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

[massiarri]

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.

[lvice]

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]

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 :-)

[langitbiru]

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?

[massiarri]

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.

[Aeolun]

If Italy, ‘we’ probably refers to everyone at the company.

[ghoomketu]

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]

This is especially true for "drip" onboarding emails. Over styled onboarding emails get completely ignored.

[massiarri]

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.

[margofx]

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

[massiarri]

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.

[mdasen]

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]

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!

[TheJoeMan]

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]

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.

[tlogan]

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).

[umen]

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]

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.

[omgitsabird]

This looks like it was made with TinyMCE 5.

How does the licensing work out for a project like this?

[hanspagel]

If you’re looking for a modern FOSS alternative, try Tiptap[1].

[1] https://tiptap.dev

[gwbrooks]

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]

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 :-)

[ioulian]

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]

Thank YOU for being a customer!!

[tlogan]

I’m confused. Isn’t BEE owned by Growens (which was mailup)?

Was BEE ever an independent company?

[massiarri]

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.

[Maven911]

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]

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...

[thecleaner]

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]

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

[simonebrunozzi]

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

[massiarri]

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

[ericpauley]

Congrats, Massimo! Well deserved.

[jbverschoor]

So that's on average $1.30 per session

[bagels]

Month vs year, closer to 0.11?

[kumarm]

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]

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]

PR can be nice to read nonetheless. I don't think HN has a rule against PR.