A single tweet (mirrored on LinkedIn) announced the private beta and pointed people to a waitlist, rather than an open signup.

“we will be accepting limited applicants off the waitlist on a rolling basis”

The goal of the tweet was explicitly two-fold: establish credibility off the back of the Morning Brew reputation, and connect directly with people who already needed a newsletter platform.

“Our first hundred customers came from a simple tweet.”

From day one, Tyler openly shared product updates, notable new users, revenue milestones, and partnerships as a matter of course, not just around big launches.

“I fully embraced the “build in public” mantra”

Sharing openly compounded beyond just users; it also put the company in front of investors well before any formal fundraising conversation started.

“it’s helped us reach new audiences, attract new users, and even get in front of some game-changing investors.”

The referral system that Tyler originally built at Morning Brew was given free to every beehiiv user from launch, rather than being a paid or gated feature the way competitors positioned similar tools.

“When we launched beehiiv, we gave it to every user (for free).”

An investor who backed the company separately observed that customer enthusiasm did a lot of the organic promotion on its own, visible both in public conversation and in the beehiiv badge showing up in more and more newsletters over time.

Tyler personally messaged every person who engaged with his LinkedIn posts, then later systematized this into an exported lead list for the sales team.

“I would message every single person who engaged with my content.”

Not every message converted, but a meaningful share of engaged LinkedIn users became enterprise customers.

“Some were dead-ends, others became enterprise users.”

With no sales team in the early days, Tyler personally ran every demo and onboarded each new user onto the platform himself.

“If someone needed a demo, I would personally do it and onboard them onto the platform myself.”

Treating a manual, unscalable process (a Google form plus personally messaging every new user) as a deliberate early moat rather than a shortcut to avoid.

“It also became a growth hack – I messaged every single new user (20K+ of them).”