Creator Spotlight: Litquidity

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 Exec Sum

Exec Sum is a concise daily summary of the most relevant financial news geared towards investment bankers, private equity investors, traders, and VCs with a witty tone and a bit of humor. Each edition is curated to be a product that I would have wanted when I was sitting at a desk. There are other newsletters out there, but you’d have to go to a few of them to get a comprehensive overview. We think about the analyst and what they need to stay relevant and up to date on stuff.

The objective and team behind Exec Sum

Exec Sum was launched in early 2021 as a daily newsletter offering a curated scoop of the most relevant financial news, while maintaining the brand’s wit and humor. Exec Sum is tailored to Wall Street professionals but is digestible enough for laymen looking to get a better understanding of the market, i.e. it isn’t loaded with the complex business jargon that you’ll find in the Wall St. Journal or other traditional sources. Lit works with college interns who are interested in finance to comb through the daily news and compile the newsletter and taps fellow beehiiv writer Jack Raines to help with editing.

Exec Sum goes big with Deep Dive Sundays, offering focused analysis of a single industry or company, like this one about beehiiv explaining why Lit not only moved his newsletter over, but decided to be an early investor in our platform. We spoke with Lit about his vision for Exec Sum being the de-facto source for financial news and his support for beehiiv becoming the go-to newsletter platform.

Who is your audience?

Our target subscriber is someone who is currently in a dealmaking environment, mergers and acquisitions, private equity, venture capital, per demographic surveys that have been done on our readers. We also appeal to people who want to stay up to speed in the market, like college students who are interviewing for financial positions and use Exec Sum for prep. Someone will DM me saying something like "I've been reading your newsletter for the past month. I just interviewed at Goldman Sachs and talked about a deal I read about in Exec Sum, which helped me secure a full-time offer!" It means we’re reaching them earlier. We’re also useful for people who don’t necessary work in finance but invest in the stock market and want something accessible for them to follow along.

How does being anonymous work in your favor?

I started out anonymous because I didn’t want to get fired. Since leaving my job, I felt that it was part of the brand already. People love a good mystery, there are artists who are anonymous or pseudnyomous like Daft Punk and Bansky. I’m not looking to be a public figure and recognized everywhere, it helps my mental health, social media can be nasty. Once people know personal information and they don’t like a joke, they can be pretty malicious.

But where it really serves me is that people trust that what I’m doing is done for the great good, they don’t get my biases. Obviously I’m human and have biases, but the focus is on content that is relevant and shared without an agenda. People recognize that whoever I am, I’m about increasing transparency and access. Last year, a Goldman Sachs analyst created a presentation explaining how bad it was working in a pandemic environment was for their mental health.

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