[HN Gopher] Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started righ...
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Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
At BEE we develop visual builders for emails, landing pages, and
more. We recorded over 5,214,407 sessions of our builders in
hundreds of software applications last month. As a company, we
recently passed $7m in annual recurring revenue. And it all started
with this post on HN exactly seven years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8474744 The Hacker News
community took time to look at what we were doing, and provided
honest and useful feedback that got us going on the right track.
And we want to say THANK YOU!! Our website looked very different
back then, but the 'core' was there: a visual builder to let anyone
design an email, easily, quickly, with no signup, nothing to fill
out, just the product. That experience remains the same today, and
we stuck with it because of comments like this one we received that
October 18, 2014, right here on HN: "Massive props for letting me
play around with it without having to sign up or enter any data."
Now there are more features, more things you can do with our
products, thousands of customers that have chosen BEE, but the core
remains the same. You can still go to beefree.io
(https://beefree.io), click on 'Start designing', and get into the
product with 2 clicks. And today there are over 600 SaaS
applications that have embedded our visual builders into their
product because we took to heart some other feedback we received
that very day on HN: "I've been looking for a good email editor
for a while now. Any chance of BeeFree being embeddable, either as
a service or open source?" We could keep going, but you get the
idea: we're truly, deeply grateful that many of you, on October 18,
2014, took time out of your day to check out what we were doing,
and share your thoughts. We never forgot. From all of us at BEE,
thank you so much!!! Massimo Arrigoni CEO BEE Content Design, Inc.
Author : massiarri
Score : 443 points
Date : 2021-10-18 04:23 UTC (18 hours ago)
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Massimo, so good to see you here! Congrats on BEE's success, and
| also well done on this nice post on HN.
| massiarri wrote:
| Thanks Simone. Great to hear from you as well. It's been a
| great ride with BEE, and we're just getting started!! :-)
| umen wrote:
| In fact Amazing story ...
|
| Build saas around specific need .. visually designing emails ..
|
| can you share some more about your technical stack back then and
| today ?
|
| also how % of this 7 millon is for hosting and third party
| services ? Thanks
| massiarri wrote:
| We literally re-wrote the whole thing from the ground up 3
| times LOL. At the start it was a JS app built with Jquery. Then
| we moved to AngularJS (1.x). Finally we decided to rewrite it
| again with React. A lot of Python in the backend.
| langitbiru wrote:
| That's great! I'm happy for you.
|
| Is this a bootstrap business or a VC-funded business? I'm just
| curious.
|
| "we" -> how many co-founders?
| Aeolun wrote:
| If Italy, 'we' probably refers to everyone at the company.
| massiarri wrote:
| Yes, that's right!
| massiarri wrote:
| BEE is a startup within a larger company
| (https://www.growens.io/). The parent company funded the
| startup. At the very beginning, it was a team of 6 (2 of which
| part-time), if I remember correctly.
| ghoomketu wrote:
| Great success story. For me personally, I've always found that
| plain text emails get a much higher engagement rate than the best
| designed newsletter.
| massiarri wrote:
| Thanks for the note. Email is such a versatile tool: all kinds
| of use cases and all sorts of ways to address those use cases.
| You're absolutely right that - for some of the use cases -
| plain text is the way to go.
|
| BTW: BEE is now a visual builder for more than emails. In fact,
| going with a couple of from a landing page to an email (and
| vice versa), is one of the really cool things you can do with
| it.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| This is especially true for "drip" onboarding emails. Over
| styled onboarding emails get completely ignored.
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| Maven911 wrote:
| That is awesome. If I may - What were you biggest business
| challenges you learned in your journey? And where do you see the
| future of email design?
| massiarri wrote:
| There are so many, but a key one is that reducing the distance
| between what you created, and the people for whom you created
| it, really does pay off: more adoption, more feedback, more
| clarity on what's going on. Call it product-led growth, call it
| removing friction, or whatever else. If you're interested on
| that concept, here are some more thoughts:
| https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/less-friction-key-massimo-arr...
| [deleted]
| ioulian wrote:
| Great Job! As a developer who hates slicing emails manually (and
| testing them), I use only BeeFree for creating them (for at least
| 6 years I think). Thank you and good luck!
| massiarri wrote:
| Thank YOU for being a customer!!
| thecleaner wrote:
| This is such a cool idea. I cannot believe this is 7 years old
| and implemented already. Well done and best of luck to your
| company !
