How Tech Safari Built a 15,000-Subscriber Audience on beehiiv

Situation:

Caleb Maru started Tech Safari to tell Africa’s tech story for both African readers and a global audience. He was already seeing traction on LinkedIn, but it came with a problem: he did not own that audience.

He wanted a central place to publish consistently, build a deeper reader relationship, and create something his team could operate together, not a personal feed that could vanish with an algorithm change.

Tech Safari launched as a twice-a-week newsletter covering African tech news, trends, tools, and events. Over time, it became the foundation for a broader media business.

Challenge:

Maru ran into limitations with the platform he started on.

• Substack did not give him the customization he wanted.
• He could not get the level of analytics and insight he needed to understand what readers actually cared about.
• He wanted growth tooling, especially referral mechanics, because he had seen referral programs drive real outcomes in past startup work.
• As the newsletter evolved into a team effort, he needed workflows that supported collaboration, QA, and consistent publishing.

He needed a platform that treated growth, data, and operations as first-class features, not add-ons.

Solution:

Maru migrated Tech Safari from Substack to beehiiv to get more control over growth and the reader experience.

What beehiiv changed for Tech Safari:

• Referral-driven growth: Maru specifically valued referral campaigns as a scalable growth lever that Substack did not support in the way he needed.
• Stronger audience insight: beehiiv became the “home” for content and reader relationships, with dashboards and engagement data that informed decisions.
• Polling as a business tool: Tech Safari used polls to collect reader input and reduce risk before making moves. Examples included testing demand for events in specific cities and validating new products.
• Automations to improve list quality: The team used automations to remove subscribers who were not engaging over a set period, trading raw list size for stronger readership focus and better engagement.
• Team-friendly workflow: They drafted in Notion, then used beehiiv for final editing, test sends, and QA, reducing surprises when issues went live.

The newsletter became a testing and distribution layer for everything else the business wanted to do.

Results:

Since moving to beehiiv, Tech Safari grew to more than 15,000 subscribers in under two years and became a platform for broader business expansion.

Beyond audience size, the bigger outcomes were operational and commercial:

• The team improved engagement by cleaning the list through automations.
• Polls helped them validate event plans and new initiatives before committing resources.
• Tech Safari expanded monetization beyond simple ads, including paid editions, sponsored events, and a content service that evolved into an agency.
• The newsletter helped Maru build authority in a defined niche, turning Tech Safari into a recognizable voice in African tech.

In Maru’s framing, the newsletter was not only a publishing channel. It was the foundation for a media company.

If you are building a niche publication and want to grow it into something bigger than email, this is the playbook.

Start using beehiiv to build a newsletter that can grow into a real media business.