Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
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.
61 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadBuild 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
Is this a bootstrap business or a VC-funded business? I'm just curious.
"we" -> how many co-founders?
How does the licensing work out for a project like this?
[1] https://tiptap.dev
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/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c7810028...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I’m just curious if there’s any research on say charging everyone $1 vs charging 1/10 people $10.
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.
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?)
It has the merit of being true, however.
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.
And your usage is probably going to ingested by Datatrics (their marketing predictive platrform).
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...
Was BEE ever an independent company?
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.
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?
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 :-)
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