How The Chief of Staff Network Turned Three Disconnected Channels Into One Motion with beehiiv

At a Glance

Founder
Scott Amenta

Network
The Chief of Staff Network, part of the Sylva portfolio

Channels
The Chief of Staff Podcast, newsletter, and website

Subscribers
30,000+ Chiefs of Staff

Open Rate
~54%

Footprint
25+ local chapters and CoS Connect conferences

Reach
Listeners across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, and beyond

Portfolio
Chief of Staff Network, Tech Ladies, Operators, BizOps Network, Legal Operators, PreSales Collective, and more

Previous Stack
HubSpot, Spotify for Creators, Webflow

Platform
beehiiv, connected to Claude Code via MCP

Scott Amenta built Chief of Staff Network from the actual life of a Chief of Staff.

It’s a lonely, high-context role. You’re often the only one of you in the building, and there isn’t always a playbook to follow. So the Chief of Staff Network needed more than a place to publish content. It needed to create a sense of “these are my people.”

The podcast became the top of that funnel. It’s how someone discovers the community, hears a peer put words to something they’ve been experiencing, and starts to see themselves in the network.

The newsletter deepens that relationship, giving members a recurring reason to stay connected. The website acts as the front door and credibility layer. And the 25+ local chapters and larger CoS Connect conferences turn those digital relationships into real-world connections.

Each channel does a different job at a different depth of commitment: discovery, relationship, belonging.

“The podcast, the newsletter, and the web presence stopped being three projects and became one. Moving to beehiiv collapsed all of that into one motion for us.”

The network needed all three because no single channel takes someone from “I’ve never heard of you” to “this is my professional home.”

Three Tools, Three Islands

Before beehiiv, that strategy ran on a patchwork of tools that didn’t talk to each other.

The podcast lived on Spotify for Creators. It worked well enough as a place to upload audio and distribute it to Apple and Spotify, but that’s where its role ended.

The newsletter previously ran on HubSpot. HubSpot is a capable platform, but it was built around sales pipelines rather than running a community newsletter that people look forward to receiving. The subscribe experience was clunky, and the platform was heavier to operate than the team needed.

The website lived somewhere else again, on Webflow.

The bigger problem wasn’t that any individual tool was bad. It was that the audience was fragmented across three disconnected islands.

Member data lived in one place. Podcast listeners lived somewhere else. The website was disconnected from both.

Consistency becomes difficult when publishing is a chore and you can’t see your audience in a single view.

And anything that adds friction to showing up regularly is a direct threat to the trust you’re trying to build.

When the Role Exploded, the Setup Couldn’t Keep Up

The timing raised the stakes.

Five years ago, you often had to explain what a Chief of Staff even was. Today, it’s one of the most talked-about roles in business, with companies hiring for it deliberately and professionals actively trying to break into the field.

That growth has shown up directly in the audience.

The podcast now reaches listeners around the world, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, and beyond.

But the old setup wasn’t built to capitalize on that momentum.

Spotify and HubSpot could each do their individual jobs, but just couldn’t connect the moment someone discovered the show with the moment they became part of the community.

Every listener who couldn’t easily become a subscriber represented potential community growth the network was quietly leaving on the table.

One Motion Instead of Three Projects

Moving to beehiiv changed how the team approaches publishing.

Scott isn’t clicking through a CMS anymore. He’s working through Claude Code connected to beehiiv over MCP, directly inside his custom Chief of Staff workspace.

Once an episode is recorded and beehiiv processes the transcript, that connection allows him to generate the entire content package around it:

• Title options
• Episode descriptions
• Show notes
• Social posts
• Thank-you and promotional emails for the guest
• A first draft of notes for the newsletter

beehiiv's podcast feature becomes the system of record on one side, while the workspace becomes the place where the content is drafted and refined.

Importantly, there’s still human oversight and judgment at every step.

This isn’t a “generate and publish” button.

Claude creates strong first drafts quickly. Scott makes the decisions.

He chooses the title, tightens the show notes so they sound like the network, decides what the newsletter leads with, and approves every word that goes to a guest.

And because everything lives on beehiiv, publishing becomes one motion.

The episode goes out as a newsletter to the network’s 30,000+ subscribers, lives on the content hub at newsletter.chiefofstaff.network, and surfaces on the main site on Webflow.

What used to require coordinating across three separate platforms now feels like one connected publishing workflow.

Turning Reach Into a Real Asset

For a niche B2B show, raw download numbers can undersell the value of the audience.

And, honestly, they can scare off partners who are accustomed to seeing consumer podcasts with millions of downloads.

It’s made up almost entirely of Chiefs of Staff and operators who sit close to decision-makers and often have significant influence over what their companies buy.

The integration with the newsletter gives Scott a much stronger way to communicate that value.

Instead of: “Here’s how many podcast downloads we get.”

The conversation becomes: “Here’s a defined, verifiable audience of tens of thousands of Chiefs of Staff, engaging at a ~54% open rate, that you can reach across a podcast, a newsletter, and a website.”

That reframes the pitch from reach as volume to reach as access.

A sponsor isn’t simply buying impressions. They’re getting access to a trusted relationship with a specific, hard-to-reach, high-value professional audience.

It also raises the caliber of guests.

When the podcast was just an audio feed floating on its own, it was genuinely difficult to communicate the broader value of appearing on it.

“Come on my podcast” lands very differently from:

“Come be featured to a community of 30,000+ Chiefs of Staff, in a newsletter with a ~54% open rate, on a real website, with a professional brand around it.”

That makes the ask easier.

It raises the caliber of guests who say yes, makes them more likely to share the episode, and extends the network’s reach even further.

The Portfolio Effect

The gains compound across Sylva. The team runs multiple communities on beehiiv, including:

• Chief of Staff Network
• Tech Ladies
• Operators
• BizOps Network
• Legal Operators
• PreSales Collective
• And more

The leverage comes from running those communities on the same underlying stack rather than creating a different Frankenstein of tools for every community.

A workflow or growth tactic that works for one community can be replicated across others in an afternoon.

When you’re operating a portfolio, that consistency becomes the whole game.

Operational overhead doesn’t need to scale linearly with the number of communities you’re running.

That’s what allows a relatively small team to operate a growing portfolio while maintaining a high standard across each one.

The Takeaway for Every Community Builder

Scott’s advice for professional community builders running a podcast and newsletter on separate platforms is direct:

The fragmentation is probably costing you in two ways you can’t see because the tools themselves hide it.

1. Growth

Every disconnected channel creates a potential dead end.

A listener who can’t easily become a subscriber is potential community growth you may never even get the opportunity to measure.

2. Time and consistency

When publishing means copying and pasting the same episode across three different tools, you publish less, later, and less consistently.

And consistency is the foundation of community.

Moving to beehiiv collapsed all of that into one motion.

The podcast, newsletter, and web presence stopped being three separate projects and became one connected system.

Start Using beehiiv

The Chief of Staff Network is proof that a community’s channels don’t have to live on separate islands.

With beehiiv as the system of record, connected to the tools the team already works in, a podcast, newsletter, and website can become one consistent publishing motion.

That motion turns discovery into relationship, and relationship into belonging.

If you’re building a professional community, beehiiv gives you the publishing engine, audience data, and monetization tools to run every channel as one system.