Resume Worded: The 1-Million-Subscriber Migration to beehiiv

Have you ever wondered how big a group one million people really is?

Personally, my brain can’t even comprehend what 100,000 people would look like.

But, someone like Rohan Mahtani might. That’s the size of his newsletter list.

To put it in perspective, if you took the populations of Miami, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh, and combined them, you’d end up with about a million people.

With a list as big as three major American cities combined, there’s no doubt that Rohan Mahtani knows what he’s doing when it comes to launching, growing, and scaling a successful newsletter.

In fact, Rohan was so good at scaling his newsletter that he started running into some serious problems.

More subscribers, more problems, right?

Not always. It all depends on what platform you’re on—as you’ll learn in this article.

In this beehiiv case study, we interviewed Rohan Mahtani, founder of Resume Worded, to explore the reasons why he switched his newsletter, The Career Supplement, over to beehiiv. You’ll learn about the challenges he had to overcome in order to switch to a new platform, how he successfully migrated a million subscribers, and how he’s already getting 50% open rates on beehiiv!

Resume Worded: An Overview

Rohan Mahtani is the founder of Resume Worded—a career development platform that helps people all over the world get the most out of their careers.

With a global audience, Resume Worded has helped millions of job seekers get better interviews and opportunities and land their dream roles with AI-powered, data-backed tools.

The company has taken over the recruitment and educational industry by helping people master their resumes, optimize their LinkedIn profiles, network with other professionals, and give people the confidence and tactics they need to optimize their working careers.

One of the coolest products Resume Worded offers is instant feedback on your resume based on AI. Simply upload your resume and job posting, and, in 10 seconds, Resume Worded’s AI system will give you insights into resume optimizations to help you land jobs.

The Resume Worded Newsletter Backstory

We asked Rohan to give us a snapshot of how he branched his career business into the newsletter space.

He shared, “I started a company called Resume Worded around six years ago. The core product is in the recruitment and educational space. We support job seekers all around the world with their resumes, as the name suggests. We branched out into resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and networking, and we have tools that support job seekers across that entire job search lifecycle.”

Rohan realized that if he was going to make his business a success, he had to find new ways to connect with his target audience on a deeper level. The problem was that people would find Resume Worded, get what they needed, get the job they wanted, and then leave. Rohan was solving his audience’s problem, but they wouldn’t stick around.

He shared, “What we started noticing, especially early in the business, is we were looking for a way to develop a deeper relationship with job seekers and users. Obviously, job seekers come to us. But, they're only visiting us for a very short period of time.”

He knew he had to figure out different ways to maintain a relationship with his audience to keep them coming back. Without repeat customers, he knew his business would soon hit its ceiling.

Rohan continued, “They need to improve their resumes and they carry on with whatever else that's going on in their life. So we were trying to figure out, ‘How do we build a relationship with our job seekers? How do we give them value, not only in their job search, but when we successfully placed them in a job? How do we continue to give value to them for the rest of their careers?”

So, Rohan started a newsletter.

The Career Supplement Newsletter Is Born

“One or two years after founding the business, we started this newsletter called the Career Supplement.”

The Career Supplement newsletter is a weekly newsletter that breaks down Resume Worded’s career tactics, insights, and resources to help people optimize their careers.

Every week, Rohan features the best career tips and tools in a quick, two-minute round-up newsletter that lands in his subscriber’s inbox. The goal of the newsletter is to help job seekers gain an edge over their competition to help them stand out to potential employers at every stage of their careers.

But Rohan’s newsletter goes far beyond basic resume and interview advice.

He shared, “It’s a weekly newsletter. We've moved it sometimes to biweekly, which helps job seekers very passively think about their careers. We give them tools and tricks to help them, and not only their job search but maybe things like, ‘How do you develop your personal brand? How do you get promoted at work? How do you build up your confidence? How? What are some body language hacks that could make me appear and be more confident for my next presentation?’”

