How I went from $0 to $1M in 12 months

About $5 million in revenue. So 5x in year 2.

We just did about $30 million in revenue last year, which was our fourth year in business.

Yeah, I actually think you already hit on it a bit of like, I think about founder market fit a lot and the Morning Brew story of actually— and you've talked about this before— of taking something you did at a company or something you've learned previously, become an expert in a low-risk way as an employee, and then apply those learnings to start a new business. I think in the founders that I've backed and seen become extremely successful, there's typically a through line between them doing that previously and then launching again. Quick story that I've never actually told before is while I was at Morning Brew, crypto between 2017 and 2020 was the biggest thing ever. I didn't even own any Bitcoin. I had no business starting a crypto business, but I wanted— as like a founder, I wanted to get into crypto. And so I found this like open source library of like a 3D model of like a cold storage wallet. I went to— found someone in China who could make them, bought 1,000 of them, shipped them to New York, and then like on day 2 started just trying to sell cold storage crypto wallets.

Right, right. So you needed a story at the beginning. I was given a talk and I call this the marketing kill shot. So some guy stood up and he— I go, tell me about your business. And he says, we're a marketing agent. We're a marketing agency for CPG companies, usually D2C CPG. I'm like, bro, this guy's throwing alphabet soup at me. And then he goes, you know, we help with copywriting, packaging, design, you name it, we could do it. We do everything. And I was like, okay, so you threw an acro— you know, threw 6 acronyms at me and then said, we do everything. All right. I said, let me ask you this. When you're pitching your company, who are you trying to get on board, right? And some new brand you want to work with you. And I said, if you couldn't tell me all that junk and you only could say one sentence, but off that one sentence I had to want to work with you, what would that be? And he started with, we do like I do marketing for consumer companies. And I was like, cool, you and any— you and 1,000 other companies out there. That did— that didn't do it for me. And I go, what's the most impressive thing you've done? And he goes, well, we helped launch— and he named like, I don't know, Poppy or like some like huge consumer brand. We did all the— all of Poppy's initial branding, marketing, positioning. And I go, why didn't you say that? Because that's the kill shot. If I'm a new consumer brand, and I meet you and all you say is, we, we help brands like Poppy launch with their packaging, their positioning, and their copywriting. And then I'm like, oh, I want to be like them, so I'm going to work with you. It's an immediate credibility and proof that no general marketing claim could ever touch. And I feel like credibility and proof is so massively underrated. And I like this forcing function of coming up with your kill shot. So for you, I think one of the The story, the kill shot is I ran growth for the, for the fastest growing newsletter in the world. Now I'm building a tool for you to, for you to grow your newsletter. Sign me up. Right? And so that's a very, very powerful story. Now somebody listening might be like, well, but I didn't do that. And so what you're offering is two things. One is first, go get credibility and track record in a low cost, low stakes way. Like go join a fast growing company, go join a company that has high potential and go kick ass there. That's one path. But I do think fundamentally, like, a story can work. So for example, if you didn't say that you worked at Morning Brew, but you said, I spent 1,000 hours studying how Morning Brew grew and all these tools they built internally, and I've built them now so that anybody can use them, that would also work, right? Like, you know, you could just create. So I think it all starts with story, and story is so underrated. And so how did that story work for you? What did you actually do with that story to get the word out there?

