Brought to you by beehiiv.
beehiiv’s most significant product update of the year launched yesterday.
We’ve spent the last year writing about trust, belonging, and owned audiences. This launch — especially the new community feature — feels like the next chapter of that story. Let’s get into it.
— Natalia Pérez-González
P.S. To celebrate the release, beehiiv is offering 20% off annual plans until Friday, July 31. Claim the offer here.
Inside daily drills’ Shopify-powered pop-up strategy
Best friends and co-founders Kennedy Crichlow and Mary Ralph Lawson Bradley built Daily Drills into a lifestyle brand with more than 300K Instagram followers. Known for its sun-soaked loungewear, the brand hit $1 million in sales in its first year— and its community has only continued to grow.
Most of that world lives online, with 60% of sales coming through the Daily Drills app. So for three days in June, the team tried something different: a Souvenir Shop pop-up at Shopify New York, stocked with pop-up-only exclusives and city collaborations. It was a chance to take a brand customers usually experience online and turn it into an IRL moment.
Read about the before, during, and after of the pop-up, how Shopify's tools played a role, the inventory bets Daily Drills made using data from two past pop-ups, and what the final numbers revealed about who actually showed up.
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beehiiv goes all in on community
beehiiv’s bi-annual release events are my Apple Keynotes (except better. No offense, Tim Cook).
Since last year’s inaugural Winter Release, our colleagues at beehiiv (Creator Spotlight is part of beehiiv) have continued to make good on their bet on the “content economy,” further cementing the platform as an integrated operating system for creators looking to own, grow, and monetize their audiences.
Yesterday’s release was chock-full of new platform features.
Native podcast hosting, available on every plan, at a 0% revenue share, with one-click sync to Apple and Spotify.
A rebuilt visual editor — “what you see is what you get.”
Copilot, an in-app AI agent wired directly into your beehiiv setup.
Four new monetization levers: metered paywalls, paid trials, group subscriptions, and premium podcasts.
And the marquee release — a native community tool.
Community is beehiiv’s biggest bet this quarter — right on time. Most creators still have to direct their biggest fans and most loyal customers somewhere else to connect — Discord, Slack, Circle. Community is beehiiv's attempt to collapse those layers into a single product, betting that the next stage of the creator economy isn't simply in acquiring audiences but deepening relationships with the ones you already have.
A newsletter invites readers into your work; the community layer gives them a place to stay, gather, and compound intra-audience relationships.
"We're not just building features to have more of more. Each one's purpose is to help creators and publishers either launch, manage, or grow their communities. We're thinking about engagement loops, retention drivers, and network effects — and building them in as platform features, versus leaving the work fully on the community builders to wrangle after launch."
Conor Gallagher, who runs the hiiv, beehiiv's own user community, frames the need for digital gatherings as a scarcity of somewhere to go. "With so much of our days lived through screens, and with the advent of AI, I think everyone is really craving those 'third-place' moments," he told me. "Community tools let the conversation wander. They let it surprise you."
"Community has transitioned from a nice-to-have to a must-have. We are past an attention economy and have moved into a trust economy, and the best way to build trust is to show up authentically and form personal connections. Community allows you to create those personal interactions at scale."
A quick run-through of my favorite parts of beehiiv’s community feature:
You can create a free community open to everyone, or a paid community that requires a subscription to access.
With beehiiv’s new visual editor, you can fully customize your digital gathering space to match your brand, vibe, and feel.
Each newsletter or podcast you post syncs directly with your community in real time, so subscribers can discuss
You can host live webinars and other digital events in your own branded space (essentially, a built-in studio for all things community management).
Do all creators benefit from hosting communities?
We've spent years talking about owned audiences as the foundation of creator businesses. I’m increasingly seeing the conversations shift past ownership to belonging — with engaged, long-standing relationships and interconnectivity as a primary lever. Relationships are a renewable resource, but they’re also expensive.
Communities are time-intensive, a slow build. As platforms — beehiiv and others — focus on community as a moat, it’s increasingly difficult for any one of them to win at community; there will always be multiple players, as in any arena. Community software doesn’t automatically create bustling communities; the internet is littered with empty Discord servers, abandoned Slacks, and tumbleweed forums.
“Community done well requires some strategy and planning. You need to be a bit more thoughtful to launch a community. It doesn’t usually happen that hundreds of people join, and everything works out perfectly. I think we're going to see these communities evolve over the next several months as we continue to add new capabilities and as creators learn how best to support their audience.”
Communities require tending: moderation, strategy, rituals, leaders, onboarding and programming, and conflict resolution.
Most importantly, they require a talent for world-building. If you have a successful newsletter or media product, you likely already understand how to garner trust and attention, but to build community, you need to understand what motivates people to gather, keep coming back, and encourage others to join.
For creators whose work depends on relationships — if your audience learns together, solves problems together, shares an identity, or wants to meet one another in real life — community grows beyond being a feature and becomes core to their business and sustainability.
That's the opportunity I see in this launch. Not that every newsletter should become a forum, but that both the platforms and creators across the content economy are prioritizing the business of relationships. The opportunity is to lean in now; any given person can only sustain relationships in so many communities, and as the number of communities multiplies, it will be more difficult to acquire and retain members.
The creators who figure out how to turn audiences into networks will likely build the most durable media companies of the next decade.
The stages of community evolution
Community-focused creators are my favorites to write, and are among the most popular with our readers. Local newsletter operators, event planners, and community experts often share relatable, highly tactical stories about reaching, nurturing, and maintaining a concentrated, engaged audience.
Over the last year, we’ve covered dozens of creator communities, like Brett Dashevsky’s Creator Economy NYC and Colin Rocker’s For the Firsts. We’ve also written on the stages of creator community building, accruing community loyalty amid the death of the follower, and how to leverage content serialization to build and retain community.
As published in our August 15, 2025 issue.
beehiiv’s Community launch takes users to higher rungs of community maturation. Creating and posting your work fuels basic connection — creating a community cements infrastructure that outlasts you.
Each stage of community building leads to the ultimate evolution: your community operating independently of your daily involvement. Members leading, governing, and creating value for each other without your facilitation.
Does every community start out like so self-sustaining? No, and to get there, creators must tend the garden. beehiiv’s new tool provides the plot of land.
And yes — Creator Spotlight community coming soon. Keep an eye out next week!
To celebrate the event, beehiiv is offering 20% off annual plans until Friday, July 31. Claim the offer here.
