How AI Central Built a 300,000-Reader Media Brand on beehiiv

At a Glance

Company: AI Central, a media brand that teaches busy senior professionals how to use AI at work through hands-on, practical tutorials.

Founder: Alex Fiore, Chief Editor and Founder, based in London.

Audience: 300,000-plus readers across LinkedIn and newsletters in the US and Europe, working in SaaS, consulting, education, and finance. Roughly 3 in 5 are 40-plus founders, C-level, or execs.

Why beehiiv: Needed an owned audience, real segmentation, an open API, and monetization tools that a creator economy "tax" was eating into on Substack.

The results:

• 5x'd total audience reach to 300,000, after growing from zero to 60,000 subscribers by mid-2025
• A 146-plus week publishing streak across more than 449 issues, one of the longest on beehiiv.
• More than $150,000 earned from the beehiiv ad network alone to date.
• Doubled revenue by inverting the model from passive monetization to content-led brand and affiliate partnerships.
• 37-42% average open rates and a target 7x LTV-CAC ratio that moved AI Central onto beehiiv's enterprise plan.

Most people building in AI right now are chasing the technology. Alex Fiore is chasing the gap around it.

Generative AI is growing at roughly 40% a year and is on track to pass a trillion dollars within the decade. Yet fewer than 1 in 5 people worldwide have ever used these tools, and while 71% of organizations now use gen AI somewhere, McKinsey finds only 1% of executives would call their rollout mature.

That space between curiosity and execution is where AI Central operates, and where it has built a 300,000-reader media brand on beehiiv. Here is how.

What AI Central Is and Who It Serves

AI Central is a media brand for busy senior professionals and knowledge workers who want to learn how to use AI at work through hands-on, practical tutorials.

Its publications reach north of 300,000 readers, mostly in the US and Europe, across a LinkedIn community and a flagship beehiiv newsletter that powers the entire editorial and content operating system. Readers work in SaaS, consulting, education, and finance, and roughly 3 in 5 identify as 40-plus founders, C-level, or execs deciding on software selection, AI adoption, and training.

Their needs are specific. They do not want just AI explained to them. As Fiore puts it, they want a high-level understanding of new advancements and use cases so they can weigh tradeoffs and drive adoption, and ultimately more sales, inside their organizations.

The Origin Story: A Quant Who Became "the AI Guy"

Alex Fiore, Chief Editor and Founder of AI Central spent eight years working on AI for investment managers at one of the UK's most successful B2B fintechs, with a background rooted in quantitative finance. That turned out to be a precious skillset for building a media brand that has been profitable and cash-positive from day one.

The idea arrived soon after OpenAI released ChatGPT. Everyone immediately grasped what it meant, especially non-technical people, but there was no central place to read tutorials, find how-to guides, and learn from other people's experiences.

"I was learning too in that period, so I started collecting documents, book snippets, guides, and learning materials for myself, building my own library of the resources I wished existed. Soon I became the 'AI guy' my friends came to, and one day one of them said 'you should start a newsletter and give more people access to this."

The Challenge: Outgrowing the Walled Garden

Fiore started on Substack to test and validate the idea with paid subscriptions. As the publication grew and paid subscribers came in, the economics stopped working.

"In the early days of any creator's journey, when revenue is occasional subscriptions in the low hundreds a month, a 10% fee quickly becomes 2-3x the cost of beehiiv's first paid tier."

The fee was only part of it. Fiore also felt the lack of automation, segments, APIs, and proper monetization tools. For someone who wanted to treat the newsletter as a portfolio of content assets, a closed platform was a dead end.

"beehiiv gave me an owned audience, real segmentation, and an API I could build systems on top of, not a walled garden. So the switch was a no-brainer."

AI is one of the most competitive newsletter spaces anywhere, but Fiore says most of his challenges were happy problems. The company grew from almost zero to 60,000 subscribers by mid-2025 and has since 5x'd its total audience reach.

The real difficulty was the business model. AI Central balances several revenue streams at once, each with its own economics, seasonality, and demands on the team.

