Stensul came into the world a handful of years ago because we used to build emails by hand (masquerading as an ‘agency’) for one of the largest companies on the planet. PAINFUL for everyone is an understatement. It took the entire week to make the weekly email, that’s why it went out on Fridays. There were often 100+ changes each week. More versions of ‘final’ than you could count.
If you added up the hard cost of all the hours spent between us and the client, you would have had a very large number. Don’t even begin to think about the opportunity cost of what those folks could have been doing.
We knew there had to be a better way, so we productized ourselves out of the process, building v1 of stensul.
The earliest version of stensul was ugly as ever, but it worked. 5 days became 15 minutes.
Everyone was much happier, and able to actually focus on doing amazing strategic work, rather than getting stuck in the muck of the back-and-forth.
What we didn’t fully appreciate back then was how pervasive this problem was.
It’s now late 2020, and most organizations still face major inefficiencies when it comes to everything that happens before their marketing automation platforms. The pandemic has only dialed up digital channels and stretched marketing teams to the edge. From conversations with marketing leaders, it has become very clear they know their email creation process is outdated and lacking in agile technology, preventing their teams from truly being competitive in the market. Stensul Agile Email Creation is architected to directly address this need for collaboration, speed, and agility in email marketing programs.
In short, agility is the new velocity.
To bring our email creation platform to even more companies, today we’re announcing that we raised a new round of $16 million after significant growth in revenue, product, customers, and our incredible team–we just crossed 100 employees!
This Series B funding was led by Rick Lewis at USVP, a firm with a strong track record around SaaS (Box, Yammer, Concur, etc.), and includes new partners like Capital One Ventures and Peak State Ventures, as well as a number of executives from leading enterprise software firms including Okta co-founder, Executive Vice Chairman and COO Frederic Kerrest, Okta CMO Ryan Carlson, former Marketo/Adobe SVP Product Aaron Bird, Avid Larizadeh Duggan OBE, former oDesk (now Upwork) CEO Gary Swart, Talend CMO Lauren Vaccarello and other superstars.
We’ll be using the funding to help bring the category of Email Creation to the world (if your company sends emails, you should be using an email creation platform), through increased investment in product innovation, as well as scaling our team across all functions (we’re hiring!).
Thank you to everyone inside and outside stensul who has helped us get here, I’m excited to continue the journey!
