Brought to you by beehiiv.
Daniel Berk sells newsletters.
He was beehiiv’s first sales hire and today, as the company’s Senior Sales Manager, he spends his days selling to Fortune 500 companies.
(Full disclosure: Creator Spotlight is owned and operated by beehiiv. While we don’t work with Daniel in our day-to-day, we are colleagues.)
When he clocks out, he runs a podcast that made $70,000 in its first year with fewer than 1,000 YouTube subscribers; a local newsletter network he’s convinced will make six figures this year; and a LinkedIn presence that pulls millions of impressions a month.
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts; watch here:
In this episode:
💰 A podcast that profits on audience makeup alone
🏡 Building a local newsletter as a community service
📈 How to arbitrage X virality to LinkedIn, and why it works
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
Crooked Media is hiring a Digital Content Manager (Washington, D.C.)
This role will manage all of Vote Save America’s public-facing campaigns across social, email, and web to successfully execute their broader political and mobilization strategies.
Listed compensation: $90,000.
Boston Globe Media is hiring a Senior Editorial Director for Newsletters and Email (Boston)
This person will run The Globe’s full suite of newsroom newsletters — everything from immigration to sports — with a mix of editorial vision and operational chops.
Listed compensation: $125,000 – $140,000
Audible is hiring a Social Media Manager (Newark, NJ)
This role will lead the brand’s social presence across North America — managing channels day-to-day, developing innovative content, and driving marketplace expansion.
Listed compensation: $86,700–$151,700
Do you want to advertise an open role in Creator Spotlight? Reply to this email.
Over a decade of newslettering
Daniel Berk started newslettering in 2013 with a personal blog, emailing through Wix to 200 subscribers — some of whom even paid for the privilege.
Even before that, for years, he woke up before sunrise and wrote — longhand at first, filling 20 to 30 Moleskines and stacks of legal pads, then typing at “165 words per minute” when his thoughts started outpacing his hand.
He’d filled thousands of pages, boxes full of notebooks. It turned out to be the best training he could’ve asked for when newsletter-first media took off.
In 2021, one month after beehiiv launched, Daniel Berk began using the company’s software … and ceaselessly emailing beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk for a job. He once counted — he’d sent Tyler “over 250” emails, direct messages, and social replies.
The guy can pitch; in late 2022, he became the company’s seventh employee and first dedicated account executive.
Today, he leads enterprise sales, helping Fortune 500 and legacy media companies adapt to the modern newsletter market or break into it for the first time.
"A newsletter is an email that is itself the bottom of the funnel. The juice. The product. It can serve as top of funnel, but the product is the email. The goal isn't to get someone to click back to a Shopify — the goal is to get someone to engage with the content you're producing."
How Daniel runs two five-figure side projects
Outside of working at beehiiv, Daniel runs two businesses.
@twodadsintech Making your first $1 online has never been easier
Two Dads in Tech, a podcast he co-hosts with Troy Munson, launched in December 2024. In its first calendar year, it brought in roughly $70,000 in revenue against $26,000 in production costs. At the time of writing, the show has fewer than 1,000 YouTube subscribers.
Palmetto Parents is a local newsletter network Daniel runs with his wife in Charleston, SC. They moved there from Chicago in 2021 with their first kid on the way — and after two years of never finding a central, trusted resource for what to do as parents in the area, they built one.
Revenue for his podcast comes almost entirely from B2B sponsorships, with Daniel and Troy bundling their combined LinkedIn audience into the deals (Daniel has 25,500 followers; Troy has 53,000). A typical package bundles a month of in-episode reads with a LinkedIn post by each of them.
His newsletter runs four weekly sections — an event, a place to go, a restaurant, and a parenting inspiration piece — each designed from day one to double as a paid ad slot. It's since grown to three newsletters (including one for dog owners), roughly 18,000 audience members across platforms, a hired writer, and an ad salesperson.
LinkedIn is a powerful sales tool for businesses and creators
Daniel’s LinkedIn audience of 25,735 is his monetization engine — for the podcast, for brand deals, and for his day job.
He and his podcast co-host Troy package access to their combined following into sponsorship deals — this is how, when they hired an agency to sell ads, they landed a $10,000 deal within 24 hours.
Though the podcast itself has fewer than 1,000 YouTube subscribers (excluding RSS feed subscribers), those tuning in are founders, operators, and decision-makers who found the show through LinkedIn, and that's exactly the audience B2B sponsors want to reach.
Daniel posts constantly, including 16 times in the last seven days as of this writing; his top-performing post received 258 engagements.
For his LinkedIn content strategy, Daniel monitors X and Reddit for content going viral in real-time across business audiences:
Marketing stunts
Product launches
Founder meltdowns
He then adapts what he finds for his LinkedIn account before the platform's slower-moving audience sees them. It’s rapid platform arbitrage.
His all-time top post, a short recount of a marketing stunt in Grand Central Station for AppleTV’s Severance, has pulled 8,457 likes to date. Brands notice his consistently high impressions and pay him roughly $1,000 per sponsored post, work that takes him about 15 minutes to draft.
Since he’s produced over 75 hours of video through his podcast, he has a content library he can repurpose into short-form clips and social posts for years.
Like his Severance post, a lot of Daniel's highest-performing content has nothing to do with newsletters or enterprise sales. They're personality-forward, broad riffs on marketing, business, culture, whatever catches his attention. But they carry real business value. When his posts are getting traction, his cold outreach response rate goes up.
People now recognize his face, his name, and the bee emoji; when they hop on a call with him, they already feel like they know what kind of person he is. In a LinkedIn feed drowning in AI-generated content and corporate filler, being recognizable and human is a competitive advantage.
Every piece of content:
Builds Daniel’s LinkedIn presence, increasing the likelihood people see his face …
Which makes cold outreach easier …
Which makes filling his sales pipeline easier …
And helps him close deals more efficiently …
Which gives him better stories to post about.
The cycle continues.