| massiarri wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words and for the best wishes. I agree:
| cannot believe it's been 7 years already!!
| lvice wrote:
| I've used BEE editor many times before, and I've always always
| loved it.
|
| When I found out the company was founded in Italy (my home
| country) I was very pleasantly surprised, as tech companies with
| such well designed products are very rare over here. Building a
| friction-less editor for engaging, reliable email layouts is a
| complicated engineering problem, and what your team built is
| absolutely outstanding.
|
| Good job, really :) the company success is fully deserved.
| massiarri wrote:
| Thanks so much for the kind words. Truly appreciated. And yes,
| most of our product and development team is still Italy-based,
| across many regions of Italy :-)
| jmnicolas wrote:
| You're welcome. Let me give you my address so you can send me a
| "thank you" check ;)
| mdasen wrote:
| This looks really cool. I can't find anything on your website
| about any license that the templates are offered under. I'd love
| to use this, but I know the first thing that people at my work
| are going to ask me is how the content is licensed. It's possible
| that it's somewhere and I'm just not seeing it.
|
| The ToS says:
|
| > Nothing in this Agreement grants any right, title or interest
| in or to (including any license under) any Intellectual Property
| Rights in or relating to the Software
|
| Are the templates part of "the Software" and so I don't have any
| license to the templates? I'm not allowed "to access the source
| code of the Software...or create derivative works based on the
| Software" so am I allowed to modify the the source code of the
| templates and use that?
|
| I kinda know that you don't mean that I can't use the templates.
| I just know that I'm going to get hit with the "can we really use
| these". Maybe my place is too worried about stuff, but I'm a
| little surprised that there isn't terms of use or a license
| around the templates. Are they public domain?
|
| Bee Plugin looks awesome, but I'd love to know what the situation
| is around the templates given that I know I'm going to be asked
| that.
|
| Also, just as an FYI, the editor launches with the copyright
| notice showing MailUp and it looks like you're now Growens.
| massiarri wrote:
| Thanks for the note and for your interest in what we do! You
| can use the templates freely to design emails and pages on
| beefree.io. If you want to embed our visual builders in your
| application (i.e. you want to use BEE Plugin), and you also
| want to create a template catalog within your application, you
| can purchase our template catalog (all of it or a portion of
| it). I would recommend getting in touch with our team for that
| so that they can give you all the details:
| https://beefree.io/get-in-touch/ Thanks again!
| mdasen wrote:
| The problem here is that I don't know what the limits are to
| communicate them to others.
|
| In the UI, I can design a free email and export it. The UI
| doesn't allow me to remove the BEE attribution, but I could
| easily remove it after exporting. Is that allowed? Am I
| allowed to modify the design outside of the beefree.io
| interface?
|
| If we're offering a product that sends emails for people, can
| I build a generic email off one of the templates and use that
| for each client?
| massiarri wrote:
| Yes, absolutely.
| nolok wrote:
| Your question seems to be along the line of "you do know I
| can use this to make money for free?"
|
| Their goal as I understand it is "yes, but we will make it
| so cool and easy and reliable after a while you will want
| to pay for the extra to make even more money"
| tlogan wrote:
| I'm confused. Isn't BEE owned by Growens (which was mailup)?
|
| Was BEE ever an independent company?
| massiarri wrote:
| Correct. It's a wholly-owned subsidiary of Growens. It started
| as a project within MailUp, the email service provider that is
| still a big part of Growens. The project grew, and so it became
| a separate business unit within the group, based in the US.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| So that's on average $1.30 per session
| bagels wrote:
| Month vs year, closer to 0.11?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Ahh and annual revenue.
| massiarri wrote:
| Yes, you're right on. But in those 5.2 million sessions
| there's everything, including the many applications that
| use our embeddable editors free of charge.
|
| So, it's a cool metric, but it doesn't tell the complete
| story.
|
| Actual monthly ARPA at BEE is around $27 for our BEE Pro
| product (hosted email & page design suite) and over $600
| for our BEE Plugin offering (embeddable email, landing page
| & popup builder).
| margofx wrote:
| Let's spread positivity! This is great, I do hope that you will
| continue to strive your way to greater heights.
| massiarri wrote:
| Thanks so much for the kind note. Yes, my intention was
| precisely to celebrate the positive impact that the original
| thread on HN (exactly 7 years ago today!!) had on our business,
| as we were just getting started. This is not "bs", we're truly
| grateful.
