Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:02.604)
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I am Tom Rudnay, just like I was last time, and I'm going to get straight into it today. I'm very excited to introduce my guest today. So I've got Darren Chape with me, who I should have checked out and pronouncing your surname, but Darren, how have I done? Nailed it.
Darren Chait (00:16.462)
Spot on. Perfect. Perfect. Couldn't have done it better myself.
Tom Rudnai (00:20.696)
Perfect, well that's good. I get just about everything under the sun when people try and do mine. So anyway, we're already going off topic. Darren, good to have you with us. I'll let you say hello and introduce yourself a little bit to people rather than me butchering.
Darren Chait (00:34.38)
Yeah. Perfect. Thanks, Tom. Great to be chatting. I'm Darren. I'm the CMO at Beehive, for those that aren't familiar. Beehive is a platform for publishers to own, grow and monetize their audiences. So we started out as the newsletter platform and now newsletter's podcasts, websites, digital products, all in one place. So we help creators and brands scale their audience and grow.
Tom Rudnai (01:03.746)
Yeah, and I know Beehive a little bit. It's one of those brands that I feel like I've never really looked into much until we started talking, but I just knew because you get news then as constantly and it has it in the URL. So think it's probably one that a lot of people listening to this are kind of loosely familiar with, which must be quite an interesting challenge for you actually, because you have that loose familiarity.
Darren Chait (01:22.74)
Yeah. But you know, it's something interesting, right? Because one thing we would hate is for our customers, our brands to be building a beehive newsletter. They're building a demand genius newsletter. They're building a, you know, their brand and where the infrastructure that's enabling them to do that, to publish great newsletter content, to host their podcast, to, you know, sell their eBooks, whatever it is. But it's their brand front and center.
Tom Rudnai (01:34.904)
Mm.
Darren Chait (01:48.27)
You know one of the one of the things that I find so interesting is when people tell me they're building a sub stack or they're tweeting or you know That's that's that's supporting someone else's platform, but it's you know your knowledge and your expertise and your unique perspective And philosophically as a business that's really important to us that you own your audience. You're not supporting another businesses brand
Tom Rudnai (02:10.487)
Well, fuck it, let's go down that rabbit hole then. like, how do you think about that as a business? I guess, probably from a product perspective as well, because on the one hand, you want to build your little kind of PLG hooks in there that get your name out there. But you also, I think that's a really cool philosophy. Like, how do you think about the trade off between those two things?
Darren Chait (02:20.92)
Yeah.
Darren Chait (02:29.378)
Yeah, I like to think about it. Think about Shopify versus Amazon, right? If I have a product, a widget that I produce, I create, et cetera, I can go and give that to Amazon and then people are going to go to Amazon and Amazon can control who sees my product, how it ranks, even the reviews to some extent. I then set a price and Amazon takes a cut of that and whatever's left over, whatever exposure Amazon decides I get, I get to take home for selling my product.
Let's look at Shopify. Shopify is a platform. No one really goes, I'm going to go to Tom Shopify store. They go, I'm going to Tom's store. No one really cares, you know, how, what he's hosted on what the infrastructure is. But to Tom, he'll pay per month, obviously, for Shopify to handle all that infrastructure for him. But it's his brand. And Shopify is just the infrastructure to get his product in his customer's hands. And that's how we view things at Beehive. And it's a very different philosophical difference. That's why we don't take a cut of what anyone earns on our platform.
And it's all about the custom domain, the white labeling, your own site, your own brand. You can turn on and off Beehive branding. It's your business.
Tom Rudnai (03:37.815)
Does it limit you a bit more from a marketing perspective? Because it does change the, it changes the motion a little bit though, right?
Darren Chait (03:46.446)
Yeah, I mean, it's not, it's funny. I've just come from Callanly, right? A few months ago, I ran growth at Callanly and Callanly has this remarkable product led growth viral loop, right? And we'll talk more about that in a minute, no doubt. But the thing that makes Callanly so magical is the fact that when I go and book time with you, I see that you've sent me a link powered by Callanly. That was really great. I can now sign up for Callanly and do this again and again. Obviously at Beehive, when we want to power these businesses, the way we see that is,
Tom Rudnai (03:56.268)
Yeah.
Darren Chait (04:15.901)
Look, there is some definitely, especially on our free plans, we definitely see a good amount of traffic and signups from our footer and so on. But our growth model isn't to go and get turned the reader into the publisher or into the creator, because you've got a good newsletter following, like what percentage of your folks that you have subscribed is going to become great creators tomorrow anyway. It's not naturally a viral loop. we would rather
be totally indispensable to you and help you make money and scale your audience for whatever your goal is versus trying to scam a few signups from your audience because they know where you're hosted. For folks that are creating, for folks that have an audience, we want to be front and center. We'll talk about how we do that, lot of organic traffic and thought leadership and so on. But we're not in the game of driving virality by turning subscribers into customers.
Because in the end, that's inconsistent with our philosophy, right? As I said at beginning, we're not there to leverage off your subscribers and put our brand above yours. That's our value proposition.
Tom Rudnai (05:19.543)
And at the end of the day, it is a SaaS model, not a platform model, and that probably is reflected in who you're largely working with, which I think from my understanding, it tends to be more brands rather than like individual newsletters contributors. Is that fair?
Darren Chait (05:33.198)
No, it's a real mix. It's of brands or publishers, individual in like smaller publishers. But it is SaaS. It is a SaaS model. We do have a free tier so you can build up to 2,500 subscribers in our free tier. But the other way we make money other than SaaS is with our ad network. So we have this world class ad network where you as a creator, you as a publisher get offered ads relevant to your audience that we've sourced with our ads business.
Tom Rudnai (05:39.575)
Mm.
Darren Chait (05:58.606)
you can drop them in, you don't have to do any of that work and then we'll pay you for each click. So that's another significant revenue stream for us. It's about a third of our, just shy of a third of our revenue comes from the ad network as well.
Tom Rudnai (06:12.854)
Okay, cool. I want to take a bit of a step back because I've already gone down a bit of a detour. Let's just go, you mentioned your time at Calendly, so maybe take us through a little bit of just your background. And what I always think is an interesting question to ask is like, is there a step that stands out to you as being the one that was most formative in terms of the way that you think about kind of marketing and about and your own career progression as well?
