TechCrunch’s new owner faced a familiar challenge: modernizing an old tech stack built for a different era. Matt Gross, vp of digital initiatives at TechCrunch owner Regent, joins Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk to discuss how they untangled years of tech debt, rebuilt email from the ground up, and reframed newsletters as core editorial products rather than traffic drivers.

Note: This episode is part of a commercial partnership between The Rebooting and Beehiiv. Learn more about how Beehiiv works with enterprise publishers.

Welcome to the Rebooting Show.

I am Brian Morrissey.

this is an episode that was recorded live last week as part of our TRB Live series.

This is, something we just kicked off.

It's an ongoing series of interactive conversations about

how publishers are adapting to this fragmented, decentralized, and.

Increasingly changing, everyday media landscape.

we gathered at Morning Brew's, studio for this session on how

TechCrunch rebuilt its email strategy.

It features, Tyler Dank, who is the co-founder and CEO of Beehive, which

is a partner of the rebooting I should add, as well as Matt Gross, the VP of

digital initiatives at region, which,

Not so long ago acquired TechCrunch from Yahoo, and we speak about how

publishers are modern, modernizing their email infrastructure, balancing

traffic driving newsletters with inbox first products, and what it takes

to turn email from a distribution channel and do a core product.

My biggest takeaway from from this discussion was how.

TechCrunch really faces some of the challenges that every legacy media

business does, and that is running the old model while trying to build,

the new one all under the weight of accumulated tech and organizational debt.

I mean, as Matt put it, when he arrived at TechCrunch, you know, there

were a lot of things that were in his words, just not configured well.

he said the te tech debt was so massive that it was easier to

move, off to something where.

We know right away how to configure everything to make it work.

And I believe that is the reality for most modern media companies.

modernization isn't just about the technology, but it's also about

rewiring the culture and the systems that grew up around the old model.

So I love these conversations.

hope you enjoy this.

I'm gonna be sharing some of these.

In this podcast feed, but it's going to be coming to you twice a week now.

hope you enjoy them.

Always like your feedback.

my email is brian@therebooting.com.

Now here's the conversation with Matt and Tyler.

We are, we are live.

welcome everyone to the first edition of TRB Live.

I want to thank, the team at Morning Brew.

They have been gracious enough to let us use this lovely, studio

today and, really thankful.

And I think it's actually fitting for a couple of reasons.

One is, you know, morning Brew where I was like walking through

these offices and it's like, you know, there's bustling activity.

There's like a merch shop, like some kind of boutique, like in the lobby.

And it was all built by by email.

And we're gonna be talking a lot about emails today.

And I, I can remember when Austin Reef came into our, our Digiday studio,

which was also a wellness room.

and he was trying to convince me that he was building this,

this media company on email.

And I was like, incredibly skeptical.

and here we are.

Okay, look at us now, and here we are.

and Tyler.

Tyler Dank.

with Beehive.

He's, he's the found co-founder and CEO of Beehive.

who was what, employee?

Two.

Yeah.

At morning.

Bris is a little bit of a homecoming.

This was, you did not have this office back then?

We did

not have this office.

We were at 85 Broad Street, down in a WeWork for the first few years back when

they actually served beer at WeWork.

So the fun days.

Yeah.

moved to a new office and then Yeah, I left before I

ever had an in-office studio.

Yeah.

And I can remember I met Tyler during the pandemic and in Miami, I think it was.

Yep.

And where there was no pandemic,

there was no pandemic.

So we went out to dinner, with a bunch of morning brew, people.

And you were talking about email and, It was funny 'cause I, I wasn't sure

why you were asking a lot of probing questions about email news, my use of

like, email newsletters and whatnot.

and it turned out you were, you were building something new.

So we were gonna get into like why email is so important.

We've got Matt Gross here, from the parent company of, TechCrunch, Regency.

We'll get into the regency, strategy when it comes to, having these different

publications, including TechCrunch.

but just to set the, the stage, what is it you wanted to build with Beehive all

the tools that you ended up building for Morning Brew as employee two?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So a, a bit of context.

When I joined Morning Brew, we were on some WordPress website.

We were using MailChimp.

Neil, who you met, or, well, you met him before, but he was just in here.

every night at like seven or eight o'clock, we would copy and paste content

from Google Doc to WordPress to MailChimp, and we would copy and paste till 10:11 PM

We would accidentally delete something.

The email would get messed up.

We'd have to start over.

We'd go till one or 2:00 AM That happened probably once or twice a week.

And so from that experience, I was like, how do we build an actual like

CMS that's built for email specifically?

And a lot of the CMS off the shelf, whether it's like a WordPress or

piano, all built for like this WordPress ecosystem of that.

Most publishers were publishing to the web and we kind of viewed ourselves as

we're an email first newsletter company.

We saw the Skim and Axios and saw ourselves as different.

And me being a 23-year-old young self-taught developer, super naive

thought, I don't want to use an off the shelf software that's kind

of built for web, but for email.

So what if we just built our own CMS for email specifically?

So that was kinda the first thing that I built.

That Morning Brew went on to build an ad management platform.

We built the referral program.

We kinda built this own, our own bespoke custom ecosystem of tech.

And so morning brew the content, which is like probably why

we were super successful.

But somewhere, second or third reason why we were successful was this totally

bespoke ecosystem that allowed us to grow very quickly, understand our audience and

publish the email and web simultaneously.

Right?

And now you're helping publishers do that.

And I think what's really interesting to me is we, we had a breakfast

earlier today with, with a bunch of great publishers, is how critical

email is now to these businesses.

It's not like there's email, just email businesses, but I think every publishing

business has to get closer to the audience, has to have a direct connection

with the audience and build from there.

And a lot of them were not architected that way.

And that's why I wanna bring in you, pat, like a little, you know, it's funny

because I remember this is what happens, you get older, I remember these, a lot

of publishers who were, you know, the kind of disruptors of their time that

are now almost legacy, let's be real, because they were built for a completely

different era and the a completely different incentive structure and.

Now you need to reorient these businesses.

So give, give us a background on Regency and, you know, the properties

under Regency, alongside Texas.

Sure.

So that's, I, we should say it's Regent Regent, sorry.

LPs a private equity company at the top of this whole pyramid.

And we own a lot of different things, fashion brands, automotive,

manufacturing, but there's a whole group of, media brands as well.

So, TechCrunch we acquired, at the beginning of May, along with the

Foundry, which is Macworld and PC World and some B2C brands like CIO.

And those joined our other media companies like Sunset Magazine, Sightline Media

Group, which is a bunch of military and defense publications, military times,

army Times, Navy Times Defense News.

We own Cheddar.

We own rate my professors.com.

So it's a, the whole sort of media constellation and, I'm the VP for digital

initiatives across a lot of that, which is kind of everything except for coding.

and a lot of email, like I, I focus a ton on email.

And so when we acquire these new brands, one of the first things I do is just kind

of figure out what they're doing with newsletters and what they should be doing.

