Case Study: Exec Sum by Litquidity Capital

Litquidity was launched through social media as the brainchild of ‘Lit’ in 2017, who to this day remains anonymous. Lit, described by NY Magazine as the “Meme King of Wall Street”, offered smart and funny insight from within the finance world. His anonymity protected him while working as an analyst at a Wall St. firm, allowing him to freely comment on his observations with irreverance and sharp wit. At the end of 2020, Litquidity had enough of a following that Lit could leave his desk job and focus full time on his brand.

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.

The Newsletter: Exec Sum

Founders: Lit

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2022 Goals

Our goal this year is to double the audience size of Exec Sum and dedicate time to publishing more deep dives that go into interesting industries and companies.

Advice for other writers

Two things. First-Authenticity is key. Second is to find "Message-Audience Fit" (aka know your audience). If your content resonates with a group of individuals, you will have better engagement seen through open rate and click through rate.

Favorite beehiiv feature

I am an early investor in beehiiv, so I am a huge believer in the technology and the team. They are always improving and innovating, their goal is to move products in-house to eliminate the need to go to external products to achieve the same thing. I’m excited for that.

Advice for anyone considering a switch to beehiiv

It’s so easy to get onboarded and the customability is simple, you can make your dream newsletter format with the tools on beehiiv. Looking forward, beehiiv’s product roadmap is really exciting, it’s stuff that other newsletter providers are not going to forseeably have.

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.

Who is your audience?

Our target subscriber is someone who is currently in a dealmaking environment, mergers and acquititons, 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.

What was behind your decision to switch to beehiiv?

I launched Exec Sum on MailerLite in January 2021, I chose the platform because it was the cheapest and more basic offering out there to create a template and start publishing. Exec Sum is my first newsletter and I quickly saw that the MailerLite usability was slow and bulky and had little support to accessing data. The emails were getting clipped. When I learned about what Tyler was doing with beehiiv, I invested before i could even more my newsletter over. Once they were at a place that I could migrate over, I did. This was in November 2021.

Why invest in a newsletter platform?

Newsletters offer the ability to deliver longer-form content directly to an audience. It is fundamentally different than the content that performs best on social media - memes / photos / short messages. Plus, newsletters are a medium I see as less prone to censorship, like social media where you can easily be taken down erroneously by an AI flagging something and lose your audience overnight. Email is a direct connection to your audience and you have that list email list, it’s not algorithmically driven, like social media feeds. But it was really the uniquenes of what Tyler and the beehiiv team were building that drew me in, there were so many benefits that it was a no brainer for me. I knew that the team behind beehiiv is very experienced and have a strong track record of building great technology in the newsletter space, so I was compelled to invest, and of course move Exec Sum over.

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. The long hours and the stress was taking a significant toll. The presentation was DM-ed to me by a burner account, and I posted it on Twitter and Instagram. The analyst trusted me to put the presentation out in the world and not try to expose him or her. The piece was picked up by mainstream outlets like CNBC and Bloomberg, and lead to investment banks acknowledging the intense work during the pandemic and announcing thank you bonuses and salary increases.

What’s next for Exec Sum?

I want Exec Sum to be THE go-to newsletter for financial professionals looking to stay up to speed on daily happenings in deal flow and the stock market. There's a lot of room to grow and we're just at the very beginning of our journey. For Litquidity overall, we’re expanding our team and want to be a big new-age digital media company that resembles Barstool Sports meets Bloomberg. We’re going for a little more highbrow than Barstools Sports, but in terms of how the organization is structured and our less buttoned-up approach to appeal to Gen-Z and millennials.