Darren Chait (06:19.724)
Yeah.
Darren Chait (06:35.543)
Definitely, I had a very non-conventional start here. I started out as a corporate lawyer. I'm Australian originally, as you can hear. I mean, we share a king, come on. We're close enough, close enough. I started out as a lawyer. I didn't like it much at all. I learned a lot, sure, but professional services, billing by the minute or six minute increments is crazy from my perspective. Was always really interested in the inefficiencies there.
Tom Rudnai (06:40.982)
Oof.
Tom Rudnai (06:45.641)
Okay.
Darren Chait (07:02.913)
Got into tech, was really excited about making money while I slept and PLG specifically does that, right? The idea of building these funnels, going to sleep, waking up and having customers was just like mind blowing to me. So got into tech after a couple of years moved to San Francisco and I co-founded a company called Hugo. We're a meeting workflow platform. So meeting, note taking, agenda setting, actions, et cetera. Lots of summarization and those things in a pre AI explosion world.
And we built that for about four or five years. We raised it on a capital, grew that, and I naturally ended up there just focused on growth. And for a business like Hugo, which was all PLG, growth was at this weird intersection of marketing. And I always liked storytelling. I liked to write. That was my sort of legal background. But also it was the other side of your brain, which was product and numbers and the technical side of things.
And it was just like this magic, like left brain, right brain thing. I just, didn't know what it was at the time, but it's what I did to keep me busy. And in the summer of 2022, we got acquired by Calendly and Calendly was looking at really going deep into our space, which they've done now beyond just scheduling. And we all joined Calendly. I came in to lead growth there, inheriting obviously an amazing product with a very impressive viral flywheel.
Tom Rudnai (08:02.336)
Mm.
Darren Chait (08:26.424)
and jumped in there to sort of help take that to the next level. Did that for about four years and then decided to join the Beehive team a few months ago. But I didn't answer your question. The most formative, definitely in my time at Calendly, I think what happens when you join a business like Calendly is that you learn growth with real volume. So one of the hard things about being in a startup is you don't have volume, don't have numbers, right? So if I want to experiment, if I want to learn how levers work,
or levers for our American audience. If I want to see what happens with conversion and optimization testing, you just don't have that luxury. Enter Calendly, booking millions and millions of meetings a week, close to a million signups a month at a time. We can try anything. And I just learned so much so quickly. I can experiment in 24 hours on some of our funnels. And it just was like this amazing crash course, but like hands-on internship almost crash course.
in any channel, in any PLG lever. And it really sort of set me on my path, you know, four years ago or so as a leader in growth.
Tom Rudnai (09:35.798)
There are things that then, because at Beehive you have kind of reasonable scale and think reasonable velocity and things like that, but not quite on the level that you would have had at Calendly. There's stuff that you had to kind of unlearn or things that you thought would work at Beehive, then you were like, that just isn't what I can do here.
Darren Chait (09:53.645)
Yeah, but you have to go to a reasonable scale. do a ton of AB testing and I'm very focused on the funnel and that experience. think what's interesting about Beehive is the product's more complicated by design. And what I mean by it doesn't feel complicated, but you onboarding are making a platform decision. when I sign up for Beehive, I'm deciding to move my audience or start an audience newsletter, host my podcast, et cetera.
So the experience that we have to provide and the funnel is much more elongated. There's so many milestones and so many different like parts to that initial experience. Calony is a really lightweight tool that helps you solve a very discreet problem. So the flywheel and the funnel is much longer and more complex at Beehive and that's using definitely testing me and using a different part of my brain.
Tom Rudnai (10:46.134)
Yeah, okay. And then it's interesting going back to like, one of the things that has kind of stood out to me in doing this podcast, and I think we're about 40 episodes now and there's 40 kind of pretty good marketers that I've got the chance to speak to, none of them or so few of them went down the like conventional route to get where they are, where it's like you get a marketing manager job and then it seems to be something that connects and none of them wanted to do marketing when they started and they kind of landed there. Like, is there stuff that...
Darren Chait (11:08.012)
Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (11:15.496)
from your legal background that you think have really, really translated to marketing that other people could maybe try and take on board.
Darren Chait (11:23.19)
feel like the biggest imposter in the world now is a CMO every time someone says to me like, what would you do as a marketer? like, me? I'm not a marketer. Exactly. And it's really funny because like, what is a marketer? Right? Like in general, and we know we have the T-shaped marketer and all these models and so on, but there's just so many different archetypes of marketer.
Tom Rudnai (11:42.717)
and
Darren Chait (11:43.981)
When I think about my background, there's definitely areas of marketing or growth that I have a much deeper rooted interest experience skills. There's others where I know what I'm doing and there's others where I've seen what good looks like and I've got a general idea and I know the people around me. And then I would also say in 2026, with LLMs and with the tools available to us, the job of a market has changed again anyway. So even if you are an age old marketer who's been doing this for decades, what worked then doesn't work now.
And I think you just got to find this like hand in glove kind of opportunity for who you are. mean, when Beehive came to me, Beehive has an incredible brand as does Callanly and they have an amazing product marketing muscle, the way they release, the way they tell that story. There were lots of opportunities around how we grow and making that repeatable and how we measure that and so on. And that's where I'm super strong. And I was able to sort of come in.
continue to ride this incredible brand wave and story and help them double down, but really add a lot more focus in those areas. And you know, I may not be the right CMO forever here, right? We might, we might, hopefully, all evolve as the business evolves, but it's very point in time. So I would go, I would do away with any sort of traditional marketer archetype or what is the path? I don't, I don't see any place for that in 2026.
Tom Rudnai (13:05.659)
So what are, and maybe there's no place for archetypes, but is there a particular skill set or a particular kind of combination of strengths that you particularly look for that you think is very relevant in 2026?