So let's get, let's get in there.

I wanna encourage everyone to use the q and a, function.

I'm, I wanna, like, I, I've got a laptop in front of me, so I'm gonna

work in, some of those questions.

but let's talk about like, the email strategy at TechCrunch, right?

Like when you got in, what was the state of it and what, what are you

trying to accomplish within the overall strategy of modernizing TechCrunch?

Sure.

So when we, when I found out we were getting TechCrunch, I looked at all

of their email products and they were doing a decent amount of email.

they didn't have a really aggressive acquisition strategy

for getting new addresses.

and their emails were generally, they were using, essentially.

B Free, which is a sort of visual template builder, connected to HubSpot

to send almost all of their emails.

And they were using mailer light to a degree for one of their email products.

But these were sort of, you know, the, the team spent a lot of time

building these emails every day and sending them out and not necessarily

getting a lot back in return.

So.

When we came in, one of the first things I always do is just try to

understand what are we even trying to accomplish with email in the first place?

Like, what is the point of sending any email at all?

Are we trying to get traffic back to the website or are we trying to send

an email full of marketing messages that are gonna hype our events?

Or are we trying to get people to like sit in, you know, a bathtub with a glass

of red wine and enjoy reading a nice beautifully written email just all on its

own in the privacy of their own inbox.

So, we looked at what they were doing with the emails that existed

and tried to sort of, sort them into those different buckets.

So there were two emails that were very much, you know, inbox reads and there

was about a half dozen other emails that were, you know, really just existed

to get people back to the website.

TechCrunch Pub publishes all.

Lot of stories every day, and we just wanna make sure that people

who really care about that stuff actually read those stories every day.

There's a lot of 'em.

So, from there it's like, okay, what are the platforms that we're

using on the other brands that are gonna make sense or are there new

platforms that we need to bring on?

And, you know, for the most part, are other brands were using a,

were already using a mix of sale through for traffic driving emails

and beehive for those inbox reads.

So it was a fairly simple process of saying, okay, well let's move

these ones over to sale through, move these ones over to beehive.

you know, there's a lot of infrastructural stuff that you have to adapt to that.

How are you getting new email addresses?

How do you send people, you know, when someone, some someone's on techcrunch.com

and a little thing pops up that says, please subscribe to our email.

How do you get that email into the right place?

How do you get them subscribe to the right email?

So there's a little, you know, automation and infrastructure work to do there, but.

You know, it's a relatively straightforward process after

that because Sail through and behi are fairly decent products.

Fairly decent.

Fairly decent.

First reason.

Good.

That's gonna go on the landing page like today.

That's right.

Um, but talk to me strategically, what is the job that email is

doing for, let's just zero in on TechCrunch, like what's the job?

Because like a lot of publishers were treating email as a way to

drive traffic back to the website and it has that job still, right?

Yeah.

But at the same time, it has a larger strategic role.

Yeah.

Well, it's gonna keep people involved.

I mean, the people who read Tech Crunch, I mean Tech Crunch is this.

You know, it, it's a, it's sort of a niche publisher in a way.

I mean, it's, it's decently big, but you know, it's covering like

the startup world, the tech world, this, you know, world of funding

and it's a trade publisher.

Yeah, it's a kind of a trade publisher, but with appeal to a broad audience.

But the people who really interested in the stuff you wanna rope them in, you want

them to stay involved and not just sort of casually come across you on Google News.

Right.

Like, I mean, that's a decent part of our traffic too.

But we want them to stay, we want them to come to TechCrunch

Disrupt our big annual conference, which is taking place next week.

And I think you can still get tickets if you're listening to this

and you really want to go to San a

fairly decent conference.

I've heard.

Yeah.

You coach TRB, I'm gonna just stop using the word decent.

we're gonna, we're gonna get, it was

a fairly, I think that was triggering

Tyler.

I like to, I like to manage expectations, right?

Yeah.

I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna hype things too much, but, you know, these are, are.

Audience, our subscribers, our customers, if you wanna take that route.

And, email gets to them and it helps us, identify what they're most interested in.

There are most devoted readers.

Really the people who are gonna hand over their email address are entrusting

you with their email address, right?

Like, we don't wanna, spam them with too many messages.

We don't wanna send them stories that they don't care about.

so we care about them and hopefully they care about us in return.

Yeah.

Tyler, when you talk with particularly larger publishers, right, I mean, 'cause

like, I think a lot of times people think of, of beehive as, you know, people

like me, you know, that are, are, are.

I hate the word creator, right?

But like, that are not like large publishing, organizations and who don't

have the infrastructure that a lot of these organizations have, which in some

ways is actually an advantage these days 'cause you don't have a lot of that,

that legacy infrastructure to deal with.

what are the challenges that they end up facing when it comes to

modernizing their like infrastructure?

Yeah, I think it's a lot of, some of the stuff that you were just talking

about where their primary purpose of email has been for such a long time

to drive traffic back to the website.

Yeah.

And trying to fit this paradigm of editorial based newsletters where the

newsletter in theory could be the product.

You might not click out back to the website.

You might be monetizing the newsletter itself.

It might be top of funnel towards something else.

So I think it's more of a strategy thing for the first thing.

Once, once we get over that hump.

The other thing is.

Beehive has an all-in-one solution for email and website and ads.

And a lot of these, legacy publishers are in deep into the WordPress ecosystem,

or they have different workflows and have trained their team accordingly.

And so we've come a long way and where I think we initially started off kind

of for this solopreneur creator who just wanted to publish and, and have

a newsletter or like the very scrappy, like, kind of like Morning Brew for X.

So Morning Brew for Crypto, morning Brew for ai.

that was a lot of like our early cohorts of users as we've gone up market to time.

the Ringer, Texas Tribune, Newsweek, Different sets of problems.

But I think what they're used to is kind of this paradigm of fairly antiquated

software that hasn't been updated in a while and doesn't move at which the pace

that we move, which is very fast, Silicon Valley startup who listens to customers.

We, we, we will have a sales call and they will explain I need x, y, Z feature.

'cause our team's taking forever to do this and we can

have that done end of week.

and so I think that's kind of really been our competitive advantage.

and then like how we've evolved is we never launched with like an RSS

ingestion or like a send API mm-hmm.

Where you can actually use your own CMS, but just like send emails via an API.

And as we've gotten more involved with these larger, more established

publishers kind of understanding, it's not like our way or the highway, but we

actually need to understand where their workflows are and build around those.

has been something that we've been doing a lot of these past years.

Yeah.

Matt, how do you end up thinking about email as a standalone

product versus the traffic driving?

Because like, you're trying to operate them both.

Right.

And it feels like more of the weight has moved towards treating

the email as a product unto itself.

You know what I mean?

There's a lot of people publishing on, on beehive on

other email platforms sometimes.

rarely, rarely, but sometimes weirdly.

and those are like, they're treating it like the product.

Mm-hmm.

Itself.

