Lemon Press is a Mongolia-based financial newsroom. Co-founders Ankhbayar Tserenvandan and Zolbayar Enkhbaatar run a 16-person team. Beehiiv published the write-up on 7 April 2025. Kanishka Kumawat wrote it. This is a vendor case study.
They used Mailchimp for the Mongolian newsletter from September 2020. After about a month of testing Beehiiv, they moved both publications.
If you are looking at the same route, start with the Mailchimp → Beehiiv playbook. Beehiiv’s Mailchimp guide is the generic path. Lemon Press’s public story is about pricing and cadence, not about the CSV.
Two lists, two jobs
Lemon Press is the Mongolian-language business newsletter. Inside Mongolia is the English-language one, aimed at foreigners and investors. The Beehiiv page says Lemon Press was sending about 22 to 25 emails a month.
Their about page now lists more than 37,000 subscribers on the daily Mongolian edition and more than 4,000 on weekly Inside Mongolia. Those are Lemon Press’s current site numbers, not figures from the Beehiiv interview.
Lemon Press makes money from branded content. Inside Mongolia was not monetized when Beehiiv published the story.
Why Mailchimp stopped fitting
They stayed on Mailchimp for years. The complaints they named were operational.
Support was hard to reach on their plan. The content builder felt slow. The price tiers did not match a newsroom that sends most weekdays. Twenty-two to twenty-five sends a month pushed them into extra costs. The jumps between tiers felt too large to swallow.
That is a volume problem. Mailchimp’s list-based pricing plus send limits punish a daily product more than a monthly one.
The page does not publish the old Mailchimp bill or the new Beehiiv bill, so I am not quoting a saving.
Why Beehiiv
Ankhbayar had been reading Tyler Denk’s writing about Morning Brew products. They tested Beehiiv for about a month, then moved both newsletters.
The feature they called out later was access. They liked being able to talk to senior people at Beehiiv. That is a vendor-page quote about support, not a deliverability number.
They also said Beehiiv let them stop worrying about the platform and write. I am leaving that as their wording on a Beehiiv page.
What they did not write down
Beehiiv does not describe the export, the import, or a dual-run. We only know they tested for a month and then committed.
Beehiiv’s current docs are more specific than the case study. You export the Mailchimp audience as CSV, then upload it under Settings → Subscribers Import. Beehiiv asks you to confirm that every address opted in. Tags and custom fields can map. By default, Beehiiv stamps today’s date as the subscription date. If you want the original Mailchimp signup dates, you import first and then ask support to backfill them.
Beehiiv also tells you to keep unengaged people out of the first two to four weeks of sends. Their example is Mailchimp contact ratings of 1 or 2. You can exclude that segment in the post builder, or drop those rows before import.
Content is a second job. Beehiiv can pull Mailchimp campaigns if you connect the account. The importer only supports campaigns built in Mailchimp’s New Email Builder from 2022 on. Legacy-builder issues stay behind. Automations and embed forms get rebuilt. A custom sending domain can move over with Beehiiv’s Entri DNS helper.
Two publications means two audiences, two languages, and two sending cadences. Map those before you upload one CSV. A merged import would mix Mongolian daily readers with English weekly readers.
The playbook already treats suppressions, journeys, forms, and sender authentication as work you plan. Lemon Press does not cover those, so they stay out of the gain column.
If you need to go back, the reverse playbook is Beehiiv → Mailchimp.
What I would copy
Count sends per month before you count subscribers. Their trigger was cadence cost, not list size.
Keep the two languages as two publications, or at least two segments with their own signup paths. Do not pour both Mailchimp audiences into one Beehiiv list and sort it later.
Export subscribed, unsubscribed, cleaned, and complained contacts as four files. Import only the active ones. Hold the low Mailchimp ratings out of the first month of Beehiiv sends.
Set the default Beehiiv template before you import the archive. After import, styling is per post. Legacy Mailchimp campaigns will not come across, so budget time to rebuild those by hand.
The Mailchimp → Beehiiv playbook is the checklist I would run. Use the Beehiiv interview for the high-cadence pricing complaint, and remember it is a vendor page.