Tyler Denk Recently Closed a $12.5M Series A Building in Public
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The Story of a Self-Taught Coder Turned Co-Founder of a $7M ARR SaaS Creator Platform
In this episode, Tyler Denk, a self-taught software developer turned CEO of Beehiiv, a newsletter publishing platform, shares his story on how he built a product from scratch into a multi-million dollar company. From teaching himself to code to navigating the complexities of startup growth and securing a $12.5M Series A and reaching $7M annual recurring revenue, he's got cheat codes to fundraising for startup founders.
Here's what you're in for:
ABOUT TYLER
Tyler is a multifaceted tech entrepreneur with a Mechanical Engineering degree and a minor in Technology Entrepreneurship from the University of Maryland. He started as a self-taught software developer, launching VentureStorm to connect startups with developers. Tyler joined Morning Brew, developing their referral program and tech ecosystem, which eventually led to a $75m exit in 2020.
After a stint at Google as a Product Lead at YouTube Music, he left to cofound Beehiiv—a newsletter platform to fuel creators' and publishers' ability to create, monetize, and grow their audience.
Now Beehiiv is home to thousands of the top newsletters in the world. Tyler also pursues personal projects, like Big Desk Energy, combining music and web development.
Connect with Tyler on:
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Published: March 14, 2024 • https://blog.thunder.vc/tyler-denk • Video: https://youtu.be/Uh_lewWR_ic
Founder & CEO Tyler Denk shares Beehiiv’s origin story (post–Morning Brew), fundraising lessons across seed, extension, and Series A, why building in public works, and how Beehiiv scaled from MVP to ~$7M ARR with product velocity, an ad network, and Boost.
Entities: Beehiiv (newsletter platform), Morning Brew, Business Insider, Google/YouTube Music, Social Leverage (seed lead), Creator Ventures (extension lead), Lightspeed Venture Partners (Series A), founders: Tyler Denk (CEO), Ben (co-founder), Jake (co-founder).
Numbers: Seed $2.6M (2021); Extension $1.6M SAFE @ $20M cap (2022); Series A $12.5M (2023); ARR ≈ $7M; SaaS ≈ $1M MRR; Ad sales $500k in Dec (top-line); Team grew ~19 → 50 in 2023.
Themes: Build vs buy; building in public; monthly investor updates; engineering-led velocity; ad network + Boost; supporting creators and publishers; scaling support and infra; remote team knowledge sharing.
Takeaways: Secure an early lead investor to unlock FOMO; over-raise for unknown costs; dogfood your own product; write investor updates; focus time on product vs. meetings.
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Episode: Fundraising Demystified — with guest Tyler Denk, Founder & CEO of Beehiiv.
Jason Kirby: Hey everyone, welcome back to Fundraising Demystified. Today we have Tyler Denk on the show with us, founder and CEO of Beehiiv. Welcome to the show, Tyler.
Tyler Denk: Yo, what's up? Glad to be here.
Jason Kirby: I'm excited to bring you on. Your product's been making a lot of buzz—had to use the pun. In the creator economy and beyond, I'm a fan personally and many other creators are using it. Excited to have you share your story. Go ahead and jump in: tell us about you and what led you to starting Beehiiv.
Tyler Denk: Yeah, for sure. I'll try to keep it brief. I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, studied mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland, and got really involved with the startup and entrepreneurship programs there.
Tyler Denk: A few friends and I had an idea for a mobile application with no way of building it, so we taught ourselves how to code. That was my first foray into learning a new skill outside the classroom. We built an app and a website to help startups and entrepreneurs connect with software developers on campus—solving our initial problem.
Tyler Denk: It didn’t become a multi‑billion‑dollar company, but it taught me a ton: teaching yourself new skills, building the plane while you fly it, doing something different every day—from coding a feature to onboarding a user to trying to acquire users with basically no budget. As students we had to be frugal and scale without paid channels, so we wrote blog content, used Medium and Quora—classic growth‑hacky moves with $0.
Tyler Denk: I spent sophomore through senior year building that company. Ultimately the business model was tough, so we shut it down right after I graduated. From there I was networking and looking for opportunities. Weird background: mechanical engineering degree, but no internships or work experience in mechanical engineering. I’d spent my summers building my startup. I also didn’t have formal software training since I was self‑taught.
Jason Kirby: Internship or...
Tyler Denk: Everything I built was for my own platform. I was in this awkward no‑man’s‑land—no traditional work experience in either field. I freelanced, built websites, and applied for jobs. One of my good friends growing up, Austin Rief, co‑founded Morning Brew. We’d nerd out on business and growth strategies. He brought me on contract to build the referral program, website, and email integrations for Morning Brew, which at the time had no software engineer.