And those are the newsletters that have, that have kind of.

I think gotten the most traction.

It takes a lot of buy-in, right?

It's one thing to do it if you're a really small organization where maybe there's,

you know, you have the flexibility to just sort of start doing that.

But, you know, for us it's, making, finding people on the edit side

who understand that and want to do that, and finding people on the ad

sales side who are gonna be able to sell the newsletter that way.

And that is, you know, that's a cultural shift.

I mean, TechCrunch has been around for a long time doing what it does.

And, you know, this new ownership, hopefully we will show new ways

of doing these things, right?

We have to start doing email in a new way.

I mean, this has been our process over the last six months of sort of acquiring

TechCrunch and shifting its systems.

And now hopefully we're in a position where we can start to experiment,

try new things, and show people that yes, we can do email as its

own thing and it can lead the way.

We have to show that now, that is the challenge.

Right?

And it requires, you know, not just me to say this, but other people on the

team to jump in and say, oh yeah, right.

We can do this thing.

I have this idea.

Let's come up with an email product around it.

So it takes time.

So what are the, walk us through, like what are the main email products?

'cause one of the Sure, sure.

One of the topics that came up at, at breakfast today was how a lot of

publishers have email sprawl in some ways.

Mm-hmm.

And that there, there, everyone seems to want a newsletter these days.

Right.

You know, there, there was, there was talk of one, one publisher that, you know, she

has a, a queue of writers that want their own like newsletters and she wants to keep

them happy and she doesn't want them to break off and go to beehive, on their own.

but at the same time, and another publisher talked about.

Really focusing on what is the job this, this is doing?

Is this right?

Is this actually adding to the strategic purpose?

Yeah, so I mean, I can talk about the traffic driving

ones are sort of easy to explain.

There is a daily email, which is actually twice daily and that's links to all

the stories that we've been publishing.

Comes out in the morning, comes out in the afternoon, comes out on Sunday.

That's just sort of basic flagship.

Here's what we've been up to.

two other traffic driving ones are startups weekly.

Weekly traffic driving email about all of our startup coverage.

And another one that's weekend review, which is really just like,

you only wanna get this once a week.

Here's like the important stories for the week.

Those are sort of straightforward.

They're easy to curate, easy to get out, easy to design, and you know.

They're, they're pretty much turnkey.

It takes five minutes for an editor to curate them and they're out the door.

And, and how much curation is this being done versus programmatic

interest space where it's actually personalized to the receiver?

Yeah, so, the emails tend to have about nine stories in them, and

the editors basically go into sail through and they'll pin maybe one to

three stories at the top to make sure that everybody's getting what an editor

decides is the most important story.

They'll tend to pin one at the bottom.

We have one slot that's like, here's last but not least, here's a cool, fun story.

And they'll paste something in there that has like a good visual or is it just

a fun, you know, kicker for the email.

And then, uh, sail through's big thing is personalization based on

tags and click and browsing history.

So we really just let the robot decide what's gonna be kind of

in the middle zone of that email.

So, going to that kind of setup is you.

Taking their process from, you know, half an hour or 40 minutes, maybe more to, you

know, pop in, see what the stories are.

Put this one here.

That one there.

Yeah.

And they're all done.

Tyler, are you agnostic about that as far as like whether people want

to have a curation of, of stories that link back to like the website or treat

them as, you know, an owned product?

Like, I mean, you have, you have your own newsletter, right?

I consume it like on my phone in the email.

Everyone should get it.

Big Desk Energy.

Yeah.

Sign

up Mail, do big desk energy.

Yep.

but I think of beehive more around that kind of email versus.

The more traditional email, which I think Matt is, is describing

even with the personalization.

And, and I think Matt would agree 'cause that's how

they siphon their email, right?

They went to sail through for this like hyper personalized interest

based email and then they use us for more of the editorial.

I would say again, as we listen to users and as we, as we've gone up market to

chat with the tech crunches of the world and a lot of these other publishers like

that, there's still clearly a massive business in this personalization.

So if anyone at Sail Through is listening, that is definitely the

direction that we are, that we are going

in.

we are launching in a few weeks dynamic content, which is like the first

step of that, which is if you live in New York, you get this type of content.

If you live somewhere else, you get different type of content.

If you open all of the emails, you get this special offer.

If you don't open emails, you get something else.

And so opening up dynamic content from the perspective of, audience attributes,

engagement, demographic data is what we plan to launch in the few weeks.

the evolution of that is going to be the full personalization where.

You, we know that this reader always clicks on links about

startups and politics, and they're a male in the Northeast.

And like, how do you personalize that email different from someone

who is interested in, health tech or something different like that type

of personalization at scale where we can kind of imitate what he just

described is very much on the roadmap and something that we think about?

So, to answer your question, very agnostic.

We've, we've built the business very agnostic from a monetization standpoint.

We have the beehive ad network, we have paid subscriptions.

Mm-hmm.

But if Brian Morrissey has a different way to monetize his audience, we

aren't opinionated in, you can't do that because we don't have the

features or we don't support that.

Our standpoint has always been how do we get publishers to have

success on the platform, however, and, and any tools that we can.

Provide and build to support them.

We are fully supportive of that.

So if the market wants to pull us towards hyper-personalization, that's a hundred

something that I think we're best in class with product and I think we can build an

incredible product to support publishers.

Yeah.

So Matt, tell me when you were, when you, when you took over, like

TechCrunch, I'm sure there was a lot of tech debt from, from, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I'm just like going with a crazy idea.

I'm pretty sure there was a lot of tech debt.

Sure.

What were the main challenges that you had to just like weed through?

I'm sure you had a list that hadn't been cleaned in a long while.

Just gimme the, gimme the top

three.

I mean, just getting off HubSpot was a big deal.

and seeing, hey, we,

we got shots fired at,

at sale through and at HubSpot.

No, I mean, no, it's not about, we're an honest podcast.

We're an honest podcast.

It's that, you know, it, there were just a lot of things that

were just not configured well.

Like things have been set up and left in a default state.

So, I think the HubSpot default is that if you miss 11 emails

in a row, you get automatically sort of disconnected, disengaged.

So our tech crunch daily email goes out twice a day on weekdays and once on

the weekend, which means if you go on vacation for a week, you miss 11 emails

in a row and you get automatically unsubscribed from this email.

So there wasn't really anybody who'd set this thing up to like,

maybe take that into account, maybe have a reengagement campaign.

There was just like not set up that way.

So I didn't, you know, that's not a HubSpot thing.

I dunno if that's a Yahoo thing, but like there were just these

holes where it's like, hmm.

No, you know, people weren't paying attention to this thing in the right way.

So maybe if it had been set up differently, if it had been really

a fully functioning email ecosystem that had been running through

HubSpot and be free and mailer light, then we might've left it that way.

But it was not, you know, the tech debt was, you know, so massive that,

or just easier to move it off onto something where we know right away how to

configure all the stuff to make it work.

so that's what we did.

