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Welcome to today's episode and workshop of uploading. Today we are joined by Martha Batar, the CEO of Flodesk, an email marketing platform that has grown to a 8 figure ARR business very quickly. Martha built Flodesk while working full time at Honeybook and now leads a remote first company that serves creators and companies worldwide. In today's workshop we're going to cover how Martha grew Flow Desk from just a small platform into the big business that it is today. While managing a full time role, we're going to cover the power of email marketing for creators and how to get started. We're going to cover the best ways to grow your business through email and much, much more. So I guess without any further ado, Martha, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got it started, how you got started building Flodesk.

Yeah, okay, sounds good. Hi everyone and thanks for sharing what y'all do. If you, if you want to drop more in the chat just so that we know what you're doing, what you're working on every day, I think that would be fantastic. And yeah, so I created Flodesk. I'm one of the co founders, we have three each and Flodesk is an email marketing platform that helps you design emails people love to get. And we started it because even though I'm sure you've heard that the email marketing space is super noisy and there are a lot of solutions, we kept hearing from content creators that none of the solutions were actually solving the modern day pains. And we had a lot of friends, Rebecca, my co founder, Trang, my co founder and I, and we had a lot of friends in the creative space of Content creators that were completely crushing it on social media. They had millions of followers, like super high engagement, they were actually making money.

But then the algorithm, y'all know by now it's super tricky, it's rented space, right? So they knew that they needed email marketing but none of the platforms felt right. And initially we said well, why don't we help you use mailchimp, right? Because it exists, it's there, we can probably very easily solve your pain. So then I remember just scheduling coffee chats with, with some of these creators and building a design for them that they could just go into the HTML next week and like change some things and iterate from there and like next week without like a fault. Every single time they say, you know what, I need help again, I can't do these. So then Rebecca and I were like what, what is happening, right? Like why? Why is this truly not working? And then we realized that they, these platforms were created like more than 20 years ago and they solved problems that were problems in a very different world, right, Than the world we live in. So if you think about it, 20 years ago, just a single act of delivering an email to the inbox was a win, right? Because it was a hardware problem and a software problem. And today all of that is kind of commodity, it's been solved. And the modern day entrepreneur has very different needs.

For example brand, right? Like there's a lot of noise, attention spans are super short. So every single email, it can't just hit the inbox, it has to stand out, it has to engage from the beginning. It has to be hyper optimized for conversion. And text based without any of your brand just doesn't cut it anymore, right? And not just for solopreneurs. We actually we looked at a case study with Stripe. Stripe is a massive company, right? I think it's the largest private company in the world and they ab tested a text based email and one that was actually optimize for conversion using their own brand. And the on brand design based email increased conversion by 21%. So whether you're a very small business or a large business, like design is not a luxury anymore.

And that's what we set out to fix, right? For example, we're the only platform that lets you use custom fonts. If you work with a designer and you have your brand, and you have your brand font that you use on your website, right? On your social media posts like designs everywhere and you cannot use it on your email, something just doesn't click there, right? It just, it tells you this, this is not really solving the modern problem. It makes you think as well. Like if you're, if you're going to rent an office, but the office is going to have their brand on it, it just makes no sense.

Right?