Darren Chait (13:19.082)
Yeah, totally. Marketers need to be tech savvy. And what I mean by that is they need to understand how to use the tools around them, how to continue to innovate in there, how they need to understand how it all connects together. Go to market engineering is a completely new job title that often commonly would sit within marketing. How do you manage those people if you don't understand the lay of the land there? So
being very technical, number one. That used to be an outlier. You used to technical marketers versus content marketers versus brand. That's now a table stakes. Number two, and I was gonna mention this later on, but I'll do it now anyway. Some of the best advice or one of the best bits of advice I ever received was from the old president at GoToMarket at Calendly. He was the CMO at Webflow, Shane Murphy Reuter, is an incredible leader.
The best
Tom Rudnai (14:20.735)
and I just lost you, I don't know if that's just me.
Tom Rudnai (14:28.725)
card.
Tom Rudnai (14:39.509)
tried that in my Air Force but I don't know whose side that is. Can you hear me? No. You can hear me. Okay, I'm not getting you. It just cut out very suddenly. Okay, you're on it.
Tom Rudnai (15:03.638)
I'll it without my fixer in case it's me.
Tom Rudnai (15:12.748)
See if I can hear you now.
Darren Chait (15:31.983)
Hey, sorry, that was me. My AirPods just dropped out and I couldn't change my input source for some reason. Super weird.
Tom Rudnai (15:35.254)
Good.
No, all good. We'll be able to place that together, that's fine.
Darren Chait (15:41.037)
Yeah, I'll start again. Sorry, one second. Yeah, I'll start. I'll go back to, honestly. Yeah. So what makes a good marketer? Some of the best advice I ever got was, from a guy named Shane Murphy-Reuter. He was the CMO at Webflow and then he became the president at Calendly. The best CMOs are actually CFOs. Which is like, what? And he said this to me at day one, even before he started, he's like, to be a great CMO, you have to be an awesome CFO.
Tom Rudnai (15:46.252)
Talk about CMO at Webflow. Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (16:03.354)
Mm.
Darren Chait (16:10.575)
And as I like dug deeper into that insight and learned from him, what do you mean or what understanding means, which I've really taken with me and how I operate today is the only way to be an effective CMO is to deeply understand your business, the waterfall, the mechanics, what drives traffic, what drives sign-offs, what drives conversion, what drives expansion, what drives churn and all the different levers that impact each stage of that.
And if you understand your business better than anyone else in the business, as if you're the CFO is what he's getting at, you will be an incredible marketer. Because what is marketing, right? Like marketing is knowing what channels and what tactics to use when. And there's no shortage of ideas. Sit down with Claude and ask Claude to come up with 10 different campaigns. Like that's the easy bit. It's knowing what levers to pull and where to deploy those ideas.
You know, everyone wants to make more money, assuming that's your goal, fine. But we can do that by driving a ton more traffic that converts in the same way. We can improve the quality of that traffic so it converts better. We can improve the ARPU or the average order value so each bit of existing traffic that converts is worth more money. We can keep all of that the same and get them to expand. We can keep all of that the same and get them to retain better. And understanding all of that so I can apply.
my ideas and skills and then the real hands-on stuff, the copy, the creative, the optimizations, that's the easy bit. And that was a big turning point in my career, learning that and testing that out. And now it's how I operate. Ask anyone at Beehive, week one for me was building out the waterfall, building out the dashboards, deeply understanding the business, not sitting there with a whiteboard coming up with the next out-of-home campaign idea.
Tom Rudnai (17:55.21)
Yeah, I love that though. think it's something that a lot of marketers forget or a lot of marketers, if you ask them what their job is, like we do marketing campaigns and I think that's completely wrong. Like your job is to bring the product to market, understand how you position within that, all of those fundamentals. And I do think they're coming to the fore a lot more now as the cost of ideas and the cost of execution has been driven way down. It becomes a lot more about those fundamentals.
Darren Chait (18:14.863)
next time.
Darren Chait (18:18.447)
And the channels are changing, right? So your playbook is a very experienced market. If I'm going to come in and I'm going to optimize our site to get it ranking much better, and I'm going to launch my standard LinkedIn thought leadership ads with some meta funnels, like that stuff is just becoming more more irrelevant by the minute, right? What worked last year doesn't work this year. So if you don't deeply understand your business and the funnel and where the opportunities are, your playbook of tactics is just becoming less and less relevant. You're reinventing that in every role in every business.
Tom Rudnai (18:47.468)
I think the difficult bit is not finding things to do, it's prioritising which ones fit you because you can go on and talk to Claude, can go on LinkedIn and you'll have no shortage of noise telling you exactly what you should be doing. It's filtering through all that that I find really hard.
Darren Chait (18:53.539)
Yep, that's right.
Darren Chait (19:00.192)
Exactly.
Exactly right, exactly right.
Tom Rudnai (19:05.837)
So what was your, you've obviously, you're not too far in at Beehive. when, and obviously your kind of background as a lawyer, a commercial lawyer that you said was one thing that must have helped you there with that like CFO mindset, right? You can look at the business from a bit of a distance and understand the mechanics of it. But so when you came into Beehive, for anyone who's maybe about to start as a CMO or marketing leader in a new company, what did you do? Like what were the steps that you went through to understand the mechanics of Beehive's business?
Darren Chait (19:33.656)
Yeah, so three things. Step one was building out the dashboards or the spreadsheets or however you want to understand the business. So interviewing a whole lot of people internally, getting access to data. This has never been easier by the way, because you and use Clawed, connect the MCPs, you know, use the MCPs for the various analytics platforms. If you don't know SQL, you Clawed or generate it for you. I don't need an analyst anymore. I used to in previous roles, week one, go and make friends with the analyst team. You do need analysts. I don't mean that.
But I don't need analysts to understand the business, the basics. I need analysts to help me with insights and the deep work, not just reporting. That's right. Exactly. So step one for me is that let's get access to the data. Let's rebuild and just see what's happening here. Each month, we get a few million people hit our website. This percentage sign up. This percentage will go on to activate. What does that mean? And really just get my head around the business. That's the con side. Two is the call side. Talk to customers.
Tom Rudnai (20:01.238)
Thank
Tom Rudnai (20:07.815)
storytelling from it.
Darren Chait (20:30.09)
It's so cliched, right? And I get it. can, you don't, you might go and listen to call recordings. you might want to go and email some customers that are recommended to introduce to you. You might want to go and survey through using winter or one of those platforms respondent where you can go and find them loosely in the market. need to hear from them because by the time you hear how we talk about our product and the story, it's been through so many different filters and biases. I want to hear from you. Like tell me about the, what does the guy do for you? What would you do without the hive?