You know, it took two months to change.

EML platforms could have been a little bit less if we d really hurried

it, but two months isn't too bad.

Yeah.

And are you, are you doing subscriber only, newsletters?

Not yet.

So I mean, that's really why we wanted to do some of these ones on beehive is

so that we could evolve them to become.

You know, subscriber only or have paid tiers.

so the, the two that we're doing on beehive right now are TechCrunch Mobility,

which is all about transportation, cars, planes, trains, automobiles, that kind of

thing, and the sort of evolution of that.

and that's very much like a written through kind of email.

It's essentially an article with, you know, other elements that

make it into an actual newsletter.

one of the shifts there was doing it so that it comes out, in

email form a day or two before it comes out on the website, right?

Like, that's a major thing is if you're gonna be publishing articles, real

editorial content in an email, give people a reason to subscribe to the email

rather than just like, you know, lots of the, lots of times you see this stuff.

On the website at the same time as it comes out in the email, why

am I gonna subscribe to the email?

What's the advantage of doing that, of cluttering my inbox when I

could just go check on the website?

No, I'm gonna give it to people before.

Give them a reason to really get this thing.

So, we've done that and that thing is up and running and it's going smoothly.

And you know, maybe now the thing to do will be to figure

out what can we add to that?

What are the most loved parts of that?

how can we add in, you know.

Elements that people would want to pay for.

People would like absolutely want this in their email, whether

they're paying for it or not.

Like how do we make that more attractive?

and then the other one that we're doing on beehive is strictly vc,

written by TechCrunch's editor in Chief, Connie Zos and Alex Gove.

And that's five days a week.

And it's like all of the info that you would wanna know about the VC world,

what's getting funded, what's not getting funded, where the money's going.

and I would love to see that evolve into something that, you know, has some kind of

paid tier to it or exclusive tier to it.

Just to say, here's a product and here's how we evolve it.

I don't know what that's gonna be.

I don't know what that's gonna look like.

we're just getting to a point of stability right now, so, you

know, over the next six, 12 months maybe we'll figure that out.

Or maybe it will stay the same.

A popular email product full of information that people love.

Yeah, we just did, I just, uh, put up a poll about, you

know, how would you describe your organization's current email setup?

I, I guess this is the opportunity for you, Tyler.

Yeah.

As you fix your, your microphone.

modern and integrated was only 22%.

the, the biggest, the most common answer with 38% was functional but fragmented.

and another 30% said, it was outdated or manual.

I guess does that speak to, that, that speaks to the situation

that you had sort of Yeah.

Originally found.

Like where would you, I think, think we're somewhere

between, what is it functional, but fragmented and modern, but integrated.

I mean, the challenge with running multiple email systems

is, you know, de-duping, right?

De-duping in a sort of.

Medicines, people subscribe, people unsubscribe.

Well, no one likes the list getting smaller.

I

noticed organizationally, like it's just really hard to come

in like the meeting and be like, so here's what I did for everyone.

I took and, and go to the sales team too at this.

I took our email list and made it 40% smaller.

Well, I deleted,

I deleted 5,000 bots that were subscribed to our email because to hear

it 10 years ago, some marketing companies signed up 10,000 bots and they just stayed

on our email list for who knows how long.

I mean, that's not Tech Crunch, but it might be one of our other brands.

You know, there's, you have to clean those lists.

You have to cut people out who are not reading, who are not even people.

When I first, it's funny you bring that up.

When I first joined Morning Brew, my first title was Growth Engineer, just

'cause I did engineering in, I don't even know if that's a real title.

I just did engineering in college and wanted engineering the title.

But my goal was to grow the, the, the newsletter.

And up until that point it was Alex Austin and then a writer.

Who like stumbled into about a hundred thousand emails over the course

of like college in a few years.

And I knew nothing about email.

I knew nothing about newsletters, nothing about email.

So I took calls with like people like you, growth leaders at like

the skim and like wherever else.

And once I understood email deliverability and saw that like 20% of our list was

opening, the first thing I did as growth engineers actually cut the list in half.

Which as someone who joined the company like three weeks prior,

was like a very difficult sell.

Yeah.

Especially 'cause I'm not even like the expert in the space.

I, I just figured out what email deliverability was.

Wait a minute.

Like I'm

a growth engineer.

Um, it was, it was at the time when the 76ers were, were tanking

and it was like, trust the process.

And so I literally have to sign off every email, trust the process, and it worked.

We got up to 50% open rate and never looked back.

But yeah, no one likes cutting the list.

we got a question from my favorite attendee, which is anonymous attendee.

They always bring the heat anonymous attendee I noticed.

It's a good, it's a good, uh.

Archetype.

hello, asking about the acquisition at the top of the funnel, anonymous

attendee wanted to know, did, did, is the landing page most important

or are there other, other things you know, you and you had to go through?

I think anytime, like I feel like email acquisition has gone through a lot of

different phases and like you've been like at the forefront of Manny Tyler.

I think some, some of the most effective like email acquisition.

Tactics.

I think you've like pioneered, you had like, you had like a viral

We take, we we you had a viral post back in the day, I believe.

Uh, the,

uh, referral program.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of that credit goes to the Skim.

I think The Skim was like the originators of this referral program

with like the skim ambassador program.

There was like sweepstakes, then it went onto referrals.

There's, we, we definitely innovated the, the MacBook Pro

giveaway, which was incredible.

What we, so I guess to give more context, the Skim had a referral program where once

you reached a certain amount of referrals, you became like a skim ambassador and

you got like your name at the bottom of the newsletter, like kind of silly stuff.

But then they had like tote bags and t-shirts and the Skim was like

the one that we always looked up to.

Like we were this upstart, you know, 500, 700,000 subscribers.

The Skim was like making milestones, three, 4 million subscribers.

That's also when we started talking about like vanity metrics

in the industry and like where.

Actual unique opens is what matters.

Not the number of subscribers, but separate point.

but anyway, the skin was crushing it.

And so we took a lot of inspiration from them.

We built our own referral program.

The morning brew referral program we gave away, what was it at three U got

like an exclusive Sunday newsletter, which was actually the most sought after.

Out of all the rewards that we gave away, we gave away t-shirts, hats, coffee

mugs at different levels of referrals.

The free newsletter on Sunday that we sent, if you had three referrals,

had a hundred thousand people on it.

So if you do the math, you know, over 300,000 people had to be referred

just to get onto this newsletter.

that was super effective.

yeah, that worked super well for

us.

But what about today?

Right?

Like, so everyone, I think the biggest problem in all of digital media is the

growth engineer might come up with, you know, the, the latest and greatest

growth hack, and then it quickly becomes well-known and it loses its efficacy.

It always happens everywhere.

And I think.

What Alex is actually, is the anonymous attendee is wanting to know is like,

what today are the best ways to grow?

Like an email list, you wanna take this or Yeah.

Like, how are you the best ways?

Yeah.

How are you growing your email list?