I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how to build a moneymaking skill, about how to leverage your time and energy. And the team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my 4 rules of how to make money. Now, this is not, you know, get rich quick advice. It's just core principles, foundational principles about building wealth, things that I wish I knew when I was, you know, just getting started. And so if you want to download it, it's in the description below. It's totally free. You can go get it. Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document, and making it available to all you guys. All right, back to this episode. Can I tell you the story I used to grow my newsletter? So After you launched Beehive, I launched a company and it was called Milk Road. And Milk Road's story is very simple. I was very interested in crypto. I had been for a number of years. And so I created— I wanted to create the crypto— the best crypto newsletter in the world. And in one year, we grew to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world, and we sold for millions of dollars. Okay, so this is a great success story, probably the easiest and fastest business I ever built. And I needed a story to start it. And so I started manufacturing stories. One of them was like anti-credibility. So I told the story how I said, can I tell you about the stupidest moment of my entire career? And people will lean into that story. You're going to tell me about this huge mistake you made. I said, this mistake cost me more money than every failed investment I've ever had, than every failed company I've ever had. So you're like, how could you? How could this cost you more money? And I said, it was 2017. My technical co-founder, the smartest guy I know, was supposed to come into a meeting and I was like, hey man, come on, the meeting started 5 minutes ago. And he goes, hang on, I'm just— I got to buy this. And I go, buy what? What are you on eBay? What are you doing? And he was buying the Ethereum presale. So this is Ethereum, but, you know, back when it was like, I think $0.17 or something was the, was the presale. And I should have leaned in and been like, why is the smartest guy I know, the most technical guy I know, have to go sign up to buy this crypto token. I should have leaned in. Instead, I was like, Ethereum, weird name, dude. Come on, we got to go. Let's go do some real business over here in this meeting room. And of course, you know, he made hundreds of millions of dollars off that and I made zilch. And I basically vowed to not make that mistake again, that when there's an explosive new industry where there's lots of growth potential, that I might start as the dumbest guy in the room, but I'm going to ask a lot of questions. I'm going to learn really fast and I'm going to figure things out for me as a non-technical person. Well, guess what? That's what the Milk Road was as a newsletter. And so I told that story of almost anti-credibility as the opening, as the gateway to get people interested in my new thing.

Yeah, either reputation because you see that, that they are, you can just search newsletter, right? And just see everyone who's talking about or promoting their newsletter on Twitter. I'd follow them and kind of see their story. So DMs primarily. And then what I eventually did, and like, as we were approaching launch for Beehive, I was never a content creator. I had 5,000 followers on Twitter. So I think when you're like giving tactics of how to scale your business, everyone always looks to like, oh, but I don't live in New York and I don't have that network, or I I don't have tens of thousands of followers on Twitter and LinkedIn. At the time I had 5,000 followers. I was not big by any means, but I posted a tweet sharing what we had been building. I talk about that we have this waitlist, limited time only. Complete lie, right? Like we had zero people on this waitlist, but you try to build some urgency. Like I call out that there's only a few spots remaining. Obviously there's unlimited spots remaining. I started like from studying the people in the industry. I already kind of understand where the frustration points are with other competitors, right? Like, what are people who have a newsletter who is my target customer? What are they already complaining about on social that they can't do with their current solution? And so I work that into the narrative. It's, uh, we have a custom website builder. Um, Substack takes a cut of revenue. We won't do that. We are totally like writer and creator friendly. And so you start to work on your counter positioning and narrative. And then comes the credibility of, oh, and I built this at Morning Brew and giving you access to the exact same tools that Morning Brew had. Do you want to sign up? Again, not a large content creator. I got 400 people to submit on this waitlist and that really became like my, my lead list of being able to go out and target these people.

Yeah, so we had about 400 people sign up initially. And in the questions that we asked, one of the questions was, why are you interested in using Beehive? So they are basically on a, on a silver platter serving exactly what intrigues them, whether it's limitation with their previous platform or they love the Morning Brew, whatever it is. And so now as a team of 3, I have this 400-person list that I can go after. I have their email, I have their social handle, and I'm just like, you know, it's like the Paul Graham essay of do things that don't scale. Like it's the non-sexy things at the beginning. Everyone glamorizes the, oh, 0 to 1 million in my first week of business. And now there's these AI companies that have like that straight vertical revenue. I think the truth is for most of these startups getting off the ground, it's a lot of like the dirty, gritty work of just doing the cold outreach yourself. And also, like, one thing that I've always found a competitive advantage is, is it's almost like people, like, try to go too close to the, let me automate everything, build like this 15-step automation funnel. We'll use AI to make sure that the messaging hits at the right time to the right person. I didn't use HubSpot. I couldn't afford it at the time. I was just doing cold outreach on email once a week, every week to all 400 people. And I got 25% of the people convert in like the first few months.

