Inside Beehiiv's Growth Philosophy: A Conversation with Darwin Binesh

We had a great conversation with Darwin Binesh, Product Manager at Beehiiv. He's spent years inside the infrastructure that powers modern newsletters. First as Beehiiv's first support rep, now shaping the product itself. He's interviewed creators who built million-subscriber newsletters in under three years. He's watched thousands succeed and fail.

» Subscribe to his newsletter here.

Darwin's not selling anything. He's reporting what he's seen from the inside. The patterns that separate sustainable growth from burnout, where AI actually helps versus where it hurts, and why most creators monetize too early.

In our conversation, we challenged each other on content quality versus velocity, the taste gap in AI-generated work, and the obsessive focus required to build something that lasts.

Listen to parts of the conversation in the audio below, then read the full exchange.

Now, here's what we discussed with Darwin:

Darwin wanted to know how I see AI fitting into marketing operations. My answer surprised him.

AI shouldn't decide your marketing strategy. It should handle the grunt work—classifying tickets, repurposing content, and creating ad variations.

"Start with the boring shit," I said. "Keep the decisions and the interesting and creative stuff on your shoulders."

Darwin pushed back with a hypothetical: "Let's say it's three years ago and it's Tyler and a group of six of us starting Beehiiv. We're a small team. What's the best way we could have used AI?"

My answer: content scale without hiring a marketing army.

"Figure out your content strategy, your brand, your marketing, how you handle products. Feed that into your custom LLM or platform and let it do your job. You don't need to hire a marketing agency or five different marketers. Keep the team slightly generalist but in-house and let AI be the specialist on the scale."

Darwin got it.

But there's a critical prerequisite: context.

"If you don't have context—which can be anything from brand strategy to tone of voice to product roadmap—it should come from you," I explained. "You can chat with ChatGPT on how to refine that, but it should come from you. Once you have that, you can work with AI. But without that, you will end up in AI slop. Which most people do, by the way."

I asked Darwin for his top three tips on growing a newsletter from scratch. His answer cut through the tactical noise.

He pointed to The Rundown—zero to over a million subscribers in less than three years through relentless focus.

"When I interviewed the founder of Rundown in his first few months, they were posting multiple times a day on multiple platforms, long threads, short threads, referrals, swaps with other newsletters. They were all over all the time. There's no fancy AI feature, no special tool. You just really have to put in the time to make the work great and promote it like crazy."

"I think a lot of people start the newsletter trying to get to the monetization sooner," Darwin said. "And I love money. I think making money is an amazing thing, but it really shows in the content when the focus is on the monetization."

He learned this the hard way. Darwin ran a daily newsletter, decided early he'd sell ads, and completely missed what his audience wanted.

"A huge portion of my list just wanted more material and was willing to pay. I realized it so late that by the time I figured that out, I had gotten rid of the whole newsletter."

The full story is worse. He launched paid subscriptions, sold to friends and family, then burned out.

"I was publishing daily. I looked at the money, looked at my day job, and thought: I did not charge enough to make this full-time. I refunded everyone and put the newsletter away."

His advice: take six months before making real money.

"People decide very early that they want to run advertisements. The problem is that advertisers aren't as interested. You know what they are interested in, though? The readers actually want to pay for better content themselves. People who decide on how to make money too soon miss that because they're so focused on ads."

I pushed back: "I always say have the buy button out on day one."

Darwin countered: "When it becomes real—these are real people, it's their money, your reputation matters—refunding that money really hurts. Making money's awesome. Just take time to make it thoughtful."

The Beehiiv Ad Network changed everything for him:

"A lot of people are great at writing newsletters," Darwin said. "They're not necessarily as great at marketing. When you have a newsletter and write an article, the goal is to get people to read that article. The content is the product."

The mistake: marketing everywhere instead of where your audience actually is.

His example: "If you write a newsletter about real estate in Vancouver, a lot of the CEOs are in their fifties and sixties, and they still read Business in Vancouver Magazine in hard copy. Putting an ad in there could be one of the best things for you."

The trap: viral growth from the wrong audience.

"You can go viral on Instagram. It'll get you subscribers. They're not necessarily serious readers. If you're talking about AI for CMOs and going viral on Instagram, I don't know how many CMOs you're gonna find sign up from there."

I laughed. "You have no idea how many times I get a DM: 'How about we do Facebook ads for you instead of Beehiiv Boosts?' My audience is not on Facebook."

Darwin's framework:

His advice: "Look at your competitors who are successful. What are they doing? Start there because they've already done the research. Then maybe newsletter swaps. You and I both have newsletters. We're gonna do a swap, trying to find the right readers for each other."

By the end of the conversation, the path from support to product made sense. Darwin isn't building features in a vacuum. He's building solutions to problems he personally fielded for years.

The difference between creators who succeed and those who burn out? They treat the newsletter like a business from day one. They focus on content first, promote relentlessly, and monetize thoughtfully.

And they use tools—including AI—to handle the boring work so they can focus on the work that matters.

Darwin Binesh is a Product Manager at Beehiiv, where he's been for over three years. He previously served as the company's first support representative. He publishes a newsletter about startups, product, and career development.

Peter Benei is the founder of AI Ready CMO, a newsletter and learning platform for senior marketers navigating the AI era. He's also a fractional CMO and consultant for B2B companies.

If you're interested in Darwin’s building Beehiiv and what lessons he learns along the way, subscribe to his newsletter here. Or follow him on LinkedIn for research-backed AI insights.

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