So you, you cleaned out a lot of like, you know, junk, not a lot

of bots.

Yeah.

lot of bots are gone.

I don't think we're doing anything super sophisticated, right.

We're using, People come to the website, right?

Like that is kind of the fundamental thing.

It's a funnel.

We're publish.

How much, how much do you optimize?

Like the, the landing pages, the popups?

Do you do like email gates where you can read half of the article,

but you have to We haven't

done that yet.

We've mostly been using HelloBar.

Do you know them?

They're, modal, popup thing that's really designed to acquire email

addresses and they've got really pretty good targeting, right?

So you can target by WordPress tags, you can target by refer, you can, you

know, target by simple things like URL keywords and things like that.

But like, you know, if someone comes to us from, you know, Y Combinator, right?

We can say, we can have a popup just for them that's like, Hey, why accommodated?

Why don't you subscribe to our emails and actually get this

story next time before it?

You know, two days later it hits Y Combinator.

Right?

Like those are the things that we can do with that.

Yeah.

And that's, you know, that's actually really effective, right?

It's people who are already interested in your content coming to you and

you target them appropriately for the things that they're reading

and how they've come to your site.

But that funnel is gonna get more challenging, particularly as

you get less like organic traffic.

Oh yeah.

It's already challenging.

I mean, that is always

the challenge of like, how do you get people, off premises, right?

and yeah, social isn't so great for that.

I'm trying to push, collaborations with, with ad partners, right?

Like, are there things that we can do together where we all collect email

addresses and share them because they can reach people that we can't.

I'd love to see that go on more.

I remember the good old days of exit intent.

Remember exit intent with the bounce exchange.

And then it was like nagging the lay.

It is like, oh, I don't want to cure cancer.

I don't want to be more informed.

Mm-hmm.

And I always thought those were.

Really low mark.

And then like you look at the data and it's like super effective.

Yeah.

They would like, it's definitely effective.

I remember the most effective thing at Digiday.

They came and, and the product guy was like, yeah, we wanna do this thing.

We just wanna run it by you.

We're gonna have an envelope with like a yellow one.

On there and, and people are gonna click it thinking they have a message.

Oh God.

And then, and they're actually just gonna get a modal to enter their email address.

I'm like, that's brilliant.

Yeah.

This is ridiculous.

I

hate

that.

Still

effective.

Yeah.

I'm about to throw that later today.

That's, it's really smart.

no for, I mean for the real thing is like you have to create great content, right?

Like I think that what Morning Brew, what Came Outta Morning Brew was a

lot of want to be morning brewers who thought that they could do the

growth hacking stuff that we kind of like pioneered and like innovated

without doing actually quality content.

Yeah.

And then you're just getting like, trash subscribers in that

are churning out way too high.

for my personal newsletter, I do quite a few things, so I

do like the hard email gate.

So

yeah,

ev, ev what I do, I publish every Tuesday morning, Monday

night, I promote what I'm like, what I'm going to be writing about

on all of the social channels.

So LinkedIn XI don't really use threads or Blue Sky, but I'll post

it there anyway with like a hard, like, here's what I'm writing about.

Be the first to find out when I send it tomorrow.

So I do that.

I publish it.

If you land on the website, you have to put in your email to

read beyond the first paragraph.

So like it's a hard email gate on any content for my newsletter.

I then, you know, post in all the different social channels as well.

beehive has an internal recommendation engine, so you can recommend other

newsletters in the ecosystem.

They can recommend you back.

You can figure out like what that looks like in terms of creating pods of other

similar but not competing newsletters that are all kind of boosting each other up.

We have what we call the Boost network, which is like basically co-reg.

So paid recommendations where you can say, so for me, if you want to promote my

newsletter, I'm paying I think $2 a lead.

So any newsletter in the beehive ecosystem can apply to promote my newsletter.

And in exchange for every email that they send me, I send them $2 minus,

like the 20% that beehive takes.

so that's, that's a revenue stream.

this is, this is like Trump sewing the government.

Yeah.

We, we, we have the, the, the referral program that I talked about earlier

that we built that morning brews built directly into the platform.

We have some distribution partners.

it, it's kind of like what, what I think everyone struggles with in the

newsletter space is they want the silver bullet of like, morning brew did X and

like, this is where I'm gonna invest all of my time and effort and growth.

And the truth is, I do 15 different things for growth and

I'm not even doing enough there.

I could take my content, turn into video, post that on TikTok.

There, there's more to be done.

but I think it's just finding distribution and it all comes from

creating actually quality content.

Yeah.

It's funny, I, I did a, a poll here about, replatforming.

are you open, are you evaluating a new email platform in the next 12 months?

and half said either actively or possibly.

so I think there's clearly a. Appetite to like up the game and email from,

from a lot of people out there.

I think, I think the two things that I think almost every

publisher cares about and every creator as well is how do I grow

faster and how do I make more money?

Yeah, right.

Well this is the old, like the morning brew simple formula.

Right?

If, if you can

just solve those two problems for Right.

Anyone.

Yeah.

Ri row sells what we said at Morning Brew, and then for me, from like the,

the founder perspective of building beehive is like, what could I wake

up and build that helps our users grow faster or make more money?

And so we have, like I, I mentioned in, when I was just chatting about like the

different ways I've grown my newsletter, I think maybe 80% of them are homegrown

beehive features using network effects or email capture on the website or whatever

else that we can help accelerate growth.

And then monetization.

We have paid subscriptions that at any day you could wake up and decide to

make one of those newsletters paid.

Oh yeah.

And we don't take a cut of subscription revenue, so you could take a free

email list and, and flip it into a subscription based product fairly easily.

And then we have the Beehive ad network, which is home to Nike, Netflix, Roku, tons

of lifestyle brands, AG One, et cetera.

And so the thinking is if we can just stack as many chips in our favor in terms

of how do we help publishers make money off the emails that they're sending?

And I think that's kind of the paradigm that we're seeing and hopefully

reflected in that poll is traditionally.

Email platforms have been solely sending emails.

In the morning brew days, we would copy and paste into MailChimp and then

campaign monitor and then sail through.

But it was just sending email and now there's this paradigm of tools

launching and hopefully beehive at the forefront of that is can this

tool actually help me with audience acquisition and growth and monetization

where it's more than just the pipes to send email, but it's actually driving

growth and revenue for the business.

and I think people are starting to take notice of that.

Yeah.

Matt, let's talk about monetization real quick.

Yeah.

How are you making money off these

emails?

primarily direct sold advertising right across all of our brands.

We have ad sales teams who.

Sell sponsorships of these newsletters, whether on sale

through or, yeah, and on beehive.

I mean, that is, that's the gold standard for us.

It's an extension of the, you know, ad sales that they do for the websites.

so that is, you know, probably 95% of it.

But, when we started using beehive, which is probably a couple years ago

for Cheddar, you know, having that ad network was a way that I helped sell

this to my colleagues and like saying, Hey, yes, we're doing direct sales,

like that's what we want most of all, but like, direct sales are not every

single day, not every single newsletter.

