How Flodesk Is designing a new narrative for startups

For the creators of Flodesk, your inbox is personal.

The San Francisco-based startup, founded in early 2018, is designing emails people love to get. As co-founder Rebecca Shostak says, “Flodesk is a relationship-building software. I want everybody to harness the power of these one-on-one, intimate relationships that they can have with their followers.”

Rebecca’s design background is rooted in rock n’ roll; she began her career designing merchandise for a company that needed, in her words, “a female touch” for the artists on their roster. It was her first exposure to designing for different types of brands—and creating beautiful designs that sold in a variety of styles. These are the skills that Rebecca brought with her on her first solo venture: a template shop designed for popular email platform MailChimp.

“I had always wanted my own business. I’m from Silicon Valley, and I have entrepreneurship in my blood from my dad. I wanted to start my own company. I saw a niche for Photoshop templates for wedding photographers. And there was a huge demand for it,” Rebecca explains. When she ran into customers struggling to implement her designs into the MailChimp platform, a bigger idea was formed: a platform that allows people to create beautiful, branded emails easily. “All email marketing companies were eco-oriented, focused on workflows and integrations. They weren’t focusing on the brand and the design,” Rebecca says. “I was like, ‘I have to do this.’ It was almost a religious calling.”

Meanwhile, Flodesk’s co-founder CEO Martha Bitar was working in customer relationship management (CRM) for small business owners, in a similar market. “Martha was marinating in the same customer ecosystem that I was, just in different lanes,” Rebecca explains. Both Martha and Rebecca sensed a common problem in their world: “We see these people who are making millions of dollars with their services and their website looks amazing, their Instagram looks amazing, their photos look amazing, and their emails suck.”

Designing a new narrative for startups

For Flodesk, it has always been about flipping the narrative. The company has strong roots in design—they were an early leader in dreaming big about how beautiful emails can be. The oxymoron formed by “beautiful” and “emails” built the foundation of what would become Flodesk, according to Rebecca: “We’re taking softer products that, in the past, have been considered clunky, ugly, difficult to use, and just unappealing. For the small business market who’s extremely brand-focused, we’re flipping that on its head and making something that people never thought could be sexy, really sexy.”

But the company’s disruption doesn’t stop at design. When Martha and Rebecca came together to create their prototype around January 2018, they turned to the path relatively untrodden for startups. As Rebecca details: “we thought, what if we pitched this and did it without funding? What if we were able to validate it and get the software going without even taking venture capital money?” Leaning into this concept, by the summer of 2019, Flodesk had a prototype. When an influencer friend of Rebecca’s built and sent an email using Flodesk, adding a plug for it at the bottom, trial requests began flooding in. “Flodesk launched itself long before we had the actual launch,” says Rebecca.

Building a trusted brand through AWS

Flodesk turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a partner from the very beginning—the platform was built on Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). “I can’t imagine Flodesk without AWS intertwined with it,” says Rebecca. “They’re like the giant whose shoulders we’re standing on, in some sense, for our tech.”

In the early days, the founders faced infrastructure problems with a sudden influx of subscribers. As Rebecca details: “we started out with AWS and we built on them. We were so open at the beginning with our policies because we just wanted as many people in the door as possible, but we found that that let a lot of scammers in. We were so brand new, things were going so quickly—we weren’t able to put the proper barriers in place to get the scammers out at first.” Rebecca spent a lot of late nights on the phone with AWS to troubleshoot the issue. “Early on, there were a lot of really close calls,” she explains. “We had moments where we were getting our server shut down because of scamming. But since we’ve worked with AWS and partnered with them to advise us on how to build out a more and more robust trust and safety team, that’s led us to be where we are today. I just can’t imagine our story without AWS in it.”

Tony Silva, Flodesk’s startup portfolio lead at AWS, was there to answer those late-night calls from Rebecca. Tony now partners with Flodesk’s engineering team internationally to troubleshoot any issues that may pop up. As Tony explains, “with Flodesk, our relationship is outside even the tech perspective at this point. It’s about their entire infrastructure. It’s helping them lower their costs, making sure that they’re architected the right way, providing any sort of support, whether it’s a go-to-market or a personal relationship or a touchpoint.”

For small businesses, the future is bright

Today, with 70,000 customers, over $20 million in annual recurring revenue, and 35 team members all over the world, Rebecca is still adjusting to enormous growth: “sometimes I still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. But I think we always had that bootstrap mindset.”

Rebecca attributes a great deal of Flodesk’s success to the company’s founding principles. A focus on problem-solving for their customers continues to guide the company today. As Rebecca says: “we started with a founder idea. We had a product-market fit before we even touched a line of code. Start with the problem, not the solution. We were really focused on this segment of the market that’s been left behind by the legacy players. We wanted to create an experience where you could self-serve, that you weren’t reliant on going back and forth with our team. And one that was affordable too.”

For Rebecca, the future is “wildly exciting” for small businesses. “I really believe that small businesses, and the creative people that run them, are going to own the future. And that future really excites me,” she says. Her outlook for Flodesk is particularly bright: “I want Flodesk to be the household name that they associate with growing business. My vision is that you have a household, you have an Amazon Prime account, you have a small business, and you have a Flodesk account.”

Rebecca’s advice for startup founders? “Be scrappy. Sometimes the best ideas come from the scrappiest of places. Use your imagination and be creative.”