Elevator Pitch is a regular feature on Lifehacker where we profile startups and new companies and pick their brains for entrepreneurial advice. This week, we’re with Simon Slade from Fluttermail.
In 128 words or less, explain your business idea.
A few years ago we set out to build an email marketing company that was priced right for small businesses. From our own experience, too many email marketing agencies were pricing themselves out of the market, and many businesses were simply abandoning email marketing because it cost too much. Fluttermail has introduced an affordable alternative, with all of the features you’ll actually need.
Fluttermail is email marketing for small businesses. We are the fastest and easiest way to send beautiful emails and profit from the results.
What strategies are you using to grow and finance your idea?
Our company has been bootstrapped by myself and my co-founder, Charles Abrahamson.
What’s the biggest challenge facing your business?
Disciplining myself enough to launch products even when I wasn’t 100 per cent happy with them. Get it out, get feedback and improve on it. You will never be 100 per cent satisfied with a product, the important thing is to improve on what you have every single day.
What one phone, tablet or PC application could you not live without?
Coda – the simplest and most elegant code editor I know.
What’s the best piece of business advice you’ve ever received?
It’s not so much advice but a famous quote by Albert Einstein that I like to live by: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
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Comments
One response to “Elevator Pitch: Fluttermail”
“Too many” were pricing themselves out of the market.. It sure is lucky there’s 123123012030 other companies that do this at every single pricepoint..
I guess there’s just something about a spam4cash provider being involved with an article about innovation that rubs me the wrong way, though I understand that in theory the premise of the business is irrelevant to the business ideologies used to make it successful.. But still.
mailchimp.com is a lot cheaper, it’s even free for the first 12,000 emails. Their elevator pitch seems pointless – they’re certainly not the cheapest nor the best in terms of functionality. And the waffle about “We are the fastest and easiest way to send beautiful emails and profit from the results” is just fluff – someone should have told him that an elevator pitch is actually about describing what the actual benefits are to using his product as opposed to other products on the market. Where’s the differentiator? I don’t see it.
And I agree with Mr Debyl – email spammers like this are scum. It’s not even innovation. There’re literally thousands of companies doing this – again what’s the differentiator?
Hi, totally agree about the fact that mailchimp is lot cheaper and free for small use. I always suggest my clients to sign up with mailchimp. we are a small group of experts in online marketing trying to understand how can life hacker can help us our website marketingefficiencies.com.au we hopefully can get some tips from this blog! Also we are looking for a great hosting provider who never goes down tried godaddy, crazy domains, net logistics but no satisfaction with them yet. People any ideas who to go with let me know thanks in advance