We need to be able to monetize this thing in between those direct sales events.

And so having that ad network has just made these things, you know, at least

break even, which is really nice.

And in some cases profitable.

So like.

Having that available is, is huge.

We haven't really, you know, gone that deep into paid subscriptions yet though.

Yeah.

That's something I'd like to see more, but talk,

talk about the, just a quick aside before that.

Yeah, go for it.

Like, I do like with Cheddar, 'cause I have to mention this, anytime Cheddar

comes up, I did pay play a small but pivotal role in getting cheddar on gas

pumps all over the Oh, you got us on

gas station tv.

Thank you.

Yes.

I joked on Twitter back when Twitter was much more useful, about how John

Steinberg was cutting distribution deals with like everyone from nail

salons and that it was only a matter of time before he was on, gas pumps.

Yeah.

And he said That's a great idea.

And Sean McCaffrey it, it happened through that.

I send emails to the gas station TV people every single day.

They're automated emails.

But they get emails from me every day.

so yeah, there's that.

I have that going, for me.

but on like the event side, right?

Yeah.

Like talk to me about how you, 'cause like a lot of publishers

are going hard into events, right?

Mm-hmm.

And there is, and this came up at, at the breakfast today, there is an interesting

nexus between like email and event.

And I think with events, like people are, are really sleeping on the

importance of that particular data.

And this also speaks to how a lot of these organizations are just still very siloed.

Yeah.

I mean, there's two parts of it.

One is just, you know, getting people to sign up for your events

and email just tends to be the best.

That's why do, like, email is

always the workhorse because you send out email, people take out credit

cards and spend thousands of dollars.

Yeah.

I mean, it's amazing.

It's, it's, it reaches people, you know, who you're reaching generally,

and people react to this stuff, right?

It's very clear.

It's written, it's got clear links to where to sign up.

It's not something that flips by on your.

Facebook or Twitter feed.

This is like the, the, the crossover is just super, super natural.

Not supernatural, but super natural.

Yeah.

and so, yeah, we do a lot of that.

I mean, all of our brands, almost all of our brands do a large number of events and

we get people to sign up by sending them emails with links to how they can sign up.

I mean, it's just, it's really straightforward.

And then the second part of that is building, editorial emails that

connect with the events themselves.

So over a site line for, all of the defense and military

events that we're involved with.

We send out emails that are called like the Digital Show Daily, which I guess

has evolved from back in the days when you would do like a print publication

every day of a particular conference.

Yeah.

So there's the digital version of it, and it's really just a simple

email of like, here's all the stories that came out of this event today.

It's like a popup newsletter.

Yeah, it's a popup newsletter.

And, We've done that on the defense and military stuff and with TechCrunch

Disrupt, we have one launching, with Disrupt starting on Sunday.

So it's for event and attendees only.

So hurry up and buy your tickets please.

You get the email newsletter,

you'll get the email newsletter with you know, we launched this

one, although it seems like it's a traffic driving newsletter.

We launched this one on beehive partly 'cause it's a

little bit easier to spin up.

But also because we know that there's gonna be photos that we take on the

convention floor, there's gonna be social posts and like putting that stuff into a

daily email for, you know, five days is gonna be a lot easier to do on Beehive.

We can just drop those, you know, Twitter URLs in there and it's gonna

appear and be really nice and we'll gotta get that out to everybody who's

going to the conference really easily.

Fairly frictionless.

Yeah, fairly, fairly frictionless.

You know, as an editor I always say, you just take out all the adverbs, so

we'll just take out the fairly part.

So I actually asked, I asked, I, I, did a survey, little poll here about,

you know, what is your organization primarily to find success for email?

And it was just about, it was exactly split in the top two

results between driving site traffic and engagement and retention.

So, yeah, that speaks to, you know, the fact that you have

to do two different jobs.

What, what are you seeing across your client base with, you know, things like

popup newsletters and using, using email for, for more than, than just the typical

daily like or weekly publishing cadence.

It's hard to say because as you know, with email, there's so much you

can do with email and, and every day I kind of stumble across, say, customer,

but gimme some new use cases that people, you throw me on the spot here.

I'm, I'm, I'm male prepared for this, um, new use cases for email.

I, I think like similar to driving to site, there's like this

paradigm of driving to community and community based content.

whether the community is custom hosted or hosted on some third party.

You kind of like earn the trust of the reader over time and identify the highest

value readers and then kind of push them typically to a paid community or

like a paid digital product of sorts.

I think that's pretty interesting.

We see like in like the digital entrepreneur space and like some of

these newer age publishers really experimenting with paid communities as

like that next evolution of engagement.

paid subscriptions are huge.

I think that wasn't, I mean, I, I grew up, I grew up like five, six years

ago was introduced to Ben Thompson and Eckery, who I think is kind of like the

OG of like the paid newsletter space.

and since I've seen.

A lot of niche publishers have a ton of tremendous success by offering

a 10 to $20 monthly subscription.

I mean some and very niche too.

There's a real estate newsletter who's doing three to $500,000

a year as a one person shop.

Yeah.

just because, you know, niche audience and it charges 20, $30 a month.

These are like the information entrepreneurs.

Like I went.

Yeah.

I think that's like a great way of describing that.

I

went to like an email growth summit that Matt McGarry, they put on like it's

a bit of like an email guru of sorts.

And it's funny 'cause I went there, I was like a total outlier in some, some ways.

'cause I mean, most of my experience is in the more like institutional media world.

And in this world it's totally different.

Like,

so, and, and on this like spectrum, I would say there's

like pure journalism, right?

Reporting and then there's like outcome based like entrepreneurs or

like organizations that are like.

The journalism is like a means to an end, right?

Or the content's a means to an end to get them into your paid course.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Your paid community, a paid subscription, click on ads, like whatever it is, they're

internet native businesses.

Right.

And like, and I feel like that energy is completely different.

And also just like that kind of like event.

It was just interesting the kinds of things that people talk about there.

I thought, you know, you should be talking more about the content.

But then when I'm like, you know, with the sort of capital J when with

all the content people they're trying to figure out how to do, yeah, yeah.

I'm like, you have to figure out, they had entire sessions about a landing page.

You're not thinking about that stuff at all.

And so it's always one of those situations where both sides sort

of need to learn from the other.

And I think you guys are an interesting position because a lot of the sort

of internet native business people, the information entrepreneurs

are using your product, right?

And I think that there's a lot to learn from.

From them for like, more like legacy publishers or institutional, right?

And, and we have the other end of the spectrum too.

So Oliver Darcy, who left CNN and went independent with status, like

one of our, our great case studies, who I think is making over a million

dollars a year in his first year in business, all through paid subscription.

So he's very much on the end of the spectrum of like pure

journalism, the daily newsletter, breaking news, et cetera.

