Make $500k/Year with One Email a Week

What if you could make 5,000 bucks every time you hit send on your email newsletter? What if there were six different ways of monetizing an email newsletter? What if you knew nothing about email newsletters? That's probably you right now. So, you've come to the right place. Today, I had on a guy that is a newsletter expert. He makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in profit with his newsletter. And he says, "You don't need thousands and thousands of subscribers to make good money on a newsletter. You just need the right offer to the right subscribers. And even if you only have 500 to 5,000 subscribers, you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So today, my friend Tyler shares his screen and he goes us from absolute zero to starting a profitable newsletter. What more could you want? All right, so Tyler, you have a newsletter. How big is that newsletter? >> It's about 120,000 subscribers today. >> Okay. Do you know how many of those came from like paid ads versus organic roughly? >> It's hard to tell, honestly. Maybe 50/50. >> Okay. How often do you email that list? >> Yeah. So, it's once a week, every Tuesday. >> Okay. And if you wanted to like fully optimize the monetization of that list, I know you don't, but if you did, if you wanted to pull every monetization lever you could with 120,000 people, how much profit could that list make you every year today if it didn't grow? I'll tell you right now, I've generated about half a million in revenue from this list. And this is my side project that I put five hours a week into. So I think that shows you if I were to take this a bit more seriously I think we could do multiple millions in revenue. >> Okay. So 500,000 in revenue and from what I understand in this business most of that is profit right? Like what percentage of that would you say is profit? >> Very few costs. The platform I use Beehive costs very little. My only employee working on this as a side project. There's really no other cost. I use free invoicing software. Um so as high margin as a business as you could possibly imagine. Okay. So, I'm already thinking of a title here. $500,000 side hustle, not even optimized, could be multiple millions. So, today I want you to take us from zero, no knowledge of newsletters to publish newsletter. And then I want you to show us like a dozen different ways of how we can make money with a newsletter. Deal. >> Let's do it. >> This will be a newsletter masterass. Whether it's a local newsletter or a newsletter about violin lessons, doesn't matter. Share your screen and show us exactly how you did that. Let's do it. >> And I'm gonna ask you questions if I get confused. >> Cool. So, the first thing I'll do is chat about kind of like the inspiration of the website, right? So, one thing that Beehive does really well is you host both a newsletter and a website simultaneously. A lot of people want to start what should my website look like? They actually have this resource, very good websites, and you can actually just click in and see what other people are building for inspiration. So to give you an idea, this is a website that was built on Beehive. Uh very clean landing page up front. Figuring out, you know, collecting emails is the name of the game. Obviously, aesthetic and style helps get new subscribers. This is another beautiful website, scalable, recently launched. Um so this was like kind of like where I started just for like inspiration purposes of of where and how I should build the website. And you can see this is my actual newsletter um and website. >> For those listening only, you've just have like an old school vibe. It looks like MS DOS or Windows 95. What's the thought process behind this? >> Yeah, so Big Desk Energy is the name of a Spotify playlist that I created which has like good music to listen to. Yeah, it has about 25,000 followers. It's basically good music to listen to while you're working. I think actually I took inspiration from like another website that was built a few years ago that has like this Windows 98 theme. So I just kind of took it and ran with it. But yeah, it's like a retro Windows 98 themed newsletter and website. So I I'll give the caveat that you can make your website look better than this. This is intentionally looking shitty for the sake of looking like Windows 98, but this is my website. >> I think in web design you can't be in the middle. You got to like either be intentionally ironic andor ugly or just beautiful. If you're trying to be beautiful but you're ugly, that's where you don't want to be. >> Exactly. Totally agree with that. And and it's important to call out as I go through this video. Everything these are like the individual posts. Posts are simultaneous with like newsletters, right? So I sent this newsletter to my list this past Tuesday. It doubles as a web post on my website to collect emails. And I can get into like the different strategies and like why I do that, but that is kind of the default behavior. So, let me jump over here. This is my Beehive dashboard. Again, unedited, perfect, raw, transparent, behind the scenes of all the numbers. I will call out, yes, I I I've led with I've generated over 500,000. 23,000 was done through the platform. A lot of it is done off platform which I can get into but that is mostly through direct sponsorships with other brands or through events and like IRL events that I host a few times every few months. >> Um so I'm not lying on the earnings number. I can I can I have the receipts here. You can see in the dashboard kind of like subscriber growth without going into the details of email deliverability. You want to keep a clean list. So there's a p a few big like unsubscribes here that were intentional. But yeah, I I'll jump in and get started by showing two things real quick. One, website analytics is awesome. And so this is kind of like what I use to see traffic being driven to the site. Um they make it super easy to see all of the different pages that you're getting traffic from and where your traffic is coming from. So Facebook, LinkedIn, X, which is still t.co I suppose. Um and the different platforms. But yeah, to get started, website, that's your bread and butter. That's where you want to build. Be has a full website builder that you can see here. I just showed the actual website. And then there's a few core pages that you want to have. This is the subscriber landing page where you send like minimal distraction. Like if I want to grow and I'm running paid ads, they typically go to this page, which you cannot mess up at all. The other kind of secret that has worked really well for me is lead magnets. And so if I go back to my website, you can see beehive seed deck here. You could I can drive traffic. And if you're unfamiliar with what a lead magnet is, you are basically exchanging value for an email address in many cases. And many founders don't actually share the different fundraising decks that they use to grow and and raise capital. And I am very transparent. So here I created a lead magnet where by simply putting in your email, you will receive the C deck that we use to raise $2.5 million. I post on X and LinkedIn and I've run ads as well saying if you want the deck that we raised two and a half million for, you come here, put in your email and then you can see how I set that up on the website builder here under resources seed deck. Voila. So everything can be done directly in the behive