To mark the launch of podcast hosting and monetization on beehiiv, Sounds Profitable Partner Bryan Barletta spoke with beehiiv co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk about how their podcast offering came together and intended audience.
Barletta: To date, each piece of beehiiv’s offering has centered around distribution of written content, whether to the newsletter itself or the website version of it. What made podcasting the next choice for a unique content pillar to support?
Denk: Newsletters and podcasts have a lot in common. Both are episodic, long-form content, distributed to an owned audience, monetized via sponsorship. The formats are closer than people think.
beehiiv is the all-in-one platform for newsletters, websites, and everything you need to grow and monetize. Our roadmap is always heavily driven by customers, and podcasting was the missing piece. It came up consistently across customers of all sizes.
Growth is one of the biggest challenges in podcasting. Newsletters drive podcast downloads. Podcasts drive newsletter signups. We see a huge opportunity there, in both directions.
This is a major undertaking expanding into a new vertical like this. Are you currently hiring for any podcast related roles?
Podcasting is a new pillar for beehiiv. It sits alongside email, website, and monetization as a core part of the product suite. We’re treating it with the same seriousness.
We’ve already built out a team internally to execute the launch and will be expanding moving forward. Right now, we’re hiring for a Head of Podcasts. If you’re an expert in podcast product, podcast ad sales or GTM, a senior developer with podcasting experience, or just think you can help us grow this, DM me. I’d love to talk.
Who is the product for? beehiiv and newsletter-focused creators/publishers looking to expand into audio or podcasters/publishers looking to expand into written content?
First and foremost, it’s for the thousands of beehiiv customers who already have a podcast hosted elsewhere. This gives them a reason to consolidate yet another tool into beehiiv and cancel another subscription. But we also see a huge opportunity with established podcasters who don’t have a newsletter yet. That’s a natural acquisition channel for us.
Follow up: you’ve got fantastic growth and monetization tools for your newsletter, what are your plans for bringing them to the podcast space?
We want to give podcasters the exact same growth engine that has made beehiiv the industry leader for newsletters. We aren’t just hosting audio. We’re providing business infrastructure. On the revenue side, premium subscriptions are available from day one. Because our ecosystem is unified, a creator can offer a bundle of a premium newsletter and a private podcast feed with a single checkout. No fragmented tools required.
We already have an established Ad Network with hundreds of big-brand advertisers targeting our network of creators and publishers. Later this year, we plan to expand beyond just newsletters and dynamically serve ads in podcasts, too. As for growth — we have a ton of existing tools and network effects in place to help accelerate newsletter growth. We plan to bundle those features with podcasts in the foreseeable future to grow the overall pie of engaged audiences across content properties.
Over the past six years, a substantial amount of companies with strong solutions in other channels have entered the podcast space just to bounce off of it quickly because it’s so different than what they are used to. What about your strategy or the timing is going to make this different with beehiiv?
We’re just in a different situation than those platforms. We already have a rapidly growing subscription base generating ~$28M ARR. Everything we build for podcasting makes our core proposition more valuable to both existing and new users, which only accelerates growth. We also already have a massive base of users with podcasts, and we’ve spent years building and running an ad network. We’re not starting from zero.
That’s why we’re confident.
Follow up: what are your plans for adopting podcast-specific standards like IAB podcast certification? Substack and other solutions haven’t focused on ad monetization for their creators so they’ve primarily skipped this critical part.
We have built everything to be IAB compliant from day one, and are about to kick off the certification process. This isn’t an afterthought. If we want creators to monetize in every way possible, and we do, compliance isn’t optional.
