Where I landed after 3 months on beehiiv

This post is sponsored by beehiiv. If you've been thinking about launching or upgrading your newsletter, beehiiv is offering Superpath readers 30% off for three months. Check it out at beehiiv.com/superpath and use code SUPERPATH30 at checkout.

Three months ago I pitched beehiiv on a simple idea. We’d move the Superpath newsletter to beehiiv and write about it along the way. I wrote about that here.

Since then, we’ve moved the newsletter to beehiiv, migrated the podcast, run polls, explored analytics, built automation flows, and turned an issue into an audio recording read by a cartoon grandpa.

Here are my thoughts after three months.

Yes, beehiiv has improved the newsletter.

The reason I’d been excited to try beehiiv in the first place was that they were innovating in the email platform space – a product category I felt had stagnated in the 2010s.

While the foundational elements of the beehiiv email builder are pretty familiar, there are some noticeable functionality upgrades from tools I’d used in the past.

The big breakthrough is that the newsletter lives on as a post on a site that can continue to get views outside the inbox. That empowers a number of cool, interactive features like polls and surveys.

The feature that most impressed me that I didn’t know about before moving to beehiiv was verified clicks, a better system for identifying real clicks from bots. Over the last decade on other tools, I became skeptical about some of the data I was seeing on opens and clicks, but with beehiiv’s tech, I feel a lot more confident.

There are a lot of cool things they are doing with growth tools and monetization as well, but I’m still dipping my toes in all of that.

The beehiiv team is shipping so much more than I imagined.

When we kicked off the partnership, beehiiv didn't have a podcast product. A few weeks in, they launched one. I had no idea it was coming. We moved Content, Briefly and its entire back catalog over to beehiiv in about 10 minutes and haven't looked back. The analytics were already better than our old host.

But that’s not the only major thing they launched over these three months. The team shipped webinars, on-demand ads, a metered paywall, paid trials, and a rebuilt automation engine. They launched an MCP integration that connects it to AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT, then released a free upgraded version a few weeks later. The team moves at an absurd clip. I made it a priority to follow everything beehiiv was doing this past three months, but I still had a hard time keeping up.

On that note, beehiiv is hosting their first-ever Summer Release Event. It's free, virtual, and (from what I've heard) has more than a few huge announcements creators like me have been asking for. You can RSVP here.

It’s clear beehiiv is becoming a full platform for a media business (which is great for Superpath!).

As I’ve kept a much closer eye on what the beehiiv team is up to, it’s clear that they are quickly branding out of just newsletters to build a whole platform for hosting a media business. That’s a really exciting development for us as well.

Three months ago, the plan was to move our email newsletters to beehiiv. Today, I see beehiiv becoming the central hub of the Superpath media business.

There are two sides to Superpath. There’s a community product that lives in Slack, and a media product. The media product (newsletter and podcast) now lives under one roof in beehiiv.

Until a month ago, the Superpath newsletter and the Content, Briefly podcast lived in separate tools, and the audiences barely overlapped. We have a newsletter list of 13,000 and another 300 regular subscribers to the podcast. We’re working toward bringing those audiences together and that’s going to be easier now that they are on a single platform.

The newsletter and the podcast do different things. The newsletter is the surface, what you can scan on your phone in a minute. The podcast is where someone with thirty minutes can sit with the longer version of an idea. The goal is to weave them together so a reader who scans something in the newsletter can drop into the deeper conversation when they're ready.

As a media creator, one of the most compelling reasons to build with beehiiv is the clarity of their vision. While other platforms take big cuts of revenue streams, beehiiv is focused on making great tools for creators. They’ve been consistent in this from the very beginning and that’s why I trust them over some of the other new platforms.

Where this leaves me

Three months ago I said I hoped this series would give anyone rethinking their email stack a practitioner's view to work with. I hope it did.

There's plenty I haven't had the chance to dig into over the first three months, including segmentation, A/B testing, more of the growth tools, but I’m really excited to continue to explore.

If you're weighing platforms, beehiiv is worth a look. The product is solid and they ship faster than anyone I've used in a decade of email tools. Plus, the stuff they ship isn’t just a bunch of random AI features users don’t want. Their roadmap is built on what customers are actually listening to.

If you're thinking about your own move and want to talk it through, reply to this email or find me in the Superpath Slack. Always happy to chat through what worked and what didn't.

If you want to try it, use code SUPERPATH30 at checkout for 30% off for three months.