A few weeks ago I was in London for a beehiiv x Google event. Tyler Denk (beehiiv founder + CEO) was presenting on stage.

A slide came up with a bunch of beehiiv newsletters on it - including Strategy Breakdowns.

Tyler goes “and shoutout to Tom from Strategy Breakdowns who is here in the room somewhere! Well, he should be in the room - he was at drinks last night 😅”

I was not in the room.

I rocked up late, the event was full, and I was chopping it up with the front desk, trying to hash out an exception to the 1-out-1-in situation.

Missed the moment entirely. Made it inside for the next presentation and then mixers.

I’m yarning with a few journos, mention my newsletter, “oh - the one Tyler mentioned?”, “huh?”, they recount, I’m not buying it.

A few conversations later, similar thing happens.

Then again after a few more - this time with some up-and-coming-newsletter-operators. We go back and forth on tactical stuff for like 30 mins.

Look - I’m not gonna say I had an existential gratitude moment at an industry mixer. More of a highly caffeinated ego buzz… but it was in the same general direction.

2.5 years ago I was trying to pin down the concept for my beehiiv newsletter.

0 subscribers, $0 revenue, 0 clue what I was doing.

Today Strategy Breakdowns has 125,000+ readers, I've quit my dream job, I can build while travelling the world, and the businesses just did back-to-back $40k revenue months for the first time ever.

The whole thing runs on beehiiv.

I owe a lot to this product.

Today's piece is one I've been wanting to write for a while. A detailed behind-the-scenes account of how I built my newsletter on beehiiv, and why I'd do it all again.

Enjoy.

— Tom

Definitely not me trying to influence the 2026 roadmap after a few Old Fashioneds. Sorry Tyler, Preeya and Lance if you’re reading this.

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The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

Newsletter platforms are a crowded market. Substack, Kit, Mailchimp, Ghost, Buttondown - dozens of options. Most creators pick one based on vibes, a recommendation from a friend, or whatever name they heard first.

I evaluated all of them and made a deliberate choice.

Here's the thing: beehiiv isn't just how I send emails. It's the entire operating system. The website. The automations. The sponsorships. The funnels. The lead magnets. The analytics.

This isn't a product review. It's a first-person strategy memo - how beehiiv let me build the exact business I wanted to build, on my own terms:

(My guiding principles - from "What was the most surprising lesson from 2024?”)

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

Open any 10 newsletters on Substack. They all look the same. Same layout. Same font. Same structure. The platform is the brand - not you.

For some creators, that's fine. But if you want to create something with unique DNA - it's painfully limiting.

I've always known a (perhaps unfortunate) truth: I’m more of a creative than a founder.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the 3D problem-solving that building a business requires, but the product has always been what it’s all about for me.

Brand, experience, design, novelty, voice. A good idea needs a bit of swagger to really come to life. The fact that beehiiv offers the most flexibility on all these fronts is a cornerstone value prop for me.

beehiiv gives you a best-in-class email editor, with granular control over sizing, colours, spacing, etc - the basics of making your emails actually look cool. But the power-user features are what really set it apart. Things like:

The result is a consistent design system across emails, website, landing pages, and every touchpoint along the reader journey. Strategy Breakdowns feels like one cohesive brand, because it all lives in one platform.

A while back I wrote a build-in-public piece documenting the entire process of designing Strategy Breakdowns - logo, typeface, colours, design patterns, animations, everything.

I still get messages about it.

And beehiiv is realistically the only newsletter platform where all this would’ve been possible.

For most newsletters, welcome emails are an afterthought.

"Thanks for subscribing! Follow me on X/LI/YT" and then silence until the next edition.

You've spent time or money (or both!) acquiring that subscriber - and then you waste the highest-intent window they'll ever have. Some other platforms even hijack your single most valuable real estate to promote their own app, and won’t let publishers customise the experience at all.

Here's what I built instead - all natively inside beehiiv:

Here’s exactly how it looks behind the scenes:

Step 1: Branded subscribe page or lead magnet landing page, optimised for conversion-rate and “looks fun - gonna share this with the group chat”

Step 2: Welcome email lands. Warm, personal introduction. I ask them to reply (the single best signal for email deliverability). If they came in for a free resource, it's included. Then I ask them to click on their goal - founder, employee, or leader. This does a few things at once:

Step 3: Over the next few weeks, new subscribers receive a surprise free strategy crash course, our most popular articles (determined by beehiiv poll data on what readers found most valuable), and a bunch of behind-the-scenes stories and resources.