Yeah, it's an underrated question. You know, in our sales, whenever I try to help our sales team in one of our companies, it's always Dude, you got to ask, you know, what makes this a win for you? Like, they just sit there and the sales guys want to tell them all about us and our pricing and our packages and our features and our benefits. And I'm like, dude, you don't even know what they want. You have no idea what their dream outcome is from this entire interaction. And as I said, just ask them, what would make this a huge win for you? You start with that, right? Or you're like, you know, hey, I know you're a busy guy, but you, you know, you booked a demo or you wanted to check out what we're doing. I'm curious, what's the, what's the pain? You know, what, what made you want to do that? Because I know you wouldn't just— you're not just kicking tires for no reason. So you kind of set them up with a reputation. You're a busy guy. You don't waste time. There must be a reason that you're here. Why did you walk through our door? Tell me the problem. And then I know exactly how to sell you, right? If we're a fit for what you do. And I think that people don't really use those two kind of core discovery questions. To get that. Is that kind of how you felt as you were asking these questions and sort of like, were there features that came out of this or marketing messages that came out of this?

Huge. And people would reach out and I kid you not, maybe 1,000 a week would reply to the email and be like, how did you build this referral program? Like, how are you? What software are you using? Like, how were you able to build this? Because I want to do it for my newsletter.. And these were either independent journalists, writers. They worked at another company, but that was the signal of like, oh shit, what we built at Morning Brew was actually valuable because other people who had newsletters wanted what we had. And one of the biggest hooks was that referral program. And after being asked and forwarded emails hundreds of times through my days at Morning Brew, I was like, you know what, I'm just going to write an article. This is like where my building in public started. I was like, I'm going to write a Medium article and break down exactly the backend of how we built this referral program. It got thousands of claps or whatever Medium uses. But like, that was like the signal that I used of like what I had personally built is valuable to other people who want this tech. And so like another thing to lean into on these like early stages is like, what is that core differentiator? A lot of founders like try to run away from competition. I think we entered one of the most competitive spaces. I could name 25 competitors that were existing and still exist today that are infinitely bigger than us. But what we had is like that case study of I already knew what had worked at Morning Brew, and I had people by the thousands who were using our competitors asking about this like very particular feature. So when we launched Beehive, one of our value props was this referral program, the same one that Morning Brew used to scale to 4 million readers and get acquired by Business Insider. You get that out of the box for free by signing up for Beehive. And so that was really like our edge into the market.

Yeah, exactly. That was your Big Mac, right? That's the, that's the number one thing on the value meal that, that people want. I got a couple of kind of related stories because I want people to see this. So the first is Ryan Hoover from Product Hunt did this a long time ago. I think Product Hunt now is probably a little underrated, but there was a time about 10 years ago where Product Hunt was the shit. It was the number one most talked about favorite product in Silicon Valley. It was like your favorite founder's favorite founder was Ryan Hoover. And one of the things he did to get off the ground, he had no marketing budget, but he realized really quickly there's only so many times people are going to care to hear about Product Hunt, uh, because that's about us. But if I make it about you— and what he did was he went to Fast Company. And if you go look at Fast Company, he says, how we got our first 2,000 users doing things that don't scale. You need a crowd to launch to. Here's how we got one. He doesn't even tell you what his company is. He doesn't tell you what his product is. But he went and he wrote this guest post there about The scrappy do things that don't scale. It's literally the same thing. He was looking for anybody who was launching a product. He would go personally email or DM that founder, be like, hey, this is really cool. I just downloaded it. It looks awesome. You know, you should consider putting this on Product Hunt because there's a community of people who like discovering new products there. And then when he would go there, then he would retweet what they're doing. And he created this thing and he used to go to Phil's Coffee every day, 6 AM, and his work looked completely unproductive. He was just on Twitter. He's just emailing, cold emailing random people. But that's what it took to build that initial user base. And he was religious about it. And so I saw him do that. That reminds me of what, you know, what you're doing. The second example comes from Emmett at Twitch. So when we got acquired by Twitch, Emmett, who's the founder now, we're probably whatever, 12, 13, 14 years into the company's existence. You know, the company was big now. It had whatever, it was like the fourth most traffic site on the internet. It was, you know, 2,000 employees. But I asked him, I said, what did you do in those first, you know, 3 to 6 months to get to make Twitch work? And he goes, what I did was I went and I talked to 100 streamers that were on other platforms. We were new and there was, you know, other platforms out there. And I interviewed 100 of them. And Emmett is not the most sociable guy. So I was like, what did you do? You don't strike me as like this anthropologist, this thoughtful researcher who will observe them and come up with this nuance. He goes, oh no, no, the interview lasted like 7 minutes. I only asked the same 3 questions every single time, and I'll send you the Google Doc of what I asked and all of their replies. And so he sent it to me and I read this thing through, and he always asked 3 questions. So he would say, what do you like about your current platform? Um, what do you dislike about your current platform? And what would it take for you to switch to Twitch? And most of them didn't— hadn't even considered it. But a few people were like, you know, I do like Twitch, But the thing that I don't, you know, the thing that it's missing is X. And then he would go build X, then he'd go right back to that person and be like, hey, we built it now. That was the thing you said you would switch for. Like, and he's like, you know, sometimes there was actually 2 or 3 objections, but they would eventually, they would, they would sort of cave to my level of ferocity of how I was approaching this. And one of the biggest features that the number 1 revenue driver for Twitch came from those conversations. There was one streamer he wanted to get on board. And the guy goes, I want to be able to make money. And he goes, yeah, but you have such a small audience, dude. Like, your ad revenue will be so small. He goes, no, I want them to be able to pay me $5 a month. And he goes, you know, people don't subscribe to individual creators. That's not really— it wasn't really a thing at the time. And he's like, that's not really going to work for these 10 reasons. He goes, well, that's what it'll take. So he goes, okay, I'm going to build this feature. It'll never work, but his current platform doesn't have it. If I build it, he said he'd move over. So he builds it, the guy moves over. And he goes, indeed, he wasn't making big money. He goes, but I got a very valuable insight. Making any money streaming video games, even if it was just $5, $10, $17 in a month, you know, their hourly rate was like in the cents. That to them felt like there's a path for me here if I just keep going. And he goes, it was unbelievable. I thought $5 would never change anything for these people, and it immediately changed their behavior.. And that feature subscriptions today drives like, you know, probably a bit close to $1 billion in revenue for them. And that was a feature he never would have built had he not had those conversations.

