Tyler Denk

Yeah, so we had about 400 people sign up initially.

And in the questions that we asked, one of the questions was, why are you interested in using Beehive?

So they are basically on a silver platter serving exactly what intrigues them, whether it's limitation with their previous platform or they love the morning brew, whatever it is.

And so now as a team of three, I have this 400 person list that I can go after.

I have their email, I have their social handle.

And I'm just like,

It's like the Paul Graham essay of do things that don't scale.

Like it's the non-sexy things at the beginning.

Everyone glamorizes the zero to a million in my first week of business.

And now there's these AI companies that have like that straight vertical revenue.

I think the truth is for most of these startups getting off the ground, it's a lot of like the dirty gritty work of just doing the cold outreach yourself.

And also like one thing that I've always found a competitive advantages is it's almost like people like try to go too close to the, let me automate everything, build like this 15 step automation funnel.

We'll use AI to make sure that the messaging hits at the right time to the right person.

I didn't use HubSpot.

I couldn't afford it at the time.

I was just doing cold outreach on email once a week, every week to all 400 people.

And I got 25% of the people convert in like the first few months.

Yeah, and so a lot of the feature and kind of like research was done in this like prior stage, but you kind of, as you alluded to earlier, you figure out the messaging points that really resonate, whether it's the, we don't take a cut of your revenue.

That's your revenue, we don't touch that.

Back when I was at Morning Brew, the first project I ever built was I built the referral program.