Tyler Denk: That summer after graduation I built a lot of tech for Morning Brew. Eventually I was working 50–60 hours a week on contract, so they asked me to join full‑time. I moved to New York and spent three and a half years there—an incredible experience. At 22–23 I could call the shots: deciding what to build for growth and monetization.
Tyler Denk: Fast forward: Morning Brew was acquired by Business Insider in 2020. I left a week or two before the acquisition. I saw Morning Brew grow from three people when I joined to ~35–40 people. I wasn’t a co‑founder but was early enough to make key decisions and see what it’s like to scale a startup.
Jason Kirby: And that led you to take what you did for one successful newsletter and make it available to thousands of creators. Walk us through the early days of launching Beehiiv—how you structured and set it up.
Tyler Denk: I said I’d keep it short and then didn’t. At Morning Brew, in the build‑vs‑buy debate, part inexperience and part stubbornness led me to build instead of buy. We built our own CMS for writers, referral program, ad management platform for sales and copy, and custom growth dashboards.
Tyler Denk: We weren’t just using off‑the‑shelf software. We were deep in the weeds, chasing incremental ROI and building the exact tools our writers and teams wanted. I literally built the software to facilitate that. So when I left, other publishers and creators kept asking how to grow, scale, and monetize. Many of our solutions were custom, and I was the one writing the code, alongside the team I later scaled.
Tyler Denk: While at Google I evaluated what to build next. Substack had raised $65M and the newsletter wave was rising. The Hustle was acquired, Axios was growing—massive interest in email. Morning Brew was a gold star for growth and design. That led to Beehiiv: take everything we learned about scaling newsletters and make it simple for anyone—from large publishers to hobbyists—to onboard and get best‑in‑class tools for site, content, growth, analytics, and monetization.
Jason Kirby: We missed the transition from Morning Brew to Google to Beehiiv. Why Google?
Tyler Denk: At Morning Brew there was white space; I could wake up and decide where my time was best spent. The founders trusted me. It felt entrepreneurial. As we scaled to ~35 people, we professionalized with PMs and heads of product, and my control and impact would shrink. I wanted to see how a massive tech company builds product—best‑in‑class PRDs, how product interacts with eng, marketing, and growth. So I joined Google on the YouTube Music team—good for personal development, though I knew I wouldn’t love big‑company bureaucracy.
Jason Kirby: That Google stamp plus Morning Brew likely helped when raising for Beehiiv. Walk us through the early days—leaving Google, launching Beehiiv, and securing the initial round.
Tyler Denk: The idea started even before Google. In the week between leaving Morning Brew and starting at Google, I knew what I wanted to build. I approached Ben, the first engineer I hired at Morning Brew—now my co‑founder—and he suggested Jake, another engineer, who’s my other co‑founder. They saw how the sausage was made and knew the tech.
Tyler Denk: While I worked at Google full‑time, nights and weekends the three of us hacked on the platform. We kept a Notion doc mapping P0 features needed for launch and what would come later. It was pure: three engineers building. We got to a functional MVP, and I tweeted what we were building: Morning Brew‑grade tools, democratized. Click‑through led to a form capturing name, email, current platform, newsletter type, and size—testing appetite and building a pre‑launch list. Summer 2021, ~450 people submitted—without a big audience.
Tyler Denk: That functional MVP plus ~450 prospective users became the basis for fundraising. Ben and Jake were still at Morning Brew; I was at Google. In July 2021 I spent a month pitching seed investors. Context: Substack had raised $65M and led the new wave. Twitter bought Revue, Facebook launched Bulletin (both later shuttered). Incumbents like Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign dominated. Competitive and noisy. Why bet on us?
Jason Kirby: Very noisy—yeah.
Tyler Denk: Exactly. Despite crypto and early AI hype, we raised $2.6M. Funny aside: our initial deck targeted $1.3M—classic underestimate. We closed $2.6M led by Social Leverage, with a long tail of strategic angels who ran newsletters—our early adopters. We viewed the seed as a launchpad of first users. Those investors were financially incentivized to try Beehiiv and provide proof points.
Tyler Denk: You also underestimate costs: security tools you didn’t know you needed, benefits, 401k match, healthcare—expenses compound. Biggest takeaway: it’s never enough. Not because of reckless spend, but unknown unknowns. If we’d only raised $1.3M, we would’ve failed quickly.
Jason Kirby: Smart to keep the round open rather than fear dilution. So after $2.6M, you’re off to the races. You raised subsequent rounds—how much and what was the timing?
