33 ms·

Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here

501 points by massiarri 5y ago

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 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 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.

umen 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  If Italy, ‘we’ probably refers to everyone at the company.
  - massiarri 5y ago
    Yes, that's right!
- massiarri 5y ago
  BEE is a startup within a larger company (https://www.growens.io/ 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.
omgitsabird 5y ago
This looks like it was made with TinyMCE 5. How does the licensing work out for a project like this?
- hanspagel 5y ago
  If you’re looking for a modern FOSS alternative, try Tiptap[1]. [1] https://tiptap.dev https://tiptap.dev
  - tentacleuno 5y ago
    I just looked and the community is hosted on Discord, and Discord only. Seriously, what is it with FOSS projects and Discord?
    - hanspagel 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 https://matrix.org [1]: https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c78100287f1 https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c7810028...
kumarm 5y ago
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.
- skrebbel 5y ago
  PR can be nice to read nonetheless. I don't think HN has a rule against PR.
- massiarri 5y ago
  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.
margofx 5y ago
Let's spread positivity! This is great, I do hope that you will continue to strive your way to greater heights.
- massiarri 5y ago
  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.
jmnicolas 5y ago
You're welcome. Let me give you my address so you can send me a "thank you" check ;)
thecleaner 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Thanks for the kind words and for the best wishes. I agree: cannot believe it's been 7 years already!!
lvice 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 :-)
jbverschoor 5y ago
So that's on average $1.30 per session
- bagels 5y ago
  Month vs year, closer to 0.11?
  - jbverschoor 5y ago
    Ahh and annual revenue.
    - massiarri 5y ago
      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).
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
Massimo, so good to see you here! Congrats on BEE's success, and also well done on this nice post on HN.
- massiarri 5y ago
  Thanks Simone. Great to hear from you as well. It's been a great ride with BEE, and we're just getting started!! :-)
ghoomketu 5y ago
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.
- mritchie712 5y ago
  This is especially true for "drip" onboarding emails. Over styled onboarding emails get completely ignored.
- massiarri 5y ago
  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.
ioulian 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Thank YOU for being a customer!!
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TheJoeMan 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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?)
Maven911 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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-arrigoni/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/less-friction-key-massimo-arr...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tlogan 5y ago
I’m confused. Isn’t BEE owned by Growens (which was mailup)? Was BEE ever an independent company?
- massiarri 5y ago
  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.
mdasen 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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/ https://beefree.io/get-in-touch/ Thanks again!
  - mdasen 5y ago
    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?
gwbrooks 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 :-)
ericpauley 5y ago
Congrats, Massimo! Well deserved.
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501 points by massiarri 5y ago

umen 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago

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 5y ago
If Italy, ‘we’ probably refers to everyone at the company.
- massiarri 5y ago
  Yes, that's right!
massiarri 5y ago
BEE is a startup within a larger company (https://www.growens.io/ 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.

omgitsabird 5y ago

This looks like it was made with TinyMCE 5. How does the licensing work out for a project like this?

hanspagel 5y ago
If you’re looking for a modern FOSS alternative, try Tiptap[1]. [1] https://tiptap.dev https://tiptap.dev
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  I just looked and the community is hosted on Discord, and Discord only. Seriously, what is it with FOSS projects and Discord?
  - hanspagel 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 https://matrix.org [1]: https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c78100287f1 https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c7810028...

kumarm 5y ago

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.

skrebbel 5y ago
PR can be nice to read nonetheless. I don't think HN has a rule against PR.
massiarri 5y ago
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.

margofx 5y ago

Let's spread positivity! This is great, I do hope that you will continue to strive your way to greater heights.

massiarri 5y ago
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.

jmnicolas 5y ago

You're welcome. Let me give you my address so you can send me a "thank you" check ;)

thecleaner 5y ago

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 5y ago
Thanks for the kind words and for the best wishes. I agree: cannot believe it's been 7 years already!!

lvice 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 :-)

jbverschoor 5y ago

So that's on average $1.30 per session

bagels 5y ago
Month vs year, closer to 0.11?
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  Ahh and annual revenue.
  - massiarri 5y ago
    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).

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

Massimo, so good to see you here! Congrats on BEE's success, and also well done on this nice post on HN.

massiarri 5y ago
Thanks Simone. Great to hear from you as well. It's been a great ride with BEE, and we're just getting started!! :-)

ghoomketu 5y ago

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.

mritchie712 5y ago
This is especially true for "drip" onboarding emails. Over styled onboarding emails get completely ignored.
massiarri 5y ago
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.

ioulian 5y ago

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 5y ago
Thank YOU for being a customer!!

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TheJoeMan 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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?)

Maven911 5y ago

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 5y ago
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-arrigoni/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/less-friction-key-massimo-arr...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tlogan 5y ago

I’m confused. Isn’t BEE owned by Growens (which was mailup)? Was BEE ever an independent company?

massiarri 5y ago
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.

mdasen 5y ago

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 5y ago
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/ https://beefree.io/get-in-touch/ Thanks again!
- mdasen 5y ago
  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?

gwbrooks 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 :-)

ericpauley 5y ago

Congrats, Massimo! Well deserved.

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