"The hard part isn't necessarily adding another stream, it's learning how to make them work together instead of cannibalizing each other: deciding, week by week, which one each piece of content should serve. That allocation problem is where my investing background does most of the work."

The Solution: A Newsletter That Became Infrastructure

What surprised Fiore most about beehiiv was how deeply the platform is rooted in data and analytics. Coming from an analytical world, and well before the MCP release, the dashboards let him find his creator-market fit early by testing themes, publishing times, A/B tests, and formats until he found what performed and what he could sustain.

That discipline produced one of the longest streaks on beehiiv: more than 146 weeks and over 449 issues sent.

As the team grew, AI Central built its own content operating system on top of beehiiv. It is a six-stage, AI-assisted pipeline that scores content ideas, suggests monetization angles, allocates, analyzes, and benchmarks performance, wired together through Claude Code, Notion, n8n, and a few other AI tools. MCP access changed the way the team works.

"It basically bakes an expert newsletter analyst into beehiiv's own subscription. Once I realized I could run the entire operation programmatically through beehiiv, the platform stopped being software I used and became infrastructure I built on."

Beyond the API, Fiore's favorite features in order are automations, segments, and digital products. The last one matters most for growth. Lead magnets are central to the strategy, and free digital products accelerated subscriber acquisition.

"The moment beehiiv made products embeddable on the website, the whole acquisition flow got far more efficient: reusable, embeddable, and tied straight into the funnel."

How AI Central Makes Money

Monetization is where Fiore finds the most overlap with managing an investment portfolio. The way a fund diversifies across return streams, a media company diversifies across monetization streams: direct-sold brand deals, the ad network, paid subscriptions, digital products, and affiliate deals.

The mix has shifted dramatically. A year ago, 80% of revenue came from passive monetization like beehiiv Boosts, co-registration, and the ad network. Today those proportions have inverted.

"Active, content-led brand and affiliate partnerships take the lion's share, and that shift alone doubled our revenue. In our experience, you close more deals pitching attributed affiliate revenue, content investments, and a full-funnel GTM integration than pitching open and click-through rates."

beehiiv's own Ad Network still plays a key role. Fiore calls it on-demand, vetted, and stocked with recognizable brands that fill inventory gaps without his team having to sell and report on every placement.

"That's basically free money, and more importantly, it's what lets a new operator self-fund a publication the way we did early on, making beehiiv ROI-positive from the start."

The Numbers

Fiore brought a modeling habit from investing, thinking in margins, benchmarks, and risk-return ratios rather than absolute figures. He credits that mentality for the steady growth that took AI Central from zero to five-figure monthly revenue and then to six-figure years.

AI Central on beehiiv, by the numbers

• Reached 300,000+ readers across LinkedIn and newsletters.
• Grew from nearly zero to 60,000 subscribers by mid-2025, increasing total audience reach by 5x.
• Maintained a 146+ week publishing streak, sending 449+ newsletter issues.
• Consistently achieved 37–42% average open rates.
• Generated $150,000+ in revenue through the beehiiv Ad Network.
• Scaled revenue from $0 to five-figure monthly income and six-figure annual revenue.
• Operated with a 7:1 target LTV:CAC ratio.
• Delivered approximately $40,000 in value back to readers through recommendations, deals, and insights.

Fiore's keystone metric is payback time, how fast a publication earns back its acquisition cost. Hitting and holding a 7x LTV-CAC target is what ultimately moved AI Central onto beehiiv's enterprise plan.

How the Content Strategy Evolved

AI Central started with curation. "Here's what you missed this week" pulled together the links, books, tools, and news readers might have missed. It built trust, but curation alone does not differentiate at scale.

The real early work was testing and developing an original style for tutorials, compilations, deep dives, and comparisons, while moving away from curating content.

"In a sense, the evolution was from aggregating signals to producing it."

Today the biggest editorial efforts go into original tutorials, ebooks, and manuals. The conviction behind that focus is sharp. Fiore describes a widening gap between curiosity and execution on AI, and the people stuck in it as a forgotten demographic: office workers and senior professionals living through real job-security concerns, who want to lead the transformation of their own workflows rather than have it happen to them.

