Community was the most-requested feature on beehiiv's roadmap. It was also the hardest to get right.
Tyler Denk's team brought us on to design it from the ground up, as beehiiv's design system didn’t cover what we’d need to deliver a best-in-class Community experience. We worked from their visual language and designed every Community component from scratch.
First, we tackled navigation. Our initial exploration was to keep the existing website header and tuck Community navigation underneath it, but beehiiv wanted something more standalone. We eventually landed on an elegant solution that gives Community its own sidebar navigation while rendering newsletter posts inside it.
Then we tackled theming. beehiiv’s two existing systems already cost material engineering time to support, and a third was off the table. So we gave publishers flexibility to set their accent color, background color, and text-on-background, and locked the rest. Unread indicators, chat bubbles, and system states stay put no matter what a publisher picks, which is how Community’s UI remains consistent across thousands of brands.
Beyond navigation and theming, we designed a Community feed split between For You and Following, channels seeded from a publisher's newsletter and podcast, group and one-to-one messaging, and highlight-and-comment interactions.
When development kicked off, our engineers embedded with beehiiv's engineering team: shared ticket pool, daily standups, one-week sprints where each engineer owned an epic end to end. Working this closely allowed us to learn their code conventions well enough that a pull request felt like it came from someone who'd been there a year.
For the real-time chat feature, we leveraged Stream, a third-party service (work smarter, not harder, ya know?). We kept its behavior and replaced its interface to meet our bar for design: adopting its message list to inherit scroll, pagination, and read-tracking logic, overriding every visible component with our own, never loading its CSS, and piping each publication's brand colors through. The chat feature feels as native as the rest of the platform.
Community shipped in July 2026 during beehiiv’s Summer Release Event. Chat during the release event was fired up - and we’re even more fired up to see how beehiiv publishers take advantage of this feature now that they have access to it.
beehiiv
Community
About beehiiv
beehiiv is the platform newsletter publishers and creators build their businesses on. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Pump Club, Colin & Samir's The Publish Press, TIME Magazine, and thousands more run on beehiiv. Founded in 2021 by Tyler Denk (formerly of Morning Brew), beehiiv quickly outgrew newsletters, adding monetization, website publishing, and a network of users that was growing exponentially.
46B
emails sent
425M
unique readers
130K
publishers
Ask
beehiiv had scaled well beyond email, but their most engaged publishers were still sending audiences to other community platforms. They needed a solution built natively, one that worked for creators with niche audiences who wanted simplicity, and media companies that needed moderation, content gating, and sophisticated admin tools.
Approach
We first explored where Community should live on the platform. From there, we settled theming: beehiiv already maintained two systems and didn’t want to maintain a third, so we locked the core UI and gave publishers enough customization to carry their brand while ensuring the platform remains recognizably beehiiv. Then we built Community by embedding our engineers with beehiiv's team to ship it alongside them.
Impact
Community launched July 2026, and it changed the dynamic of how beehiiv’s creators and their audiences can engage. From a feed that surfaces relevant, active discussions, to real-time chat that is part of the creator's own platform, to newsletter posts that show up with their own comment thread, Community keeps the conversation where it started: on beehiiv.
"We've got an insanely high bar for engineering, and you go punch for punch with our team."
"We've got an insanely high bar for engineering, and you go punch for punch with our team."
