Tyler Denk

I was like, I'm going to write a Medium article and break down exactly the back end of how we built this referral program.

It got thousands of claps or whatever Medium uses.

But that was the signal that I used of what I had personally built is valuable to other people who want this tech.

And so like another thing to lean into on these like early stages is like, what is that core differentiator?

A lot of founders like try to run away from competition.

I think we entered one of the most competitive spaces.

I could name 25 competitors that were existent and still exist today that are infinitely bigger than us.

But what we had is like that case study of, I already knew what had worked at Morning Brew and I had people by the thousands who were using our competitors asking about this like very particular feature.

So when we launched Beehive, one of our value props was this referral program, the same one that Morning Brew used to scale to 4 million readers and get acquired by Business Insider.

You get that out of the box for free by signing up for Beehive.

And so that was really like our edge into the market.

Which is more or less the exact, I mean, when I'm emailing these 400 people, those conversations are exactly, even though they showed the slightest bit of interest by filling out this Google form, it is, I'm kind of good on my platform and you don't have automations, you don't have X, you don't have Y, you don't have Z. And I think that's like the other trap that a lot of founders fall into.

It's like the perfection over progress where they see these existing competitors or like the startups who are already quote unquote successful, right?

And they think that they always just like showed up that way, right?

Like they came out of the womb, just successful, polished, like beautiful.

And one thing that I've really honed in on is in addition to like the things that don't scale, it's like the shipping and being comfortable shipping things that are 80 to 90% of the way there that you can get in people's hands to collect their feedback and then iterate as quickly as possible.

Because if this thing's going to work out, you have to assume that where you are now is the smallest you'll ever be.

And so to piss off and have a less than ideal first impression to your 100 first users is nothing if that means that you can take that feedback from those 100 people, make the product 10 times better, so the next 100 and the next 1,000 get a much more polished product.

But I think so many people get stuck in not wanting to release that unpolished, unsexy feature until it's exactly right.

And so, I don't know, an example of another thing that we did in the early days that didn't scale is email is ripe with spam and abuse and there's security complaints and concerns there.