platform. And the other thing that I think is interesting and worth calling out is you have full flexibility over the automations for each of these subscribe forms. And what I mean by that is typically if you put in your email into the landing page, you get like a welcome email with the lead magnet. You can see over here with the automation, I chose the seed deck lead magnet. And so anyone who is driven to this page, they put in their email, they then get added to my email list and using the automation feature, which is really powerful at VHive, they will immediately receive that CDC. So I'll pause there for a second, ran through websites, ran through automations quickly, and this is like the very simple automation that I set up. It's just two steps. It's if the email is submitted and in the website builder I specified which form that comes from. Um they will receive this email which has a link to the seed deck. Beautiful. All right. So I want you to pretend like I'm Cindy Ker. My mom I love her. She's 65 years old. Start at the very beginning. Like if if someone out there wants to start a newsletter like what is step one zero to one. >> Step one sign up for Beehive. They make it simple. Step two, launch a website. And so we I showed you what my website looks like. You there's full web templates that you can use. You don't have to be an artist or a designer or even an engineer using the website builder. Not only can you use quick start templates, beehive also recently launched the ability to just simply chat with AI. And so you can actually take a screenshot of your favorite website, input it directly into the chat, and it will generate a page that looks like that website. So where most people run into friction of I'm not a developer. I'm not a designer. I don't want to build a website. I think that's like step one. You need a place to send traffic. You need a website. Behive makes it incredibly simple to get set up. >> Can we treat this as if we're starting a newsletter right now? >> Yeah, I would need to sign out, but yeah, we could do some things there. You want to go through the full like log in, start everything. Yeah. >> From from scratch. >> Cool. >> So, this is what you're going to see when you sign up for a free trial, right? >> Yep. And coming in as a total newbie. I do not have a newsletter yet. Set your newsletter name. What What should it be, Chris? What are we thinking? >> Let's say, you know what? My favorite band of all time is an emo band. They're called Brand New. And I thought in another life when I had more time, I would make a newsletter about Brand New. And I'm going to call it Brand News. >> That's amazing. >> How about that? Isn't that a good name? >> That's great. And this is not rehearsed. That's on the spot. That's great. >> That's on the spot, baby. >> We'll see if that domain is available. brand news.behive. We'll start there. Newsletter. >> We'll go music. >> Okay. >> And how often do we plan to publish, which which for those who are starting, let me let me give you a word of advice. Do not kill yourself by trying to do daily. Uh people underestimate how much time and effort it takes to actually put together and and >> that's a grind. >> So start weekly and as you grow in scale and and find opportunities to monetize, then you can always ramp that up to to daily. I'll add to that like I used to be so maniacal about never missing a week. Mine was only weekly, but still it would be like Sunday. I'm like ah at the end of the day people don't really care. They don't really know. They don't really remember like if you miss a week or if you miss a day. Be consistent so you don't quit on the thing. for sure. But at the end of the day, like we don't occupy as much real estate in our subscribers brain as we like to think that we do. >> Yeah. Unless you have a banger newsletter every week, which I like to think that I do. But yeah, so I think just from like a quality of life, don't dive in, don't jump into the deep end too soon, right? Like I think just like >> start off with weekly is a great place. Um, cool. So once you get there, this is the dashboard to get started. Settings first place. We can do pro I'll skip profile picture for now. This is like my own personal links. We we will skip that for the sake of the video. Brand News is the publication name. We can actually with AI soon upload the logo, but we'll skip the logo for now. Everything you need to know about brand new. >> Tell me about niches, Tyler. Is is is there such thing as too niche? Cuz you you see it from the inside like or is there no such thing as too niche if we're all connected by the internet? >> No, I definitely am a big believer in the latter. So Ben Thompson always says like the internet is so much bigger than people give it credit for and there like you know you can go down the route of a thousand true fans. There's if you are obsessed with brand new I guarantee you that there are hundreds of thousands of people around the world that are equally as obsessed and it's really just about finding those pockets. So I think there's power in niches. I think when the newsletter it kind of like wave really started taking over. There was like the skim and morning brew and the hustle and everyone viewed them as these massive multi-million subscriber list that you had to have to have success. What we're actually seeing today is this wave of smaller independent they there's a newsletter that speaks to 5,000 CFOs. It's not a massive list by any means. It's it's 4 million smaller than Morning Brew. But if you actually can reliably get in front of CFOs that trust you, the amount of software and things that you can sell to that cohort is so valuable. And so maybe we should have chosen a B2B one, but we we'll keep riding with brand new. I I think the fact I think if you were to work backwards from like a business perspective of how can this make money, it's who would pay to get in front of the audience that I have and the more valuable your audience like if you if you only sent an email newsletter to a hundred of the Fortune 500 CEOs, you could probably sell any software at an incredibly high CPM and have an incredibly healthy business there. So, I do think it's important to think about one niche is good. I think for most people mass market is more difficult to do and it's harder to scale. Um and then I think you can think about the advertisers if that's the route you're going to go down in terms of monetization like who would sponsor this and it's really important to think about. >> Yeah, I love it. I mean there are like best practices with regards to what you can charge for ads, but if you have a newsletter with 5,000 CFOs, you could throw all those out the window. Like you could charge whatever you want. >> Absolutely. And and you should and we see that all the time. Internal settings, it'll be music. We'll do it in English. We'll do uh East Coast. Invite your first subscriber. Um I'll invite myself and then uh we'll invite you. >> Now, what about um email verification? Do do we have to do that ourselves or does beehive handle that? >> So, email verification as in the emails that I'm adding. >> Mhm. Like what if they're not valid? >> Yeah, Beehive handles all of that. So beehive, no every email that is entered both in the back end as like what I just did and when I have a landing page and people are signing up if there are typos or incorrect emails like we run thirdparty verification services to make sure and