| omgitsabird wrote:
| This looks like it was made with TinyMCE 5.
|
| How does the licensing work out for a project like this?
| hanspagel wrote:
| If you're looking for a modern FOSS alternative, try Tiptap[1].
|
| [1] https://tiptap.dev
| tentacleuno wrote:
| I just looked and the community is hosted on Discord, and
| Discord only. Seriously, what is it with FOSS projects and
| Discord?
| hanspagel wrote:
| We have GitHub issues (works fine for bugs, not so much for
| discussions), GitHub discussions (no one is there), added
| Discord by public demand (I hate it, but it's working well.
| People help each other there) and plan to add Flarum as an
| open discussion board soon.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| Have you tried Matrix[0], out of curiosity? I see quite a
| lot of FOSS projects on that (with the users to back it
| up too, obviously) and it seems to work quite well. I'm
| in quite a few established projects on there.
|
| You can bridge your Discord channel(s) to Matrix rooms,
| so it's basically win-win unless you rely on some
| proprietary custom verification system (e.g. Reactiflux's
| complex system), although with a little work you can re-
| create said verification on the Matrix side.
|
| EDIT: I apologise if the tone of my original comment came
| off as snarky, by the way. It's just so annoying and
| tiring seeing open-source projects require people be on
| some downright unethical[1] proprietary chat platform.
|
| [0]: https://matrix.org [1]: https://gist.github.com/Rapp
| tz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c7810028...
| VRay wrote:
| Is there a way to use Matrix without signing up for it?
| That's my main problem right now
|
| You can usually get some use out of Discord by just
| clicking an invitation link, but for Matrix it looks like
| I have to create an account with some shady unknown
| social networking entity
| Arathorn wrote:
| right now most matrix servers have guest access disabled
| due to spam risk.
| thujlife wrote:
| Do you get paid for pushing matrix?
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for breaking the site
| guidelines and for posting too many unsubstantive
| comments.
|
| If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email
| hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that
| you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| toilari wrote:
| Disclaimer: this is just guesswork from my own experiences.
| I do not actually have experience in running the community
| of a FOSS project.
|
| I'd guess its lowering the barrier of entry by providing a
| "casual" platform for communication. Discord is widespread
| enough for many people to already have an account. Joining
| new servers is dead simple.
|
| Also, collaborator retention could be another thing. I'd
| argue it is easier to keep less active contributors hang
| along when you have this sort of "community" where people
| do other, unrelated stuff (post memes and discuss unrelated
| topics) alongside the actual work on the project.
| gwbrooks wrote:
| After seeing Chamaileon drop their free tier earlier this year
| for charges that begin at $150/mo, your pricing model is a breath
| of sanity. Cheers to your success!
| massiarri wrote:
| We believe in reducing to a minimum the friction to get
| started. So, I seriously doubt that we will ever have a paywall
| to get going.
|
| In fact, it's more likely that we double-down on free access
| going forward: the revenue comes (and will continue to come)
| from those that need more. When you need "more", you're
| typically willing & happy to pay for it. Pretty much as simple
| as that :-)
| kumarm wrote:
| Nice.
|
| I remember listening to Nathan Latka podcast about the same
| company earlier today? Seems like a PR exercise? None the less,
| great achievement.
|
| Others asking whether bootstrap or vc-funded, From the podcast it
| appears they are part a publicly traded European company.
| massiarri wrote:
| Believe it or not, it's a complete coincidence. Nathan
| interviewed me on September 23rd, and we had no control on when
| the interview would actually be published on his podcast.
| skrebbel wrote:
| PR can be nice to read nonetheless. I don't think HN has a rule
| against PR.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| Could anyone share the economics of letting people use it for
| completely free? Do you charge a lot for the people who do
| convert to subscription? What kinds of things can you withhold
| for the paid version?
|
| I'm just curious if there's any research on say charging everyone
| $1 vs charging 1/10 people $10.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Even a $1 fee scares off 98% of users. The friction between
| FREE and ANYTHING BUT FREE is really really high, and a lot
| more than the friction between $1 and $2. I think for many SaaS
| platforms it wouldn't be worth it.
|
| If you are doing a free tier, the next level up likely should
| be at least $5-$10 a month. Or you are overcoming a giant
| hurdle of getting someone to pay, only for $0.55 after payment
| processing fees.
