Manager.dev update: Moving to beehiiv

After almost 3 years on Substack, last week I finally made the decision to move to Beehiiv.

I’ve been thinking about it for 6 months - it’s definitely a hard one:

• Substack has an amazing community of creators. The energy is great, everyone is supportive, and I met some amazing people here (too many to name personally - you know who you are!)

• Most of my growth came from Substack itself, mainly the awesome (albeit dark) recommendation feature.

• It’s free, while Beehiiv is more on the expensive side.
  

But it’s been getting worse.

• But I feel my interests don’t align with Substack’s (which is understandable, they let me send 1M+ emails for FREE, costing them quite some money probably).
  They want people to be on the app, and create a social network. In some cases, people are required to download the app to read my free articles.

• The open rates have been dropping. This is just in the last 2 months, down from 34% to 28%.

  

  I did a test in beehiiv. I removed 8,000 unengaged subscribers from the first email, sending it to 17,000/25,000 ones. And still, I got more unique opens, for an open rate that’ll probably reach 46-47%.

• I want to make this newsletter amazing, and I lack the tools. Beehiiv provides:

  • An MCP that works really well (to work with Claude on figuring out your newsletter)

  • API you can use

  • Deep analytics. For example, I can finally see a better picture of the whole publication. Where the traffic came from, at what hours, and to what articles.

    

The move is part of a bigger push for the newsletter: I want it to become THE place for engineering managers, by investing more effort and research into each article.

I’m really grateful to Substack - it took me from zero to 25,000 subscribers, completely free, and the community of newsletter writers here is really special. I appreciate you, and thank you for the continuous support!