Most of you found me on Substack.

That's where I started How They Grow—mostly because in 2022, Substack was just the default place you started a newsletter. Not a considered platform decision per se, more the path of least resistance.

I love the platform, and love the writers and readers I met on it. So much so that I interviewed for a PM role on their team in 2024, and as part of my “unhinged job application” created an interactive roadmap with a stack of ideas for making writers' lives better. But in conversations with their leadership team, it was clear my thinking was not where their vision was for the platform.

That was when I solidified my realization of the direction Substack was going.

Then at the start of this year, I did something that on paper could read as relatively silly. I left the momentum behind and rebuilt the whole thing on beehiiv.

Part of what tipped me, beyond everything you're about to read: beehiiv's own data shows newsletters there grow 2.75x faster than average. The momentum I was “leaving behind” was, statistically, the slower path. I was seeing the proof with my friends like Bill Kerr from Open Source CEO who did not stop growing.

(And if you end up trying it: my code THEDIFF30 gets you 30% off your first 3 months—it's linked throughout.)

It wasn't really a choice between just two newsletter tools though. It felt like it was a choice between fundamentally different ways of approaching building a media business. To me it was like a pilot choosing which machine to learn to fly for the next decade—the Airbus or the Boeing.

Two years ago, I wrote a deep dive on beehiiv. They were at $6.5M in ARR. I said that Tyler Denk and his team would 10X and hit $60M within five years.

I think I’ll be wrong. They're already at $30M in half the time. Their growth rate makes my ceiling look low.

And why their growth has been so strong is the point today, because it's a bigger picture strategic type of play you can run in almost any market: betting on opening up when the other guy is betting on closing in—and the type of customer that wins you.

Something I said in the first deep dive which is just as true today: you don't have to be first. beehiiv was definitely not the first, nor 2nd or 3rd or 4th newsletter tool. You just have to be right about a different point of view and willing to commit to it harder than the people who got there before you.

Some days I'm in back-to-back calls, and I used to choose between half-listening while I took notes or actually paying attention and forgetting to/being too lazy to write and send out notes after. Granola ended that. It's my AI notepad that sits in the background of all my meetings, listens, and turns call transcripts and if I feel like it, scrappy points I jot down into clean, structured notes the moment the call ends.

I get to just listen and just trust I have a repo of notes to reference back to at any time. Granola handles it and I love that it skips the whole “hey guys, can my notetaker join?” shebang. I use it for everything and the notes are genuinely amazing, not generic transcript soup you'll never reread.

🥷 When a strong incumbent commits hard to one belief about how things should work, don't build towards a better version of that same belief. Commit just as hard to the polar opposite one and win the people who were waiting for someone to build it.

You’re all to familiar with this type of bet. What’s within arm’s reach of you right now—Apple or Android?

Substack is the Apple. It’s beautiful, curated, and the same for everyone—which is the point. Your publication looks like every other publication besides different color buttons. The platform takes 10% of your subscription revenue, and lately it's spending its energy becoming a social network with a feed to scroll and a following count to accumulate. They’re betting on a clean and controlled ecosystem that’s closed to basically everything. No doors in or out. And the feature gaps Substack won’t close, they also don’t really let you close anywhere else via an API.

There’s a phenomenal essay by Emily Sunderberg on the walled garden of Substack.

So, then you have beehiiv as the Android. You can shape your newsletter into any brand you want. It’s often hard to know if a newsletter runs on their OS because they look so different. Like, take Arnold Schwarzenegger’s newsletter vs MilkRoad—such different vibes.

beehiiv takes 0% of your subscriptions. It has a real API and an MCP so you can pull your data out and pipe things in. It hands you automations and segmentation which is the plumbing for running and optimizing a media business. More knobs to customize and tinker, more control over everything, just more yours.

beehiiv is the open play full stack platform in what has largely been a walled ecosystem. And the limitations of the walled ecosystem are to many and myself, becoming way to obvious and hard to ignore.

I owe Substack. So does every newsletter creator. It made newsletters cool, it proved a regular person could turn writing into a living and it made it easier for people to find others talking about things they care about. This is a piece about two fundamentally different bets, the story of why the open one won me and a lot of people like me, and what we can learn from the open move.

in beehiiv’s case, the open move found them space in the red ocean email tool market up against a well-funded Substack, a Mailchimp that had sold for billions, and every social platform bolting on newsletters.