“So we basically started focusing that newsletter on, ‘How do we develop some sort of mentorship email that people get regularly to passively put career at the top of their priority list?’”

Rohan found that by engaging with his audience on a consistent basis, he was able to keep them around, turning them into repeat customers when they needed to find a job again.

He commented, “We have our core business, which is effectively a SaaS business in the career or in the career space, helping people with resumes and things like this. But people who are reading the newsletter for a couple of years (when they're on their next job search) come back and they're like, ‘I have another job search. Let me use the tools again that I trust and that I used a couple of years ago that worked for me.’”

He shared how his main revenue stream is his SaaS products, but his newsletter has given him the opportunity to diversify his income with sponsorship deals.

“What we have done to get to where we are now—We have a good audience. They're engaged. They like our stuff, and they trust us in terms of the kind of content we put out. That's when we started talking to a few brands who were like, ‘We have a product that I think your audience might enjoy and it would help them.’ If there was a good fit there, we'd be like, ‘Let's start bringing those companies on as sponsors.”

Challenge: Safely Migrate 1 Million Subscribers With the Right Newsletter Platform & Team

Before switching to beehiiv, Rohan’s primary challenge with the Career Supplement newsletter was finding the right platform to safely migrate a million subscribers.

Rohan’s newsletter grew far beyond what he imagined, which came with plenty of rewards.
But, his newsletter platform wasn’t able to keep up with his growing list. He was running into technical issues, inaccuracies with metrics, and major delays in send times which led to frustrated customers.

He knew he had to find a new solution if he was going to keep his newsletter running. But, migrating a list of that size is no easy task.

Rohan shared, “Newsletters started becoming a high priority in our business. We had a large audience, we had an engaged audience, and we were at a point where we needed a better tool to manage our email marketing. We already had tools in place for lifecycle management where people who use our tools get reminded of [products] at different parts of their journey with us.”

“What happened was we were like, ‘We really need to figure out how to effectively send newsletters to our audience, keep them engaged, and build that trust.’ We were using an existing self-hosted solution that worked pretty well for us.”

Rohan was using Sendy, a self-hosted newsletter solution. And, while it was sufficient for him as he scaled, it wasn’t working for him anymore. So, he started the hunt for a new platform—one that could handle a list of his size. And one he could continue scaling with.

“We started running into some issues with it because of our volume and scale. We were getting some stats that we weren't really confident in. That's when we started looking for alternative solutions.”

Rohan shared, “If newsletters weren't the focus of our business, and we were just sending emails on a weekly basis to update people on what's going on, we'd probably still be using Sendy because everything was set up and we don't need to go through the hassle of migrating into a new solution.”

“We decided to make newsletters our priority for two reasons: Number one, we realized it's an amazing way to build a brand with our audience and keep them engaged. And number two, it started turning into a revenue stream for us. We were like, ‘We're gonna get some sponsors who really care about some certain metrics and things like that.’ If it wasn't for those two reasons, I don't think we would've moved.”

“I started looking for standard email marketing providers. I came across Mailchimp, SendGrid, and things like that. Then I started going a little bit deeper in my search, and that's when I came across beehiiv.”

“There were a few things that made me pick beehiiv. I would say beehiiv seemed super modern in terms of the toolkit that was available with it. beehiiv wasn't the only tool I looked at. I looked at Campaign Monitor. I looked at going to SendGrid.”

“I was looking at a few ones and I was looking at the toolkits available and it really did seem that beehiiv in terms of raw feature sets, there was a lot of good stuff there. Things like the polls, segmentation, and A/B testing out of the box. I could see a lot of value immediately.”

“That was when I realized if I want to make newsletters a priority, what I need to be doing is not just thinking of non-transactional marketing (like sending emails) but thinking of a tool kit that helps me grow. If I'm making it a priority in our business, how do I make it a real priority in the business and have those growth levers?

“[beehiiv] seems to be successful as an email marketing solution, but also combined with some elements of growth as well.”

