How Flodesk CEO Martha Bitar grew Flodesk to $27M revenue and 80K customers in 2024.

Introduction to Rebecca Shostak's background flowes makes email marketing easy as pie from 2011 to 2014 she was selling MailChimp templates doing $ 400 500,000 per year ultimately canva and other tools came in and so templat stopped selling as well but she still had a great built-in base that said hey we'd love to build you know this inside of MailChimp and make the flows easier that prompted her to start going and interviewing folks from her audience pairing up with a team at honeybook and eventually launching the three co-founders put in $90,000 total uh back on launch date before they launch their first paid plan at 19 uh bucks per month they eventually got going and today over 30% of their inbound is powered by affiliate marketing and Word of Mouth marketing they have over 80,000 paying customers Revenue run rate today is about 27 million bucks up from 20 million just a year ago and their $10 million a year was back in 2021 which they hit just it's crazy 18 19 months after launch all here's a cherry on top with no outside funding and just 50 full-time employees for $540,000 of Revenue per employee hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan ladka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's jump into the interview hey folks my guest today is Rebecca shc she is the chief brand officer and founder at flowes launched the company over six years ago after being very active in sort of the graphic design template space from 2011 to 2018 we're going to learn her full story today Rebecca are you ready to take us to the top I so ready let's do it I am stoked you're here I met you via Greg head at saso a week ago and you know I rarely get surprised but he goes you've got to meet the Rebecca I'm like well why do you have to meet her and he goes well she's bootstrapped and she's doing a crap ton of Revenue so I don't want to Origin story of Flodesk and transition from selling MailChimp templates bury the lead what are you at today in terms of Revenue uh we are hovering right around 27 million AR this is incredible okay and and just so people get a growth rate before we dive into your product your background design templates Etc where were you exactly one year go um I oh my goodness I feel like I'm being put on the spot um I believe we were at around we're hovering around 20 okay so sort of 20 now up to about 26 27 yes that's great growth okay guys keep listening we'll hear how she drove that growth growth without raising VC even while her competitors raise a bunch of VC but Rebecca first how did you get into this space six and a half years ago oh my goodness well I mean we can go way back so I think I think um my first job out of college actually it it goes back to that I was hired at this company to be the designer for um the merchandise for a lot of top brands so I was designing for Lincoln Park and Rihanna and Cheryl Crow this was my first job out of college so that was pretty cool and I I would I was living in LA and I would go to Hot Topic and I would see my designs all over um the t-shirts behind the clerks I'd be like oh I I want to buy a few of those and they're like well why do you want to buy those like those are a lot really different bands and I was like oh I designed them and they were like we don't believe you it's like no really I did and uh from from there I I fell in love with being able to design for a lot of different brands and especially marketing design and uh brand design and doing like a lot of different styles um that would excite different people in different verticals and from there I sort of I fell in love with um this idea of creating for lots of different brands and I started another company that was a recurring Revenue company but it was just it was just a little um that I had online where I was selling templates for professional photographers and I would get all these phers Photoshop templates that's right yeah and I would create a lot of different types of templates like pricing and branding for these professional phot wedding photographers especially and then I started getting a lot of requests for MailChimp templates but I wasn't able to actually make a MailChimp template that wasn't really a thing it was either like you had HTML and then you had to package it with images from Photoshop you had to export and then you had the copy like the um the the written pieces of it and you would have to paste these emails together into MailChimp and I sold that as a package but every time I sold a MailChimp template the next day I'd get an all cap super angry you need to give me a refund email from the customer saying like I could not Implement these designs in MailChimp and this this happened from about 2010 to 2014 and I was like wow that is a big gap in the market of people needing really beautiful email marketing that represents their branding and it's not being served by the Legacy players but I was like that's someone else's problem Challenges in the template market and the strategic pivot surely there's going to be a squar space of email that was 2010 to 20 you said 2010 to 2017 14 14 14 when was what was your best year Revenue wise selling those templates are we talking like 50 Grand a year or like 500 Grand a year or more maybe it was it was between four to 500 Grand a year okay so this wasn't like a small business I mean this was plenty for you to live on have a great life yeah I mean it was it was it was really Nifty I would say though that with the onset of canva and a lot of SAS players coming into the space the demand for these one-off Photoshop templates a decrease so it wasn't super sustainable but it was something that uh that created a really nice little lifestyle business okay so what happened in 2014 canvas's coming in your templates are selling less you've identified this key need you haven't built a product for it yet what happened in 2015 so between about so we the the idea of flus I would say it was conceived in 2017 so I had this template shop and then I also started to pitch template shops to other influencers um so I was just just making a lot of creative output and templates for a lot of different brands in different uh spaces and to different audiences but in 2017 that's when I met my co-founder Martha um and we got together and she was working in a company a CRM called honeybook which is CRM for small businesses so she had a lot of overlap with her um with her Market seeing the photographers who a lot of them use honeybook and she was seeing the exact same problem where we would see these huge influencers that were making millions of dollars a year and had the most beautiful Instagram feeds the most gorgeous websites and their emails were freaking ugly like to be completely honest and so she saw from her side and she saw that the uh these amazing influencers were so Savvy with every part of their business email and they were struggling I saw it from my side and we were like somebody's got to do something about this so what was her role at honeybook um I believe she was working in business development okay yeah because I mean that was I'm just going back and our we can do this live when we have 3,300 episodes we had Oz Alan May 4th 2021 on the show one of the honey book Founders and yeah yeah the data he shared I mean they were this wasn't a small company I mean they broke seven uh they broke uh 10 million bucks of Revenue uh in 2021 now over 30 million bucks of Revenue but it sounds like she was on to something even back then because in 2017 when you met they had already I mean they raised a bunch of money so she certainly understood what it was like to work for a VC backed company how did that influence how you guys split equity on day one as co-founders and how you thought about funding your first million of Revenue yeah well we actually have a third co-founder to trong who is in Vietnam and he's our technical co-founder and so um we we split up the the equity um between the three of us going forward and then we also put aside an employee pool so from the beginning it was just the three of us and then um we also had uh some set aside for employees but we we always knew that we wanted to um remain undiluted and keep as much of our shares as possible and also make sure that anybody that we Formation of the founding team and their roles brought on and offered Equity too would feel like really bought into the company and so that was um a big part of not taking on VC now Rebecca did you guys have the tough conversations early on about are we all equal are we not do we just do 30% each didn't have a 9% ESOP pool I mean how did you you know you probably can't...