a drip that's just eight weeks long. Give yourself a buffer time so that by the time you figure out what is the strategy, you have emailed them some value added email from the acquisition and over the course of some weeks of time. It's unfortunate, but with how blackbox the email world is,
the email list gets cold way faster than people think.
So, 90 days even without emailing a list. Like, well, you don't have to start from scratch, but like you kind of have to take some big steps back to start emailing that list.
Yeah, I need to I don't have a welcome email, but people are very small amounts, but people are starting to subscribe to E with Troy, and I'm starting to get a little traction.
You need email. Don't wait.
I need that welcome email. I need to have like a very personalized, authentic, welcome email. Maybe like my family, I don't know, something where it's just like I'm
You got to strike when the iron's hottest because they just gave you their information on their own.
They didn't have to do that. So, you're waiting 2 3 6 8 weeks to say something to them like they might not care about you anymore. They might not care that you exist. The iron is hottest at that moment of subscribe. And you can get very creative with this. You can implement surveys where you say, "Hey, thanks for subscribing. Tell me about yourself. What part of Wisconsin do you live in? Do you eat wings or are you just interested in the story of me eating wings? You want to meet up in real life someday? Yes or no? Radio button. And actually log all those answers into the subscriber record on Beehive. And then create automation flows for the way they answered. They say yes or no. You have an automation for both yes and no with an email addressing the way they answered that poll. I mean, all of this
I have no idea what you're saying.
And like I'm saying it on purpose because this is the complexity but the user friendliness of implementing all this.
You can do all of what I just described in a day. A day of work. You can do everything I just described.
All right. All right. I'm going to probably play around with that today. And if not today, tonight. Yeah.
Jeez,
man. I'm missing out. I'm missing out. This is Do you have like playbooks and stuff?
We do. We have a knowledge base of hundreds of upto-date very technical but easy to understand articles. We have a whole knowledgebased team that writes those every day. Very well done. We also with everything I mentioned on the winter release event have a corresponding YouTube walkthrough of what the product is and how to do it or how to use it. Um, and we have a full-time YouTube team as well behind those educational videos. They're very good. Shout out Steven Van. He's so good at this, but he really does go all the way down the rabbit hole with each of these products, but in a way that anyone technical or non-technical can follow and understand. So check out the Beehive YouTube channel. It's It's just very very well done.
Yeah. I saw a LinkedIn post yesterday that said something along the lines of now you're competing with Patreon. Is can you tell me like what what does that mean?
Yeah. I mean in the sense that we are offering digital products and paid subscriptions and having courses like
Yes, we we are.
Nice.
There are so so I have I'm a podcaster. I'm really big and right now I'm using Patreon. I've got like 4,000 patrons I think is what they call them. Nice.
No, no, not me. This is
How did I not know this about you? No, that would be I'd be so
Wait a second. That's like That's like a six figure company. What are you doing here?
Yeah. No, no, no. I'm I'm just giving a scenario. So that's me, right? So essentially same thing. I can have tiers. I can have people sign up and then they can get exclusive content for that tier. yada yada yada. The the scary thing about Patreon is that they are a walled garden where if you use their payment processor, you're stuck. And that is what Patreon's done. Patreon doesn't use Stripe or like a third party integrated payment process. Patreon uses Patreon's homebuilt native payment processor. You cannot take those paid Patreons with you.
Where Beehive uses Stripe and that's very common. Stripe is the largest payment processor in the world. Most payment processors accept Stripe in some facet. You can take what you make on Beehive somewhere else. If for some reason down the road you decide, I don't want to use Beehive. I don't suspect you will decide that. But if you do, okay, we make it very easy for you to leave. Patreon doesn't. If you start acquiring paid patrons, patrons, I don't know, on Patreon,
you can't just take them with you. And so with Beehive, you have your paid donations, you have your payment system, you have Stripe integrated, you have digital products, you have pay walls, we have a podcast website integration right now. Sneak peek for 2026 is we're going to go very deep into podcast. And so, you know, stay tuned for that. Right now, it's very easy to just integrate where your podcast are hosted to your Beehive website. And so, we've kind of started the skeleton process of what that will become in 2026.
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So where do you think where does Beehive want to go? Like what what are they trying to accomplish?
We want to own the content economy. If you think of where you build your content adjacent or content first business, it's Beehive. If you are in the content economy, you have a beehive account. you have either a beehive newsletter or a beehive website or develop your audience with the beehive growth tools or monetize that audience with the beehive monetization tools or all the above and many many more things to come. And so we want to compete with web builders and we are we want to compete with email processors and delivery you know devices and we are we want to compete with meta in the sense that if you think of where do I acquire customers as an advertiser you think Google ads you think meta you think beehive beehive will become and is already really in a way the one place on the internet that it makes most sense for an advertiser to advertise for highly engaged email eyeballs. And again, we're in the first inning of what that will become. And we're already we're already doing it. We pay out millions of dollars to companies, creators with the ad network. And advertisers are renewing their contracts with us. They're very happy with what they're seeing advertising across newsletters on Beehive.
Yeah. Yeah. That's sick. That's sick. I love that.
All right. So, this this all sounds amazing, but I do have one question. I feel like a lot of companies don't have the bandwidth to do something like this. So, let's say I do want to switch email platforms or I do want to start using Beehive, but I'm like, I don't know, Beehive. I can't learn the new tool. Do you offer services? Are there consultants? Do you have agencies that you work with? What does that what does that process look like?
Yeah, we have a list of vetted agencies that we work with and partners. So, you know, kind of all across the spectrum. If you want someone to do everything for you, we have that. If you want someone to just do like paid acquisition, there are partners for that. Someone to just redesign the newsletter or the website, there's partners for that. And so we lean on those partners and they're very close to our internal team. And so it's not like, hey, here's like a phone number. Call them and you know, sayara, it's like we actually know them personally. We've vetted them. Some of us have even used them for our own businesses. And so yes, uh if you don't want to do any of it and you want to close your eyes one night and wake up the next day and have it all done for you, there are options for that. I will say we've tried to eliminate the need to do that by making the experience user friendly, but I get it. Some people are too busy or just don't have the extra bandwidth and would prefer paying for it. And so we do have vetted partners that we can certainly suggest for that.
Yeah. Got it. Awesome. Well, I know exactly what I'm going to do on my Friday night when my wife is out for girls night is I'm going to play around with the AI website builder cuz I want to build a website. So, if anyone's listening and they're like, "Damn, this kind of sounds cool. How how can they learn more?"
Yeah. Well, first of all, uh, two dads.com is our podcast website and it is built on Beehive. So, that's a great example of Beehive website. I'll also show
Yes. And and shout out again to Stephen Van who built that. But we have two websites that I'm going to drop in the show notes. One is called very good newsletters and one is called very good websites. Both are showcasing handpicked websites and beehive newsletters that are just amazing and they'll give you a lot of different creative energy and juices flowing of like what's possible here. What have other people done? I'll drop those in the show notes as well. But if you want to get started, click the link in those in the show notes for beehive.com and just start an account. Get 30 days free right off the bat. Hit me up daniel@beehive.com if you have questions. It's beehive and we would love to help you out at Beehive. Troy is just here for the ride. He's not a Behive employee, but he's a Behive customer. He's a fan. So, um, hit me up. I'd love to give you whatever you need to to help you get started.
Awesome. Daniel. Thank you. And for everyone listening, we'll see you next week. See you next week.