What did you do before? What would lead you to churn now? How do you articulate the value of Beehive? All these questions. Five, 10, 15 customers, the penny will drop very, very quickly. That's two. And three is obviously across the team. There's a lot of institutional knowledge and that's a needle to thread because you've got, we've always done it this way and that never works for us. They're not helpful insights because
Obviously times are changing and the way you execute changes, but I don't need to reinvent the wheel. Like, you know, we don't have a webinar program, beehive. Have you guys thought about it? Why? What did we learn? And really just try and, you know, gather up all the learnings that you can through talking to the team. So those three things was like my first few days, basically, or, you know, first couple of weeks. And then you can sit down and say, okay, where are our bets? Like you're a portfolio manager. What are the big swings? What are the small swings? What are the safe swings? What are the high risk swings?
Tom Rudnai (21:52.748)
All
Darren Chait (21:56.972)
and make sure there's that diversity in there. And then you start moving chips and some are real slow, some are real fast. And you start to look at your portfolio every day of what you have in market. And on a weekly basis, you see if it's paying off or if it's not.
Tom Rudnai (22:12.876)
And then compare that to Calendly a little bit. And for people listening to this, maybe don't like Calendly to me stands out as one of the better examples really that I could think of, of a really well done product growth engine. And that was the kind of key driver. Like when you look at Calendly versus Beehive, what are the biggest mechanical differences in terms of how those businesses work and how does that impact the growth strategy?
Darren Chait (22:33.006)
Yeah, look, there are different stages. Calendly is we look at things incrementally. - We looked at things incrementally. with that volume and there are hundreds of millions of ARR, at that volume, you're really starting to look at, what levers do I have? What experiments can I run? What happens if we make this tweak to the user, the booking flow? What if we expose
free users to this, so next time they come into the app, what can we do from a lifecycle standpoint? You're measuring it very carefully and you're making decisions like, you know, go or no go. So it's very, very incremental and it's much more scientific because of that. Beehiiv is much more out of the big swings. Beehiiv is doubling year on year, right? And it's very hard to double a business by making a small change to a checkout flow, you know, or the equivalent. So...
Tom Rudnai (23:15.167)
Yeah.
Darren Chait (23:20.59)
We should make those small changes because we want that flow to be the best we can. I don't want to be wasting any percentage points of conversion, but that's not going to be enough. We have to be making these big swings in market, these big campaigns, these big stories, these big launches and so on. So I'm using sort of different channels and different skills because of that. But fundamentally, it's still the same, right? Like, yes, we might.
have a big multi-hundred thousand dollar out of home campaign for Beehive that's not perfectly measurable, but we should still operate it the same way of, you know, what's the bet, why are we making it, what are the insights, how do we measure it, even though it's hard in some cases for those type of brand campaigns. And let's see what happens afterwards. And then we double down, we roll back, you know, like, or we learn something and go from there.
Tom Rudnai (24:08.076)
Does it change the way that you need to operate day in and day out? Because I guess what you're describing is really success at Calendly is about like velocity of experimentation. Whereas at Beehive, there is a little bit more of, I don't want to say more creativity, because I think it takes creativity to keep coming up with experiments. But I think you kind of know what I'm getting at. It's a little, it's a bit more about the big projects that you launch.
Darren Chait (24:25.837)
Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. My right brain is working a lot harder at Beehive for sure. My left brain maybe a little less than at Calendly. It's also the way we were structured at Calendly. Like I had a partner who was very, very much driving creative and so on. At Beehive, yeah, it's definitely that mix.
Tom Rudnai (24:35.126)
Hmm.
Darren Chait (24:45.741)
It's a total mix and we've got a great team. We have an amazing creative director. We have amazing growth leader. All of these things together, let us do that. each business is different and wherever I end up next in my career might be one, know, way or more one way or the other, or it changes within the business. You know, what the business needs at a certain point in time is what you have to do.
Tom Rudnai (25:10.376)
Yeah, I love that. That's one of my biggest philosophies that I tend to live by when I hire for any job actually is I want people who write playbooks, not run them. Like think there's a lot of people who come in and they go from business to business and it's like, this is the playbook that I run. This is what's worked for me in the past. I'm going to come here and I'm going to implement that same thing. that just like, first it just sounds so boring.
Darren Chait (25:30.677)
Yep.
Darren Chait (25:35.373)
And they're getting unstuck more than ever because the rate of change of our environment has never been faster. So what was unbelievable for you last year in your last role might be completely irrelevant now, right? And I think it's pretty easy to spot those folks. You just got to, when I meet someone, if I'm interviewing for the first time and they've got a very strong point of view for what we should do straight up without understanding anything about the business, that's a red flag to me, right?
Tom Rudnai (26:04.257)
Yeah.
Darren Chait (26:04.545)
How do you know that we should go and double down on this type of content or these types of campaigns or this type of whatever based on what you've done before? Because everything's gotta be bespoke for the environment you're operating in.
Tom Rudnai (26:17.814)
Yeah, so that classic person, I think it's harder than ever for like the VP level market or any in any function really. He's like, I just want to do strategy now. And I think you could spot from a mile off the people who have done strategy for far too long and they don't actually understand the world that they're now operating in. I think it's going to be a very hard five years or so for that kind of people. You seem to really love the process. Like you seem to get excited not by any outcome, but by the process of figuring this shit out and like building.
Darren Chait (26:26.486)
Okay.
Darren Chait (26:36.461)
100%. I couldn't agree more.
Tom Rudnai (26:47.422)
A plan. Is that fair?
