3 Months on beehiiv: An Honest Review from a Newsletter Creator

Hey honeys and hustlers,

I’ve been on beehiiv for 3 months, for reasons I outlined in this article. Normally, Saturdays are reserved for exclusive articles to PHR+ members, but I wanted to share my experience from my first 90 days on beehiiv with everyone. In this article, I’ll be exploring:

• how I’ve grown each newsletter

• what I’ve experienced as part of the beehiiv community

• if I’m actually using the features I claimed I wanted

• what features I’d like to see

• and my overall thoughts.

You’ll also be able to vote for my next YouTube video on newsletter writing at the end. So let’s hop right in!

Newsletter Growth

The top 3 sources of new subscribers for Please Hustle Responsibly are Substack recommendations, beehiiv recommendations, and LinkedIn (link in comments and direct messaging people). A general rule of thumb I noticed on Substack was that 20% of your recommendations give 80% of your new subscribers. I’ve been a lot more careful about who I reach out to for recommendations on beehiiv, as I want the folks I recommend here to be good fits for readers of this newsletter. One thing I can’t adequately measure on beehiiv is website traffic, as I’m constantly referring to previous articles and sharing previous articles that are timely on social media. While most of my reads will always come from email sends, it would be great to have that data as well, and it may come with the new website builder.

Melanin MVP is still under 1 year old, and I’ve only been consistent with it since December, but I’m hoping to tap into the women’s sports communities on Twitter and Threads. Ironically, I got featured in 3 LinkedIn News articles this week talking about sports, so there may be an opportunity there as well.

Another thing that’s left out of these numbers, given that my open rate is much higher since I moved to beehiiv (previously in the high 40s%), is that deliverability is constantly at 98.5%+ on each newsletter. I believe this is because beehiiv allows you to send from your actual email address, not the made-up one they give you. People on Substack who subscribe to your newsletter on the app can also choose to only receive your article/post notifications there, so they are more likely to unsubscribe if your email actually hits their inbox (which is the whole point in my opinion). While the Substack Notes feed (their social media feed) is a good tool for discovery, I’m glad to be less dependent on it.

The beehiiv Community

I’ve found beehiiv writers in primarily three places: the Hiiv Slack channel, Twitter, and Lettergrowth. It’s been slightly more work on my end than mindlessly scrolling the Substack Notes feed but it's worth it. I’ve been slowly but surely adding some folks to my recommendation network in each newsletter. I recently connected with the authors of soapbox, Flavors of Charlotte, and change is here so be sure to check them out!

beehiiv does allow you to do paid recommendations, which they call boosts. Boosting other newsletters isn’t my ideal way to collaborate with others or monetize this newsletter so I’ll likely only be making non-paid, genuine newsletter recommendations in my Community Spotlight section going forward. I’ve also mentioned that there’s a higher emphasis on scaling newsletters quickly in the beehiiv community with paid ads, rather than writing to genuinely build community and make email a visual medium that creates connection. I’m not a fan of that, but I try to take the advice that helps and leave what doesn’t from the gurus who are always sharing growth tactics and strategies.

Outside of beehiiv newsletter writers, I’ve been getting together virtually with other Black newsletter writers in a mastermind group (they use Substack and Flodesk). Realistically, could I have done this while I was writing on Substack? Of course. So this isn’t a limitation of Substack, we just didn’t start meeting and discussing newsletter strategy until after I moved from the platform. Having a mastermind and accountability group is something I highly recommend when you’re creating online and don’t have the pressure of a deadline from a client.

beehiiv Features I Love

beehiiv has added a ton of new features since I started using their platform, and delivered on many of the features I really wanted. I love the newsletter design functionality. It can be overwhelming at first, coming from something as minimal as Substack. But once you see beautifully designed newsletters from other writers, you start to experiment with it and get used to it. Not a single one of you has commented on our new header image that I’m extremely proud of but that’s okay, I’m not salty or anything. 🙃 I do wish my newsletter text formatting and design preferences were reflected on the website version, as I often share previous newsletter articles.