we have our own proprietary things to make sure that every email that hits your list is a legit email. There is a difference between legit email like real email and like legit email, right? You could type in momgmail.com. That might not be your email, but it exists. And so if it exists, it would go through. >> Yeah. Because I mean, I've been send sending mass emails for almost two decades, and I'm used to having to go to some third party. Upload a CSV. It'll tell you, all right, 88% of these are valid. You scrub it, you clean it, then you upload it to one of the incumbents or whatever. But when I upload my list to Beehive, like if I'm doing a new segment, I upload a thousand and I get like 972. Cool. A few of those were invalid. I don't have to mess mess around with them because one of the big risks traditionally with newsletters was your bounce rate could be high, right? You send too many emails to too many bad email addresses and you could get kicked off the platform. But it sounds like that's like you could still have a high bounce rate if you were spamming people that didn't opt in, which we would never want to do. But >> yeah, I think what beh does really well is they simplify it in the sense that you shouldn't have to be an email expert whatsoever. And there's a lot of guardrails make that kind of protect you from you. So you focus on creating website, creating content, sending your newsletter. You can then focus on growing the newsletter, monetizing the newsletter. Um but yeah, there there's a lot of guard rails built into the platform. >> So we have our settings set up. We're we're in need of a logo. We'll get there. Uh but building your website. So for this is where you're going to send people. There's a few different options. There's like the news site. There's a simple blog and a link in bio for like someone who's just starting off and depends where you're going to get traffic. Link in bio is great, but I think we'll start with simple blog for now. Can I ask you something real quick about like niches? If if someone doesn't know, like they have a few hobbies, but it's like I love basketball, but I don't want to make a basketball newsletter. Is it a good idea to default to just like this is going to be a public journal entry of of Chris Kerner of my life and my first subscribers are going to be the my 500 Facebook friends or you know what I'm saying like people I know in real life. Is that a good default or is it hard to monetize that? Depends. Um so I'll give you two anecdotes there. I actually just chatted with someone who started on the team this week earlier today and she said that one of her best friends launched a newsletter a few months ago and it's literally just a diary of his life. So every week he's kind of updating his group of friends and co like uh co-cententric circles of friends of here's what I'm doing professionally personally concert I went to and it's like a great mechanism to stay in touch. Um, so I don't know how monetizable that is as a business, but as far but it I guess it extends to what do you consider a business? Another example of that would be we have someone that we work with who she launched a newsletter that she just kind of covers and gives an update every week of the work that she's doing. She's built an entire consulting agency out of that because she can showcase here's the brand work that I worked on with this company. Here's the growth and UGC strategies I built for this company. and she started off by sending to a few hundred of her close friends and acquaintances. Now it's probably a few thousand readers. The newsletter itself, I would say, is like not printing money in the form of like ads and paid subscriptions as most people traditionally think of newsletters, but because she's staying top of mind and showcasing her work, she's gotten I think hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of contracts through consulting and different gigs working for companies because those people have been reading her newsletter. So I I think if you don't know what to write about, yeah, the this is what I'm doing in work or this is what I'm passionate about and starting with a smaller circle uh is definitely a proven strategy. >> Yeah. I mean I think that's a really smart way of looking at it because oftentimes I look at it like all right I know that newsletters you you know typically if you put ads in there 50 cents per subscriber per month. So I just need 20,000 subscribers and I can make 10,000 a month. Cool. But like you got to go sell all those ads yada yada yada. In your example, if you're doing consulting, let's say you quote unquote only have a 2,000 subscriber list, and your average consulting engagement is, let's say, $3,000. And every month, 1% of your list signs up for consulting, right? 20 people times $3,000. Like, you're making a half a million dollars a year doing consulting on a quote unquote small newsletter. But the even better part about that is you don't have to go hustle to find sponsors and place them and collect money and send invoices. Like it's your personal brand. And assuming that you're in an industry where you can charge a lot of money for whatever it is, you know, like that could be a lot more profitable than a 30 to 50,000 subscriber list, right? And and I think that's what's really interesting about newsletters and just about the audience ownership of having people that look forward to read your content and building that relationship with them is I think way too many people default to if you're video you just turn on YouTube ads. If it's a newsletter you do paid subscription or you add different ads into it. All like very viable business models that beehive also helps. We have the there's a beehive ad network. paid subscriptions, they don't take a cut of subscription revenue. And so it's like very easy to monetize through the traditional models. But to jump ahead to like how I've turned my newsletter into half a million dollars in revenue. I host an IRL founder mastermind where it's $10,000. So So my my newsletter, it's 120,000 people. It's primarily startup founders, early employees, and people who have a small or medium-sized business or or ventureback business. So entrepreneurs. And all I need of those 120,000 readers is eight people to have interest in going to this founder mastermind, which I vet and qualify. And it's a $10,000 ticket to come. We have this like massive mansion in Costa Rica. We go surfing. We talk about business. It's like a great little trip. I personally enjoy it. But it's very outside of the box of like traditional like this is how you monetize the newsletter. It's one understanding who my audience is, which is startup founders and entrepreneurs. And then what do they want? they want to connect with other founders and how can I provide that for them and so the mastermind came from that. So again I think that just kind of speaks to like the power of like the top of funnel of having an audience and and newsletter being one of those amazing top offunnel mechanisms. >> Yeah. I mean take your exact example with this. Now I objectively chose like a low value niche email music right like but let's say you know there's 1.2 million monthly Spotify listeners are brand new. Let's say we get 10,000 people on this newsletter overtime, right? And every year we have a little conference, a little conference where we talk about music and we hang out and it's two grand and we get a couple hundred people to show