How Flodesk Grew from 0 to $27M ARR Without a Sales Team

Launched 2019, Flodesk is an email marketing platform for small businesses. In just 5 years, it has grown from 0 to 27M ARR with zero external funding and without a sales team, a no easy feat for a bootstrapped SaaS company. Throughout their journey to $27M ARR, Flodesk has remained focused on their target customers and used different organic strategies to grow their business to $27M ARR. Their growth journey underlines the importance of solving real customer problems and driving growth through organic channels.

Founding Story

In 2018, Martha was working full-time as Director of Business Development at CRM company called HoneyBook. Her job was very intense, and she often had to work all night and on weekends. Her emotional and physical health was deteriorating due to improper eating habits and a hectic routine.

In her work, Martha came across many small business owners who needed help with designing their emails as well as large companies could. She realized that large companies had specialized teams for designing and marketing. However, small business owners could not afford to own an specialized teams to design and build their emails.

Martha first reached out to Rebecca who already had her email template store which others could use. Rebecca was a prolific graphic designer who previously worked with large clients like Rihanna and Linkin Park before starting her own email template store for marketers.

Upon Martha’s request, Rebecca refused to take additional clients as her existing customers were facing issues with reusing email templates on their email platforms. The email platforms her customers were using were not designed to render the email templates created by Rebecca. This encouraged Martha and Rebecca to partner to solve each other’s customer problems.