J.T. Levin

The Journey

Both of J.T.'s parents were journalists, and he followed that thread into a journalism degree at the University of Missouri. But rather than heading into a newsroom, he went straight into early-stage tech. He was one of the first employees at Sailthru, an email service provider that built a strong position in the publishing space. That gave him deep roots in the email ecosystem that would shape everything that followed.

From there he moved through a series of sales leadership roles: VP Sales at Confide, Commercial Director at Enigma, then Head of Sales and VP Sales at ChartHop over three years, followed by two years leading sales at August Health. Each role was early-stage, each required building the GTM motion from scratch.

beehiiv was the obvious fit: an email platform at the right stage, with the right mission, and a gap that matched exactly what he'd spent his career building toward. He joined in early 2025 to lead enterprise sales.

The conviction he keeps coming back to: beehiiv wins because it makes the best product in the industry. The team ships faster than anyone else in the space, the CEO answers support questions on Twitter, and the culture of caring about customers runs through everything. Sales can only do so much when the product falls short. At beehiiv, the product is the foundation that everything else is built on.

The Exact Tools

HubSpot is the CRM backbone. It handles pipeline management and sits at the centre of the sales workflow. Standard, reliable, and well-integrated with the rest of the stack.

Clay is used heavily for prospecting and enrichment. When your ICP is publishers with 100K+ subscribers trying to build real businesses around their newsletters, identifying serious operators from hobbyists is everything. Clay helps the team layer signals and build targeted lists that feed the AE-led outbound motion.

Claude Cowork rounds out the stack. The team are big users, applying it across research, strategy, and day-to-day sales workflows. When you're selling to sophisticated publishers and large corporates, the ability to go deep on an account quickly makes a real difference.

Warmly handles website visitor identification, helping the team see which publishers and companies are checking out beehiiv and surfacing intent signals that feed directly into the outbound motion.

On top of these, the team has built homegrown tooling to evaluate newsletter quality. Since subscriber counts aren't public data, they've created internal systems that assess a newsletter's seriousness based on signals like ad presence, content quality, and publishing frequency. It's a proprietary edge in a market where the most important ICP data point is invisible.

What Channels Work For Them

Product-led growth accounts for over half of beehiiv's revenue. An exceptional growth marketing team manages that engine, and it's the primary way smaller creators and publishers discover and adopt the platform.

AE-led outbound is the motion for enterprise. J.T.'s team focuses on publishers with lists over 100,000 subscribers. Every sizable publisher already has an email program, so the conversation isn't about starting from zero. It's about upgrading. Too many publishers are still treating email like it's 2012: blast links and drive traffic. beehiiv's pitch is that newsletters have evolved into standalone products that deserve their own P&L and can be an inbox-only experience.

There's also a growing segment of large corporates spinning up newsletters as owned channels to decrease CAC. Some are turning their newsletter CAC negative by supporting them with ads. That corporate segment is healthy and growing fast.

What To Look For in the Age of AI

J.T. splits hiring into two buckets: the things he can control and the things he cannot.

The things he can't control come first. Work ethic, intelligence, charisma, how well someone communicates. If those aren't already there, no amount of coaching will put them there. He interviews for these before anything else.

The things he can control: how well someone runs discovery, how they map the power base in an account, how they understand influence on the buying decision, how they plan second and third meetings. These are coachable. You assess where a candidate sits on each, weigh it against the role's salary band and growth trajectory, and triangulate from there.

Strategic depth is the newer requirement as beehiiv has moved upmarket. The team now has serious conversations with large publishers and corporates, sitting in boardrooms with C-level executives. That's a different conversation from selling to smaller operations. But the fundamentals haven't changed: find people with the raw ingredients, then build the craft on top.