👋 Hi Reader,

I am a big fan of builders, who can ship product fast.

I have been working in product for 2 decades now, and I sincerely believe CEOs who can ship fast, do well and last longer in business. Period.

So when I see Tyler Denk and his team of builders at beehiiv ship, my eyes water. I have not seen an org ship this fast and at scale, the sole exception being Anthropic with Claude.

Take for instance, all the features beehiiv has shipped just in the past 8 weeks. I had covered their webinar and podcast announcements briefly in our previous issues, but I wanted to dedicate this issue to one key capability they shipped: MCPs.

What on earth are MCPs, and why should I care?

Anthropic developed the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard in Nov 2024, to allow AI tools to connect to outside applications.

Since then, over 10,000 companies have embraced the MCP server standard to allow external apps to talk with their core capabilities in simple English with AI tools.

Don't APIs do that already?

Yes. And Not quite. Let me explain.

When a software company like Stripe provides their APIs, they provide them with extensive developer documentation in tow.

APIs require a very structured format to request information, and provided a structured response in return. Occasionally, they may also return terse error messages, which requires the developer to resort to the documentation to understand what's going on.

And that worked fine for the last decade.

But more non-technical creators and builders are spinning up interactions within their AI tools, and they don't have the time or the inclination to read and comprehend technical docs.

Here's the clincher:

These builders may not know exactly what they want in a structured format, but they would like to explore the possibilities of the platform, in simple English.

Enter dynamic AI interactions, via MCP

With MCPs, you get to extract information from an app by invoking it in plain language. The prompt that you use in ChatGPT (or any other AI tool) would then connect to the app of choice, and may choose to invoke APIs and other tools within that app to perform the required action, and respond in the format that you requested.

What changed here from APIs to MCP?

The primary mode of interaction (your AI chat of choice)

AND the dynamic nature of requesting and getting the information you needed

WITHOUT worrying about the technical nature of the request(s) happening behind the scenes on the app.

Is it fraught with risk?

Yes. Not all MCP servers are securely built to allow rightful access to the data it exposes through an MCP capability.

Does it open up possibilities, that never existed until now?

Oh yes.

If you have ever wondered what it feels like to send out a newsletter from your AI tool, versus keeping 20+ open tabs to build out your newsletter edition, that just became a reality.

Auth0 wrote a wonderful blog on the tradeoffs on using MCPs vs APIs. I recommend reading this article below.

All eyes on beehiiv

The companies choosing to build MCP servers for their capabilities understand one thing well:

With AI chat usage, their customers will eventually stop coming to their user interface to interact, and instead let an AI tool or AI agent invoke their app capabilities remotely through a prompt calling their tools in plain language.

Beehiiv is the first among the major newsletter platforms to not just understand that concept, but to build furiously to drive that behavioral change in their creator audience.

Why drive this change?

Because Tyler and his team understands that their creator audience may or may not have a large team, but they are all using AI chops to drive their content operations.

So it makes sense to lean into that adoption full-tilt, than try to resist it.

Do these technical platform moves throw you for a loop, as you start your newsletter journey? If you are starting your newsletter journey today as a creator, I would be happy to be a sounding board for you.

Hit ‘Reply’ on this email, or send a note to marketing@letterstack.co.

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