And it took them from $24K in 2021 to $30M ARR in 2026 without shipping a single thing Substack couldn't have built. It won market share on the belief that open plays win, and that a big enough group of creators love to tinker.

Because I believe Attio is the best and most customizable CRM that all go-to-market teams should be using.

Most CRMs feel like they were built for a sales org in 2012 and never touched again. Attio is the opposite—it builds itself from your email and calendar, bends to whatever your data model actually is, and feels like fast, modern software instead of homework.

Startups and deal teams use it to run pipelines, partnerships, and relationships without the usual setup tax. I use it to run my sponsorship business. If your "CRM" is currently a spreadsheet you're scared to open, this is the upgrade.

Any investor who heard the beehiiv pitch probably asked the obvious question: why you, and why now? Tyler, before mentioning features, led with belief.

It was a truer point of view about what a newsletter even is. Not a hobby with a subscription—but a media business that needs the whole stack: growth, analytics, monetization, all of it. Tyler had watched that stack from the inside at Morning Brew. That single insight was the wedge. Being late to a market matters far less than being right about something you think everyone else got wrong.

Could Substack copy beehiiv’s features? Of course—customization, an API, automations, an ad network are all within reach, and Substack recently said they’re adding ads. So the features were never the moat. The moat is the open belief held and solidified loudly in public that the other side won't match. Substack for years has sincerely committed to one thing: B2C paid subscriptions, no ads, a curated network.

beehiiv is just as sincerely committed to the opposite. Diversify how writers earn, take nothing off the top, open the whole thing up. A capability your rival can't copy is rare and short-lived; a belief they won't copy, because they genuinely think you're wrong, lasts for years.

To be clear, Substack isn't failing. They're a $1.1B company executing a different conviction, with conviction. Two companies can win for different reasons.

The oldest promise in the creator world is "own your audience". Your list is yours. It’s exportable and doesn’t get locked to a platform like Instagram followers. I learned why that mattered at a small scale years ago on Medium, seeing a few hundred followers I had no access to and couldn't take anywhere.

But ownership erodes the second a platform becomes a feed. Followers inside a feed aren't yours; they belong to the algorithm, and they don't leave with you.

So as the closed player in this case leans into social with the feed and app and followers, the audience relationship slides back a bit toward platform, and the walls around that garden inch a bit higher.

I have over 40K followers on Substack-- and credit where due, its recommendation network drove a big chunk of my early growth there—but 10K of those followers are rented to me by the platform. Those followers see what the Substack algorithm promotes, with no direct relationship to me. 

The open player's pitch is the reverse. In this example, everything from your list to your data is yours. For someone building a business, "you keep what you build" is a really important thing.

"We're for creators" isn’t enough. That’s too broad and I’ll show you why.

Open wins people who want to tinker, own, and control. Closed wins people who want simple, consistent, and handled for them. I'm proof in both directions on the same day. I use an iPhone, not a Samsung, even though I think Samsung makes the better phone. Why? Because I have zero desire to fiddle with my phone. I want it simple. But my newsletter? I want knobs. Same person, opposite choice, decided entirely by the job in front of me.

So the question is not just "open or closed." You have to ask for which job, for which person, in which mood, are you building for? Both Substack and beehiiv are for creators, but different archetypes.

beehiiv chose the creators who treat writing as a business they run. Substack chose the ones who mostly want to write and be found. Both are real customers. Both bets can win.

And yes, Substack absolutely has some serious business operators on there. Like mega money being made. You know Lenny obviously, I’ve mentioned Noahpinion before. Emily’s Feed Me. So of course there are real business operators there, but more and more of them like Kyle Poyar (Growth Unhinged) and CJ (Mostly Metrics) are migrating over for the promise of open that beehiiv is selling. And Tom Alder (Strategy Breakdowns) wrote a whole piece on why he runs on beehiiv—the same story, from someone whose strategy breakdowns you probably already read.

Many would have started on beehiiv in the first place, but Substack was there first.

A belief gets you the wedge and your shipping velocity widens it before anyone reacts. beehiiv ships faster than the category. Its big November 2025 release dropped 10+ features in a single day so even fence-sitters figured anything missing would land soon.

And sure enough, the closed player eventually concedes the obviously-good ideas: Substack now runs ads, the exact thing it once called "busted," because creators were doing it anyway. But by the time an incumbent crosses the line it swore it never would (which Substack has done more than once), the open player like beehiiv already owns the position, the power users, and a multi-year head start.

