Alumni Excellence Awards: Rising Terp Recipent Tyler Denk '16

In 21st-century business, few tools are as effective as the email newsletter.

A vital marketing technique, email is an affordable way to communicate with an audience, build brand loyalty, maintain engagement, and drive readers to a website.

Thanks to Tyler Denk ’16, more than 25,000 newsletter creators are sending out in excess of 2 billion emails every month with the click of a key. Denk is the co-founder and CEO of beehiiv, a software company that gives businesses big and small templates for creating newsletters that communicate information and drive sales.

“The novel thing about beehiiv is we tie together services under one roof,” says Denk, who launched the business in 2021 to compete with Substack, which offers a similar, but less customizable service. “You can launch a newsletter and have a beautiful website with growth tools, and be able to monetize, all within a single platform. And you don’t need to know how to code.”

A quarter of beehiiv subscribers – both free and paying members – use the platform to monetize, or sell, a product. As of March 2024, beehiiv is valued at $225 million. For his role, Denk, of Los Angeles, was named to the 2023 Forbes “30 Under 30” list, an annual publication that recognizes young entrepreneurs.

"People have been claiming for a decade now that email will be dead, yet I think it's more important now than ever,” Denk says. “You'll likely rely on email more than any other medium for classes, for work, for networking, and for commerce. Plus, it's one of the last remaining channels where you own the audience and distribution."

It's not just businesses that rely on beehiiv. It has a wide range of users, from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who sends a daily fitness newsletter, to large media organizations such as Time magazine and Blockworks.

Denk developed beehiiv to help email publishers address a variety of inefficiencies, as content producers previously struggled to piece together various tools to run their operations.

Writers and businesses had to combine WordPress for websites, Mailchimp for emails, and third-party tools to create advertisements, for example. Beehiiv integrates all of the features onto a single platform.

Beehiiv’s tools include an ad network with high-profile advertisers like Netflix, Nike, HubSpot, and Betterment, allowing users to generate income through ad placements in their newsletters. Additionally, Beehive enables creators to monetize directly through subscriptions, without taking any cuts, unlike Substack, which garners a 10% commission from its users' earnings.

Denk’s entrepreneurial journey started long before the company’s launch. Growing up in Owings Mills, Maryland, the founder was always driven by a desire to improve processes and solve problems.

He majored in mechanical engineering (with a minor in technology entrepreneurship) at Maryland, where he launched a startup called VentureStorm, aimed at connecting business and tech students to encourage more campus startups. That experience helped him home the skills needed to create beehiiv.

Today, beehiiv has raised substantial funding, including a $33 million round in 2023, and employs a team of 80 people.