Transcript of beehiiv Winter Release 2025 | Full Event

The world was dark. We created fire. And with fire came stories. Stories carved into stone. Stories pressed into paper. Stories carried on airwaves and flickering across screens. Every invention brought the same promise to be heard. Then came the internet. It promised to amplify our voices, to erase borders, to create real connection. But the promise was broken, hijacked by algorithms, controlled by gatekeepers. And yet, the fire never died. We kept it burning by building, publishing, creating. Beehive was born to keep the dream alive. to take audiences back from the platforms that stole them. To give voices back to the people with stories to tell. This is not another feed, not another algorithm. It's a return to the original promise of the internet. For builders, for visionaries, for those who refuse to play by someone else's rules, the fire still burns. And today, it belongs to the builders. Welcome to the first ever Beehive Winter release event. You'd probably think of Beehive as a newsletter platform, and you'd be right. Today, we send nearly 3 billion emails every month, powering tens of thousands of the world's top newsletters. But what makes newsletters so powerful is ownership. Owning your audience, distribution, brand, and even your revenue potential. In the age of AI and algorithms, ownership isn't just a nice to have, it's essential. That's why the newsletter ecosystem has exploded. That and because tools like VHive make it possible for anyone watching today to build their very own business. What used to take a team of 10 engineers can now be done by anyone in minutes. And you definitely don't need to be technical. Our intern has a better website than half the Fortune 500. In the past few years, we've seen some of the largest creators and publishers in the world launch and scale on Beehive. And we've also witnessed lots of these newsletters get acquired. But email was just the beginning. Last year, we acquired Typeream, an AI native website builder. And a few months ago, we brought that vision to life, launching our very own no code website product. The results have been pretty unreal. And the feedback has been even better. Some of the most creative, beautiful sites on the internet are now being built right here on Beehive. And when you combine website, newsletter, and monetization all under one roof, you unlock something even bigger. Which brings us to today. Beehive is no longer just a newsletter platform. It's the operating system for the content economy. I can't wait to show you what we're launching and what it'll mean for you. The content economy is transforming how businesses are built from the ground up and Beehive is leading the way. Today, I'm proud to announce that we are launching digital products, one of the biggest features we've ever launched. Digital products lets you package your knowledge into something tangible. It can be anything from a guide or a template all the way to one-on-one services like career coaching or consulting. The best part, you can sell these products directly to your audience without paying a scent of commission. For many creators, this is going to be the difference between building a side hustle or standing up a business. And for publishers and brands, it's a sustainable way to monetize readers beyond just ads or subscriptions. Other platforms take a piece of your earnings. Beehive lets you keep it all and put it right back into building your brand. Let me show you how easy it is to get started. Recently, I've started advising a few product teams and founders. It's really taking off, but now I want to make it more accessible to anyone who needs help with their product strategy. So today I'm going to add a 60-minute product strategy tour to my website. That way founders and PMs can book time with me directly. First, I'm going to select the appointment option and connect to my calendar. Next, I'll write a quick description of what we can cover in each session. Then add an image to make it stand out on my website. Next, I'll design the product card and the product page. This is what your readers see. So, we make it easy to create something professional and premium. Now, the best part. Your products show up wherever your readers already are and seamlessly integrates with your website and your newsletter. You can see here I've already added it to my website for the readers to see. And here I'm adding it to my latest newsletter. Once a user clicks through, they just pick an open slot on my calendar, pay to lock it in, and instantly get a calendar invite. Beehive takes absolutely no commission and there's no need for third party tools. Launching today, you'll be able to sell products like PDFs, ebooks, images, presets, templates, and even one-on-one coaching sessions. But coming early next year, you can offer full educational courses, and even sell your own merch. In short, Beehive is now the storefront for your expertise. This is a huge step in realizing our mission, helping you not just grow an audience, but build a business. The website builder has been a huge hit since we launched it back in July. In the past 4 months, our users have built tens of thousands of beautifully designed websites, all without writing a single line of code. And today, we're making it even easier. Introducing the all-new AI website builder, where you can build a fully interactive website by simply chatting with AI. Now, you're probably already familiar with some of the other vibe coding platforms out there. While the first few prompts are magical, you often get stuck at 90%, spending hours prompting over and over again, struggling to get it just right. But our AI website builder is different. It's built right on top of our existing drag and drop experience, so you can prompt it in plain English to get started. Then use the drag and drop functionality to fine-tune it until it's perfect. To get started, activate AI mode in the top right corner of the website builder. I'm going to prompt it to create a landing page for a new project that I'm working on. From there, you can drill down and add custom elements with AI. Let's make this lead magnet a little bit more memorable. How about we add a giant floating cow that spins when you hover over it? Yeah, I came up with that all by myself. But let's pivot back to the media business. If you don't want to start from scratch, you can actually upload a screenshot of your favorite website and it'll generate a twin. I'm going to use Blockwork's beautiful homepage as a starting point. And you can continue to prompt as much as you'd like to edit and create new sections and designs. I'm going to convert the purple to beehive pink and then invert