Tyler Denk at Beehiiv Beehiiv Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Can an upstart creator services company take on some of the best-known players in the space? Beehiiv believes it can. The tech company, founded in 2021 by Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett, and Jake Hurd, on Thursday announced a suite of new offerings that will take it well beyond its newsletter routes as is seeks to entice more creators to its platform. "My thesis from day one is every creator, journalist and publisher honestly cares about two things: It's typically growing faster, and making more money," Denk tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. "And if we can build tools that facilitate either of those things, that's where we prioritize our time, so the digital products, being able to pull in analytics, that into like having a more comprehensive suite so they can better understand their audience, so they can grow faster and so they can make more money. We also don't take a cut of subscription revenue, unlike Substack and with digital products, we won't take a cut of revenue either." Related Stories Business Tubi Inks Deal With Hartbeat for Creator-Driven Film Slate (Exclusive) TV MIPCOM Wrap: Creator Economy Eats TV's Lunch at Cannes Confab The new offerings are meant to build out the platform in a way that is more fully-fleshed out for journalists and creators, complementing existing offerings like a burgeoning advertising network that Denk says brings in around $1 million per month in revenue. "A lot of these content creators and publishers don't have massive sales teams, or they're an independent operation, they want to spend their time focusing on their content, they don't want to spend time selling to Nike and AG1," Denk says. "So if we can bridge the gap and provide that optionality, I think there's a ton of upside there." Beehiiv has been growing like crazy in recent years, with users that include established publishers like Time and The Boston Globe, as well as creators and independent companies like Oliver Darcy's Status and Milly Tamati's Generalist World. "I live on this little island in the middle of nowhere. It's in in north of Scotland. There's 191 people there. But from that island, I can create this newsletter, which makes six figures. It helps 1000s of people. And so I think about the barrier to entry of creating content that reaches many, many people, it's just like an extraordinary time to be in," Tamati says. "I can just totally see the play, that they're going from newsletters to this entire ecosystem, for example, like we host a podcast, we have the YouTube and now that all exists within the Beehiiv platform. It's just such a no brainer." Denk says that Beehiiv now has a $32 million annual run rate, and some 55,000 active users (for comparison, Substack reportedly had a run rate of $45 million in its recent $100 million funding round). He estimates that creator and publisher earnings are around $3 million per month, though he notes that it doesn't include brand deals that or other revenue sources that creators secure outside of his platform. "I think we have more of an open approach to trying to meet content creators and journalists where they are. Ideally, we provide the best in class toolkit, but we are unopinionated in wanting you to connect with whatever other tools would help you succeed," Denk says. "Platforms like Patreon and Substack are fairly opinionated that you're building a Substack on their app, on their website. We want to be more of like Shopify, tools and infrastructure that sits behind the scenes." It's a pitch that seems to be resonating. Chris Koerner, who writes The Koerner Office across LinkedIn, X, and his newsletter, was persuaded by the sheer force of what Denk and his team were building. "I had followed the Beehiiv guys on Twitter, and they just seem like incredible founders, like they were all in on the company, whereas every other founder on Twitter, myself included, is all over the place, distracted, launching new things all the time," Koerner says. "I loved the user interface. I loved that I could integrate polls and surveys in my newsletters, and it just seemed like they were always adding new features. It just kind of looked like this was the next email platform, right? Out of all the hundreds of other options this was going to be the next one." THR Newsletters Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day Subscribe Sign Up Writers Guild of America Hollywood Guilds Make Historic Push to Unionize YouTube Content Studio Theorist Media (Exclusive) Starz Starz Losses Widen to $53 Million as Subscribers Stay Steady at 19 Million MLS Apple TV Abandons Extra Paywall for Major League Soccer Games AI Why a Top Hollywood Exec Became an AI Evangelist: A "Tidal Wave" Is Coming international "Skyn