Each email is personalised based on segment - founders get business-building content, employees get career growth, leaders get influence and impact. Same automation, dynamic experience.

Step 4: Eventually, readers are introduced to the StrategyHub ecosystem - courses, tools, templates - with context on how/why I built them, social proof from students, and a special (personalised, of course) bundle.

My friend Chenell even made a video analysing how the first few steps work:

Every lead magnet and entry point pipes into the same master sequence. This means I can iterate, measure, and optimise across the board - all from one platform.

beehiiv's automation engine isn't just "send a single welcome email after signup".

It lets you go as deep as you want - conditional logic, branching paths, segment-based personalisation, landing-page integrations. You can build a genuinely unique, productised, world-class onboarding experience - the kind that used to require stitching together 5+ different tools.

(Oh and if you want the full power of the automation builder, STRATEGY30 at checkout nets you an exclusive discount!)

I won’t lie.

Building a newsletter audience is hard.

And figuring out how to make money from it is hard too.

Which is why I love beehiiv’s market-entry strategy so much → they wedged their way into the crowded space by being laser-focussed on tackling these 2 problems:

Growth + Monetisation

To this day, they’ve held on to the exact same unique PoV.

In just over 2 years, Strategy Breakdowns has gone from 0 to 125,000+ readers and we just hit our first back-to-back $40k months.

beehiiv's native growth and monetisation tools played a direct role in both.

→ Growth

beehiiv is building a blogosphere-type network inside the product. Creators on the platform actively help each other grow - here are 2 of my favourite features that make this work:

Recommendations:

beehiiv has a native opt-in cross-recommendation network. If you turn it on, when someone subscribes to your newsletter, you can recommend other newsletters they should subscribe to too. No outreach needed, no integrations to set up.

This means - if other writers find your stuff worth reading, they’ll ‘recommend’ you, and some of their subscribers will end up signing up to your newsletter too!

Strategy Breakdowns is recommended by 59 other newsletters, which has generated 7,635 subscribers.

Boosts:

Boosts is beehiiv's paid growth marketplace. Essentially, I can say “I’m willing to pay US$2 per engaged subscriber” - other newsletters can promote Strategy Breakdowns, and will get paid automatically based on qualified signups.

It’s super easy to set up, so it’s been a regular part of my growth mix since launch - I’ve acquired 17,512 new subscribers through the program.

You only pay if they open your emails (otherwise they get auto-removed and cost $0), so engagement is particularly strong.

→ Monetisation

Boosts:

I also earned $2,303 from the other side of Boosts - recommending other newsletters to my audience. Not a core revenue stream, but not bad for something that I tested for a few months in the early days when I was still figuring out my monetisation strategy. Especially considering it only took about 5 minutes to set up.

Analytics:

My primary revenue stream is ad placements. That business only works if I can prove impact to sponsors - and beehiiv's analytics are genuinely best-in-class for this.

Detailed drill-down reporting on opens, clicks, cohorts, segments, posts, acquisition sources, etc. I can show a sponsor exactly how their placement performed - which lets me create custom campaign reports that keep sponsors coming back.

The granularity the platform offers powers is mission-critical to decision-making for the sponsorship business: which acquisition channels produce the most engaged readers, which types of content performs best, how to price placements, which sponsors are the right fit, and more generally - where I should be investing my energy and CAPEX.

(Plus, for the chronically integrated among us, they just made all this data available via MCP).

The bigger picture:

My primary revenue stream is direct sponsorships, and my primary growth channels are LinkedIn organic and a mix of paid ads platforms. But I appreciate that beehiiv is relentlessly building for a variety of different business and growth models too:

Every week there's something new.

The pace is unparalleled.

The team is downright obsessed with giving creators better ways to grow and get paid - regardless of which business model they choose.

If you've read this far, here's the honest takeaway: beehiiv is the platform I chose when I had 0 subscribers, and it's the platform I'm still on at 125,000+. I've tried the alternatives. I evaluated them properly. And I'd make the same choice again tomorrow.

If you're thinking about newsletters - or you're on a platform that's holding you back - give beehiiv a go. Use code STRATEGY30 for an exclusive Strategy Breakdowns reader discount.

I hope you found this interesting! If you want more behind-the-scenes / building-in-public, share this article and tag me / beehiiv so I know to do more like this :)