Massimo Arrigoni grew up in Milan, Italy, and moved to California 27 years ago to create software products and start a family, eventually moving to the San Francisco area in Silicon Valley. While leading product at the software company MailUp, a popular Italian email marketing software, his team built and tested a better visual editor for creating email templates and website landing pages. The free software tool called BEE (“Best Email Editor”) became popular and a new product line was born.
BEE end users love the modern and easy-to-use no-code editor which doesn’t require email or credit card to use the product for free. The company also sells to SaaS developers who want to embed the BEE builder into their own apps instead of building their own visual editors. BEE is growing with no paid advertising or marketing spend. New users find their free template library and start to use the product instantly with a frictionless experience.
Businesses now pay for the BEE Pro solution making up about half of company revenue and embedded plug-in makes up the rest. BEE is now a standalone company owned by parent Growens with 80 employees and over $10M in annual recurring revenues. The BEE visual editor is used by 400,000 users in over 8 million monthly sessions to design millions of emails and web pages every month, including BEE Pro and the embedded BEE plug-in.
Best quote from Massimo:
“One of the biggest PLG lessons is a mistake that we still make. You fall in love with a solution that you have in mind, this new shiny thing, instead of really first falling in love with the problem. In PLG, in product-led growth, the problem focus is even more crucial because the product alone has to lead to acquisition and conversion.
“When you experience the problem yourself, where you can explain that frustration immediately because you know it so well, then you’re so much more likely to address something that’s real. It’s a status quo that’s really wrong. There’s something wrong here. I’m going to address it.
“So that’s where being the first heavy user of the thing, not just because you want to be, but because you are the first one that experiences that very problem typically leads to a more successful outcome.”
In this episode, Massimo explains:
- Why the BEE builder is used by both end users to create marketing campaigns and by developers to embed the BEE builder into their apps
- How they leveraged their knowledge of what end users wanted while adding the features that developers required
- How they are evolving their visual page builder with collaboration and brand integration features for larger companies
- How the parent company in Italy supported the BEE startup “skunkworks” with a small team until it was sustainably breakeven in a new US-based company
- What principles of product-led growth (PLG) were most powerful in their product design and go-to-market growth
- Why most of their employees are directly involved with researching, designing, and building the product
- The most common challenges and misconceptions of product-led growth
BEE Company Facts
- Founded: 2014
- Description: BEE provides no-code design tools that empower everyone to design emails, landing pages, one-page sites, and more. BEE has millions of monthly users in over 20 languages in over 150 countries. BEE’s design tools are available online at beefree.io and embedded in 600+ SaaS applications.
- Funding: Funded as an internal project and then debt by the Italian parent company MailUp, now owned by Growens
- Parent Company: BEE Digital Content Design is 1 of 5 business units owned by Growens
- Headquarters: San Francisco with an office in Milan, Italy and remote employees in the US and Europe