Slow Sends = Angry Customers

Rohan shared how sending an email to a million people isn’t the same as sending to a few thousand. Without a platform that has the capacity to handle high-volume sends, you’ll start running into some serious issues—like slow sends.

He shared, “There are so many [email newsletter] solutions out there. But we were using a self-hosted one, which basically means that the email provider was stored on our servers.”

“On the technical side, our team is pretty good, but because we were using an external solution that was on our servers—when we started hitting the big scale—our technical team didn't know how to debug certain issues from the self-hosted solution.”

He shared that his emails were sometimes taking a whole day to send to his list. For the Career Supplement and thousands of other newsletters, timing is everything.

“One example of this was the sending rate. So when we hit maybe a million subscribers, for some reason our sends would be super slow. It would take us maybe 24 hours to get an email sent to a million subscribers.”

“That's a big problem if you have a Black Friday deal where you're like, ‘This is a time-sensitive offer. This offer's gonna last only for 24 hours. ‘You can buy now. It's on till Friday,’ and we're sending it on Thursday, but they only get the email on Saturday.”

“We basically got a lot of angry customers. That was a massive headache because it's not something that we wanted to have to think about.”

Missing Data = Misguided Strategy

The second issue Rohan was running into with his scaled list was analytics. He started to notice inaccuracies in his numbers.

“Number two was the reporting of stats. Sendy was pretty great in terms of tracking open rates, click-through rates, and things like that.”

“But one thing we started being unsure about was some of our subscribers were complaining that they clicked a link, but it took 45 seconds for the page to load. At a big scale, the tracking links were slowing down because they were maybe on our servers, which weren't set up in the right way for Sendy.”

“I was starting to have certain doubts that not all our stats were estimated correctly. For example, I felt that because some people were waiting 45 seconds to one minute for a page to load, it’s very likely those clicks weren't actually registered in our systems.”

The Million Migration Strategy with beehiiv

Eventually, Rohan knew he had to switch to beehiiv if he was going to solve these deliverability, analytics, and customer experience issues. But with a list that big, he certainly had his concerns about migration.

He shared, “My concern initially was when I was moving over the list [to beehiiv] that we were just nuking our [deliverability]. I was like, ‘This is going to be a big challenge.’”

But, after meeting with the team at beehiiv, Rohan’s doubts began to fade away. The beehiiv development team offered Rohan consulting, strategy, and resources to allow for a smooth transition from Sendy to beehiiv.

“The beehiiv team was helpful here. They sent over some docs—a domain warm up schedule. So, once you get through the first month or so, you can speed up the transition a lot quicker.”

“My very first send on beehiiv, I sent to a thousand contacts with the same domain that I was sending to via my old provider. The email used to go to the inbox updates folder was going to promotions because it was a new domain and a new IP.”

“That gave me a lot of hesitation because if our deliverability is getting ruined it's almost an immediate veto for this migration. But I kept with it. What I noticed was encouraging people in the initial emails at the bottom of the email saying, ‘Hey, listen, reply to this email with an okay if you got it,’ and quick hacks like that. What I started noticing in emails two or four, we were breaking back into the inbox folder. So, it was less than a month with weekly sends.”

“I was very apprehensive that this move was going to happen and suddenly we’re getting consistent deliverability that we were getting with our old provider a month in.”

“The strategy that I used, and I'm still using now to migrate my entire list, has been very specific. I first started bringing in all the clickers: the active clickers from every single email in the last week, in the last two weeks, and in the last three weeks. One at a time I was loading them into beehiiv.”

“One thing that we did that I’m happy with in the transition over to beehiiv was getting okay with the idea of unsubscribing contacts.”

“And I know a lot of people are like, ‘I don't wanna unsubscribe contacts.’ If you're dreading a CPC model, you maybe pay $5 or $6 for each of these subscribers. And suddenly to just torch them, you're like, ‘Am I torching money here?’”

“We've basically gone through this process of migrating, identifying contacts who joined two years ago and have not opened an email in God knows how long. ‘Do I really want to put them into beehiiv and ruin the IP reputation of this new IP that I'm warming up?’”