the colors into dark mode. When you're done prompting, you can use the drag and drop tools until the page is pixel perfect. I'm going to add some padding and shadows to it to give it a nice floating aesthetic. But here's where it gets really awesome. As Jake just showed, you can now sell digital products directly on Beehive. Combine that with the most powerful newsletter tools in the market, and now your website, store, and newsletter all live under one roof. So, this isn't just another AI tool. It's part of a complete platform to create, grow, and monetize your audience. We started with newsletters, but today many of our most successful brands are expanding outside of the inbox. They're exploring new mediums and formats, and one of the most popular has been podcasts. But up until now, if you had a podcast, it was totally disconnected from your newsletter and your website. And as a publisher, you have to make a tough choice. Do you send people to your site? Do you send them to Apple or Spotify? or do you pay for yet another tool just so you have somewhere to display your podcast? And no matter what choice you make, your audience ends up having to bounce around all these different platforms just to find all your content. That's why we're introducing native podcast functionality directly on your Beehive site. So now you can host everything, your newsletter, your website, and your podcast all in one place. Let me show you how simple it is to set up. If you already have a podcast hosted on another platform, you can integrate it directly with your Beehive site. This is going to pull in all of your show and episode information with no extra work required. The end result is a dedicated, fully customizable homepage for your show. The best part is every time you publish a new episode, it gets displayed on your site as soon as it's published, completely on autopilot. And this just goes back to our core belief. When your content lives in one place, your audience can easily discover and engage with everything that you create. We hear it all the time from customers. Figuring out who's actually engaging is one of the hardest parts of running a content business. Our newsletter analytics are already bestin-class, but up until now, understanding your website performance meant relying on third party tools. tools that are hard to use and expensive to buy. With our new website analytics, that all changes. It's built right into the platform, so the days of having to stitch together data from multiple sources are gone. In one place, you'll get real-time visibility into how people are interacting with your site and a clear breakdown of which channels are driving the most traffic. Have legacy data on other platforms? Don't worry, we are working on new tools to import historical data. So you can compare past performance with what you're building now. Website analytics is launching in beta this quarter and will roll out to customers in Q1 next year. Link in bio can be a powerful tool to promote your most important content and products. But up until now, most creators and publishers have had to use yet another platform to set up yet another integration, which actually makes it more difficult to get a full picture of your audience. And let's be honest, paying $10 a month for a simple link in bio tool just doesn't feel right. So today we're introducing Beehive's linkin bio. Every Beehive customer now gets a premium mobile optimized linkin bio that connects seamlessly with your website, newsletter, podcast, products, and analytics. And I'm going to show you how easy it is to use. Each Beehive website now comes with a default link in bio page. You can pick from several professionally designed templates or customize your own. And the design you choose carries through across the platform. Your link in bio will match your website and newsletter so your audience gets one cohesive experience. Here's a look at my personal link in bio that I built for my newsletter, Big Desk Energy. It's styled to match the rest of my brand and plugs into my website analytics so I can better understand my audience end to end. No extra tools, way less hassle, and you can manage everything from one platform. First impressions matter, but website builders can be intimidating, especially if you don't come from a design background. And I can tell you as a newsletter creator, turning the site in your head into the site on your screen isn't always straightforward. But we don't want creators spending hours fiddling with layouts. We want them creating content, growing their audience, and building their business. That's why we're rolling out a full suite of professionally designed website templates. With Beehive, you'll have access to premium templates for entire websites and individual pages. Plus, we've created dozens of readytouse elements like subscribe forms and footers that you can simply drag and drop wherever you'd like. So whether you use an out-ofthe-box website template or customize it to make it your own, you'll be able to go from zero to launch in just a few minutes. But our focus on sharp, flexible design doesn't stop there. The brand you build on your website should carry through wherever your audience finds you. That's why we're also introducing a full library of newsletter templates to help you cut through the noise of a crowded inbox. So whether you're updating your website or publishing the latest edition of your newsletter, every audience interaction stays perfectly on brand. Imagine if every email you sent felt like it was written just for the person reading it. That's the power of dynamic content, one of our most widely requested features, and it's available starting today. Dynamic content means you can add even more personalization by serving different content to different readers. Instead of sending one newsletter to everyone, you can create thousands of custom experiences. The result, higher engagement, better deliverability, more revenue, and a deeper connection with your audience. Here's how it works. When you're writing your newsletter, just group your content into sections. Then adjust your visibility settings so only the right reader see each one. You can edit these settings to include things like reader subscription details, their location, their interest, or any custom fields in your account like age, gender, profession, or even company size. For example, rather than showing a single ad to your entire list, you can show a Manscaped ad to your male readers and a Kate Spade ad to your female readers. This makes your ads more relevant and engaging, meaning better performance and ultimately more revenue. There's also a lot more you can do. For example, you can promote a new digital product only