📧 Inbox Influence

Curated and written by Jon Kallus

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This year, our company began ghostwriting on LinkedIn for a small subset of our clients, my friends, and our newsletter subscribers.

But we don’t come up with the posts.

They do.

Our system turns a 45 minute chat with me into 8 posts that are 100% you. We call it “LinkedIn without lifting a finger,” and profile audits and strategy calls are free for fv/ subscribers (ie., you). Book a complimentary call today »» 

Everywhere I look, I see “The Deal.”

That's my nickname for the advertiser supported business model that has fueled everything from the earliest days of radio through TikTok, Instagram, and soon, ChatGPT.

The Deal goes like this: show me what I want for free, and in exchange I’ll stomach an ad every now and then.

I love The Deal. I love how it keeps content free, and I'm fascinated by how many different areas and parts of media it is able to operate in.

__

I knew there was something that I liked about the software that sends this very newsletter out, even before I started using it.

This newsletter uses Beehiiv. It was co founded by a self taught software engineer and growth specialist named Tyler Denk, who was employee no. 1 at a popular financial newsletter called Morning Brew.

Using a mix of innovative internal software tools and promotional strategies and tactics, Tyler helped scale Morning Brew from tens of thousands of subscribers when he started, to several million by the time he left.

Oh, and Morning Brew was bought by Business Insider for US$75m during the pandemic.

An eight figure exit, five years after starting out, is not bad for any business, let alone a newsletter one.

So what would a Morning Brew veteran get up to next?

Start a newsletter sending and scaling SaaS company, of course.

That's Beehiiv. And while it’s already an interesting story, what's really interesting about the company to me is not the speed at which it deploys new features, nor its intuitive and friendly user interface, or even it's amazingly responsive senior executive team, always happy and willing to accept a new feature suggestion, or address a support ticket.

No.

It's the fact that the Beehiiv team wants to bring The Deal into a whole other sphere: your inbox.

And in so doing, the people running Beehiiv are aiming to create a company that could someday meet the largest online media companies out there in terms of scale.

Beehiiv’s secret sauce is the fact that the company aggregates many of its senders’ newsletters into a single advertising platform that it then pitches to brands.

In other words, if you send your newsletter using Beehiiv, and pay for the pro tier of service, Beehiiv will pitch your title, as part of an aggregated collection of newsletters on the platform, to blue chip advertisers on your behalf.

For small fries like myself, executing a manual sales process in order to get an advertiser to sponsor an issue is both time consuming, and complicated. Basically, a non starter.

So Beehiiv bundles fv/pro, plus my other newsletter fv/, and thousands of others, and offers all of our titles as a programmatic advertising platform, to high profile brands like the language learning app Babbel, The Economist’s executive education business, and many many others.

OK, COOL. WHAT DOES BEEHIIV MEAN FOR MARKETERS AND EVERYONE ELSE?

First off, long live the Creator Economy. I mean, not only are the barriers to entry getting lower for creators, but their paths to monetization are getting wider.

Beehiiv’s one of them. But Beehiiv also opens the monetization path up to an interesting cohort of people.

Shy ones.

LONG LIVE THE SHY CREATOR ECONOMY

Long time readers of this newsletter (or people who follow me on LinkedIn) might recall an expression I coined back in 2022: the “shy creator economy.”

That’s my phrase for those platforms that allow people to share their opinion, their comedic impulses, or whatever else they want to share with the world without revealing their face, name or voice.

Reddit is a great example of a shy creator economy platform. So is Discord, Twitch, and even YouTube and Instagram, should you choose to create and post under a faceless, pseudonymous account.

In my view, the shy creator economy could one day supercede what we call the creator economy today.

The reason why is as simple as it is profound:

One of the largest barriers to creating online for many folks is worrying how you will come off to your IRL friends and network.

I know this both first hand and second hand.

I’ve started ghostwriting on LinkedIn for friends, clients, and subscribers of this newsletter, and I’ve been really impressed by the uptake.

The pain points that our LinkedIn ghostwriting service solves are (i) scarcity of time (ie., people know posting on LinkedIn is a growth lever, but they also quite literally don't have the extra minutes hours in their week to plan, write and post what's on their mind.)

BUT.

There's a more psychological pain point at play as well: (ii) a very strong desire to not come off as a LinkedIn windbag. Even if what you have to say is thoughtful and valuable, the fear of being judged for posting whatever you post, by people you know IRL, is really widely held.

Shy creator platforms sidestep that barrier completely. No name, no fear.

And Beehiiv, unlike LinkedIn, is a total shy creator platform.

I publish this newsletter under my own name, but if I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t have to. No one has to share their name to write and send a newsletter, and that means that anyone out there who has something to say about any topic can not only start a newsletter, but now (if it gets popular enough) have blue chip advertisers sponsor it.

That is a Big Deal.

Beehiiv knows it. Which is why the team is confident that they may someday hang with the biggest online media companies in the world.

As a newsletter sending service, Beehiiv is already capitalizing on the atomization of pop culture (ie., the splintering of our information and entertainment into ever-finer input streams, each more unique and niche than the last).

Newsletters (and blogs before them) have long given anyone and everyone with a writerly impulse and an interest in something, however obscure, an opportunity to find their audience.

Now Beehiiv wants to get those people paid, whether they write under their own names, or not.

The future of online media is in your inbox.

And it just might be in your sent items too.