Creator Spotlight: Kenny Beecham + Cody Hock + Cole Hock

What is Creator Spotlight?

Each week we'll feature a newsletter on beehiiv that's experiencing tremendous success with their content and growth. It's a two part initiative packed into a single day:

1. an email showcasing their content, tips, and goals (this email here)

2. and a live Twitter Spaces today where you can join the conversation and ask questions directly

Tell me about Enjoy Basketball

Enjoy Basketball is a brand & community catered to people who want to uplift the game. Our newsletter is a succinct breakdown of everything you need to know about what is going on in the world of basketball. It's written in a friendly tone, similar to how your best friend would describe the previous night's games/general news. We launched in late March ahead of the NBA playoffs. We cover basketball without click bait, hot takes, or tearing someone apart. We love basketball and cover all aspects of the sport in a fun, positive way, including memes, gifs, and fun takes.

Who does Enjoy Basketball reach?

Kenny has a very large & dedicated audience, so the continual push from his social channels has led to explosive growth. We’re excited about the potential to scale our community, and be a leader in the category. A ton of sports legacy media companies have done a great job of building around social, but none have really cracked the inbox of their audience, especially the younger demographic. We see a lot of potential to hook people into our community through email. We’re hitting the 18-34 demographic, giving overviews of the game to young professionals who maybe mised it the night before.

How are you building out your community?

We haven’t fully tapped into Kenny’s community. We want to turn on our referral program- it was a feature of beehiiv that we knew we wanted to optimize. We’re also looking at partnerships that are organic to the brand, to basketball. Collaborations that can reach a large audience, we recently had a sponsor for our NBA bracket playoff pool. We had a 10% conversation rate for our sign up, it was a great opportunity for the community to play together and win some prizes (NBA gift cards, naturally), in an organic way. We’re looking for more partnerships, we have a meeting scheduled with the NBA to see if there’s a possibility for collaboration.

We have a live Q&A with Kenny every Thursday for about 45 minutes and we’re hoping that we can eventually do live events in select cities, maybe in partnership with a ticketing company. We want to engage the community, highlight people doing good work in the greater basketball community.

What happens in NBA’s off season?

There’s so much for us to cover offseason, the draft, summer league, the rookie class. We want to preview for the upcoming season, do deep dives on the history of teams and players. Games and game analysis are only one aspect of our newsletter. We’re into the business side of the game, including contracts, endorsements, how corporate brands structure their partnerships, crypo and web3 integration with players. We’re also going to cover college and the WNBA, we want every basketball lover to be a part of our community.

What are you teams?

Kenny is a diehard Bulls fan, we’re both Toronto Raptors fans. We still manage to have a great working relationship together. It’s really about the love of the game.

Why newsletters?

We wanted to add an additional layer to serve Kenny’s already hyper engaged community. We also understand the potential of creator-led businesses as well as the importance of owning your audience. In contrast to Kenny's other social channels, we're not at the mercy of a changing algorithm, the lowering of reach on a whim, or even worse, a platform shutting down. A whitespace also exists - we thought that having a weekly newsletter hitting email was different; namely, many sports media companies are not targeting gen-Z/millennial audiences' inboxes (and if they are, they don't have the greatest open/engagement rate).

We've had numerous people directly reply to the newsletter email letting us know how much they're enjoying it.

Why is starting a newsletter a great decision…