Community @beehiiv. Always building something to connect ppl. Writing more these days.
Cincinnati, OH
Joined March 2011
- Tweets3.3K
- Following2.1K
- Followers2.4K
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I have been keeping a secret that I can FINALLY share with you all!!!!!
I'm partnering with @beehiiv to lead their Community Product.
It's LIVE now. Released today at the Summer Release Event which was...truly something (link in comments if you want to watch).
I love 0-1 work.
AND I love it even more when it means I'm on a team enabling more connection in the world.
It is now possible for hundreds (thousands?) of diligent writers, podcasters, business owners, growth teams, and publishers to launch a community with a tool they already use.
We have tried *very hard* to make getting started easy, manage, engage with, and grow your community.
If you're thinking...thanks for the tool, but where do I even start...
The beehiiv team and I are here to support you.
How? via...
- Calls where we jam on your community strat
- Helping you launch it
- Being a thought partner to ensure the dials are set up so the community and members thrive
- Listening to your feedback (and doing something great with it)
ALL of the above are part of my role (can't believe I get to do this for work 🥹)
That's how much it matters to the team that YOUR community succeeds. And that your members genuinely love their experience too.
There are 1 million business reasons to make community a part of your strategy.
But what's really freaking exciting for me is the idea of *so many more* communities being available for a variety of humans to join, participate in, nerd out in, connect in.
So yes, I'm repping community with the incredible @beehiiv team with whom it has been a privilege to work with over the last month.
And I'll still keep supporting all kinds of community architects by sharing more about the work that goes into community. I also hope this means I'll connect with + learn from more of them (you??). DMs and comments open!!
Now, I shall return to the work. I think @denk_tweets 🐝 just DM'ed me 234 ideas. See you all around here more. 💕
Alifya✨ retweeted
one of the most underrated luxuries in life is having enough time to follow a curiosity without needing to know where it’s going
"A walled garden" is a beautiful way to describe a private, curated community
If your emails have added value, your audience trusts your brand enough to walk into a curated room.
You can be the reason they get 10x value from being in the same room.
In return you get the intangibles like long term loyalty and goodwill.
Tangibly you're securing your brand's future. LTV up! Retention up! MRR up!
The threat to @beehiiv isn't marc lou (guy's a jester).
The actual threat to beehiiv is that humans will stop reading their email.
AI agents don't read newsletters.
Even today, the Apple summary front-runs the need to open for a percentage of readers.
This means the ad model for newsletters is gone in 3 years.
The conversion math also becomes tougher and tougher, even with a huge list.
If everyone is using Claude/Muse/Grok as their LifeHQ (which they will), the only newsletters that get read will be personality/opinion driven (for fun).
The "own your audience" frame also dilutes when the layer between your words and the human buyer is designed to avoid consuming it.
This is not a beehiiv problem, it's an email problem in general.
Beehiiv is diversifying into other products, which is smart.
But one of the core tenets of audience building (just get their email and you're golden) is starting to weaken.
If I had a job interview and they sent me a Teams link, I would very politely decline the opportunity to continue the process
Alifya✨ retweeted
what would you like to see improved in @beehiiv?
we asked our users how we could most improve @beehiiv and heard them loud and clear
the next 6 weeks: relentlessly shipping as many high impact features and clearing the backlog
> core email features
> editor improvements
> reimagined website builder
> tons of QoL improvements
Taking wellness day quite seriously while learning how difficult it is to paint squares on a curved surface
If you’re gonna to spend your weekend figuring out how to insure your content business by building a corner of the internet for your community or network, I’m rooting for you 🫵
Dan gets it.
Creator/media businesses who are starting to build their communities and corners of the internet will continue to thrive.
a big take I've been noodling on and I’m ready to call:
the newsletter is dead
@every's core business is a newsletter with 120k+ subscribers so I don't say this lightly.
persistent agents mean i dont look at my inbox
with dots (GrokBots, Muse, etc) I almost never look at my inbox. if I do it's for a specific thing I need to reply to.
i think in a year I'll be doing all of my email this way - fully filtered by my dot / something like it.
this is not new: it's a continuation of the trend of having a “newsletter” folder in Gmail, but 10x more filtered.
what it means
It doesn’t mean people won't read newsletters, but it does mean that getting a person’s email is no longer the guarantee that you have a relationship with them that it used to.
luckily, with persistent agents (and AI coding more generally) there is an entirely new playing field to build relationships with readers. instead of fighting to get an email address, publishers and creators will need to make sure we're installed in our reader's agent harness of choice, so that they get directly notified when we do something new.
we're already starting to experiment with this @every with our MCP and the frontier alerts we send users of our slack agent (every.to/agent)
it's also more affordable than ever for publishers and creators to build their own platform ecosystem: you can have your own website, app etc. and you can use AI to publish 100x more high-quality stuff to your community—so we may see a world where many creators themselves are running their own little empires that have their own apps, feeds etc.
to be clear: It'll take a while before this actually happens, but the idea of getting someone's email creating a direct relationship with them is over.
here's a set of predictions I made 3 years ago about AI and media that panned out pretty well: every.to/chain-of-thought/we…
love Hampton and the podcast is 10/10.
we can help you do this and make sure the writer you bring on spends time doing what they do best - write
example:
- see the top discussions from the last 7D
- click 3 dot menu
- press "🔁 start newsletter draft"
they wouldn't have to worry about formatting / SEO / AEO / web-posting / adding to the content library / build a way to pull that send into the community for more discussion / help make the issue a lever for growth
We're hiring a writer to start trouble in Hampton's Slack full of 1k+ founders/ceos.
Then turn the best threads into two weekly newsletters.
Real writer, real personality. Not a community manager.
NYC hybrid. $80-110K + bonus.
joinhampton.com/careers/news…
It is true that the hardest part about building this site & newsletter was deciding what to name it.
The most time consuming was my own bar for its aesthetics so I went back and forth on design for each asset.
The least time consuming part was pulling the whole thing into @beehiiv.
I connected the MCP and just said “build this pls, use native functionality as much as possible.”
Came back 20 mins later to the whole thing ready. All that was left for me was looking over + small tweaks (which I continued to use the MCP to fix).
Then I hit publish. That is actually the *only* time I pressed something in the UI throughout this whole experience.
Use the MCP!! Even if you’re just starting out. Actually *especially* if you’re just starting out.
It’s SO GOOD.
our Head of Community, @alifyavaliji, recently launched a beautiful newsletter + website on @beehiiv
the hook? she barely even touched the UI:
> claude built the design assets
> the beehiiv MCP built the website
all she needed to do in beehiiv was preview the website and hit "publish"
this is the way. check it out: what-and-why.beehiiv.com/
p.s. the newsletter covers the latest developments with our community product (which is absolutely crushing) 🚀
pretty cool to see a much bigger company take notes from beehiiv community w/ their latest updates
maybe i can add unofficial PM at _____ to my portfolio 🪄
Direct access to and building trusted feedback loops with the customer is the greatest thing a PM can do in 2026