Well, which is more or less the exact— I mean, when I'm emailing these 400 people, those conversations are exactly— they, even though they showed the slightest bit of interest by filling out this Google form, it is, I'm kind of good on my platform and you don't have automations, you don't have X, you don't have Y, you don't have Z. And I think that's like the other trap that a lot of founders fall into. It's like, the perfection over progress where they see these existing competitors or like the startups who are already quote unquote successful and they think that they always just like showed up that way, right? Like they came out of the womb just successful, polished, like beautiful. And one thing that I've really honed in on is in addition to like the things that don't scale, it's like the shipping and being comfortable shipping things that are 80 to 90% of the way there that you can get in people's hands to collect their feedback and then iterate as quickly as possible. 'Cause if this thing's gonna work out, you have to assume that where you are now is the smallest you'll ever be. And so to, to piss off and have a, a less than ideal, um, first impression to your 100 first users is nothing if that means that you can take that feedback from those 100 people, make the product 10 times better, so the next 100 and the next 1,000 get a much more polished product. But I think so many people get stuck in not wanting to release that unpolished, unsexy feature. Until it's exactly right. And so like, I don't know, an example of like another thing that we did in the early days that didn't scale, it's like email is like ripe with spam and abuse and there's like security complaints and concerns there. And when we first launched, we couldn't just have anyone sign up and just start blasting out emails, right? Because like we'd be overrun with spammers and we could have spent 3 to 4 months building this like automated security check, which is like was, was discussed as an option., but that would delay us 3 to 4 months and it would take so much time away from building other features that we knew that we already didn't offer. And so we actually had the highest friction signup of all time. You would sign up, you'd have to submit your name, uh, what platform you're using, all of this other information, including the handle to your Twitter and to your LinkedIn. And you couldn't do anything. You couldn't send emails, you couldn't use the platform. You were like in a brick until I approved you on the backend. We had this dashboard where everyone who signed up to the platform would populate, and I would go by line by line and click on their Twitter profile, their LinkedIn profile, and try to look up their newsletter to see if they were legit and manually click a button to say this person is approved and they get an email that they can now use the platform. Goes against everything in terms of like hypergrowth startup, right? We're preventing people from using the platform in the name of security. The way that I flip that into a growth thing is when I would go to their Twitter profile and their LinkedIn profile, I would follow every single person who signed up for the platform and I would send them a DM being like, hey, I'm the co-founder at Beehive. Thanks so much for signing up. Here's what we're working on. Let me know if there's anything I can do to improve your experience. And I turned someone who was initially probably pissed off that they couldn't use the platform they signed up to, to like, wow, it's pretty wild that the co-founder and CEO just messaged me and followed me on Twitter.. But as I amplify what we're launching, whether it's new features or users having success, I now have all of these people who followed me back as super fans who are now following the journey and engaging with the content. So I, I think it hits on a few things of like, one, not letting perfection get in the way of progress and just being okay shipping probably the least optimal signup flow of all time, but also turning into a positive of how can I actually turn this into a growth lever where I can connect with these people, have them become fanatics of what we're building and then now be one of thousands of people following us on this journey.