Darren Chait (26:50.241)
Yeah, I think I still love seeing our output in the real world. There's nothing better than we're just shipping a big onboarding update the moment I saw that was a staging site and I'm like, my God, there's nothing more exciting for me than seeing that come to life, nerding out on that. I think the one thing I'll say though is I like building a lot and that's why I'm having a great time at Beehive and I think any great, and at Calendly too, any great executive.
especially in the go-to-market world, they need to understand the tools. And I know they're not, that doesn't mean necessarily that they're spending their days building, but if you kind of appreciate the how to build and how things come together, I don't think you're gonna be a great growth leader anymore. It's like the builder, right? Your general contractor, as the Americans call it, your builder who's building you this massive house. They're not sitting there, you know,
laying bricks or laying tiles. But they can and they understand what happens if the fall of the tiles isn't right to the drain or if the bricks aren't perfectly plumb or whatever happens because they've done the time laying bricks and from time to time when they're under the pump, they'll get in there on the bricks and they know how that works. And I think that's more relevant than ever. The marketing or go-to-market executive that lives in slide decks.
Tom Rudnai (27:52.235)
Mm.
Darren Chait (28:13.229)
has their times up in 2026. You've got to understand the tools, the how, the approach. I might not know the ins and outs of Clay, but I know exactly what Clay does. I know exactly that I can go and take an API and then call a webhook when I get a response and some of the use cases for that. And I can help guide the team for what we want to do and they can figure out exactly how.
Tom Rudnai (28:35.734)
Does that worry you at all when you're thinking about like hiring and developing younger marketers at Beehive? Because obviously that time, it depends on what you call on the tools a little bit, right? But obviously your time writing content is gonna be a lot less now because you're gonna use AI to help you with that process. Like that's still doing the work, but it's very different. Do you think something will get lost if you're not doing it yourself end to end or it's just a natural evolution and...
Darren Chait (29:00.967)
No, the same way. I don't think I'm losing anything as a marketer by leading a team of marketers. I don't think a marketer who is relying on LLMs and AI tools to help them do their job is going to lose anything. In fact, the speed at which they can do things and get things out means they're going to learn more. The mistake would be if you outsource your job, just like if I sit there living in the slide decks and say, hey, content team, hey, performance team, like you guys need to do this and go with fun and I don't really care how you do it, just show me the app.
And the same goes for hiring AI, because that's really what the AI tools are doing. They're giving everyone an army of maybe slightly more junior employees to work for them, even if you're an IC yourself.
Tom Rudnai (29:42.272)
great for anyone on a power trip, just like me. Exactly, I manage like 50 people and none of them talk back. Yeah, for sure you just cancel that agent. But one thing is putting a premium on his judgment. And I guess I've not thought about this before, but I'm whether like, is judgment sharpened by managing a lot of AI agents or is it weakened?
Darren Chait (29:44.658)
That's right, it's the headcount that the budget didn't approve.
Darren Chait (29:52.47)
No,
Very easy to deal with the poor performers.
Tom Rudnai (30:10.624)
There's something that forms my judgment on what a good piece of content is, which comes from writing a piece of content, writing 20 pieces of content, working out which ones I think are good. At the same time, I'm now reviewing 100 and editing them. Do you think judgment will be sharper or blunter based on the way that we're operating now?
Darren Chait (30:15.201)
Yeah.
Darren Chait (30:28.8)
Yeah. You know, when I studied law in Australia, you can't just do law on its own out of high school. You have to combine it with something. So I did business and then in business, I said, what major are you going to do? And I went, I don't know what's useful accounting. I guess I have to do tax returns one day or do accounting. Boring as fuck. But anyway, study accounting. And I remember sitting in the accounting classes and they, get like a, like a exercise book with lines and we're learning like ledger journal entries. Right. So, you know, when you,
Tom Rudnai (30:47.638)
you
Darren Chait (30:58.55)
payroll is debit this and credit that. And I'm thinking like, this doesn't make any sense. Everyone's using Xero and QuickBooks and NYB and all of these SaaS tools to manage accounting where this is all automated. Why am I sitting there learning how to do ledger entries for accounting? And I view it much the same with marketing. It is really important that you know how to write, you know how to tell a story, you know what great looks like. Same for design. I can accelerate my output with production design by not having to produce 50 different variations of the same asset.
I can ideate 10 different directions before I settle on something, but a good designer still knows how to push the pixels and edit design. They're not just sitting there being a prompt engineer for designers. So I think it's the same. think good marketers still need to how to do it. And then they can hire people to scale it. But if you think that you can be a good content marketer and a terrible writer, don't know, what,
because your job is to prompt agents. think you're making a mistake and you're outsourcing that judgment and it's a slippery slope.
Tom Rudnai (32:03.68)
Yeah, I agree. I think of it because I often talk to like family members and I'm talking to them about AI and I was curious like how kids in school are using it. And I remember when my uncle was like, no, you can't use AI. I was like, well, would you have stopped me using a calculator? And I think there's something very analogous. Like, no, you wouldn't have. You would have probably taught me to do like five plus five for that one, which I can just about do. But I think it'll take a while. But even that was frowned upon in my very early days at school.
Darren Chait (32:19.222)
Yeah, that's right.
Darren Chait (32:27.595)
Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (32:32.256)
And then it took a while for people to be like, well, why would we take this tool out of their hands? They're going to have it for the rest of their life.
Darren Chait (32:35.212)
Wowie.
There's also like a lot of busy work like in between. So I think a lot about like summarizing things or manipulating data like CSVs and cleaning things up. And that work is what takes hours out of my day but doesn't add value to what I do. And the in between means that like what I saying earlier, like our analysts now are doing like genuine insights and analysis. They're helping us with real deep like modeling and regression analysis.
Tom Rudnai (32:54.635)
Yeah.
Darren Chait (33:08.236)
and things that can help us make the right business decisions. Whereas the job 12 months ago for an analyst in a SaaS company was reporting, dashboarding, pulling CSVs, and a little bit of that, you know, of real analysis where you can. So it's the same across all of marketing in my mind. You get to do the real value and work that requires real judgment and not all the crap in between.
Tom Rudnai (33:30.688)
Yeah, I think that's a nice way of thinking about it, actually. What it's doing is it's pulling the impact tasks together. So there used to be four hours of buffer and busy work that had to sit between two impact tasks. And now there's 20 minutes of it. And it's while you're making your coffee.
Darren Chait (33:38.742)
Yeah.
Exactly. That's it. That's it. Exactly right. Or while we're recording a podcast. That's what's going on right now. It's probably why I dropped out before because Claude's killing all my CPU. But anyway.
Tom Rudnai (33:49.418)
Have you got clothes?