to people who haven't already purchased it. And if you're hosting an event in New York next week, you can promote the event only to people who live in the tri-state area. Plus, you can add even more personalization with merge tags, address your readers by name, build automated emails on their birthdays, and so much more. So, however you use it, dynamic content unlocks a new world of possibilities for your newsletter and your audience. There's only so much time in the day and honestly your time is better spent creating great content than managing operations behind the scenes. And that's where automations come in. We're giving you the workflows that you need to easily grow your business. From flexible triggers to powerful third party integrations, you can now connect your newsletter to an entire ecosystem of apps and tools. There are countless ways to use automations. Let's start with one of the most important, the subscriber welcome journey. When readers sign up, you can trigger a workflow that sends them a welcome email. You can also send a web hook to Slack that alerts your team whenever someone new signs up. And then, let's say you offer paid subscriptions. You can add a simple true or false branch to spot readers who've upgraded and automatically invite them to your Discord community. And finally, you can send targeted discounts to those who might be on the fence about upgrading. So now instead of someone signing up and just waiting to receive your next post, you have a workflow that actively engages them and drives sales from day one. And that's just the beginning. In the last few weeks, we've rolled out new triggers, better analytics, and deeper visibility into every subscriber journey, all wrapped in a more intuitive design. So the bottom line is whatever workflow you want to build, you can build it on Behive. The Beehive Ad Network is home to 50,000 newsletters and many of the biggest brands in the world. These are household names like Nike, Netflix, HubSpot, and hundreds more. Just last month, we launched a brand new publisher experience that makes monetization easier and more rewarding than ever. And today, we're rolling out new advertiser tools that help brands find new customers and drive more revenue. For publishers, it all kicks off with the weekly email that we send every Sunday morning. Inside, you'll find fresh ad offers curated just for your newsletter. And you can also view your pending ad opportunities in the ad network dashboard and inbox. Here you can browse ad opportunities, preview how they'll look in your newsletter, and see your estimated payouts. Simply accept the ads you want and reject the ones you don't. Once you've accepted and scheduled an ad, it'll show up right in the editor while you're creating your post. Send your newsletter like normal and you'll get a full report a few days later. Then your earnings will land right in your Beehive wallet. From there, you can use them in platform or withdraw to your bank account. And of course, there are no contracts or long-term commitments. As for the new advertiser tools, our goal is to build the Facebook ads manager for newsletters. Our new advertiser portal lets you upload assets, set your budget, and launch campaigns all in one place. Then you can use our new advertiser dashboards to track the performance of your campaigns across thousands of newsletters all in real time. You can break down performance by content category, creative assets, and even build your own custom reports. And the Beehive Adixel tracks conversions all the way downfunnel using your preferred attribution window so you can see exactly what's driving results. The Beehive Ad Network is the only channel that allows you to sponsor thousands of quality newsletters, all optimized in real time. So, it's pretty easy to understand why advertisers continue to renew again and again and again. Deep audience relationships are the foundation of any content-led business and paid subscriptions transform those relationships into recurring revenue. Hundreds of our publishers have turned side hustles into full-fledged businesses collectively earning over $30 million by charging for premium content. The best part, you keep 100% of your earnings. In fact, Beehive is the only platform that doesn't take a single cent of paid subscription revenue. Every other platform takes a cut. Instead, we want our users to earn even more by offering a range of subscription tiers, flexible payment options, custom upgrade pages, and analytics that track revenue, growth, and performance all in real time. Just to give you a sense of what's possible, publishers like Oliver Darcy Status are already clearing over a million a year. Brands and creators should keep every dollar they earn, whether it's from digital products, ads, or paid subscriptions. I think we just dropped more features than most companies drop in a year. To quickly recap, we launched digital products where users can launch and sell ebooks, templates, coaching, and so much more. While other platforms charge as much as a 12% transaction fee, Beehive won't take a single penny from its users. That's right, 0% take rate now and forever. We launched our AI website builder where you can build fully interactive websites by simply chatting with AI. We introduced native podcast so you can serve your podcast directly on your beehive hosted website. We launched website analytics so you can get real-time visibility into how people are interacting with your site without any third party tools. We introduced our own link and bio tool. Now every Beehive customer gets a premium mobile optimized link in bio that connects seamlessly with their website, newsletter, products and analytics. We introduced dozens of new website and newsletter templates. We launched dynamic content which unlocks personalized newsletters at scale. We announced our latest updates to our automation suite which is now one of the most powerful in the industry. We shared our latest ad network updates for publishers and introduced a new suite of advertiser tools. And lastly, we've reminded the world why Beehive is the place for paid newsletters. We offer the most expansive suite of subscription features and are the only platform that does not take a cut of revenue from our users. To everyone watching this, I hope that one thing is incredibly clear. Beehive is becoming the operating system for the content economy. And we're getting there by putting our users first. In just 4 years, we're already powering tens of thousands of the world's top newsletters and websites. Everything you've seen here is the result of that work built by people who genuinely care. This is still just the first chapter of our story. There's so much more to come.