"We want to own that gap, to be the brand that helps people cross from curiosity to execution."

The Most Surprising Result

The biggest surprise was how much of the value lived outside the inbox, and the outsized value of owning an audience. An owned list is a hedge against algorithm risk, which can flash-crash a publication built on social media overnight.

"Instead of just building a following, we ended up building a compounding asset with measurable reach, real revenue, and an audience senior enough that the beehiiv newsletter itself became a credibility instrument in rooms it was never built for: partnership deals, press access, and accelerated capital conversations. The newsletter stopped being the product and became proof."

Giving Back to the Audience

From the beginning, AI Central was built with a financial give-back commitment, returning a slice of revenue to readers. Over the years that has added up to roughly $40,000 in value, between hundreds of free subscriptions to the paid library, giveaways, and gift cards for the most engaged. The brand also spotlights less-visible creators instead of only the loudest names in AI.

Internally, an engagement leaderboard scores opens, clicks, and overall engagement to decide who gets rewarded. Fiore still runs office hours with the most engaged subscribers when he has time, and some of those calls have changed working lives: a teacher building lesson plans with AI, a reader between jobs landing freelance work.

"Could we have squeezed more revenue out of the list by skipping all of this? Almost certainly. But that side of the work can't be measured in ARR, it's measured in something closer to happiness, and I've come to treat it as a personal, non-financial return on a very real investment."

Where AI Central Is Headed

Two big lines of work define the next 12 months. AI Central is closing its first funding round, with new capital going toward accelerating content production and launching its own academy and training solutions, built on proprietary content and infrastructure. At the same time, the team is productizing and replicating the model, building toward a portfolio of properties under the AI Central brand rather than a single newsletter.

Fiore's advice for anyone weighing a newsletter on beehiiv today reflects the same long-game mindset.

"Start before you feel ready. And treat it like building a compounding asset, not only posting content. Pick a real audience and refuse to drift from it. Then use the data beehiiv hands you to build your own benchmarks and stop flying blind. And don't do it only for the money. The give-back compounds in ways the spreadsheet won't show you, and over time, that's the part a competitor can't copy."

Why This Story Matters

beehiiv powers more than 75,000 publishers and over 350 million unique readers, and the platform has sent more than 20 billion emails. AI Central shows what happens when an operator treats those tools as infrastructure rather than software: an owned audience, an open API to build systems on, native monetization through the Ad Network and digital products, and analytics deep enough to run a publication like a portfolio.

Start Using beehiiv

If you want to build a media brand you actually own, beehiiv gives you the same foundation AI Central relies on. Grow an owned audience instead of renting one on social, segment and automate your funnel, monetize through the Ad Network, digital products, and partnerships, and build directly on the API when you are ready to scale.

Start using beehiiv and turn your newsletter into a compounding asset.

About Alex Fiore

AI Central's editorial team is based in London, UK, led by Alex Fiore, Chief Editor and Founder. Alex is a founding member of the San Francisco-based AI Collective and part of the Data and AI Group at the Global Tech Advocates in London. He has taught applied AI in Finance at the academic level, written for several leading industry magazines, and holds an MSc in banking and finance. Before launching AI Central Media, he spent eight years working on AI for investment managers at one of the UK's most successful B2B fintechs, leading go-to-market and international expansion.

About AI Central Media

AI Central is a media brand helping busy senior professionals learn how to use AI at work through hands-on, practical tutorials. Its publications reach 300,000-plus readers across LinkedIn and newsletters in the US and Europe, working in SaaS, consulting, education, and finance. Roughly 3 in 5 are 40-plus founders, C-level, or execs deciding on software selection, AI adoption, and training. Partnering with fast-growing AI companies including ElevenLabs, Luma AI, Gamma, and Replit, AI Central helps B2C and B2B brands develop content and launch lead generation and brand awareness campaigns. Learn more at thecentral.ai.