up like of our 10,000 person list that like that could be a high value way of monetizing a small and quote unquote unvaluable like you know lowvalued list. Or or maybe you're one of the larger fan clubs, if that's what we want to call them, and you have a relationship with the band, get merch that you get a kickback on that you can sell through the newsletter. Or if they're on tour, I have no idea if they're still touring, but if you wanted to go see their shows live because you have this uh, you know, call it 10,000 people primarily in the US who also love this band. Can you circle Nashville as an upcoming show and be like, for $5,000, we'll fly you to Nashville. We're all renting out this massive villa. We have a party bus and it's going to be like this whole experience with like these massive dieard fans. And so you can kind of turn an experience around whatever your niche is. >> Yes. I think I'm I'm growing more bullish on this idea by the minute, but I think we could turn this. Cool. >> All right. Cool. >> Cool. So, here's the the website building spot. Bunch of different templates. I'm not sure if any of these scream latest news about my favorite band, but we can choose one of them. We'll go with this one. All right. So, this is the website template that will have all of the latest news about brand news. You can choose different colors. Do they have like primary colors? Like what what's their album look like? >> Uh, it's like white and black. A lot of white and black. >> Cool. Perfect. That's what came up here. So, we'll do white and black. Dark mode. Cool. White and black. white and black. Here's the color palette. There we go. So, moving on. Quick three-step. First, it's template, then it is colors, and then it's fonts. Um, I'm not sure if there are specific fonts that are speaking to you here. We'll choose that to move along. Not not the >> Looks good. >> Cool. Start building. >> I assume you've got AI integrated to the website, so I can we can just chat with it. >> Yeah. >> We can see what the AI chat will do. We can add different stuff here. So let's for an example of what that looks like, right? Uh let's go to HTML here. Click on this chat and let's say give me a portrait of the band brand new. Let's hope that the AI know is familiar with that band. >> Should be. I mean there are hundreds of people that like this band, Tyler. >> Yeah. So and then hopefully our AI chatbot is one of them. >> Hopefully. Um, so here you can see while it does that, you can see this is where the posts will go. We don't have any content yet, so it's a fairly minimalist website. Um, as with you can kind of like preview what's going on here. >> And just to be clear, when you send an email to your newsletter, as long as you have that box checked, it also becomes published to the world on your website like a blog, right? That would be considered a post. >> Absolutely. So, this is actually where I think it might even be better. Um, make an image of the band brand new. Uh, this is just like trying to use AI features. I'm sure we could have went to Google, grabbed the picture of brand new and dropped in so that Let me Let me actually get familiar with uh who we're dealing with here. >> Okay. >> Said it's more of like emotype music. >> Mhm. >> Great. We'll do we'll save this image. Cut the trying to be fancy with AI because who needs that? And we are going to add an image right here. Upload an image. Downloads. And then the last thing we're going to add here is a subscribe form. Very important. We want to collect emails. And so wherever the subscribe form is, there we go. The one thing you don't want to forget. >> Do not want to forget this. We probably want it to look a little bit better, but we will fix that later. Input. And and the thing that makes it easier with behive, you can customize like literally everything. So, we're going to make that white. Cool. Easy enough. For the sake of trying to launch a newsletter in 20 minutes, we will consider this done. And cool. We're going to get all of this onboarding stuff that we do not need right now because we are just busting through this. Cool. Version history. Complete onboarding. Publish. And we are going to publish every page. >> Boom. >> Cool. >> Amazing. It's not going to win an award for design, but we are we will come back and make it better. >> That's okay because brand new themselves are like very punk rock about design and they're so it fits. It just fits. >> Cool. All right, next step. Website is done. Design your newsletter. So, lots of different templates here. Are any of these speaking to you for the new newsletter for the band? >> Maybe honestly, that first one, >> that first one looks pretty good. Yeah, >> you can. >> So, this is what the actual email itself will look like, right? >> Right. And so, there's different types like this one's a bit more, I guess, like imageheavy. Um, there's more editorial based ones. Uh, let's try something like this. It would be like another hypothetical example. >> Yeah, that looks good. >> Cool. And this would just be the latest and new. So, you know, no effort, no styling needed whatsoever. We're going to choose this. Go to next. And then we can jump in here and design the template. And so, let's jump out of some of this. So, this is our new template. Uh, we'll call it straightforward the news. We'll start there. Nice and easy. Okay. So, amazing. We have in in without the back and forth and questioning, I call it five minutes. We have a website and we have a newsletter template. The next step, what I would do is set up a simple automation to welcome my new readers when they sign up. So, we're going to go to automations. There's a bunch of different triggers that you can choose. We're going to do the signed up trigger. Nice and simple. Everyone who signs up will be entered into this automation. I just want to send a simple welcome email. Um, so we're going to create this email here. Oh, they even have this looks great. >> Let me ask you this. How do you feel about email like pretty emails like this versus plain text boring emails? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I am actually a big I love design and I think most companies and most emails look so shitty that if you actually take the time to invest in a high quality or differentiated design, it looks really good. But it depends on like the type of email you're trying to send, right? Like I think the let's do a plain white and black and makes it seem like I actually type this from Gmail. I think that serves a purpose um for certain circumstances, but I I mean as we showed earlier with wherever my newsletter is, like my newsletter is as far too different and weird and Windows 98 that you can get. And so when people open up their inbox, they see this essentially. >> And I think this looks like very differentiated than most newsletters. So, I think it depends on what you're going for. So, here's our here's our welcome series. Let me just get rid of all of this stuff. Um, there's like a lot of >> extra baggage here. Actually, we'll keep the we'll keep the let's chat on Instagram. Get rid of this. We'll keep this uh welcome email very minimalist. And we want to welcome all of the fans of the band brand new to our brand new newsletter. Cool. I'm not a big fan of of Centerine. Let's throw this stuff to the left. And here we have when someone signs up. Thank you for signing up. Hey there. We love brand new just as much as you do. See you on Fridays. And so