My Deep Dive

I imagine beehiiv’s subscriber distribution across newsletter sizes looks something like this - dumbbell effect.

To me the problem is: The bigger newsletters don't need to participate in the ad network and the small newsletters don't encourage enough confidence in advertisers to scale their ad budget.

Getting to $50M revenue

Advertiser's POV: Advertisers might hesitate investing heavily on the ad network if they only see the smaller newsletters active on it.

Newsletter POV: As newsletters grow, they increasingly shift toward direct sponsorships, reducing premium inventory within the ad network and reinforcing advertiser skepticism.

This is the marketplace problem I was talking about - as soon as a newsletter creates a good subscriber base, they get direct brand sponsorships and they graduate out of the ad network. I saw countless “Sell your own ads” posts on Reddit.

The crux is if we cannot keep medium sized newsletters on the ad network, it would be difficult to attract bigger deal sizes from advertisers. The loop would continue, low ad inventory forces newsletters to graduate out of ad network, which discourages future newsletters.

I saw this on Reddit from someone in Beehiiv team.

The backlog is caused because the demand for the ad network far outstrips inventory (there are more advertisers compared to newsletters to advertise with) so instead of having a glut of advertisers who's campaigns' inventories don't get filled, we work with fewer, advertisers as we acquire additional newsletters.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this has a silver bullet solution.

But if I do get hired: this is my 90 Day Plan

• Building a deep understanding of how the Ad Network operates today
  • Shadow ops and sales on active campaigns to understand where human judgment is required and where product gaps are being compensated for manually
  • Map the end-to-end advertiser journey — from campaign setup to post-campaign reporting — and identify points of uncertainty that impact ROI confidence
• Understand mental model for newsletter/publisher across the lifecycle
  • Segment newsletters into cohorts (early, growth, premium) and document how monetization expectations and constraints evolve at each stage
  • Understand why and when newsletters graduate toward direct sponsorships, and what signals influence that decision

For the relentless shipping maching, where velocity is a priority

This is my early hypotheses (happy to pressure-test)

I think Direct Sponsorships feature was built to bring in these "graudating" newsletters back in the fold. I checked what reddit users had to say for this and how they compared with competitors like Paved, passionfruit.

• Better Direct Sponsorship Page Builder
  • I saw posts mentioning the current sponsorship page is limited in its functionality.
  • Passionfruit claims "Launch a professional media kit in minutes".
  • Perhaps, we can leverage the existing Beehiiv website builder capabilities (which I know Beehiiv is investing a lot in) to let newsletters create their own sponsorship page.
• Optional prepaid/split payment feature for newsletters using direct sponsorships.
  • We should offer parity payment models to what a newsletter would get if they get a brand outside the Beehiiv ecosystem.
  • Yes, most advertisers don't want to pay upfront and would want to pay once they ad has run, but for bigger newsletters, they (advertisers) may be open for exceptions. We should be supporting this.
• Enforce newsletter exclusivity for direct sponsorships.
  • Saw this comment on Reddit:

    It also seems unfair tat beehiiv will use this to add more advertisers to their own network, monetizing them and potentially driving them away from my publication. a referral system from which I get nothing.

  • Adoption of Direct Sponsorships depends heavily on trust — newsletters need confidence that advertisers they bring in remain their own.
  • We can be more transparent about this, to reassure the newsletters, that Beehiiv will not directly approach these advertisers to bring them in ad network.

A bit about me.

I’m a Product Manager with 9 years of experience working on business-critical, systems-level products at companies like Razorpay, Clear, and Jisr.

Razorpay and Clear are considered among India's biggest startups. Jisr is a one of KSA biggest SaaS companies with over 4000+ organizations on board.

Much of my work has lived at the intersection of revenue, trust, and scale — from growing RazorpayX corporate cards to ₹100+ Cr in monthly spend, to launching new fintech and expense products in sales-assisted environments.

Outside my day job, I’ve also co-founded and scaled a Shopify app to $3K+ MRR. Would want some brownie points for ownership for this please.

I’d love to walk through this thinking if it’s useful, and pressure-test where I may be wrong.
Finally, thanks for taking the time to read.
I hope this email worked and convinced you to consider me for this role. Let’s have a killer 2026 (and hopefully many more years beyond) together 🤝.

vedant.lohbare@gmail.com | +91 9767137428