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Tyler Denk only had $1.55 in his bank account the day someone called him and asked if he could build a referral program for a small newsletter out of Baltimore. He had never built one before. He had no idea how to build one. But the guy offering him $3,000 to figure it out was his friend from back home, so he said yes and figured it out anyway.
That newsletter was Morning Brew. It grew to four million readers and sold for $75 million. The technology Tyler built from scratch inside of it, the content management system, the ad management platform, the dashboards, the data infrastructure, became the blueprint for what he went and built next: beehiiv, which is where this newsletter lives, and which is quietly becoming one of the most important infrastructure companies in the entire creator economy.
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I know people have been saying newsletters are having a moment for a while now, and it's fair to wonder if we've already missed the wave. Tyler made a compelling case that the opposite is true.
Morning Brew sold for $75 million. Axios sold for $500 million. The question of “are newsletters over?” ignores the fact that every major example of a newsletter-first media business has either been acquired for a life-changing number or is currently printing money as a standalone operation.
Tyler's read on where we stand is that the market has proved the model, but the vast majority of creators, journalists, and founders who could benefit from it haven't touched it yet. There is still enormous room.
Put Yourself in Uncomfortable Situations
Tyler did a brutal engineering degree while trying to run a company with two co-founders and simultaneously doing capacitor research. He drove to hackathons at Michigan and Harvard and Waterloo, slept on auditorium floors, and signed up users for a two-sided marketplace that eventually didn't work, but taught him how to code, which led directly to Morning Brew.
His pattern is to constantly put yourself in situations where failing would genuinely be bad. Not catastrophic, but bad enough that you have to figure it out. The pressure forces curiosity. The curiosity forces growth. He turned down a safe consulting job at Deloitte to join a three-person startup in a closet-sized office in New York, and he's repeated some version of that choice at every major fork since.
He does not describe this as bravery, but as the only system that has actually worked for him. Comfortable situations have never produced the same results.
Why Storytelling Is a Founder's Most Important Skill
Tyler told me about convincing one of his co-founders who was paying the bills, recently married, and thinking about starting a family, to leave a stable job at Morning Brew and help build beehiiv from scratch. No guaranteed salary and no track record. That conversation required him to paint a picture of something that didn't exist yet and make it feel inevitable. He called it storytelling.
When beehiiv was making a thousand dollars a month in revenue, he told anyone who'd listen that it was going to be a billion-dollar business. He knew it sounded irrational, but he also knew that building conviction in other people is entirely different from lying to them. You have to genuinely believe it, and then you have to take them step by step from where you are to where you can plausibly get, stacking the puzzle pieces until they can see the picture too.
Every creator who has ever tried to land a brand deal or get someone to take their pitch seriously has had to do exactly this. The ones who do it well aren't necessarily more talented. They're just better at the story.
The Art vs. Science of Building a Business
Tyler has a CFO and COO who think almost entirely in numbers, and he respects that completely. But he also believes strongly that business has an art side that numbers can't fully capture, and that the best companies hold both in tension.
His clearest example is the beehiiv Media Collective. The program brings in independent journalists who are leaving places like CNN and the New York Times to go independent. They’re given health insurance, legal review, Getty Images access, and a dedicated support person, entirely free. The science of the business says this costs roughly two million dollars a year that could be saved by cutting it entirely. The art says that those journalists are now beehiiv's most passionate advocates, championing the platform to people who have never heard of it and probably would never have found it otherwise.
You can’t put a clean number on that. But you can feel the difference it makes, and Tyler believes that difference compounds over time in ways the spreadsheet was never designed to measure.
Tyler doesn't really consider himself a creator, but he does publish a newsletter called Big Desk Energy every Tuesday, and it goes to 130,000 founders. There is no better way to know what needs to be improved in a newsletter platform than to use it every single day as a publisher yourself. He also noticed that most startup founders share almost nothing about the actual experience of building because they're afraid of what transparency costs them. Tyler has the opposite instinct. He writes about the things successful founders usually don't talk about, because those are the things he genuinely wished someone had told him.
It only takes five hours a week, but makes $400,000 a year in revenue. The equivalent of a single workday per week can generate the income of a full-time job.
beehiiv Is Building Something Bigger Than a Newsletter Platform
The most successful creators in 2026 are not just doing one thing. They have a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a podcast, a website, digital products, maybe a community. Every one of those assets has historically lived on a different platform, but beehiiv has been quietly building toward becoming the single place where all of it lives. Newsletter, website hosting, digital product sales, podcast hosting, all under one roof with one unified view of your audience.
The vision is simple: you should never have to wonder which of your thousand true fans is watching every YouTube video, opening every email, and downloading every episode. beehiiv wants to be the place where you finally can.
On that note, make sure to RSVP for the Summer Release Event! This announcement is going to be big and worth tuning in to.
📬 Creator Call-ins
"I have 40,000 Instagram followers and nobody signs up for my newsletter. How do I get them to move to email, and is it even worth it?"
Tyler's newsletter makes $400,000 a year in five hours of work per week. Yes, it is worth it. On how to actually get people to subscribe, you can’t just ask. You have to give people a reason. What works for him: he posts ten lessons on social, gives people five of them for free, and tells them they have to subscribe to get the other five. Not clickbait. Just a fair trade. Eight hours of his time writing something genuinely useful, in exchange for an email address. Most people, he said, will take that deal without complaint.
"What newsletter behavior kills growth the fastest?"
Chasing cheap, fast growth. There are a thousand ways to get email addresses on the internet, and most of them involve people who will never open your newsletter. The vanity metric of a bigger number matters far less than whether the people on your list actually want to hear from you. Quality has to be the top priority, even when it's slower, and less satisfying to watch in real time.
Go sign up for beehiiv if you haven't already, and check out the Tyler on LinkedIn!
Xo, Gigi Robinson
Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom 🐾
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