|
| * Some sites for sure do the $1-$2 thing, but it seems like not
| a best practice in general.
| cxr wrote:
| Following logic like this is why so many aspiring
| entrepreneurs don't have more paying customers, and it's
| _the_ source of ad-supported everything.
|
| Want a healthy online economy of individual consumers that
| isn't bifurcated between people who might pay because it's
| related to their one main hobby/business vs the masses who do
| everything else on Facebook and YouTube? Then let them have a
| way to give you 20 bucks for what they would have consumed
| over the next year on your free tier.
|
| Instead of letting me give you 20 bucks one time to try
| something that looks interesting, which is an easy decision
| to make, you demand that your customer base divide themselves
| between casual users who will never leave the forever free
| tier because your prices won't let them and your billing plan
| immediately+ brings to mind thoughts about the overhead of
| trying to cancel something that turns out not to be worth the
| price tag, vs wantrepreneurs who can rationalize a recurring
| expense at the same price as a year of Amazon Prime because
| they see it as the cost of doing business since they "know"
| they're eventually going to win the startup lottery.
|
| + Autopay availability should feel like an easter egg that
| people can seek out and enable and get a sense of
| satisfaction from because it makes them feel productive. If
| you're handling it in a way that makes it a source of
| anxiety, then you're fucking up. Don't look around and say
| "everyone else is doing it". If there's a known problem (like
| "it's really hard converting people into paying customers" is
| a problem) and everyone else is doing the same thing, that's
| your signal to not do that thing. (How do _so_ many aspiring
| capitalists not get this?)
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > Following logic like this is why so many aspiring
| entrepreneurs don't have more paying customers, and it's
| _the_ source of ad-supported everything.
|
| It has the merit of being true, however.
| massiarri wrote:
| If it's a B2C model, then ad-supported might be the way
| to go, but if it's B2B, there are lots and lots of great
| examples of making things work. You definitely need to
| figure out the math about the incremental cost of
| additional free users vs. the margin generated by those
| that pay. But assuming the math holds, the product-led
| model works wonders.
|
| From Zoom to Calendly, from HubSpot to Monday.com, the
| free tier generates an enormous user base that leads not
| only to upgrades, but also to a fantastic feedback loop
| that makes the product stronger and stronger.
|
| In the space where we operate - the democratization of
| design - the most successful example is by far Canva. It
| has over 99% of users that are on the free plan, but with
| 60m users, that 1% is golden, and generates $1b in ARR.
| Melanie Perkins recently shared some of those numbers and
| their journey here: https://medium.com/canva/a-note-to-
| the-canva-community-1d4b0...
|
| So, in the end, it's all about making sure that small %
| of customers that ARE willing to pay, pay you enough to
| make it all work. It sounds obvious, but it takes a lot
| of time to figure it out (we certainly do not have all
| the answers yet, even after 7 years). But here's the key:
| among the large amount of free users lies the very
| audience you need to listen to in order to determine
| _what_ people are willing to pay for. That discovery
| process ends up being the game changer.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I definitely can think of examples of free -> paid being
| enormously expensive (Dropbox?). But is it a required
| result of bifurcating the customer base?
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I like your thoughts on how the free<->notFree is the large
| hurdle, and that's why incremental cost increases are
| absorbed
| tlogan wrote:
| BEE editor is a part of Growens. I believe key to the business
| model is upsell to other Growens services (MailUp, Datatrics,
| etc.)
|
| And your usage is probably going to ingested by Datatrics
| (their marketing predictive platrform).
| massiarri wrote:
| No, the model is the product-led growth model. For example,
| take our BEE Pro product: we do tens of thousands of monthly
| users of the free editor at beefree.io, of which over 10,000
| become free trial users of BEE Pro every month, and of them
| hundreds convert into paying customers, every month.
|
| Similarly with our embeddable visual builders: you can get
| started completely free of charge, then move up to a paid
| plan when you need more. And with this product there are
| actually many that "need more" from the get-go, so they get
| in touch with our sales team to make sure that the product is
| a good fit, do a proof-of-concept at no charge, and then go
| live.
|
| Some more thoughts on being product-led here, if you are
| interested, here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/product-led-
| vs-product-focuse...
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| Thank you so much for sharing the ballpark
| numbers/percentages of the free->paid funnel. I'm not
| starting a competing mail application (haha) so my use case
| might be different but it's very useful for comparison.
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