Tom Rudnai (33:54.764)
It's one thing I've noticed also, like so I've got some guys running right now, so I noticed that yesterday though it absolutely kills my machine but it really upsets me whenever I have to stop them. It's terrible. But I want to talk about newsletters a little bit as well and like just
Darren Chait (34:04.126)
Yeah.
Yep, yep, yep, exactly. I'm not.
Tom Rudnai (34:17.376)
Get your take obviously with what you're doing at the moment on what makes a really good newsletter and part of that selfishly is just because we're planning on launching one soon. I guess like the easiest piece to start is in your time at Beehive, what's the biggest, what's best way to ask it? Yeah, what are the biggest things that you've learned about newsletters that you maybe didn't know before and what makes them successful?
Darren Chait (34:25.046)
Yep.
Darren Chait (34:36.096)
Mm-hmm. Lots.
Newsletters, it's funny, right? Like we've been talking about email for decades and the end of email and so on. And what we see about newsletters is newsletters is real knowledge from someone that I trust, that I've subscribed to, that is teaching me or educating me or sharing something that I care about. And we actually see in general...
Even back to what we say about AI, the use of AI in producing newsletters, it's on the actual content production, it's actually very seldom. We don't see many of our successful publishers producing complete newsletter content using LLMs. They help with outlines, they can use our MCP to understand what types of content resonate best with their audience, their subject lines, all of that, sure. And I think that's a very smart thing to do. But the crux of what you're doing...
Tom Rudnai (35:25.484)
Bye.
Darren Chait (35:33.519)
is really like your brain and extension of your brain. Because remember what a newsletter is, right? You've gone and said, hey, right on time, I know something about something. Here's a preview of that. Someone's come along. Yeah, maybe you don't, but you've convinced them you have. You know, someone's come along on top of all the other crap that they get bombarded with every day. They said, you know what, this guy does know something about us. Or I enjoy listening to him, you know, watching him or reading him saying something about something.
I'm gonna give him my email address, which is mine. And I want him to come into my inbox every week or every month or every day, whatever the cadence is. And I'm gonna read that a lot of the time. And I'm gonna keep doing that. And that is a pretty big deal, like a pretty big transaction, right? It's not me scrolling a feed, it's not me opening a Chrome tab that I'll close in three minutes. It's me giving you permission to...
jump into my space, my inbox, my devices, et cetera. So remembering that and remembering that people are coming to you for a unique point of view, because it's you, because you've piqued their interest, because you've got the resume, whatever it is, is something to keep in mind. And that's where you see the success. The content I read every day, people I try to mention, Kyle Poirier earlier, he's Beehive creator, very strong in the SaaS PLG space.
I've learned, continue to learn so much from Kyle and he deserves that spot in my inbox and I'll open it every time within an hour or two of getting that and I learn something and I pay as well. So that's something, that's number one, I think with newsletters, remembering that. Number two, just getting a bit nerdy, our consistency. You don't even realize subconsciously being there on a regular cadence is absolutely critical. Yes, you could, if you said to me, when does
Kyle in the example published, I can't tell you that it's Tuesdays or whatever day it is, but if it's been a while without Kyle, I lose that habit, lose that trust, I lose that expectation. So really, really important to be consistent. And three, which is an emerging trend that we're obviously very bullish on strategically, is the multi-channel. So everyone consumes content differently. We know, I explained to the beginning why we're so...
Tom Rudnai (37:36.417)
Yeah.
Darren Chait (37:55.775)
bullish on owning your audience, having that direct relationship. I know who you are, you've opted in, I have your details. I'm not relying on some algorithm or some feed to determine who sees the light of, know, which content sees the light of day. But surrounding your audience with content in different types, we've just seen this magical, this magical aggregate effect. So the idea of having your newsletter audience, sending them to your podcast, having a guide, an ebook, a webinar, a one-on-one coaching, a digital product that you can go and
that you can go and sell to them or share with them. Going and building a website that brings it all together. All of this and surrounding that audience is where the magic starts to happen. You you're more than a newsletter brand or you're more than a newsletter sender or author at that point. You're a publisher, you're a creator, you're someone that knows a lot and I want to consume in any format that suits me.
Tom Rudnai (38:49.227)
I like that. That's something that I've thought about quite a lot and that we've talked about on this podcast with other folks before is the idea of like, you don't want to build your house on rented land. like, it's, you have to leverage social channels and you have to use algorithms. But if it's not all of the view to ultimately bringing them into your sphere, you're kind of just going to be, you don't actually have anything there. There's nothing defensible. It's not your audience.
Darren Chait (39:14.987)
That's right. Everyone's got a horror story about an algorithm and so on. But to my point earlier as well, like it's, I don't want to build a sub stack. I don't want to build a Twitter feed. I want to build Darren's audience and you know, whatever, however you're branding it because that is going to stick with me for life. And whatever your use case is, you know, we see a lot of success with B2B brands. It's really interesting actually to obviously what's happening in the content marketing world right now. But brands like Ramp or Brex are these big B2B brands.
And HubSpot's acquired three newsletters in the last year. What they're doing is they're realizing that they can produce really high quality thought leadership. People can develop an affinity and start consuming that content and they become pipeline. Right? That's an amazing, obviously, customer acquisition strategy. Now, if I'm reliant on someone else's feed or algorithm for that, I can't control what's going to happen. I can't connect those readers to my CRM. I can't track them through, nurture them, do what I need to do to turn them into Pi.
So it's for any use case, it's incredibly important that you own that audience.
Tom Rudnai (40:19.436)
mean, the hardest thing to get at the moment is attention, right? It's to cut through the noise and just get a message in front of someone. It's incredibly expensive. So if you can own that, and also as a marketer from a career perspective, if you're worried about your kind of place in the AI world, build an audience. I guarantee you someone will hire you because you solve their biggest problem in a pretty easy way. How do you, if I'm a brand launching a newsletter and I think what I've heard from you here is that it's something that needs to be a bit more personal and it's...
Darren Chait (40:38.132)
try it.
