Two weeks ago, roughly 3,000 people tuned in live to watch the Winter Release, beehiiv’s first ever product launch event, where we announced 9 major new features!

(For the full recording click here)

Since then over 10,000 people have watched the video and hundreds have reacted online (including some great memes like this).

I was fortunate enough to work on many of the features included in the launch, and today I’m going to break down the strategy behind each one: Why did we build it, how does it fit into our plan and how does it help beehiiv win long term?

During the winter release, Tyler articulated the vision:

But what is the Content Economy?

So to deliver on this vision, we need to build the one-tool that creators and publishers need to run their content business online.

In product language, this is the classic ‘all-in-one toolkit’ playbook, but with a clear view of which customer you’re targeting (knowledge creators and publishers).

The key challenge is how you go from being the best newsletter tool to the full operating system? There are countless tools that every creator has stitched together to run their campaigns, monetization and business operations. So where do you start?

There are three key aspects to a successful ‘all-in-one’ strategy:

The Winter Release was executed to deliver against all three:

If done correctly, the reaction from customers should look something like this…

Why do the all-in-one strategy?

For beehiiv, executing a all-in-one playbook gives us clear path to TAM expansion:

In short: The world for newsletters is big but the market for the content economy is massive.

Dominating the content economy has huge upside if done successfully as it opens you up to so many potential customers and allows you to capture more of their wallet.

Interested in improving your product strategy ?

Before I dive into the thinking behind each feature launched at the event, I have a small interruption:

A few subscribers have asked about getting product advice for their startups or asking if I can review their existing strategy.

I love advising founders and PMs and I want to open this up to more people, so I’m excited to announce that you can now book a consultation with me directly (via beehiiv’s new digital products tool).

Simply book a slot, send me your existing strategy + a loom with some of your key challenges/what you’d like help with. I’ll review everything, come up with some feedback and then we can discuss on the call and discuss next steps.

(Back to scheduled programming…)

Let me break down the four “new tools” that we launched at the Winter Release and explain how they each fit into the plan I’ve outlined above:

One of the core ICP users at beehiiv is an entrepreneurial ‘knowledge creator’. ie they monetise their expertise by creating content.

Outside of Ads and subscriptions to premium content, many of these users monetise by selling digital products, courses, consulting, or running paid communities etc.

Previously, these were all done using other tools which means our users needed extra platforms & subscriptions, often lost out on platform commission, and had extra tech debt as they attempted to stitch everything together using tools like Zapier (another subscription).

Adding digital products allows beehiiv to provide immediate value to users by

By bringing digital products into the platform and connecting it with our existing monetisation offerings (Ads, Boosts & Referrals), we are one step closer to providing the full operating system for our users.

From a creator perspective, podcasting and email have many similarities: long-form, sent out weekly/daily, montized via ads/premium content & heavily reliant on owning and reaching their audience.

Unsurprisingly, lots of our users have podcasts and given the overlap, adding more podcasting features seemed like a no brainer. But where to start?

In podcasts there are typically four areas to play:

The most obvious place to start for beehiiv is the #4, Distribution:

We already have a powerful and popular website tool which seamlessly integrates with the rest of our ecosystem.

Adding functionality to pull in and display the RSS feed for our user’s podcasts was a immediate value add for users as they no longer have to pay for and manage another podcast-specific website tool (like podpage).

This extra functionality also enhances the core platform’s appeal to new users, and creates an easy way to upsell a podcast audience directly into newsletter, ads or digital products.

It also creates more optionality for us to lean into extra podcast functionality in the future if we wish… 👀

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of using Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the most popular (& free) web-analytics tool in world, you know it’s a painful experience.

So painful in-fact that several new saas platforms have emerged (Fathom, Pirsch, Datafast etc) to fill the gap.

When surveying our users only 65% used an analytics tool, with basically everyone using GA4. However, almost everyone who used GA4 wanted an alternative, and everyone who didn’t use a tool said they wanted to use one.

Cue… native web analytics.

Again, immediate value to existing users by giving them access to the data they care about & replacing a tool they hate.

Importantly, however, this also opens up huge opportunities for significantly enhancing our existing Ads, Email, Growth and Website tooling through data. Think… subscriber enrichment, funnels, custom events etc….

In my opinion, data (and analytics) is the backbone to the Operating System, and this feature will become one the most important and highly adopted features in the beehiiv ecosystem.

Arguably the most commoditised part of a creator’s tech stack is the link-in-bio. In almost every case it’s a standalone tool (eg. Linktree) which means its also another subscription and another thing to stitch together

For many creators this is also the switchboard for their business, and represents the highest traffic touch-point with their tech stack.

From a data and analytics perspective, beehiiv only having visibility over the website traffic (and not the link-in-bio visitors) means we are missing out on a huge portion of the data from our users and their audience.

In addition to the value of replacing a tool in their stack, providing a link-in-bio also gives users much greater visibility over their customer’s entire journey. For our analytics products and features, this is incredibly powerful.

These big bets of course went alongside a ton of other features which helped to improve the core platform (features like the dynamic content, automations and the AI editor).

I wont go through each of them, but these are the features that help ensure beehiiv remains the #1 newsletter platform for those looking to grow and monetise their audience.

Speaking of which….

This newsletter you couldn’t wait to open? It runs on beehiiv — the absolute best platform for email newsletters.

Our editor makes your content look like Picasso in the inbox. Your website? Beautiful and ready to capture subscribers on day one.

And when it’s time to monetize, you don’t need to duct-tape a dozen tools together. Paid subscriptions, referrals, and a (super easy-to-use) global ad network — it’s all built in.

beehiiv isn’t just the best choice. It’s the only choice that makes sense.

Start free today. No credit card required

Anyway, thats a wrap on the Winter Release! I hope you found it useful. If you have any questions, please let me know.

Otherwise, I’ll see you next week, where I’ll be doing a walk-through of how to build an AI-agent. Stay tuned!

Thanks,
J