now we have our weekly brand new newsletter and then a a chat up follow me on Instagram and we can link our our soontobe brand news Instagram account there. Details. This would be welcome. you're in the author um by default will just be us and then the style we have set up. Um so what this will look like in the inbox simple again we we are doing a power run through this very quickly so we are not going to win any awards and then what it looks like on mobile you can kind of see right there really the point of this email is just to acknowledge that they had signed up their email is in they're good and then kind of set the expectation that Friday is the day that they're going to get their content. >> Love it. Cool. I'm going to remove this. Cool. So, >> so just a two-step automation. That's your welcome email. >> People sign up and this email is sent. So, let me publish this. >> Now, how is this different than if you just go into settings, email, welcome email and change that. Is that about the same effect? >> Yeah. So the welcome email behive gives everyone the ability to create basically what we just created where I think we can differentiate and the benefit of using automations is you can go multiple more steps here right so we could say let's wait a day and did they open or like let's say let's wait seven days and so assuming that you send a weekly email they should have received at least one email in this time and then you could say true false have they opened an email. And so when we go into this true false branch, you could say email, let's go days without opens is greater than seven. It's probably a cleaner way to do that. Actually, we'll do that. Days without opens is greater than seven, which means they've never opened an email essentially. And then that splits it into this. And if the days without opens is greater than seven, which means they have not opened an email since they've signed up, you can actually send another email here and be like, yo, what what's going on here? Like, did you miss our first or like last newsletter? Here's like the you a place you can check it out. So, I just chose this template again, but to use this, it could be like, hey there, did you miss our last newsletter? Right? So, >> yep. again doesn't look great for the the sake of this, but I think that is the benefit of having an automation. And so now once you start getting into the game of yes, there's the welcome email for just letting people know that they got and received an email like there's more you can do here and you can integrate them. Could also like reward them. It could be instead of being like, "Why did you not open?" If they open the first one, it could be like, "Hey, take 10% off our merch store." Or, "Here's like an extra uh bonus or something that you get for being one of our most loyal breeders." So, I the power of automations is just that you can go a lot deeper. Um, but great question. >> Or you can say, you know, like, "Oh, you found me on Facebook," or, "Oh, you found me from Instagram," or, "Thanks for finding me from LinkedIn." Like, you could have conditional filters. >> Exactly. And so, I didn't go into that, but you can basic you can do all of those different conditions, right? And so Beehive will automatically track where the subscriber came from. So if they came from Google, did they come from organic? Did they come from Instagram, etc. And you could do exactly that, right? So if they came in from Instagram, hey, thanks for finding me on Instagram. Be sure to like our most recent posts, etc. >> Okay, so let's say that I'm impatient, which I am, and I want subscribers immediately, but I don't want to go learn Facebook ads because that's a whole, you know, hornets's nest. How do we how do we like pay to play on Beehive to get subscribers ASAP? >> Yeah. First thing I would definitely and this isn't within Beehive, but just like post on your socials, right? I think like use the low hanging fruit fruit. Post on Instagram, post on LinkedIn, post on X. Second, under grow. There's a few different things that we can do here. Recommendation network. Basically, you can create a top four, which are other newsletters that you recommend within the Beehive ecosystem. The thinking is if you recommend them, they will receive a notification and can recommend you back. There is like a bit of a song of a dance in the sense that if they are a massive newsletter and we have zero subscribers, we probably aren't high on their list of people that they want to subscribe. But if I were >> with recommendations, no money's exchanged, right? >> No money. So this is like let's just get like here Izzy's music town. She just started recently. I mean this looks like a brand new newsletter. So, she's kind of actually at the exact place that we are. We can recommend >> Izzy's music town. And you can see here now I have this one spot taken. She Izzy just received a notification that brand News just added them. >> Um, so we could probably find a few more. Inspire music. We'll recommend them. Music matters. >> Also, relatively new posts. >> And >> so when people subscribe, they're going to see a popup for these recommendations after. Right. >> Correct. And so let me show you what that looks like here. If I were to go to my newsletter and I type in a email after subscribing to Big Desk Energy, these are the four newsletters that I personally recommend. So I am fans of these newsletters. I want other people to discover what I like and so I am recommending these four into my top four newsletters. Um so in this case when we sign up for brand news, which we can test in a moment, we're already at the point where we have like a live website. we can test things like we should be able to see these pop up and then we should also receive that automated welcome email that we already created. So this is the first thing I would do as far after I text my friends, drop it in the group chat, put it on X, put it on LinkedIn that I just launched this newsletter. Also for this case, like do you go to a brand new YouTube video and drop like, yo, just started a new fan club, subscribe here. Like you can get creative of how you're going to grow your audience. Um, but recommendations is a free way to be able to get other people in the ecosystem referring you. And as we did here, these are all kind of actually new newsletters. So they're actually starting off at roughly the same time. And I'd say the likelihood of them recommending us back is pretty high. Happy to jump around. Um like if you want I can show what this looks like at scale. So we can kind of like go back and forth from my newsletter and between the two. >> Well, how do we pay to play? So that's recommendations. >> Yeah, I'll I'll jump to that next and show exactly what that looks like. This is So these are my recommendations as we just showed here. You can see I've actually sent 36 35 and a half thousand subscribers to other newsletters over time. And to reciprocate, I have 774 other newsletters that are referring me that have sent me 34,000 subscribers. So, this is my newsletter at scale, but you can see like where it starts. Obviously, I just signed up for this platform 20 minutes ago. This is like where all of that starts to kind of compare and contrast. Now, I'm impatient. You're impatient. We know these people. There's people out there that love brand new and we want that get them on the list. There is a paytoplay which is called boost where basically I can put money and choose