Tom Rudnai (40:49.389)
kind of a direct line into a person's brain and that like that.
connection is it seems to be what really drives success and that was something I was thinking about for demand genius I was like there's two ways that we could play this one it needs to be everything written by me I needed to do it on a Sunday morning try not to be too hungover and give a good kind of put something a bit more personal or the other one is you go down the brand route and it's like this is the summary of our latest research and that's one of the other like unique advantages we have it sounds like it's the first that would be the the route like but if I'm if I'm thinking of meandering towards a question here if I'm
a big brand so I want to not launch a newsletter. Do I need to go and get my CEO to write it? Like what's the best way to do it without that I guess.
Darren Chait (41:30.653)
Bye.
Yeah, no, there's actually, I'm talking a lot about Kyle today, lucky him, but he's got this great article from a few weeks ago maybe, where he talks about the different types of content and what makes people listen. So for example, a really great producer of content is Carter.
Now, Carter has a unique perspective because they do the cap table management. So they know how much equity everyone has and the salaries often that go with that. So compensation and they know about outcomes, right? Because when with M &A and so on and IPOs and whatever, they see what happens to employee equity. So they've got this really unique perspective and they have this unbelievable content machine.
that you can subscribe to that has all of these, all of these insights regularly. I have no idea who's behind it, but their brand is so strong because I know that I can trust them with that unique perspective. Obviously in media, we see that all the time. Time, for example, is all the time. Time is a big customer of ours. They have an amazing newsletter product that people are subscribing to because they trust the brand and they like the quality of reporting.
I couldn't name any of the journals or authors in the time newsletters, but I read that every year, every couple of days. So you can go either way. I don't think that's the unique insight that you have to build it on the back of an individual human's brand.
Tom Rudnai (42:58.157)
So we talk a lot about information gain and we think that's the most important thing actually is people adjust to like content in the AI world. There needs to be a reason for you to be citable. If all you do is sum up the old content playbook is you find a high intent or high value or high volume query, you summarize knowledge against that query and the best query wins. That was search, right? Well now AI can do that for anyone at any moment on a bespoke basis. The only thing that makes anything useful to a human or a machine is if it produces like net new knowledge and we have this framework that it's like
Darren Chait (43:20.596)
Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (43:27.96)
is interpretive gain, which is a new slant on existing knowledge. There's genuine new. So what you're describing is like newsletters as a format is like a forcing function for information gain content that adds that perspective. And I think most brands can actually really benefit from taking that into just content in general.
Darren Chait (43:47.176)
Yes, I agree. Newsletters are the distribution channel, but these are insights that are relevant to content. I would just push back a little bit on the aggregate, like the aggregate versus, you know, distilled or bespoke insights or whatever we want to call them. To some extent, you're right. Sure. I can go and say to any LLM, can you tell me all the news, you know, all the political news in the United States in the last 24 hours? Sure. But you're really diminishing the value of aggregation here.
Because imagine if like Morning Brew and our founders of Beehive came from Morning Brew, but Morning Brew was effectively a news aggregator. And I know it was a little bit older now, but what they did really well is they knew what bits of content and news and interest were going to be relevant to me as a certain persona that reads their content. So we see lots of really successful news, newsletters, for example, that are very ICP or persona specific who say, you know what?
marketers are going to be really interested in tech, B2B tech marketers are going to be really, really interested in the news this week. It's very hard to do that with a generic LLM. You can go and aggregate based on keywords and search and that's all out of the way, sure. But pulling together a set of content that's relevant to me as a persona, there's still a lot of human value in there.
Tom Rudnai (45:10.327)
think that's fair. think maybe what I'm describing is a bit more in terms of like B2B content marketing and certainly situations where the content isn't the product. The content is meant to be a kind of driver for something else and a way of hooking people in. And I think that's where we've just seen in the data information gain is critical. But I think, you're describing a slightly different thing where it's like news and things like that. I can see the curation element is still huge, but it's a different goal.
Darren Chait (45:34.921)
That's right.
That's right. And newsletters by definition are where content is the product. Like newsletters are a distribution channel for content. If you have a poor product, your content is shit, you're not going drive the opens and engagement and growth straight up. We see that time and time again.
Tom Rudnai (45:41.6)
Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (45:53.494)
Let's finish with a dumb question. What's the difference between a newsletter and just a string of emails?
Darren Chait (45:58.057)
It's a very good question. We talk about this a lot because email marketing has something different. Look, I think it's a two-way relationship. The example I gave you earlier, right? A newsletter is someone saying, here's my email address, here's my details. Please give me more of this every week. Email marketing or a string of emails, and legally there's probably no difference because you have to opt in in a lot of places, whatever.
Tom Rudnai (46:25.91)
Thank
Darren Chait (46:27.465)
But email marketing is you trying to push something onto me that I haven't engaged with. And because of that, just open rates, clicks, engagement, unsubscribes, like just in the newsletter space are a fraction of what they are in any sort of life cycle or transactional email world. So I think that's the big difference. There's also a really strong undertone thesis brand that sits amongst all the newsletter content that stitches it together.
that the folks follow along with. And even though the tech at the core is probably not that different, the relationship you have with your reader, with your subscriber is.
Tom Rudnai (47:07.629)
So the relationship and the tone and I guess the outcome because the newsletter is the outcome or the outcome in itself, right? Rather than it necessarily just being a mechanism for promoting something different.
Darren Chait (47:16.681)
That's right.
Well, that's right. I'm talking a lot about my audience, right? I don't know. I've never referred to Calendly where we, we've got an email database and a list that's in the hundreds of millions. I don't call them my audience. They're just people that are charging me money in Braze. They're not engaged necessarily. Some are, aren't. They're all worth different things. Whereas my newsletter audience,
my crew, right? They're people who liked me, liked me or liked me, who want to be here, who want to listen to me, who want to learn something, who want to share. And again, when we talk about lots of channels come to play, they listen to my podcast, they buy my products, they visit my site. It's a very, very different relationship to just traditional email marketing.
Tom Rudnai (48:02.38)
Yeah, okay, makes sense. But before I let you go, I'm going to do a couple of quick fires that we like to do at the end of every episode. So the first one that I'm going give you is, is there like an AI tool or use case that you absolutely love? Like the thing that's just like blowing your mind?
