Our weekly sponsor slots are sold out for 2026!

So for the first time, we’re opening ad slots in our new daily newsletter, Strategy Screenshots.

The daily, screenshot-sized version of Strategy Breakdowns. 1 chart, 1 big idea, 1 poll, 1-minute read.

We only partner with companies we’d happily recommend to a friend. Building something you think this community would love? Sponsor a week of the Strategy Screenshots and tell them about it, 6 mornings in a row (book by 15 Nov for early bird pricing).

Today’s breakdown shows exactly how we run both.

Enjoy.

- Tom

In a survey of 1,500+ software practitioners, 87% say AI helps them ship work faster. Yet only 28% feel noticeably less friction than before AI.

Part of the problem: only 1 in 5 say their organisation has a clear AI strategy.

Atlassian's State of Developer Experience Report 2026 shows where local AI gains get lost, and what to measure instead of AI usage.

A few minutes later, Viktor replies in the thread. The reach number in the partner update was pulled mid-send and undersells it by 10x, so it drafts the corrected line.

It's the AI employee you message like a colleague in Slack and Microsoft Teams, reading the figures across your 9,800+ connected tools. It catches the number that would have cost you.

(Strategy Breakdowns readers get up to $100 in credits)

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

So, last week we started a 2nd newsletter, Strategy Screenshots!

Set up by hand, the ops behind these daily sends would eat 12+ hours a week of button-pushing: templates, polls, ad slots, A/B tests, graphics, link checks, formatting, etc.

Those parts now take us ~10 minutes a day.

So the hours get spent on the bit that matters most: the writing.

Claude does the legwork. A human writes every word.

What changed?

→ The Strategy Breakdowns Operating System.

Today's breakdown is in partnership with beehiiv, the platform this newsletter is built on, and we’re going to explain exactly how we use a wonderful little feature called MCP to run our newsletters.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is what lets Claude (or ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity etc) use your beehiiv account the way you would, in plain English.

Read your stats, build segments, draft posts, set up polls, run A/B tests, etc.

beehiiv was the first newsletter platform to ship an MCP, in March 2026, and it's now a 1-click connector in Claude and ChatGPT.

We plugged it in the day it launched, and have been a Daily Active User ever since.

~6 months later:

→ 21 of our production skills (saved, reusable instructions Claude follows for a job) talk to beehiiv directly

→ 8 automations run on a schedule off beehiiv data

→ Nearly every tool in our stack now either feeds or reads beehiiv.

We use Claude Code to build everything, and our custom UI called ‘SB Dash’ to run everything (sales pipeline, ad slots, content calendar, sponsor reporting,e tc). All built by non-engineers in plain English, wired through beehiiv using the MCP.

Rather than just tell you about it, we made a spoiler-free copy you can click around (fake companies, fake content, numbers blurred, no doxxing today!)

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

Every stage of the newsletter has a skill for it, and those skills run on schedules, reading and writing to beehiiv at each stage of the lifecycle.

With this stack in place, we can experiment and iterate incredibly fast. Anything repetitive gets turned into new skills + processes.

A few examples of how this looks in practice:

“Do subject lines even matter?”

(Spoiler: yes!)

Claude pulled every subject line A/B test we've ever run in beehiiv: 100s of sends, 1000s of subject lines.

→ The best and worst line in the same send sat ~2.6pp (percentage points) apart on average, over 3 hours.

→ Picking the winner bought us at least +1.24pp of open rate in the first 3 hours, expanding over the ~48h lifecycle of an article.

→ We analysed the patterns throughout the winners and losers

→ We updated the /article-pick skill to reads our article and comes up with a suite of subject lines, ready to remix. If we like one, we use it. If we like bits of one, we edit it, or combine it with another one.

The result - we now always split test 4 high-performing subject lines across 10% of the list for 3 hours, then run the winning variant with 90% of the list, netting us a higher open rate for every send.

We piloted Strategy Screenshots with our most engaged readers. To do this, we built a beehiiv segment in 1 sentence: “Make a segment of readers who opened 5 of my last 10 posts.”

The waitlist for our new product, quicker.chat (one inbox for all your Slack + WhatsApp + LinkedIn + X + iMessage DMs), runs entirely on beehiiv:

→ every signup (about 2.2k so far) lands on a beehiiv survey (email prefilled), and every answer saves to a custom field

→ answers become a score (3+ hours a day in DMs? +3. Business owner? +2)

→ Claude reads new signups, survey answers and replies through the MCP, then hands us the next 50-100 people to invite

Even our topics start in beehiiv.

Our Hotmail breakdown began with a question to the MCP:

Whatever we’re working on, we use the beehiiv MCP in one way or another.

We have the privilege of working with some wonderful sponsors.

They expect great results - proof that their marketing budgets are well spent with us.

By hand, we’re talking screenshots + CSV exports + spreadsheets, per sponsor, per ad.

(With 45 deliverables going live in the next 30 days, that’s a lot of admin!)

No longer. Here’s how the automated (minus the copywriting!) lifecycle looks:

Reporting alone used to eat 4-5 hours a week. Now it runs in our sleep.

Lesson for builders: proof is part of the product. Automating that proof is now easy, and probably a better use of time than shipping another feature.

Our new Daily newsletter adds 6 editions to send every week.

Each send needs research, a chart, a poll, 2 ads and a beehiiv draft with an A/B test: ~2-3 hours apiece by hand, before anyone writes a word.

James and I jump on a call each week to jam on topics.

→ What have we seen in the feeds.

→ What are the non-obvious takes.

→ What did we learn that’s useful for readers.

Then every morning, Claude does the legwork a newsroom of junior reporters used to.

It reads our call transcripts, updates our topics database, scores and prioritses ideas, then scans our trusted chart sources and files a briefing in SB Dash: the stat, the primary source, a few angles, and different ways to tell the story above and below the chart.

Picture a 1960s magazine editor's desk, stacked with pitches, stubs, and clippings from the team.

Then a human takes over.

James reads the brief top to bottom, keeps what's good, and bins the rest.

Then we pull it apart like Lego: the stat from one angle, the hook from another, the chart framing from a third. Reordered, restyled, rewritten.

James hands it to me.

I do the same pass again.

We slot the completed editions into a date, which correlates with ads we’ve booked. Once we’re ready, we click the shiny Migrate to beehiiv button.

Claude then builds the beehiiv draft through the MCP: template, body, ads, poll, 4-way subject line test, URL slug, thumbnail. Everything.

Karen checks the live draft (eyeballing, plus a checker skill that reads the draft back through the MCP and runs 37 tests before I see it: segments, A/B test, links, tracking tags). Yours truly hits send.

With beehiiv's MCP we could also schedule the post.

But we like to keep that magic feeling for ourselves (still a thrilling click 200+ issues later 🤓)

That's the whole system. beehiiv in the middle, Claude building the scaffolding, so every bit around the human bit (writing) is as automated as possible.

Shoutout to the beehiiv team for making this breakdown happen. Been dreaming of sharing this for a while.

The MCP works on every beehiiv plan, including free (write access needs a paid plan). Free was all I used for months, and once you’re ready to start kicking around the platform’s more advanced features, use the code STRATEGY30 for an exclusive discount!

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

The spoiler-free copy of SB Dash, the internal tools we use to run Strategy Breakdowns.

Housing everything we build in one place has been the most important technical shift for us this year.

From a “coming soon” landing page to 150k+ readers, this is the first piece we did with beehiiv.

The design, the sponsorships, the email sequences - the foundational backbone to everything you just read.

beehiiv's own prompt library, sorted by job: content, audience, growth, sponsorships and automations.

Worth a bookmark for any builders reading this!