We just had this guy on the podcast, Tommy Mello. He's built this billion-dollar thing from starting with zero, right? He was like painting garage doors himself, you know, day by day, and then realized he's painting doors that these other guys install. They're making more money. He starts becoming an installer. He learns how to be a technician. Now he's built like one of the biggest ones in the country, A1 Garage. And he said he was telling us what he has his team do and he's like, you got to pet the dog. And I just love this. I'm like, I feel like I want to put that on a poster. Pet the dog is basically like, when you go to their house, you don't just go there and you give them a quote, you hand them a bill. Like, no, you go there, you pet the dog, you say hello, you smile, you make eye contact. On the way over, he always has them in their script is like, hey, I'm just picking up a coffee. Can I get you anything? Oh, don't make me guess. Tell me, what do you like? You like black or you like it with sugar? He's like, you know, we would— we want to bring them something into the relationship because, because it's a relationship. I don't want to, I don't want to just be one vendor. Uh, you know, you're just going to go for the lowest price. Like, I want you to, you know, people buy from who they trust and who they like, right? And it starts with who they even know. Do they even know you? Right? And so what you're talking about is basically how do you get them to know you? How do you get them to like you? How do you get them to trust you? Like, before I even used, uh, before I invested in Beehive, I was listening to your Spotify playlist. I don't know if you have that in here as one of your growth hacks, but You made one of the best work music playlists called Big Desk Energy. And I used to listen to that every day. And so it was funny, like by the time we met, I felt like indebted to you. And so it was like this little thing that I, you know, I would have never thought that that would work, but it totally worked on me. I don't know if it worked on others.

I'm constantly listening to users and so, and I eventually become a user and I have my own newsletter also called Big Desk Energy on the platform, which you should sign up to. We entered, I guess I'll set the stage. We, there are 25+ competitors that we entered this space into. And when we first launched, we had nothing, right? Like you could, we, we set up how to send an email 2 weeks before launch. No automations, you couldn't customize anything. Basically table stakes of what you could do on every one of our competitors, you could not do on our platform. And so basically what we decided we would do is we would ship one marketable feature every single week. So like we had a core team of engineers. Our core competitive advantage was going to be product velocity and it was the only option. I would, I'd be reaching out to all these people on the waitlist. I'd be convincing them to sign up to the platform. I'd do all this hard work and they'd be like, bro, I can't do anything on this platform. Like, nothing works. And so like from the earliest days, I did such a great job selling, but the product wasn't caught up to like the expectations of what you were supposed to deliver in this industry. And so the— what we decided to do in addition to shipping one marketable feature every single week was we turned each product release into like a moment. And so what I mean by that is we would figure out what would be the most useful thing that would prevent churn and that would be flashy enough that when I launched this on Twitter and LinkedIn, that people would be like, oh, one, that's super interesting. The platform I have doesn't even offer that. And when you do it repetitively week after week, it becomes more of a narrative of, yes, maybe they don't offer what I have, what I want today, but if they're shipping something new every single week, it's only a matter of time until they offer exactly what I want.

And it sounds like you, when you said you didn't just say make the product better, build features, you're saying build one marketable feature every week. And I like the word marketable there. It reminds me of the Amazon work backwards from the press release. At Amazon, you don't get to build a feature until you have written the press release. How would we announce this to the press? Now, press release is like this very outdated thing. The reality for you is probably like, what's the tweet? What's the tweet? Like, why are we building this if there's no tweet? If nobody's going to care when we tweet this, why are we building this? And that simple forcing function of starting with the tweet and working backwards to do product is going to eliminate like 30% of wasted effort just doing, you know, pet projects or things that sound good on paper to you internally, but nobody cares about. The users don't care about.

