Creator Spotlight: Shaan Puri + Ben Levy

What is Creator Spotlight?

Each week we'll feature a newsletter on beehiiv that's experiencing tremendous success with their content and growth. It's a two part initiative packed into a single day:

1. an email showcasing their content, tips, and goals (this email here)

2. and a live Twitter Spaces today where you can join the conversation and ask questions directly

Tell me about Milk Road

We’re long time believers in crypto, Milk Road is our vehicle for having the fun and interesting conversations we want to be having about the world of web3. We are not offering analysis on daily price action and instead are looking at the future of the space. Think, Barstool Sports for crypto.

What is Milk Road’s approach to talking crypto?

When you see people making a lot of money in things, it’s natural to be curious. We’re helping to keep up in a way that you’re gonna understand. Our target customer is not someone trying to make money fast, but is interested in the technological implications. We want them to be asking what is the right way to invest and to make their way in this space.

What’s been the most impactful in growth?

We aren’t looking to change much about the newsletter, we have our shape and quality is there. Expansion for us looks like taking on projects that are interesting to us and can further engage our community. Down the line, we might offer a course in crypto or web3 native, or a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). Last week we offered a $25K grant to someone who wants to build something in crypto, no strings attached. We received over a 1,000 applications. Our bar for projects is whether or not it’s something that Shaan and I would enjoy ourselves, something that we’d want to work on or read about.

We’re 75 issues in, nothing is ever really what you expect it to be. We’ve learned what people like and dont like. But it’s harder than I expected, figuring out what’s interesting on a daily basis is taxing. There’s an art to finding those interesting bits and then figuring out how to package them so people understand them. There’s an appetite for this and we’re just experimenting to figure out what works. For instance, beehiiv’s referral feature is really nice and that’s probably accounted for 5-10% of our growth. The beehiiv team is building really helpful tools for growth. We drive a lot of viewership from Twitter. Our most viral content ever has been a tweet thread that Shaan posted on the Metaverse. We want to keep growing our list through fun and smart content.

Tell me about Mailbag: a feature where you post and respond to reader questions

Mailbag is another way that we’re connecting with our community, as if we were at a pub talking about some new ideas and thoughts. That’s what we bring through in everything we do and Mailbag is an example of us trying to execute that. The most important thing we can do to build trust in the audience. We’re not trying to sell anyone on anything, we want to talk with our audience and build a cultish brand that is interesting in exploring new ideas.

We get a lot of questions about what we should buy, what we shouldn’t buy. We don’t respond to those questions, we don’t claim to know what coin will go up next. If we did we would be doing that and not a free newsletter. It’s a much more fun thing. Short term price movement isn’t always based on funademnetals, it’s based on other factors. We’re looking to create a behavior with the audience, so we won’t respond to questions that are looking for investment advice. But if someone is asking about the future broadly, we are happy to talk about this.

Advice for anyone considering a switch to beehiiv

It’s a new platform so it’s one that going to grow with you. The beehiiv team knows exactly the problems we’re facing and they are focused on the types of media we care about. The beehiiv team is quite responsive to our needs. When we want to build features, they hear us and if it’s not doable in the short term, they are figuring out work arounds.

Want more?

Join the conversation with Shaan and Ben on Twitter Spaces. We'll discuss how they plans to reach millions of followers in the near future!

For those new to Twitter Spaces—you can join the conversation and ask Shaan and Ben (and others) whatever you want!

When: Today at 7pm ET Where: Twitter Spaces (link below)

In the meantime, be sure to follow Shaan on Twitter here and Ben here and subscribe to their newsletter here!