the exact dollar amount that I'm willing to pay for a new subscriber and people will be able to see that within the beehive ecosystem. I can't show it because I need to set up Stripe but to show you what that looks like on my account which has been a a big growth driver for me. So 190K looks like a lot. The newsletter has been around for two years so it's about 6K per month that I've put into this. Um, so that's actually probably the biggest cost when you go back to like my expenses. It's paid on Facebook and paid through Boost. And what you see here is I had created an offer which is $2.50. So anyone can browse all of the different offers within Beehive and see that Big Desk Energy is willing to spend $2.50 for every subscriber that you send to me and in exchange I send that money. And Beehive actually has a verification system where if that subscriber looks fake, it doesn't it they never open an email like that 250 gets returned right back to me. It's held in escrow in the meantime. So it's almost like risk-free growth where like if you were to pay for users on Facebook ads and if that customer never actually bought something from you, like they actually just give you the money back. >> Love it. >> And like the flip side of this is like you can also make money with boost. And so that's where I think it is pretty interesting where if like you can see I'm generating $10,000 on boost. >> And so what I would do is like here are all of these different newsletters that are paying $4 per subscriber, $8 per subscriber. That's definitely an outlier. It's very expensive. It's typically around $250. And if I was interested in for lovers of high culture and delicious trash, like great. If if I wanted to promote Premiier Party, I would click apply. I would give a reason why I think I should be recommending them. Once they accept me, as soon as they accept me, they will be shown here, but with like a little sponsored tab next to it. >> Okay. So, you can pay to play or other people can pay to play and pay you for every not just subscriber, but every verified subscriber. >> Exactly. So, it's a two-sided marketplace. I can get paid for recommending other newsletters. I inversely can put in a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars a month and have all of these other newsletters in the ecosystem driving more growth to me. >> Yeah. And of course, you're picking in this case, you would be picking other newsletters in the music niche, in the email niche, whatever, other bands. They're not going to like suggest you or you're not going to ask to be suggested to a finance newsletter in this case, >> right? And so what I actually think I would do going back to brand new is um let me jump to boost. And so you can see here, these are all the different offers. I can type in music. And so if I am a brand new newsletter and I want to start generating money, like yes, we're impatient. We want to get more fans, but it's also great to make money because then we can take the capital that we're making and reinvested into growth. And that's really like kind of like the infinite growth fly loop that people or flywheel that people do with emails. it is whether it's ads, paid subscriptions or boost. I want income in. I take that income and revenue and I put that right back into Facebook ads and boost to grow faster. And then as you grow faster, you have a larger audience. You can charge more for advertising and that's like the flywheel. >> So this is what I would do here. I just typed in music and I can see um whether it's orchestra music for humans, they're paying $2.40 per subscriber. the business of YouTube is paying a dollar and then the starting five is paying $3. I would actually apply to each of those and then I would start promoting them. So every subscriber that I get that signs up to brandnews.behive.com I would get $3 for everyone that I send here and then now I have this like free money bucket that I can start reinvesting into my own growth via boost. >> Yeah. Because the hope is to, you know, acquire a subscriber for $2 and then your recommendations or your boost gets you another$1 to $3 back. So you could just break even, maybe make a little money, maybe lose a little money. But if each of your subscribers are worth $10 over their lifetime, then that is kind of an infinite money glitch, right? And if if you know that you can acquire a new subscriber on Facebook ads for $2, which is reasonable, and you know that one in three people are going to also subscribe to the starting five, which pays you $3. And then you know you have an ad coming into your next newsletter as well that's going to monetize all of them. There's like a very simple equation that you can do where if you know that you can reliably grow for $2 per new subscriber and you're making three, four, five dollars on the back end of that, that is kind of like the the free money glitch. Yeah, I mean I'm kind of spoiled. I I pay a dollar like45 on Facebook to acquire subscribers and that's lower than average cuz I have a good Facebook audience and I can retarget them, right? But then I make about 65 cents of that back. So almost half of that I just get back immediately. So my net is like 75 cents per subscriber, but each of my subscribers is worth like seven and $10. Like seven to$10 depending on how many levers I decide to pull. So that's like a 10x rorowaz return on ad spend on my newsletter subscribers and it's amazing. It's an amazing business. >> Totally. So here's where we are right now, right? And in the few minutes that we've been on this video, we have a beautiful website that does not have any content yet. We have when you subscribe, we have these recommendations that pop up. >> Yep. >> We can choose to opt in and subscribe to these recommendations. Uh we need to do a little editing here. The button's actually black, so we need to update that. And if I remember what email I just put in, if I were to go over to my inbox, we should actually have a welcome email coming in at any second that is welcoming me to the newsletter. So that's where we are right now in this newsletter journey. >> Now, what was it? Boost where you can just like you can use like a magic link to monetize as well. Tell us about magic links. >> So magic links are really just like a one-click subscribe. And the way that these work were if I had a buddy like you who has a larger newsletter, I could give you this link here. You can drop like, "Hey, my friend just launched this new newsletter about brand new. Click here to subscribe." Magic Link basically just removes all friction. They never have to go to our beautiful new website that we just built. It would automatically add them to the list. And you can do it for your friends who have a newsletter on any of these platforms here. And so there's like a different link for each of them. >> So it's able to do this because it's like your email is stored in like a cookie or something. >> Yeah. So it has like this every platform has like their own way of being able to pass in an email. And so when you add this link to the newsletter, it will have this link and then it will swap out this with your personal email individually for each recipient. And so when that recipient clicks on it, it knows to automatically add them to the list. How big of a lever is p our paid newsletters, right? Like how many people are you seeing have let's say they have 10,000, you know, free subscribers. How many are they able to get to be paid? Like