“I decided no. I think it's given me the opportunity to remove those people. To be honest, our actual openers are the same. I haven't really lost too much, which is cool.”

Rohan shared how the beehiiv importing tool allowed him to easily migrate over subscribers. But it also filters out temporary (disposable) email addresses.

“I've been happy with how smooth the migration has been. I know it goes under the radar, but the actual import tool is nice that beehiiv runs. It imports all through a third-party tool that validates the emails.”

“For example, if someone signed up with a test email on resumeworded.com, we would be okay with having that. But, if we're loading that in an import list, beehiiv is cleaning out the test emails. So it's nice that it's that extra validation that your list is high quality.”

Results With beehiiv

Since switching to beehiiv, the Career Supplement has had significant results both in terms of deliverability and engagement. While he’s still in the process of moving over the list, he’s moved about 700,000 subscribers to beehiiv already.

Rohan shared, “The first few emails, I was getting maybe like 10% to 20% click-through rates because the people who are constantly clicking on these emails were the only ones that these emails were being sent to.”

“I started identifying the very engaged openers. I went into our self-hosted solutions database. I was looking at people who joined at least a year ago and have opened an email in the last two weeks. They’re people who are likely very engaged. I started adding in those people.”

“One thing I started doing in all my emails at the top: I was like, ‘You're going to be unsubscribed in 24 hours. Click here if you're still reading and if you want to receive the email.’ Over five emails a good chunk of people would become clickers.”

“I started looking at raw openers. I sent an email at the end of last week on beehiiv, and before that, I moved another 100,000 contacts over. Right now we have 600,000 to 700,000 contacts over to beehiiv. So our 1 million is like 70% of the way through. I would basically be downloading a list of all the people who opened last week and who opened four weeks ago—they’re also going to be super engaged.”

“Now, we've got a huge number of engaged subscribers [on beehiiv]. We're getting 50% to 60% open rates on that 700,000 list, which we're happy with.”

Enjoying this case study? Learn how Jack Raines of Young Money used beehiiv to skyrocket his newsletter from 2,000 to 35,000 subscribers in one year. Read the full case study here.

Favorite beehiiv Features

beehiiv’s Responsive Development Team

One of the main reasons Rohan eventually chose beehiiv out of all the other platforms was his confidence in the team at beehiiv and how quick they are to implement user product requests and roll out new features.

Rohan shared, “The team was dope at beehiiv. I was really pleased with every interaction I had. I remember there was a case study about Milk Road which I read that was cool. I was like, ‘This is a kind of blueprint [for us] if we were treating our newsletter as a priority.’”

“Every interaction I had with the [beehiiv] development team—I had so many requests. Because I was coming from Sendy there were these out-of-the-box features that were awesome in Sendy that I didn't see in beehiiv and I was like, ‘I need these features.’”

“The development team has been very attentive. They've been very quick to get back to me on certain stuff, assuring me that stuff is in the roadmap. I definitely have faith that I'm in good hands. There might be a feature that I think is nice to have that I may not have right now, but I know that in three months you guys are going to put it in.”

beehiiv’s Flexible Plans & Pricing

One of the main beehiiv features that has given Rohan the confidence to scale with beehiiv is the flexible plans and pricing. beehiiv charges users a flat monthly fee so publishers can invest their resources fully into growth.

beehiiv also offers unlimited sends within the enterprise plan, giving publishers peace of mind to send more or less on any given month without being hit with a huge bill.

Rohan shared, “We were running a newsletter once a week. And we had been always thinking about increasing our volume—going up to two sends a week. Maybe in the future going up to three sends a week. Every other provider we looked at was like, ‘How many emails are you sending a month?’”

“We'd be like, ‘Five million emails a month. What if we wanted to do seven million emails a month?’” The prices [of other newsletter platforms] weren't very aligned, and they weren't cognizant of the fact that we needed some room for flexibility.”

