3 years at beehiiv

I just hit 3 years with the beehiiv team.

The crazy part? This entire run started with one cold email on November 2nd, 2022, to Tyler Denk, pitching myself to join as a writer.

This did not involve 7 rounds of interviews or endless back-and-forth emails.

TG trusted me with my ideas, and I was onboard to help build the beehiiv content system that now drives millions of impressions every month and beyond that, is a resource that hundreds of thousands of people trust.

In startup years, 3 years feels like a decade. I’ve always been an impatient human, there’s always this need to act fast, and as a result, I often expect instant results. But everything I’ve ever worked on has only shown results months later.

If this story— how I went from writing to strategizing content at beehiiv — sounds like something that just happened… it really didn’t. It took me 50 articles to even begin to understand the nitty-gritties of the product and how I could provide the most value and that’s after having already worked with a few high-growth startups.

Most of all, this journey has taught me persistence, to show up like it’s day one, with or without results, and keep iterating.

So I wanted to zoom out and share a few of the biggest things I’ve learned along the way.

I’ve learned this the hard way and the fun way. Very early on in life, I realized early on the kind of people I enjoy hanging out with — doers.

Working alongside people who:

…is a completely different game than working in a place where every decision has to pass through 10 filters, 4 stakeholders, and 3 “quick syncs.”

One small, sharp, high-agency team will out-perform a massive, slow organization every single time and this AI bubble has really proved that.

When you trust the people you work with:

The people are the leverage.

This also means you can feel out of place at times, because everybody around you is an A-player. That can feel uncomfortable, but honestly, it’s the best thing you can do for yourself.

You don’t figure out what works inside a Google Doc. You figure it out in the wild. A bias toward action makes it much easier to:

This applies to:

The goal isn’t “move fast to look busy.” The goal is: move fast on the things that actually make a difference.

Speed gives you more time to iterate, which gives you more data to work with, and more data gives you better decisions.

All my best work comes from time-blocked, focused sessions and that maps perfectly to how we operate at beehiiv:

You’re not rewarded for looking busy. You’re rewarded for building. One of my core beliefs is: Deep, focused work over time > trying to be visible 24/7.

There’s no amount of soft skills that can beat someone who lets their work speak. While it’s important to be communicative (over-communicative in a remote setup, in fact), you have to draw a line and remember — the person you’re talking to might not have the time to read 3 blocks of text about a problem.

The best way to lead?

It’s really that simple and I have huge respect for people who understand how much time this saves.

Or at least, write it down.

Be it features constantly discussed or new content ideas that could crush it, sometimes you just can’t tell what might work or when. Sometimes it’s all about timing.

If you have an idea, write it down, share it with your team, pitch it, show exactly what you’re thinking.

Over 3 years, I’ve seen:

And weirdly, all three categories are useful.

Bad or mid ideas:

You can’t just sit around and wait for perfect, fully-formed, guaranteed-to-win ideas.

If your idea is great, pitch it. If your idea might be great, definitely pitch it.

The goal isn’t to be right all the time.

The goal is to create enough surface area for the right things to show up, and to be more right than wrong. (And how would you ever figure that out if you don’t share the bad ideas?)

I still show up with the same energy as Day 1.

That doesn’t mean it’s always glamorous. A lot of days look like:

From the outside, going from freelancer → full-time → 3 years with the same team might seem like a long game.

That’s the whole point. It is a long game.

I genuinely believe: you have to give years to a vision for it to start working in your favor.

Stay long enough and:

One day, it looks like an “overnight success.”

You’ll know it was just thousands of unsexy reps. If you care about what you do, you barely care how long it takes to get it done.

At the end of the day, your users don’t care about your org chart, your internal debates, or your clever strategy decks.

They care about:

They’ll tell you:

If:

…then it’s usually just a matter of:

Listen hard. Ship fast. Close the loop.

From one cold email on November 2nd, 2022… to building on beehiiv’s content engine… to seeing millions of impressions roll in every month…

From my side of the screen, it hasn’t felt like one big break and I didn’t even realize it until I went back to my Gmail inbox looking for some old emails a few weeks ago.

It’s felt like:

3 years in, it still feels like Day 1.