From a teenage WordPress blog to a meme-powered media empire with beehiiv

Situation

Jason Levin began writing online at age 13 with a baseball blog. Over the years, he launched other projects including a college music magazine, eventually building a weekly newsletter called Cyber Patterns, focused on startup growth and marketing. He set out to own his audience, grow a brand around his writing, and monetize through digital products and community.

Challenge

Before switching to beehiiv, Jason struggled with clunky platforms like WordPress and Substack that limited his ability to customize, automate, and scale. He needed better tools to handle growth, segment his audience, and build a reliable long-term business from his newsletter.

Solution

Jason moved to beehiiv, citing its growth-oriented features and the hands-on support from CEO Tyler Denk. Key beehiiv tools that enabled his success include:

• Automations: Used Zapier to trigger multi-step email sequences based on book purchases and survey responses.
• Landing page customization: Saved $700/year by hosting lead magnets natively on beehiiv.
• Templates: Streamlined weekly publishing with structured layouts for content, curation, and memes.

Results

• Built a 20,000+ subscriber newsletter (Cyber Patterns), publishing for 150 Sundays straight.
• Launched a second daily newsletter (Meme Alerts), a viral meme template subscription.
• Monetized through a premium community, bestselling book (Memes Make Millions), a course, ghostwriting, and speaking gigs.
• Created a system that compounds weekly progress toward his long-term goal of 100K+ subscribers.