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This is the infamous cold DM that Ben Levy(co-founder of Milk Road), sent Tyler Denk (CEO of Beehiiv) on New Year Eve 2021.
Ben Levy had just bought the domain milkroad.com for $2000 but besides that, nothing else about Levy’s new venture existed yet.
Within 6 months, Milk Road was doing $1 Million in ARR.
Within 10 months, Milk Road had grown to over 250,000 subscribers and gotten acquired for 8 figures (exact number undisclosed).
That’s right - 10 months.
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So what did Milk Road do so right that other newsletter failed to? How did they scale so quickly? How can you do the same? Let’s answer these questions.
Design
Milk Road launched their newsletter in early January 2022 with a simple yet distinct newsletter template.
The signature blue border, coupled with the milk carton dividers, did exactly what it needed to do—stand out in the inbox, and lay the foundation of creating a recognizable newsletter brand.
For anyone thinking about launching a newsletter, there are two options:
Option A: Over-complicate the initiative and create more work by hiring an email developer to build custom HTML templates. Test those templates in every mail client from Apple Mail to Outlook 2011, and ensure it renders perfectly across them all.
Option B: Leverage beehiiv’s no-code template editor. Spend 10 minutes tweaking the fonts, borders, spacing, colors, header, footer, etc. Guaranteed to render perfectly across all clients.
Milk Road obviously went with Option B and created a better template than 90% of the newsletters I’ve come across.
(Fun fact - you could use the exact tool as Milk Road here)
They later created a new logo (or rather, mascot) and refreshed the aesthetic of the newsletter.
I don’t know about you, but I think that looks really good.
Website
To continue with the option A / option B analogy here :
Option A: Hire an engineer or two to create a totally bespoke website. Ensure the content is optimized for SEO, ensure the site itself is optimized for email collection, throw some cool scroll effects on that thing, and build the site of your dreams.
Option B: Trust beehiiv to provide you an incredibly performant, functional, SEO-optimized web experience that’s built for email collection and an optimal reading experience.
Don’t get me wrong, you can create much better websites from scratch but you’d also have to spend months and thousands of dollars to get it up to par.
By simply creating their website using Beehiiv’s website builder Milk Road saved lots of time, lots of money, and still grew like wildfire.
You don’t go from launch to acquisition in 10 months by wasting your time on things around the margins.
Referral Program
Seriously, it's that simple. Ben Levy spent a few hours one day creating a writeup on “What 12 Crypto Whales are Betting On,” turned it into a PDF, and offered it to any Milk Road reader who refers a single subscriber.
One referral = one reward.
Organic Traffic
Top of funnel growth is all about getting in front of your target audience in a cost-effective manner. And nothing is as cost effective as free.
Without a web archive/blog, most newsletters lose the opportunity to capture valuable web traffic and keep their past emails alive beyond just the inbox.
Milk Road posts a daily recap of crypto news Monday through Friday, so the content is both timely and relevant. The quality is 🤌, and their beehiiv-hosted website was built from the ground up with SEO in mind.
Summary
I think the biggest takeaway is this—they made a ton of trade-offs along the way to really focus and prioritize initiatives that move the needle the most:
Creating the best, most engaging content that they possibly could
An open-minded approach to testing all sorts of acquisition channels
And trusting Beehiiv to fill in the gaps where their team lacked competency
They could have been known as Milk Road, that crypto newsletter with a super cool website that has a neat scrolling effect on the landing page. But instead they’re known as Milk Road, that crypto newsletter that went from launch to acquisition in under 10 months.
Which would you prefer?