I can now embed Tweets and Thread posts, which is something that can’t be done on Substack. I love the control over the send email address and reply-to email address, something Substack doesn’t allow you to change. I think it's a huge help with email recognition and helps email providers mark the newsletter as safe, which increases our deliverability rates.

I like the ability to create different paywall sections with different copywriting. I can create different options for promotions or try out different messaging to see what converts. I was also really excited about beehiiv’s acquisition of Typedream and was even happier when they launched the new website builder days before my birthday. It hasn’t been rolled out for users on the Scale plan, as they’re letting the Max users stress-test the website builder first. They have it scheduled to roll out to all paid plan users in the next 4-6 weeks.

With new features come new ideas, like:

• adding live subscriber counts to the email footer

• creating an email course with previous articles (coming soon)

• adding more internal backlinks with shortcuts (creating a frog tree of articles for people to explore)

• gating popular and/or evergreen posts. Gating is a feature that requires people to subscribe to read free articles. A pop-up, which Substack also has, will ask for an email, but won’t require it for someone to read the article.

• adding a monthly roundup mail option for Melanin MVP. The sports news cycle moves so quickly, this article format is impossible for me to publish weekly.

• the ability to create email templates. In Substack I would have to duplicate an email that was closest to what I wanted to achieve and start from there. Sometimes I would have to go back several issues to copy and paste sections that I wanted. Very time-consuming and inefficient.

• surveys for new subscribers on Melanin MVP

• welcome sequence for new subscribers on this newsletter. I’m going to try to implement this for people who subscribed before I created it so that you can reap the benefits of special emails on your birthday.

• automation for people who complete the survey in the welcome sequence

• created a one-time payment option. I did this on both newsletters. I decided against having a paid membership option on Melanin MVP, but it’s nice that people can still support my work with a one-time donation.

• creating a more robust referral program

And these are likely just the tip of the iceberg for what I will continue to implement to make this community better.

beehiiv Features I Would Like to See

There are still a few features I would like to see implemented on beehiiv.

• link generation upon scheduling an article. This is the only Substack feature I miss.

• the ability to see total opens in aggregate form, not just unique opens. I’ve noticed that I measure my email open rates by the first 24 hours and the first 72 hours. Because I write a longer newsletter (averaging 750-1000 words per article), I think people like to have time to read it, and that time may not correlate with the day I send the email.

• the ability to save sections as templates just like you can with paywalls.

• the ability to edit content tags in bulk. I pulled in almost 100 articles, there’s just no way I can take the time to manually add content tags to all of those articles in addition to the ones I’ve written since using this platform. I do think content tags would help with organization, as not everyone cares about filmmaking.

• the ability to add subscribers to automations in bulk.

• the ability to link directly to the one-time payment option. Right now, I can only link to the Upgrade page.

• the ability to connect my RSS link to my Framer websites, allowing automatic feed updates.

The beehiiv team is super responsive, and I’ve requested many of these in the Slack channel. What features would you add?

My Overall Thoughts After 3 Months

TL:DR: I’m very happy with the switch to beehiiv. Though I still occasionally hang out on Substack Notes, I don’t think the platform’s discovery method is enough to keep me from missing out on all these features. The deliverability is probably beehiiv’s greatest selling point in comparison to Substack, and it’s very underrated. Whenever I have a problem, I can reach out to beehiiv’s support team. They’re a very responsive team, and I get to hear from actual people, unlike Substack which only has an AI chatbot.

I’m very excited for what’s possible. We’re cooking up some new collabs. 😎 😉 Let’s see where we are in a year on the platform! This newsletter turns 2 years old around the time that we’ll reach 1 year on beehiiv. Until then, let me know what you’d like to learn about newsletter writing by voting below, or responding to this email.