I still remember the weekend we launched the first version of Beefree on Hacker News. The website looked incredibly basic, but the idea struck a chord: 20,000 people visited in just two days.
We were floored. I thought, “What?? We’re famous!”
A few days later, the traffic died down… and no one had signed up for anything.
We’d built the project as a growth marketing experiment for MailUp, the Italian email service provider where I was VP of Product at the time. The idea was: give marketers a free email builder, and then pitch them our email platform. Sounded smart on paper.
In practice? Nope. People loved the builder, but they already had their own sending platforms.
And that’s when the real story of Beefree began.
Listening First, Building Second
One comment on Hacker News stood out to us:
“Any chance of Beefree being embeddable, either as a service or open source?”
We hadn’t seriously considered that. But it made total sense.
Marketers wanted to design in Beefree but send elsewhere. And other software companies saw an opportunity to offer a better content creation experience, without reinventing the wheel.
That comment led to our first Beefree SDK sale.
Soon after, we launched Beefree as a standalone product, with MailUp (today Growens) backing us through internal debt. No VC rounds. No seed decks. Just a small, passionate team trying to build something people needed, and a company willing to bet on an internal startup.
Great Products Come from Great People
People often talk about product-market fit. I think we forget about people-company fit: how important it is to build a culture that supports curiosity, trust, and craft, and how directly that impacts growth, just like product-market fit
Beefree has grown from 6 to over 130 team members, distributed across Europe and the U.S. And I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built together, not just the product, but the way we work.
Our retention rate is in the high nineties year over year. That’s rare in tech. And it’s not because people are staying still.
They’re growing, taking on new roles, leading new initiatives, and mentoring others. That continuity has been one of our greatest strengths.
A team member once said, “100 people is complicated, and it’s a treasure.”
I couldn’t agree more. Startups are messy. People are complicated. And yet, when we stay grounded in our values, we find a way to build something meaningful, together.
Remote-First Since Day One
We’ve been remote from the very beginning. Not because it was trendy in 2014 (it wasn’t), but because it allowed us to bring together the right people, regardless of where they lived: even the original core team was geographically distributed.
But remote work is not just a logistical choice. It’s a mindset.
It requires trust, transparency, and care. Over the years, we’ve learned how to balance autonomy with alignment, and flexibility with structure.
And we’re still learning every day.
Global by Nature, Not by Strategy
Beefree didn’t “expand internationally.” We were international from the very beginning: although the core technical team was in Italy, the early adopters of our embeddable email builder were in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and their customers all over the place
We now have ~500,000 people using our content builders in virtually every country in the world, and our team reflects that diversity. I’ve seen firsthand how powerful that is—not just for innovation (we’ve invested heavily in multi-language support and in accessibility), but for empathy.
A great example: during a recent outage, it was our globally distributed team that helped shape our communication strategy. Thanks to their cultural fluency, we could reach customers in ways that felt respectful and reassuring, not robotic or off-base.
That’s the kind of nuance you only get when the right voices are in the room.
Expand When You Have Something People Really Need
At MailUp, we tried to enter the U.S. market, and failed. I was even living in San Francisco at the time. But we underestimated just how saturated the email space already was. People switch to a new product when there’s something wrong with what they are using today. And it has to be wrong enough to want a change. There was nothing substantially wrong with the email marketing solutions that already existed.
With Beefree, the story was very different. Countless software applications 10 years ago did not have a good content builder. Their customers were not happy with the status quo, and therefore many product managers were indeed asking themselves the core question that was at the heart of our reason to exist:
How do you let anyone, designer or not, create beautiful emails and landing pages, fast, and without writing code?
That problem existed everywhere. And our solution, especially our embeddable builder, was uniquely positioned to help.
Today, Beefree SDK is embedded in over 1,000 software products. From marketing platforms to internal comms tools to applications in all corners of the SaaS industry, teams use it to save months of development time and deliver a better experience to their users.
Bootstrapping Was Our Superpower
We didn’t raise external funding and did not receive a large investment from our parent company in the first few years of our journey (Growens has invested much more in the last couple of years, as we increased the overall investment in Beefree).
And while bootstrapping is hard, it gave us a gift: focus.
We weren’t chasing vanity metrics or prepping for the next pitch. We weren’t hiring left and right, or spending large amounts of marketing dollars. We were focused on one thing: building something truly useful. The “bee” part of our name comes from the original, internal project name: “best email editor”. For years we stayed completely focused on just that: building a really great email editor.
We continued investing in both the email design suite available at beefree.io and the embeddable version of the builder because this created a fantastic feedback loop that helped stay true to that goal: beefree.io itself was always, and still is, a very heavy user of our Beefree SDK.
This hyperfocused path has also turned out to be a great example of successful intrapreneurship. The parent company, Growens, now owns a valuable asset that allowed it to sell off its core email marketing business when it received a great offer and continue its journey by doubling down on Beefree. The side project has become the main event.
What I’d Tell My Past Self
If I could hop in a time machine and give my past self a few words of advice, I’d probably say:
- Listen harder. People will tell you the real problems they’re trying to solve, if you take time to ask the right questions.
- Be the first. When those people are “you”, building great products is soooo much easier. What are our email designers struggling with? What are our marketers frustrated with?.
- Invest early in your people and your culture. That is your first job, and it’s an investment that truly compounds.
And maybe also: don’t worry when the first launch flops. Sometimes the best opportunities start with “no one signed up.”
Looking Ahead
As I write this, the world is changing, and it’s changing fast. We are entering a dramatically new era not just in digital content creation, but in how virtually everything will be done. Most of our jobs will change, and are already changing. In this new, AI-assisted world, we want to be as useful as we can, and we need your help in understanding how.
How is the way you are creating content changing for you? How is the way you use tools like Beefree evolving? How can we be helpful to you? You can find me on LinkedIn or check out what we’re doing at beefree.io and developers.beefree.io.
And if you’re an early-stage SaaS company in need of a great, AI-ready editor, we have a Startup Program just for you. It includes $10,000 in credits to help you embed our content builder and focus on what really matters: building something your users will love.