And that comes from a place of, again, like talking to the users from the beginning and being really indebted into these communities on Twitter. And like the framework that I would use for prioritizing what to build, um, is like 3-part framework. One is preventing churn. In the earliest days, we had, we had 10 users, right? If one user churns, that's 10% of our revenue. So if someone says, hey, you don't have X, and if you don't build X, I'm leaving, like, I can't take that 10% hit of revenue. So that's like top of the line. We have to ship that first. Next is unblocking growth. So as I'm trying to convince all of these people to leave their perfectly good platform to come to our platform, someone might be like, you don't offer this feature, thus I can't move over until you have that. Once I hear that 2, 3, 4 times, it becomes a pattern that becomes something that needs to be prioritized to be able to unblock and bring new people into the ecosystem. And then the third one is just maximal hype, right? So some combination of what do I know, whether it's the Morning Brew referral program or XYZ feature. When we first launched the AI writer into the editor, right, it was like at the peak moment, it was like a year after ChatGPT. Like I knew that AI would hit as it does for everything now., but some combination of like, we don't want the people that we've already worked so hard to get into this platform to leave. So anything to prevent that. What opens the door and casts a wider net for more people to come into our ecosystem? And then like, what's that sizzle at the end that we can add that we know that when we tweet it, working backwards from the tweet and like the press release that we know will spread because it, it solves the problems of the people that we know we want on this platform. Um, so that's how we would think about the product release., and we do a few different things with the product release. And this is like probably what we are most well known for today is when we would turn each product release into a moment. We have the email that goes to every user. And this is coming from a place of insecurity of I wake up every morning in these days and I have, you were one of them way back when of like, hey, if you don't ship this, like I'm out of here. And so the email goes out to all of your users.

Right, exactly. So like to me, like to your point of like being exposed and naked, like, yes, but that's kind of like where I think I thrive. Like I want the accountability and I want the pressure on that. No matter what happens at the end of the month, I'm going to send an investor update to 500 people who trusted me with their money or passed. And I don't want them to get the gratification that they were right in passing. And I know that we are going to be exposed and share our revenue numbers, and I want those numbers to be up and to the right and green. And so there's like an inspirational, like motivational tactic behind it. There's also like a very, um, tactful, like a lot— time is your biggest resource, especially as a founder when you're being pulled in a million different directions. And like, we went down the venture-backed route. And so as you're building in public and sharing your milestones, there's always investors who are reaching out on Twitter, hey, you want to grab coffee for 30 minutes? Hey, you want to do this? And like, my time's too valuable to have these coffee meets, but I do need to nurture those relationships in some capacity if I do want to raise a later round. And so the investor update to me became the greatest life hack of saying like, no, I'm not going to spend 30 minutes meeting for coffee, but I'll add you to our investor update and you will learn far more about me and the business and how I think about this and how we're growing month over month. By reading 3 to 4 months of our investor updates than you would ever get in like a 30-minute coffee meet. And so by using these investor updates, we actually raised our Series A in one week. We raised $12.5 million in a week. I don't know, with AI companies, maybe that's not as impressive, but it was amazing for us.

I mean, again, it's like the little things, like, so we've built into the company this like very social-first culture where everyone is distribution. And what I mean by that is like when you get hired at Beehive, our social media manager shows you how you should use social media and engage with our content and promote different initiatives at the company. And so starting from the top of like me actually building in public is like I have this constant stream of content out about the business. We have our employees who we do a few different things internally. One, every week we have like an award of like who was like, we call it the social media girly of the week, who's like, who was the most active and engaged on socials. There's like some like incentive built into that. We have a Slack channel called Pump Channel or Pump, whatever. And the whole purpose of the channel is like anytime that one of our users says something positive about Beehive, whether they're having success, they had a milestone, it's so much better than their old platform. Someone sees it, drops in that channel. Now the entire company gets that notification, jumps in, engages, retweets, and likes. And so we've been able to build this narrative of one, like the early days, it's like, oh, everyone's seemingly moving to Beehive because every time that someone says anything remotely nice about us, you get a retweet and like from me and the house account and like 15 of our other employees. And so like a very grassroots method that we've been able to scale now to over 100 employees. In the sense that we utilize every positive thing that we can get and all of the employees at the company to help amplify the different messages.