call it $10 a month, $5 a month. >> Yeah, totally. I mean, the shitty answer is it depends a lot in terms of the quality of the audience, the quality of the content, how differentiated is it? I don't know if we have like any amazing benchmarks of like one in 10 convert to paid. It really does differ depending on the status of the person and the type of content they're creating. But yeah, paid paid works extremely well. So if you were to go under monetize here, uh I'd have to like connect my Stripe account here to really kick that off. But you can launch and add pay walls to all of your different content. Only paying readers can see specific content. You can payw wall and email gate different parts of your website as well. And Behive doesn't take a cut of revenue. So, however you want to I'd say like what Beehive does well and I can jump over to my dashboard like another way to monetize that I think is super helpful because I just signed up for the other account I won't have it is the Beehive ad network. And so here you can see at the bottom again we've talked about like what are the most common ways that most people are typically monetizing emails and it's typically sponsors and paid subscriptions and you can get creative and out of the box with like IRL events and whatnot. So, the Beehive Ad Network every week just sends new opportunities to my newsletter. You can see deal down here is a potential sponsor. They're willing to spend $2.50 per calls per click. And then they're estimating based on historical performance that I'll drive 7 $275 from this newsletter. >> Okay. >> And so, if I click here, you can see the different creatives that I can choose from. And so, there's ad spots with a logo at the top, which is like a primary ad. You can see how it's actually retrofitted to my newsletter. So, it shows exactly how it will look in my newsletter, where I could do without logo, which is a little bit less pay and a little bit less copy. And it makes it super easy to be able to say like this is a ad that I'm excited about. It's going to pay me $2.50 per click. I don't have to speak to anyone on the team at deal. And I drop that into my newsletter and get paid a few weeks later. >> That's amazing. in your personal newsletter, what is like the rough give or take breakdown of your revenue lines? Like how much from events versus boost versus all that? Yeah, I'd say boost is probably about 5 to 10% of my earnings. It's it's not a a major part of my earnings. Sponsorships right now I'm charging between 5 and 7,000 per newsletter. It's a weekly newsletter >> percent >> to the whole list. And I can show you like what exactly that looks like. So this was my newsletter that I sent on Tuesday. And you can go down here. Sponsored by Adio. Shout out Atoio. Um but it's just like an ad placed at the top of the newsletter. Pretty, you know, image, copy, whatever. That's 5 to7,000 a newsletter. So you can say between 20 and 30,000 per month on sponsorships. And then the revenue from the masterminds about 80k topline. Do those once a quarter. So you can start to do the math. It's like what 20 to call it 25k a month in sponsorship. Um so let's do some public math here. It's about 300,000ish in in annual revenue. Two to three mastermind events per year. 80k each. So another 240k. >> Mhm. M that puts you over 500k. Boost is probably in like the 10 to 25K um when I'm like active using Boost. So that's kind of how you get up to the half a million a year revenue, >> dude. And what we're not even talking about. Do you mind if I share my screen real quick? I want to brag on myself. >> Let's do it. >> I'm addicted to segments. I've got a zillion segments and I just keep making more every day. Literally every day. I just firmly believe that the more you segment your list, the more money you make. So these like I could click load more all day. There's so many segments. And so I'm just going to kind of walk you through what I'm doing here. Focus group A, focus group B. This is me. I emailed my entire list and I asked them, "Can I use you as a focus group for business ideas that I want to dive deep on?" Basically, I'm I'm asking for permission to email them more often and just to click on a poll like, "Do you want to learn about pressure washing, landscaping, or roofing?" Click. I go make a video on that. So, I had 6,000 people opt into that and I wanted to AB test um with these polls. Do I want to do an embedded beehive poll or an external uh type form poll? So, I'm AB testing it to see like I pulled them. How often do you listen to my podcast? Every episode, every week, every month, occasionally, never. So, never viewers, every now and then, monthly, weekly. And so, I have them all segmented so I can just ask them questions. Like sometimes I'll just be out doing stuff and it's like, "Dang, I should I should ask my newsletter." Or, "I need to hire someone, I should ask my newsletter. I need a new sponsorship assistant. I should ask my newsletter." And like any problem in my life that I need solved, I just send an email either to the whole list, which I try to avoid as much as possible, or to the segment. And then when you talk about surveys, like I think this is the most underutilized feature on Beehive. This is my survey. I get people to fill it out about once every five minutes. 15,000 people >> might have to zoom it. Yeah, zoom. Give it a little zoom there. >> 15,000 people have filled this out and tell me tell me how valuable this is. So, these are people that are either uh 40% business owners or 60% aspiring business owners. So, I asked them what's your work situation? What industry are you in? Are you interested in this course? Uh what stage are you at? I've started a business. I've never started a business. I own a business. So, according to this, 50% have started a business. >> Crazy valuable audience. now. >> Crazy. And so I can show this to potential sponsors, right? Are you interested in learning about buying a business or only starting? Do you want to be part of a fund where I invest in cool companies like Beehive? 36%. Yeah, I'm good for 50K a year. Like 36% of my list, right? And then you look at this. Yeah, I may be good for 250 to 1 mil a year, 1.3%. Yeah, I'm good for over a mill year, 1%. Like I know exactly who these people are and I can segment accordingly. So, if I have an opportunity, I can email those 86 people that said, "I want to invest a million dollars." Right? Oh, how about this church podcast I have? How much lifetime revenue have you generated across all your businesses or side hustles? 