Beehiiv’s Preeya Goenka: “Podcasts are the natural evolution of owned media”

Beehiiv's expansion into podcasts is about following newsletter creators into their next channel, chief customer officer Preeya Goenka has said.

Goenka said the company sees audio, and soon video, as the next logical step for writers who have already built audiences through email and now need new ways to reach them directly – particularly as AI makes it easier than ever to flood feeds with generic content.

"No matter how good your content is, if you're not distributing it in the right way to the right people, then in the end it's kind of meaningless," she told The Daily Influence.

Beehiiv* rolled out podcast hosting last week, allowing users to distribute audio shows to platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. The company said more creators signed up on launch day than it had expected for the entire quarter.

Analytics and audience data remain within Beehiiv, giving creators a single view of how their audience is engaging across both newsletters and audio.

The podcast push has fuelled wider speculation about Beehiiv's next move, including whether a larger platform might try to acquire its infrastructure.

Recent reports have suggested LinkedIn explored a potential acquisition of the company, as it builds out its own creator tools and content ambitions.

Goenka declined to comment on any deal discussions, but described LinkedIn as a “really natural” partner given its scale and the role it already plays in how professionals share content.

"We're always looking to partner with the other players out there," she said.

Meanwhile, the question of whether podcasts should include video by default has become increasingly fraught, a debate Beehiiv is alive to.

“Video’s being worked on at the moment… that’s been the biggest ask from our customer base,” Goenka said, adding that Beehiiv plans to roll it out “pretty soon” as an extension of its new audio hosting.

Even so, she noted that there are “tons of audio-only podcasts”, arguing creators should build for their audience rather than default to what the market expects.

Constantly iterating

That positioning comes at a time when major platforms are increasingly building creator tools in-house, raising questions about whether infrastructure players like Beehiiv risk being squeezed out.

Goenka said the company has deliberately resisted chasing adjacent opportunities, instead focusing on the backend for owned distribution.

"It would have been easy to change how we're building Beehiiv so we can get more market share," she said. "But that's never really been how we think about things. Our thesis has always been the same: we want to be the absolute best platform to support our creators."

She said Beehiiv’s approach would be difficult for big tech platforms to replicate.

"It's really, really hard to send emails at scale the way that we do," she said, pointing to the technical complexities of delivering billions of emails each month. "You can't just spin up a simple tool. It takes deep expertise and years of laying the foundation."

Among Beehiiv's recent product launches is Beehiiv MCP, an integration that connects publisher accounts directly to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude, allowing creators to analyse performance and automate workflows without manually exporting data.

Crucially, Goenka said Beehiiv does not see AI as a replacement for editorial work.

"We don't want people to be using AI to create their content," she said. "We want them to use AI to make every other part of their business easier."

*The Daily Influence’s newsletter is hosted on Beehiiv.

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