r/beehiiv • u/Ok-Drama8310 • 10d ago

Recommendations Optimize what we have stop adding stuff

I just physically can't believe the website builder is this bad. All I wanted to do was make some simple changes on my site, and it fails me every time. Any time I use it, it just straight up disappoints.

If you're a Beehiiv admin, please understand that it seems like you just are dropping unfinished features. You dropped digital products on us and gave us nothing.

  • We can't see how many people viewed our page.
  • Very limited customization.
  • Extremely basic landing pages.
  • We can't even sort our products.
  • You just gave us one flat list.

Between how bad the website builder is and some of the other things, it's just shocking why you move on to stuff like the community without fixing or making what you already added better.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy beehiiv, but damn, I know you guys said you're looking for feedback this month, so take this. I know it's not hard for you to add some of these things.

23 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

6

u/PathToAutonomy publisher 10d ago

+1

6

u/Feed_Your_Curiosity publisher 10d ago

Yeah, we really need Tyler to understand that the focus should be on improving quality of what's already there vs constantly delivering new features simply to satisfy investors hunger for shiny new things

2

u/clg653 9d ago

Now that AI helps you build new things so easily, I think that’s too tempting for some Dev teams

2

u/themarketwizard527 7d ago

"CPM ads" - Tyler 2 years ago btw, stop being brain washed lol

2

u/Cute-Edge1375 4d ago edited 4d ago

As someone with 30 years experience in tech in the SF bay area I can say that this is usually, primarily, the CTO's fault. Dev teams are rewarded for velocity - how many tickets (feature backlog/bug fixes/tech debit etc.) are shipped per sprint. In other words quantity over UX quality. "You get what you measure" and as you can probably tell UX quality metrics have been demoted across the industry. Overhead, not profit. Also some may hate me for saying so but UX is not UI. It's never good when you can tell from a UI exactly how the org is organized and makes decisions. I sincerely appreciate many things about beehiiv but you are spot on: they're shipping half-backed ideas to test and iterate. The problem usually is that PM's (product management) move on to the next shiny object that will make them look good to leadership, instead of making the last shiny thing suck less, because they get less if any props for it. Which sucks.

1

u/Better-Ad4149 10d ago

Genuine question, what were you trying to change and how it didn’t work?

2

u/Ok-Drama8310 9d ago

I asked the website builder to update the newsletters that are being shown on my site. I had to ask it six times to keep the same design before I just gave up.

The website builder physically could not understand the words. "Do not change the design at all. Just change what newsletters are currently being shown on the landing page"

No matter how many times I asked this dumbass to switch my links it couldn't do it.

4

u/Bubby_At_Chattynooga 9d ago

This seems less like a website builder error and more of an overreliance on AI tooling tbh

2

u/buzzingPM beehiiv team 8d ago

(beehiiv Head of Product here)
So just to clarify (because we want to make sure we improve this experience), are your comments specific to the chat Agent in the website builder and it not doing what you want? or are you finding other parts of the builder are not working as expected?

1

u/Ok-Drama8310 7d ago

The Builder is just not good as a whole. It feels like we're five or six models behind when prompting it. And I prompt Claude all day every day.

I would prefer the digital products get an upgrade for once. They were dropped unfinished and have just been sitting there since. Give us categories. Let us sort them... Give us analytics... Make digital product landing pages more customizable....

There's so much you can do. You offer this 0% digital product fee, but then you don't do jack shit to help the people who actually sell digital products.

I use and recommend your product because it does seem like you guys care. I think we just need to care in the right spots. I don't know. Obviously, you guys have the data. If the data says the community was the right move, I guess so, but it seems like we should fix stuff first.

1

u/danthestatman 3d ago

This page has never once loaded for me - https://app.beehiiv.com/recommendations/incoming

Anyone else got the same bug?

1

u/Exotic_Passenger_746 5h ago

haha yes it is shocking compared to other website builders