So we see both.

but again, that's why I said it was like a difficult question to answer

because email is email and there's so many different things you can do as

in the medium, whether it is as the editorial destination, whether it's

top of funnel to drive traffic back to your website, your paid community.

there's a lot.

And, and so we see something different kind of every day.

Yeah.

How do you see, do, do you, and we, we talked about this just at the end of the

breakfast, but I'm like intrigued by new.

Email formats, right?

Because I feel, and maybe it's just me as like content guy, like I just

kind of feel like, almost like the email format has gotten a little tired.

Like there's a couple different types.

You know, we're well into past the sort of novelty phase of like an email newsletter.

the ones that seem to work the best to me, you know, are when

they're written more personally.

But at the same time, like I see what like the New York Times is doing with

like the world and trying to introduce more multimedia types of content.

And I'm just wondering, do you see anything that you would point

to that is like an innovative use of like email newsletters?

It depends what you consider innovative, right?

Like I think, and, and this is how I answered at breakfast as well, which is.

Being very designed for it in the inbox.

I think a lot of traditional publishers have always viewed email, one from

the traffic driving standpoint, and then also from an email looking like

any other email where it's plain text, a few links, maybe an image.

And I think what hopefully our tool has democratized is the ability to

add, images, videos, gifs, like really great design, interesting backgrounds

where it actually is something you look forward to opening in the inbox.

And so I think there's been like an evolution and like maybe Morning

Brew played a, a small part.

I still remember redesigning where we had like the drop shadows around

the content in each of the cards.

but yeah, I, I think thinking as email newsletters as a product has forced people

to think of like if this is actually is the, the end, the the end product, how

do we make it differentiated both in the information that we're delivering

and the way that that information is delivered and the aesthetic that it has

in the inbox, and how is it different from the other types of content that

I'm consuming on a day-to-day basis.

So design I think is like the area where we've seen the most,

like quote unquote innovation.

different formats.

I agree with you.

I think, I think the e the emails that stand out and are the most defensible,

especially with like the age of AI would be like the Ben Thompsons of the

world, like my personal newsletter, which is really just like me building

in public of like the, the behind the scenes of building the company.

Yeah.

I think those like narrative based personalized emails perform really

well and have like this affinity and brand following, whereas regurgitating

news, unless you're the one breaking the news, I think is like a little bit

harder with like how the information

Yeah.

The roundups.

Yeah.

Right.

And we were talking about it in breakfast too, where, where we were

talking about email fatigue and how most people haven't experienced it.

But the one case that the publisher gave an example is if you're just covering the,

the daily business news and you have six other daily business newsletters, right?

By the time you get to the fourth or fifth one, you're kind of reading

the same story over and over again.

And unless you have.

Someone that you respect their opinion and they're giving a different analysis of

the news, then it's the news is the news.

Right.

And so I think those are like the most likely to be disrupted.

Yeah.

How do you end up like sort of dealing with, 'cause you're, I mean, TechCrunch

is kind of on both sides in some ways.

'cause like, I guess historically I thought, like I think of like

the DNA of TechCrunch with Mike Arrington extremely opinionated.

It was his lens, right?

And then I felt like TechCrunch moved more into being almost like a, I

don't wanna say a Newswire, but it was like anything that was happening,

it was aiming to be comprehensive.

Yeah.

I mean, we're still fairly comprehensive, right?

Like, sorry,

we're comprehensive.

There you go.

We're comprehensive.

As an

editor, you just gotta like take out the ly work.

Yeah.

yeah, we're very comprehensive.

I mean, we certainly have people writing who are very opinionated.

Connie, the editor in chief, writes some great stuff that is

very, has a strong perspective on.

Tech should or shouldn't be doing.

Amanda Silber is doing great cultural stuff as well, so there's

definitely that aspect of it.

But in terms of the business, it's very, it's often very just scoop

driven, exclusive driven, comprehensive.

We're trying to catch everything that's going on with this enormous, huge

industry in America and the world.

And so that is really one of the, you know, prime animators of what we do.

and that, you know, that's a tricky thing.

It translates into a particular kind of email product, right?

Strictly VC is here's what's going on, here's all the VC stuff that's happening.

So, you know, I don't know that we're doing yet in email what.

Tyler's talking about in terms of, you know, like an Oliver Darcy kind

of thing or sort of very strong personality led So they don't come

from a, a person?

Well, no, they do.

I mean, the tech crutch mobility is, is written by Kirsten and Right.

She's,

does it say her name?

Oh, yeah.

It's her name on.

It's sort of tactical, but it is, yeah, definitely.

And strictly

VC is coming from Alex and Connie.

They are coming from those people.

But these are people who are, you know, they're, they're in some

ways traditional journalists.

They're very focused on the reporting and the writing of that reporting.

And it is a different approach from someone who is Right.

This

came up today.

I mean, 'cause it's a different type.

Yeah.

Of it has, at least to me, and maybe this like sort of wears off 'cause it can.

Be overdone.

Right?

But like there needs to be a conversational, like element to it.

And I think one of the things that was brought up today that was a

good point was that it is still kind of a one-way conversation.

Mm-hmm.

And I mean, one of the great things about email is you get responses.

You know, like, I mean, right or wrong, I think publishers gave up on the comment

section, of their websites and now they're trying to fi figure out how to get back

into community that they've outsourced to a lot of platforms in some ways.

but the comment sections were abandoned for the most part.

And email promises to be sort of two way.

But like often is, is is still kind of one way.

I mean, it's great because you do get responses.

Well, some of the little stuff that beehive does, like the pole

widget is just like, it's such an easy way of getting people to like.

Tell you what they think.

Right.

There's a really basic way of making it a bit of a two-way conversation.

Yeah.

I've gotten a lot of feedback from polls too.

I used to think no one would ever click on them, but I, I have some posts where

I have three, 400 votes on a poll with like, very good constructive criticism

of what they didn't like about my writing or my take that I've learned from.

I think the challenge that he, that Matt was just kind of getting at, which was

also discussed at breakfast, is like, I think the personality led newsletters

or content in general adds a bit more narrative and has some fandom behind

it where people like look for, like, I don't even call it streck, I call

it like, I wanna read Ben's opinion.

Right.

But as a larger publisher, there's kind of this balance, especially as tools like

call, whether it's beehive or substack, make it easier to go independent.

There's kind of like this inherent risk in building personality Yeah.

That, that came up, right?

Yeah.

Because it's, you're like, you're kind of in like the talent business, right?

And like you have to retain talent.

They know their worth.

They know, they see the responses and the replies of how much.

People love their content and their beat and their opinions.

And once you build up this profile and you make them the personality of this

particular newsletter or publication or column, and then they know their worth.

Like, is that not a risk of them eventually going independent?

I think that's what you hinted at with like Business Insider

allowing them to mm-hmm.

Follow.

I think you need to figure out like a tactical way where.

You want them to lead personality driven.

'cause you know, that's where the fandoms created in behavior and like where

it stands out and is more defensible.