3% of my list is over $10 million, right? First name, I have that automatically plug in to like attach their first name to their account. And then if I want stories of people to interview for my podcast, hey, I'll give you a hundred bucks if you have a cool story of a business that got started. How incredible is that? >> What I was doing over here is I was pulling out my survey so we can go back and forth on on surveys. But um here check this out. Say so I think even to take it one step further and show like why that is so important. Let me go to screen. Here are surveys name people kind of that's like the least important data. Birthday. So I don't really care about their actual birthday. I just want the year right? What describes you? And so, first of all, you can see how many responses I've gotten. Like almost 40,000 responses and my list is 120,000. So, the engagement is pretty off the charts here. 60% of my audience identifies as a founder. What is your primary skill set? So, others a big one. Marketing, engineering, sales, product. >> And then this is actually really cool. So, what's the number one thing you want to accomplish in the next 10 months? I guess a lot of people want to make money accordingly. I actually have an automation setup where 12 months after they sign up, I remind them of what their goal was when they initially signed up and it's one of the the most engaged with emails that I send because it's just like a shock and surprise from the past and that holds people accountable. >> So, I get a lot of great responses, but like why is this data so interesting? So, this is actually my media kit that I created. And this is what I actually send to advertisers to get them to pay the5 to $7,000 per send. And you can see here, let me run through this real quick. This is like an overview again in like my my shitty Windows 98 uh theme, but this is like an overview of the newsletter. This is what people say about the newsletter. Here's like my highle metrics. And so, I've recently cleaned the list a bit, but it was at 131,000. You can see the age. Like the only reason I know age is because I asked them the survey what their birthday was. The other data geography you can get through the platform. This direct onetoone of what I just showed you. Right? So I was able to take this first party data that I've collected and turn it into a great slide to help sell my audience. I explain what the ad placement is. It's 150 words. This is what it looks like. Case study. This is a case study that I've done for this company called Confetti. Absolutely crushed it. We had two posts. They booked 41 demos. Tons of revenue. So like this is like the proof is in the pudding of like it actually working. I did another case study. Ads typically clickthrough rates are like 0.25 to.5. This ad had a 1.7% click-through rate. So like the copy works really well. >> And then this is me kind of just like a last flex of like why invest in my audience. There's people like my recommendations. They come to this Costa Rica mastermind um and then get in touch. And so the reason I wanted to show that is Behive does really well and what I think you need to think about as a newsletter operator is like how do all the pieces fit together. And I created this very simple survey that you showed off for the sole purpose that I can sell more ads which then drives more revenue which I can then invest into boost. And when you saw when I shared my screen and I spent $190,000 lifetime on boost. When you realize that I'm making six sevenk per newsletter send, like that's just fueling more growth, which then will eventually turn the six to 7K to sponsor my newsletter to 8 to 9 to 10. And then that's really like the flywheel that you need to kind of hit that escape velocity. >> Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I think it's time we pull the curtain back. Like how do you know so much about about newsletters here? I've been in newsletters for quite a long time. Um, so yeah, one I am the co-founder of Beehive. So that has helped me master that platform. >> But pri prior to being the co-founder of Behive, I actually was the second employee at Morning Brew as well. Those of you unfamiliar with Morning Brew, we scaled that to 4 million readers in about three and a half years. So I'd like to think I know a thing or two about newsletters. >> Yeah, you're the goat. But dude, this was amazing. This is incredible. We showed people how to make money. We showed them how to do it. 0ero to one. Where can people find you, your newsletter, and most importantly your company? >> Yeah. So, Tyler Den's the name, and that's where you can find me on X and LinkedIn. Beehive is the name of the company. It's the I'm biased, but genuinely believe it, and I think, you know, tens of thousands of other people believe it as well. The best place to launch a newsletter and website is on Beehive. And then highly recommend subscribing to my newsletter, bigesenergy.com or mail.bigesenergy. bigesenergy.com. Thank you, Tyler. Cool.

Tyler’s $500k/year side hustle is the ultimate proof that you can build a massive business in just 5 hours a week. I use beehiiv because it’s the best way to scale and monetize an audience without the headache. Start yours here - use code CHRIS30 for 30% off your first 3 months: https://beehiiv.link/71c8b1 ━ Check out my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOPOD.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and join my new community at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOwners.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ━ What if one email a week could turn into a $500,000 per year business? In this episode, I sit down with Tyler Denk, former Morning Brew early employee, to break down exactly how he built a 120,000 subscriber email list that generates over $500k/year, mostly profit. We go step by step from zero to launch, cover growth with paid ads and referrals, and show all the different ways you can monetize an audience, from sponsorships to paid subscriptions to high ticket mastermind events. If you’ve ever thought about building an online business but didn’t want something complicated, this is about as simple and high margin as it gets. You can find Tyler on X: https://x.com/denk_tweets and LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tyler-denk Check out his newsletter at: https://bigdeskenergy.com or https://mail.bigdeskenergy.com Enjoy! ⸻ Disclosure: Beehiiv is a sponsor of this video, and I am also an investor in the company. This means I may benefit financially from their success. All opinions are my own, and I only promote products I genuinely use and believe in. This video is for educational and entertainment purposes only. It does not constitute financial, business, or legal advice. Any business examples, tools, or strategies shown are for demonstration only and may not produce the same results for you. We do not guarantee earnings, outcomes, or success. Always conduct your own due diligence, comply with applicable laws, and use these ideas responsibly. We do not encourage duplication of copyrighted material or existing business assets. Always ensure your use complies with copyright and intellectual-property laws. Some links may be affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. --- Audio podcast on all podcast platforms: https://toolkit.tkopod.com/podcast Free weekly business ideas newsletter: https://tkopod.com Private community where we build cool businesses together: https://TKOwners.com Learn more about me: https://www.chrisjkoerner.com/ Business ideas shorts channel: @thekoernerofficeideas The Koerner Office highlights: @thekoernerofficesegments AI-enabled accounting software, because Quickbooks SUCKS: https://lazybooks.com/ --- For the Algorithm: #Newsletter #NewsletterBusiness #EmailMarketing #SideHustle #OnlineBusiness #DigitalEntrepreneur #Beehiiv #MorningBrew #TylerDenk #BigDeskEnergy #EmailList #AudienceOwnership #StartupFounders #Entrepreneurship #MonetizeYourAudience #PaidNewsletter #NewsletterGrowth #ContentCreator #CreatorEconomy #OnlineIncome #MakeMoneyOnline #Mastermind #FounderCommunity #AdNetwork #EmailAutomation #LeadMagnet #DigitalMarketing #BusinessModel #RecurringRevenue #PersonalBrand #IndieHacker #Bootstrapping #MarketingStrategy #OnlineCreators #BusinessGrowth #EmailListBuilding #NewsletterTips #SaaS #MediaBusiness #ContentMonetization