Okay. You're sending $3 billion a month, so you're getting $3 billion mini billboards at the bottom of those emails saying that these emails are powered by Beehive, right? Like that type of stuff adds up.

I'll leave with one, one last thing is like, I love the concept of not making people think. In the sense that like there's always— I mean, granted, I just talked about how high friction the signup process was, but prior to signup process, all of our competitors had this, the most complex pricing models. You're limited on how many emails you can send per week and contacts. You have to like calculate how much volume you're sending per month, which no one has any idea how many emails they're sending per month. It's like way too hard to even figure out the simple question of how much is this going to cost me to use? And so when we launched, we had an all-inclusive, every premium feature for $99, and you can send unlimited emails. In retrospect, not the most scalable model and not the most optimal model to make the most amount of money. But going back to not letting perfection get in the way of progress, I could explain that in a tweet at any time saying for $99, unlimited emails, every feature you see here. Um, and so I'm a big fan of living to fight another day in the sense that a lot of people get handicapped by trying to think of the most optimal solution in the future. But if I'm trying to figure out the most scalable pricing model that I can't communicate easily, I might not ever live to see that future day because we already shot ourselves in the foot. And so I'm a big fan of kind of pushing off some problems to be solved later under the assumption that later will involve us having more money, more revenue, more people to help us solve that problem in the future.

All right. So back in the day, there was like all these, like, races. So there was the World Wars, and that's where countries competed. But in between the World Wars, there was like, ooh, the North Pole, which country can get there? And it was a sort of like, you know, a bit of an ego contest between countries. And it was pride. It was who's the bravest, who's the fastest, who's the strongest, who's the smartest. And so there was the North Pole, there was the South Pole, and there was Everest. And I'll tell you the South Pole story because I think it's pretty crazy. So there's these two teams that go down to the South Pole, and one team basically bets on, we're going to have the strongest animals to pull our sleds. We're going to make sure we're fully stocked. We're going to build, like, really sturdy camps so that we can survive. We're going to take this, this known route. And they were very smart and strategic. So they would, when the weather was good, they would, like, gung-ho. He would give a motivational speech and they would try to go as many miles as they could. And when the weather was bad, they would bunker down and they would wait it out. And it seemed like the smart, strategic thing to do.. And so, uh, that was one of the guys. And then the other guy took the opposite approach. He's like, I'm gonna try to go in a straight line. That seems like the fastest path. We're not gonna bring all those supplies. It's gonna be too heavy. So we're gonna bring like just what's needed. Uh, we're gonna use dogs instead of horses. Yeah, they're not as strong, but hey, we're not bringing so much weight. So with these supplies, so I think it'll be okay. And he took this like absolute brute force mentality and his approach was 20 miles a day. So it's like good weather, 20 miles, bad weather, 20 miles. He would just march 20 miles on average. Whereas the other guy had this huge variance in what they would do, and he was very dependent on the weather, the conditions. People have taken this lesson and they sort of like, you know, like a, like a moral of the story was this idea of the 20-mile march that, you know, you could start in New York, but if you just take this approach of 20 miles a day of walking, It's not an unreasonable amount to walk in a day. You can get to California. You will be on the beach soon. There will be water in between your toes if you take this 20-mile march idea. If you try to, like, you know, sprint some days and rest some days and run some days and jog some days, and you try to, like, bring all, you know, you think you need all these resources to get there, you'll never make it. And so what I love is, is to me, your story is very much this sort of 20-mile march idea of, like, you just wake up every day. And you just do the next thing. You live to fight another day just by doing, you know, the basics really, really well. The common sense things really, really well. All right, Tyler, thanks for coming on. Everybody should go listen to Big Desk Energy on Spotify. That's my plug for you. Great playlist. And subscribe to your newsletter because I think your newsletter is pretty fun. It's partly, you know, founder stuff, how you're building your company. It's a pretty entertaining read. Yeah.