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, while smaller newsletters don’t inspire enough confidence for advertisers to meaningfully scale their ad spend.

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.

If I do get hired, this is my plan of action

• Questions I want to get answers for:
  • I am sure all of the above research you folks already knew, so at what stage does Beehiiv see Newsletters graduating away from the ad network?
  • From newsletter's POV: Is the decision solely based on which advertiser will help them earn more?
  • From advertiser's POV: I am assuming, Beehiiv does not share details of which newsletter the ads were published on, if I am right, how does one convince the advertisers that there's an audience match.
  • How does Beehiiv ensure advertisers get repeatable results, since the final decision to put the advert in is solely with the newsletters.

• Going deeper in the ad network
  • Identify the current challenges & bottlenecks that require operations to step in more frequently
  • How much of the current ad network process from discovery to fulfillment is product driven vs ops driven?
  • Understand delta between the experience for our ICPs when choosing Beehiiv Ad network and competitors or direct brand deals

Product velocity is the key.

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 the advertisers they bring in remain theirs.
  • 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.

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

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.

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