Tyler Denk: First, seed took ~5 weeks—relatively quick but frustrating because no one wants to be first. Once Social Leverage committed the anchor, everyone else moved fast—FOMO and scarcity are real.
Tyler Denk: Money hit the bank around Sept 2021. We quit our jobs and went full‑time. Launched in November. Early traction validated the hypothesis; we leaned on Morning Brew credibility. By March/April we hit ~$10k MRR. Flipping beta users to paid is hard, but we did it. We realized we needed more capital to hire A‑level engineers, so in May we pursued an extension. I thought it’d be easy—wrong. In 2022, funding markets tightened. That extension—$1.6M on a SAFE with a $20M cap—took ~2.5–3 months and was led by Creator Ventures.
Jason Kirby: 2022 was brutal for fundraising, so that’s still impressive. You’ve since raised more and accelerated—share where you’re at now and the more recent raise.
Tyler Denk: I build in public and share MRR/ARR milestones on Twitter and LinkedIn—it helps recruiting, user trust, and investor awareness. We send detailed monthly investor updates: what’s working, what’s not, milestones, roadmap. That transparency replaces a lot of relationship‑building calls and shows our thinking over time.
Tyler Denk: That’s how the extension round happened—an internal investor (Creator Ventures) stepped up after seeing consistent progress. Over the next year I kept ignoring most inbound VC intros to stay focused, but a Lightspeed partner invited me to a founder dinner (smart move). We did a short call; I added him to our investor updates.
Tyler Denk: By spring 2023, I wrote a doc: “If we had $10M, what would we do?” Hiring 12–15 roles, scaling support and infra, and de‑risking worst‑case scenarios. Competitors had more cash and were making big guarantees to lure creators. It was time to raise. I contacted a few funds who’d engaged thoughtfully with our updates. We had two term sheets in a week. We chose Lightspeed and raised a $12.5M Series A in 2023—they were genuinely excited and aligned.
Jason Kirby: Love how you focused on building the business and let investors come to you. What was revenue when you raised in June last year?
Tyler Denk: Around a $6–7M run rate—roughly $500–600k MRR. I avoid low‑yield meetings because time is most valuable. If I focus on product and customers, the results attract investors. Otherwise you risk great relationships and no business.
Jason Kirby: After the raise, you announced ~$7M run rate and kept the momentum. I also respect that you dogfood Beehiiv for your own newsletter. Where’s the business today and where is it going?
Tyler Denk: The round closed in June; we invested in what we’d planned: support, engineering, and de‑risking. We hired infra and data engineers, improved tooling, and scaled safely. We doubled the team from ~19 to 40 in Q3 and ended the year at ~50—shifting challenges from tech to people and process, especially as a remote company. Knowledge sharing became a big focus.
Tyler Denk: Today we’re roughly ~$1M in monthly revenue; 80–90% is SaaS. We also run an ad network connecting advertisers to niche newsletter audiences, taking a margin. In December we did ~$500k in ad sales (top‑line). Boost, our two‑sided growth/monetization marketplace, is approaching a $1M business on its own. We designed the platform from day one with ads in mind—even if we didn’t touch it for ~18–20 months.
Tyler Denk: Mailchimp was acquired for ~$12B; programmatic email ads companies like LiveIntent and PowerInbox reached billion‑dollar scale. Each is hard to build—we’re doing both (world‑class SaaS and ad network) together. It’s complex but fun.
Jason Kirby: As founders and creators consider platforms, a big reason I’m switching to Beehiiv is how quickly you ship. You’re engineering‑ and product‑led, responsive to customers—even answering support tickets yourself. That explains the fundraising success. Any final advice for founders and VCs listening?
Tyler Denk: Shameless plug: my newsletter, Big Desk Energy (mail.bigdeskenergy.com). I share unfiltered thoughts on building the business. Two recent themes: build in public unless there’s a clear proprietary reason not to, and send monthly investor updates. People love following real stories and learning from mistakes. The updates align everyone and show how you think. Even without investors, the exercise is valuable.
Jason Kirby: It’s like accountability at scale—you want each update to look good, which pushes you to hit numbers and craft a strong narrative. Where else can people find you?
Tyler Denk: There’s also a Big Desk Energy Spotify playlist. I’m most active on Twitter: @denk_tweets. Follow Beehiiv—B‑E‑E‑H‑I‑I‑V—on Twitter and Instagram. Our social team shares great tutorials, content, and shout‑outs.
Jason Kirby: Tyler, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for sharing your insights. We’re excited to follow your journey.
Tyler Denk: Hell yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Jason Kirby: All right man, that was great.
Guest: Tyler Denk — Founder & CEO, Beehiiv
Host: Jason Kirby — Fundraising Demystified