“And we don't want to be locked into an annual contract. You're being billed for 10 million emails, but you're only sending 6 million. With beehiiv, I like the idea of unlimited sends. Even if we did one email a week and five emails a month, it's still coming up to be a reasonable price. If we increase the volume to 8 million, 10 million, 12 million, we have the flexibility and the pricing isn't going up.”

beehiiv’s A/B Testing

In October 2022, beehiiv introduced an A/B testing feature, allowing creators to optimize the performance of their newsletters and enhance customization options.

The beehiiv A/B testing suite allows publishers to test multiple subject lines to improve the performance of newsletters. Plus, the A/B testing suite also includes custom field segmentation, which lets you gain insights and send different newsletters to subscribers based on custom attributes.

When asked about some of his favorite beehiiv features, Rohan shared, “A couple I've gotten instant value out of are number one: the A/B testing. That's super useful. I know how important subject lines are, but at my old [newsletter platform], I would just come up with a subject line on the fly and send it out. I wouldn't really care or think twice whether or not it's the best subject line to be using.”

“It's pretty easy in beehiiv to add a variation. I've previously been doing that process ad hoc—just coming up with subject lines, but [with beehiiv] I have a little more room to experiment.”

Rohan also shared about the automated welcome email new subscribers get upon signing up.

“The welcome emails are cool as well. I used to send welcome emails when people would sign up for our product. But I never sent dedicated newsletter welcome emails, so I’ve started doing that with beehiiv. So anyone who signs up for the newsletter specifically (and not for our product) gets a welcome email, and it’s nice to see the stats there.”

Summary

Two months ago, Rohan Mahtani was looking to switch his million-plus subscribers over to a solution that would allow him to accurately track his newsletter sends, get his emails to his subscribers without delay, and allow him to continue scaling.

After analyzing the top newsletter platforms in the world, he decided to migrate over to beehiiv due to its robust features, world-class development team, and enterprise capabilities.

With great deliverability, 50% open rates, and strong click-through rates in the first month, it’s safe to say that Rohan’s migration has been a success–and there’s only moving up from here.

Looking forward, Rohan plans to continue scaling by leveraging beehiiv’s robust newsletter toolkit.

He shared, “A lot of the features I haven't used exhaustively. I’m interested to see how to play around with the referral program.”

“During the migration, we're still sending via our old self-hosted solution, and we're also sending via beehiiv. Because of that, we design our emails in our old solution using HTML, and we paste that into beehiiv’s editor just to minimize the work for redoing the newsletter in beehiiv.”

“We haven't actually been able to even use the rich text editing features in beehiiv or the widgets yet. Once the list is fully transferred over, that's when we’ll be very actively using beehiiv’s features in terms of the referral program and stuff like that.”

When asked what Rohan would say to a friend considering using beehiiv, he shared, “For most people, [beehiiv] seems like a very easy way to set up a list, to start sending emails, to have pretty good deliverability.”

“If someone’s at a scale of one million subscribers and wants to migrate over to a good solution and were hesitant about using a product like beehiiv, I would very much recommend it because our deliverability has been good. The migration and warm up has taken time, of course, a few months to migrate our list. But it's been successful. We haven't seen any drops in deliverability. The features, so far, have been good.”

“One thing that's very important to us is the metrics and the tracking. That was one of the challenges I mentioned with our old solution. Before that, we weren't sure that our metrics were being tracked appropriately. Since we moved over our metrics, our open rates and our dashboard are all good. So I would say for all of those reasons, I would recommend beehiiv.”

You can rest assured that migrating over to beehiiv will be well worth it, no matter how many subscribers your newsletter has–from 1,000 subscribers, to one million subscribers, or anything in between.

beehiiv is a growth-focused newsletter platform built by the same team who started and scaled Morning Brew to millions of subscribers.

Whether you haven’t launched a newsletter yet, or you’ve been in the game for a while, beehiiv can help you reach your goals. Get started on beehiiv for free today!