But you don't want them to become so big where they can just pick up and leave.

And so where does the broader organization support them to be quasi independent but

still part of the larger umbrella company?

And I think that's to be determined.

I've seen different companies try different things.

Yeah.

Really good health insurance.

Yeah,

could, could be.

Yeah.

That'll help.

I mean the, the health insurance premiums are set to skyrocket.

Yeah.

who wants to go

independent and have

to, that's Yeah.

Pay triple premium.

I'm in the Obamacare marketplace.

Lemme, we can do a whole podcast on that.

got a tactical, question here, Tyler, for you, were you affected, was

beehive affected or were you personally affected by, by the AWS outage?

Yeah, but I, I've grown in maturity leading the company where.

Fetal freak out in earlier days.

I used to be in fetal position in my bed while customers are texting me and

calling me while their websites are down.

I had meetings all day on Monday and I, I was aware of it and just

kind of like kept on with my day.

But yeah, we were, we were impacted.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, Alex has a, has another question.

He said, great exchange.

Thank you, Alex.

he says, recently I was really into the TLDR Tech newsletter,

that exploits, the paradigm of link you'd send to your group chat.

It's quite effective criterion to choose what goes in and what's not.

If you ask me, for Alex's newsletter, he's, he's often, thinking about what

other paradigms and approaches, to use, value to a reader is understandable.

One, but it doesn't have the network effect like shared to your group chat.

Does, any thoughts on this, Matt?

I mean.

Share the link you'd share to your group.

Chat is a great concept if you don't have that many links, right?

I mean, yeah.

TechCrunch has, you know, 30 links a day.

Are we just gonna choose one or two of them to

set?

Yeah.

I think this is more curation newsletter type, like, yeah.

I mean, I think that's great.

I mean, in some ways that's what we're doing with that sort of final spot

in our, traffic driving newsletters is like, here's, you know, and by

the way, here's this one thing that you should definitely check out.

Yeah.

I think it's like, it's not coming from like a personality.

It's not coming from like a person saying, oh yes, it's me, by the way.

You should.

Yeah.

I'm always biased to, like, you should have a lens, like, I think what you're

talking about with like Ben Thompson.

Ben Ben has a lens on a business.

I mean, sometimes it's like.

It's a little overdone for my taste, but like, you know, I don't need

to go back to something he wrote from 2012, but maybe that's me.

but like, you know, I think one of the advantages, first of all, of

having a lens is like you literally just point it on like an industry or

whatever, and everything that goes through it just goes through your lens.

And so it's very repeatable format.

but like just having interesting link that you would share to a group

chat, I think that's a tough, I think that's a tough place to be these days.

It's, I'll be honest.

I mean, if you could build a whole company on that, great.

But that's, but

curation is like, I think becoming more and more important, right?

Like when, when information now with AI and everyone has chat, GPT is so

easy to get what happened in the news.

Like, what does this mean?

I think, like, I know taste is a thing that everyone likes to make fun of now,

because like what's, what's taste like?

People are making fun of taste.

Well, because everyone shifted from having taste.

Ha ha.

Well, yeah, having taste is like the new paradigm of like, what people want, right?

If, if everything's available to everyone, then people who have taste

as like taste makers are the ones who kind of like basically curation, right?

I think I wanted Aura.

Yeah.

E either or.

Okay.

Gatekeepers.

Yeah.

We're, we're all saying the same thing here.

Okay.

But what, what, what's interesting about like Matt and TechCrunch is

like, they have a problem that, like some publishers do, a lot of the

publishers on Beehive don't, which is they have like too much content, right?

Yeah.

They're publishing dozens and dozens of stories per day,

which makes the whole like.

automated personalization of these emails more interesting potentially, but we,

we would always go back and forth in my morning brew days about that, where.

In theory, you know, Austin's very analytical and he'd be like, well if we

know that these people, like politics content more, 'cause we have all of

their link data and like what they're clicking on and whatever, why would we

not just serve them more politics content?

And we actually went on the other end of the spectrum, which is Neil and our

editors have a finger of the, on the pulse of like what our audience wants.

And like it's up to the editor to determine what they think

would resonate most or what's the most valuable on any given day.

And so the whole curation versus hyper-personalization I

think is always like a really interesting debate for publishers.

Yeah.

I'm like laughing 'cause I think like Austin caught a

stray here with the in theory.

I mean that's like fairly No, no, in theory.

In theory.

He's analytical.

No, no, no.

He, he is very analytical.

Okay.

well we are, we're about out of time, but I just wanna like, when we wrap

up, can just give me like sort of for those who are thinking in the 78% of,

of the people responding about like.

Stopping their sort of email strategy.

Just give me one or two, pieces of advice.

Matt, I wanna start with

you.

Figure out what you want before you do anything.

Just, do you need ad dollars?

Do you need traffic?

Do you need event signups?

Do you need engagement?

Like, let that first decision about what you actually want from your business,

from your publication, from your endeavor.

once you figure that out, then all the other pieces are gonna fall into place.

Okay, Tyler?

I think I'd start with like what your value prop is and like

why your audience comes to you for the content that you create.

And I, I come from like a different per, like, we know that tech crunches

content is great, so like, it's a different problem of you optimizing

for audience growth or revenue, because I deal with a lot of the, like, you

know, independent journalists, Digital entrepreneurs, they are, as you mentioned

at that conference, hyperop optimizing around growth tactics and like how to

scale their audience and squeeze every dollar out of an open or a click where

a lot of them overlook like, what is the content where I have a competitive

advantage that people would even sign up to this newsletter or be a part of

this publication in the first place.

So I think you, it's like the ying and yang, right?

Yeah.

You kinda need to have both.

And I think most operators or publishers skew on one end of the

spectrum and try and try to take the best practices of each, I think

is like how you have to succeed.

Yeah.

My, my one thing would be don't just look at dashboards, like talk to

the people who are in your audience.

They will tell you and what you hear from people when they respond to you

and is way more important oftentimes than what you see in a dashboard.

'cause a lot of times the data will lead you into all sorts of areas, but nothing

really replaces talking specifically to the audience and really understanding.

What they, what they need from you and what they want from you.

I, I'd also double that and say that a lot of people think, because

you're kind of like sending this email into the void, that it feels more one

way when it really should be two way.

And so when people would ask me, how do I grow faster?

I have this like, recommendation network and this referral program.

I always recommend just like asking them the top of the newsletter,

if you've enjoyed this newsletter, to share it with one other person.

And that's always the most shares that they've ever received.

Yeah.

And it's so simple.

We, we have a thing like that at the top of Cheddar's Need to Know newsletter,

which is on Beehive that says, if you like this email, please share it with a friend.

If you didn't like it, why not share it with an enemy?

Yeah.

There you go.

Awesome.

Thanks guys.

Appreciate it.

And thank you, to our friends of Morning Brew.

Thank you.

Morning Brew for hosting us.

Thank

you.

Bye.