A late concession just proves the open bet was right all along.

btw, beehiiv has a July 16th Summer Release that is going to be insane. I can’t tell you what’s coming because I am not allowed to, but they are dropping an incredible set of updates.

Join me there to watch how a growth stage startup does product launches.

The arc of each case here is who do we win by opening the thing the incumbent keeps shut?

In 1981, IBM needed a personal computer fast, so it built one from off-the-shelf parts and published the specs. Anyone could make a "PC compatible," and Compaq, Dell, HP, and a lot of clone-makers did. The open standard went on to own ~90% of computing. Apple kept the Macintosh sealed end to end and nearly died as the pricey holdout in the '90s… then became the most valuable company on earth by owning the experience completely.

Takeaway: open usually wins share, closed usually wins margin. Decide which game you came to play before you pick a side.

The closed frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) are like the iPhone: super good and dead simple to work with—paste an API key and go, which is why most of the web does exactly that. Open-weight models (Meta's Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral) are the Android: download the weights, fine-tune on your own data, self-host, pay a fraction of the cost.

Hugging Face, the open hub, now lists over 2 million models, and the gap to the frontier has shrunk from a year to a few months. So builders sort themselves by the job: cost-sensitive, privacy-bound, or customization-heavy work goes open; "just give me the best answer with zero babysitting" goes closed.

Takeaway: when the work is undifferentiated and control matters, people pick open; when they want the safe bet with no maintenance, they pick closed. And as with me, the same buyer splits down the middle depending on the task.

Amazon is the closed marketplace: enormous traffic, but you don't own the customer, the brand, or the data, and Amazon can and often does decide to stock its own version right next to yours.

Shopify took the opposite side of the bet by making the open toolkit for building your own store on your own domain, where the customer is yours.

"Arm the rebels," as they say.

Millions of merchants who wanted to own their business instead of being a line item in someone else's picked the incredible extensibility and open customization ecosystem of Shopify.

Takeaway: sell ownership to the producers a marketplace turns into tenants.

The open vs close pattern is everywhere really: Stripe opening payments to developers while PayPal stayed clunky; or Linux and WordPress running most of the internet by being open; and Meta with their open Meta Quest headset vs Apple’s closed Apple Vision.

Here's how to find your version of the bet.

First, what’s the belief your incumbent has committed to in public? And the type of model that belief protects? The cut they take? The data they hoard? The experience they control? The roadmap they’re prioritizing? The audience they route through their own product? Whatever they'd defend to the death is the thing they can't easily reverse.

Then ask the real question: is there an opposite belief a group holds? Not "we're cheaper" or "we're nicer" but like an actual different worldview about how this should work. beehiiv's was "a newsletter is a business, so let people run it like one, and own it." PC was “computer geeks are inherently people who want to customize their hardware”. If you can say yours in a sentence and a real crowd nods somewhere you probably have a good wedge.

Then ask, are the people you’re serving tinkerers or simplifiers? We spend a lot of time naming ICPs and stuff like that, but I don’t think that attribute gets tagged enough. Lean open if your people want to own and control and customize. Closed if they want it consistent and done for them. Pick one and build for it—which is why I have no shade for Substack, they’re sticking to their view point. I just drastically prefer the other view. 🧑‍🔬

And lastly, ask what’s the easiest thing of value you can open up for your tinkering customer base that gives them what the incumbent can’t?

Ok, so if the open bet feels right to you, I think a suitable way to feel it first hand is to go own something yourself. If it’s not already clear, I write this on beehiiv, and you can start your own newsletter here in a few minutes—my code THEDIFF30 gets you 30% off your first three months.

I called their growth two years ago and still lowballed it. I think the next two will make me look even more wrong.

Happy tinkering, testing, and trying.

› “Empowerment of individuals is a key part of what makes open source work, since in the end, innovations tend to come from small groups, not from large, structured efforts.” — Tim O’Reilly

› Take a look at beehiiv’s seed deck. It’s unedited and the stuff they used to raise their first capital, $2.6M → (View the beehiiv seed deck)

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› While Claude or Codex is grinding away in your terminal, you're mostly just watching a spinner. I built something to fill that dead air: one line to install, and it feeds you a fresh idea or a bit of news from the topics you care about, right in your status line, while the agent finishes. Learn something in the gaps instead of refreshing X. (Install bits)

› My free builder tools do the math for you — an app revenue calculator, an app health calculator, and a competition calculator (See how your app compares).

› Check out my personal app store of tools I actually use — these are the vetted products I lean on to build things and run my business (Explore my stack).