Darren Chait (48:19.545)
I've said it already, but let me say it again. MCPs and connecting my LLMs to my tools have just let me explode as a marketer. Like being my own analyst, being able to query, you know, ahrest or SEMrush or whatever. That has just completely changed connecting my LLM to every tool I use.
Tom Rudnai (48:40.096)
Yep, think the context is the biggest difference between using an LLM well and using it like most people do, which is like putting a prompt to get an answer. The chain of reasoning is so much better.
Darren Chait (48:49.585)
Exactly.
And schedule jobs, might add as well, right? We're here with Cloud Desktop scheduling. hey, every week, like I know on a Monday, I'm gonna wanna know what happened last week. I wanna know what's happening in these channels. It just runs, like there's, I have a moment of delight every day when I get there and I've got Slack messages and other outputs, spreadsheets built and whatever else.
Tom Rudnai (49:12.15)
Yeah, we've done the same and I've got all of that feeding into kind of context docs that then the whole team has access to. So everyone can go and be like, what's this person working on this week? So all of the, we're trying to cut down the amount of time that we spend on standups, just updating people pointlessly and making bad jokes. Yeah.
Darren Chait (49:17.609)
I fish.
Darren Chait (49:21.161)
Amazing.
Darren Chait (49:25.341)
Game changing. Love it.
Tom Rudnai (49:28.542)
For you, where should I go next? This is a bit of a fun one. If you had unlimited budget for one campaign or one bet maybe is a better way of putting it. And the way that I like to think of this is like the thing that your CEO would never be stupid enough to actually approve. What would you do?
Darren Chait (49:38.205)
Yeah.
Darren Chait (49:47.333)
I am such a suck off of being out of home. I would take over a couple of cities with an insane, insane out of home, insane out of home spend. Out of home, firstly in 2026 brand is the most, is the biggest mode you've got and that's how you build brand. But that's you become a one way to become a household name and you can surround someone.
Tom Rudnai (49:53.91)
Thank
Darren Chait (50:10.793)
who makes you then believe that your brand is incredibly prolific. If I take over two subway stations, right, the subway station you get on in the morning and the subway station you get off, you're go and tell someone that our brand is over the entire, you know, that we're everywhere, that Beehive is the biggest thing ever, everyone's talking about it. No, I just hit two stations, you know, for $50,000 a pop for a week and a lot of our ICP, we know live in this area and commute to that area. So I would go to town in the key cities where our...
customers live, prospects live with out of home.
Tom Rudnai (50:43.732)
Nice, think that's probably something that, for some B2B, I think B2B brands tend to do big things like that because it's harder to target it and understand that you're going to reach your prospects, but I you probably could do it. And certainly there'll be some brands out there that could very clearly pinpoint clusters where their OCP lives.
Darren Chait (50:52.669)
Yeah.
Darren Chait (51:00.091)
Yeah, yeah, it obviously depends on who you're building for.
Tom Rudnai (51:02.901)
Yeah and then for you personally like is there a skill or a trait that you have that you feel has been most impactful for you?
Darren Chait (51:12.697)
again, I'll just tie it all together. that CFO mentality as a CMO, I think is where I've added the most, the most value. If I, when I come in and I feel like I have the best grasp of the business mechanics, I'm going to be the best marketer, but I add the most value to the company. And it's, it's definitely part of my secret sauce. That's not so secret.
Tom Rudnai (51:34.12)
Yeah, it's not anymore. You just said it. You're terrible at this.
Darren Chait (51:35.462)
Yeah, fine. Do it. Go for it. It's worked for me. No guarantees, but yeah, it's definitely made me who I am as a marketer.
Tom Rudnai (51:43.818)
Yeah, okay cool and then final one, just before I let you guys, I always like to give you like, is there one recommendation that you have and actually I'm gonna say what's the best newsletter that is in Kyle Poirier?
Darren Chait (51:56.104)
Cool, best newsletter that isn't Kyle Poyer. There's so many. Let me think about this carefully for one second and then I'll answer it again properly so you can cut this little, gotta be careful here, who I promote. What am I reading at the moment? That's, I wanna give a shout out to.
Tom Rudnai (52:20.052)
If I put you on the spot, we can make it more general.
Darren Chait (52:23.584)
No, no, no, no, no, it's a good opportunity. Okay, so the best newsletter I'm reading at the moment that I'm a big fan of, there's one called Growth Daily. It's marketing Max's newsletter. Firstly, there's two reasons why I love it. Firstly, it's a quick, it's that example we were talking about earlier of that valuable curation. I'm a marketer every day, what's happening out there? I'm not keeping up with big algorithm changes and crazy campaigns that...
crushed it or flopped, but this has given me the bullet point lowdown of what I need to know to talk the talk to be a successful marketer every day. But something that's very impressive to check out is how natively and how well he promotes his product and what he's selling. And I think that is something that is quite, quite, you can, you can see without it, without it being offensive, how he's driving a funnel from high quality content to leads for his business. So yeah, growth, growth daily, big fan.
Tom Rudnai (53:17.684)
Nice, I like that. You can kind of peel back the curtain. think game recognises game, right? Marketers like good marketing. And then final, really final this time is just give you an opportunity to promote anything that you're doing that you want to promote and let people know where they can find you.
Darren Chait (53:23.656)
That's it. Exactly.
Darren Chait (53:34.556)
Yeah, obviously if you are a publisher, if you're a creator and you're not, or you want to be one rather, I highly recommend you get started on Vhive. But in general, always love talking about this stuff. Find me on LinkedIn. You can just search Darren Chait and I'm definitely producing more and more content and getting deeper into the creator world. yeah, check us out. We actually just put out a pretty sweet video today talking.
about that topic of owning your audience, which is one that I'm obviously have strong views on, we spoke about it. I'd post that on LinkedIn and you should check it out. But otherwise, feel free to hit me up anytime.
Tom Rudnai (54:13.836)
Awesome. And he does sometimes respond because that's how I ended up on this podcast. Sorry. Cool. Darren, thank you. It's been a very, very insightful 54 minutes and 25 seconds. So thank you for coming on.
Darren Chait (54:16.858)
True, true I try,
Darren Chait (54:25.978)
Loved it. Thanks Tom, thanks for having me.
Tom Rudnai (54:28.525)
Cheers, bye bye.