Beehiiv: Building in Public, Scaling in the Open
Beehiiv’s rise shows the power of building in public. From nights-and-weekends commits to scaling billions of events, the team turned transparency into trust, feedback into features, and community into a moat—proving openness can outpace stealth as the ultimate growth strategy.
Frustration. Possibility. Same table.
That’s how beehiiv began—three ex–Morning Brew engineers building nights and weekends—not in stealth, but in public. From first commits to billion-event scale, they proved the fastest growth comes when the world watches you build.
For founders, makers, and builders, it’s proof that narrative, transparency, and constant community feedback can accelerate both trust and innovation.
The Brew Blueprint
Beehiiv’s roots trace back to Morning Brew—a newsletter scaled on custom tech and obsessive growth.
Tyler Denk, beehiiv’s co-founder and CEO, was hire #2 at Morning Brew. Over years, he and a lean team built referral systems, a custom CMS, deep analytics, and bespoke ad tech—taking the Brew from 100,000 to 3 million+ subscribers.
Outside Brew’s walls, most creators couldn’t replicate it. They stitched together WordPress, Mailchimp, duct-taped dashboards, basic referrals, and manual analytics. What Brew’s small tech team made seamless took others weeks of patchwork.
The spark: empathy for these creators. If you could package the best tools Brew had—landing pages, referrals, analytics, growth automations—into one streamlined platform, anyone could run a pro-level newsletter without friction.
Early Grind, Public Lens
Denk, Ben Hargett, and Jake Hurd—three former Brew engineers—started beehiiv on the side. Nights. Weekends. Remote calls in 2020 and 2021.
But unlike most stealth-mode startups, they built in the open. From first commits to early prototypes, they posted progress, setbacks, and questions—on Twitter, Substack, indie hacker forums, and direct emails to beta users.
Why? Because building in public does four things at once:
Tightens community.
Speeds up feedback.
Signals trust.
Expands reach far beyond cold outreach or PR.
Every update, bug confession, and feature brainstorm drew comments, DMs, and real user stories—feedback loops that boosted velocity.
When a GoDaddy outage took the platform down for hours, they posted the postmortem—warts, lessons, and all. When they swapped analytics from Postgres to ClickHouse to handle scale, they documented the decision so others could learn from their scars.
Community as Moat
This openness attracted not just solo creators, but big lists, indie brands, and enterprise teams.
Beehiiv’s team asked in public: What’s broken? What would 10x your workflow?
Signature features—Boosts (a creator cross-promo marketplace), 3D analytics, advanced referrals—came directly from those conversations.
It became normal to see customers quote-tweeting launches, pointing out bugs, and celebrating fixes in real time.
That visibility had a compounding effect:
TIME’s CTO signed up after reading a founder blog post.
Nearly $50M raised in two rounds—closed in under three weeks.
Enterprise leads and engineering hires flowing in without heavy outbound.
Ship / Show / Ask
The team turned their build-in-public habit into a playbook:
Ship: Release fast, even at 80% done.
Show: Explain why, how, and what broke.
Ask: Pull in unfiltered feedback from users.
Launches weren’t passive updates—they were invites to try, break, and improve the product on day one.
Feedback became a core input, not an afterthought.
This kept them locked into creator needs and helped avoid feature bloat.
Pivots in Plain Sight
Hypergrowth wasn’t smooth.
A co-founder’s sudden death less than a year in forced public grieving and operational reset.
Scaling from hundreds of thousands to billions of events a month broke systems—requiring infrastructure pivots like the move to ClickHouse.
The same transparent updates that engaged users also won over investors, compressing fundraising timelines.
They even posted openly about hiring, comp, and equity philosophy—drawing mission-driven talent who knew exactly what beehiiv valued.
From Platform to Philosophy
By 2025, beehiiv is the default for serious newsletter operators: 45+ employees, 8 countries, millions in annual revenue, powering some of the biggest lists in the world.
The product lets you:
Build, grow, and monetize newsletters.
Own your list outright.
Run integrated referrals and ads built by practitioners.
Get deep analytics and fast integrations—no bloated tech stack required.
But the real moat isn’t code. It’s trust—earned in public, update by update, launch by launch.
The Beehiiv Playbook for Builders
Beehiiv’s rise isn’t just a company origin story—it’s a modern blueprint:
Build in public for speed and trust.
Treat customers like co-builders.
Ship, show, ask—then iterate out loud.
Share both failures and wins.
Turn visibility into your flywheel.
Tomorrow’s biggest platforms won’t just solve problems—they’ll narrate the journey, invite users into the mission, and turn transparency into traction.
Because the ultimate product isn’t the software—it’s the movement that forms around it.
In beehiiv’s hive, every creator counts, every story matters, and the work is always, fiercely, unfinished.