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Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#32I’m confused. Isn’t BEE owned by Growens (which was mailup)?
Was BEE ever an independent company?
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#33Could anyone share the economics of letting people use it for completely free? Do you charge a lot for the people who do convert to subscription? What kinds of things can you withhold for the paid version? I’m just curious if there’s any research on say charging everyone $1 vs charging 1/10 people $10.
BEE editor is a part of Growens.
I believe key to the business model is upsell to other Growens services (MailUp, Datatrics, etc.)
And your usage is probably going to ingested by Datatrics (their marketing predictive platrform).
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have GitHub issues (works fine for bugs, not so much for discussions), GitHub discussions (no one is there), added Discord by public demand (I hate it, but it’s working well. People help each other there) and plan to add Flarum as an open discussion board soon.
Have you tried Matrix[0], out of curiosity? I see quite a lot of FOSS projects on that (with the users to back it up too, obviously) and it seems to work quite well. I'm in quite a few established projects on there. You can bridge your Discord channel(s) to Matrix rooms, so it's basically win-win unless you rely on some proprietary custom verification system (e.g. Reactiflux's complex system), although with a little…
Is there a way to use Matrix without signing up for it? That’s my main problem right now
You can usually get some use out of Discord by just clicking an invitation link, but for Matrix it looks like I have to create an account with some shady unknown social networking entity
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#35This looks really cool. I can't find anything on your website about any license that the templates are offered under. I'd love to use this, but I know the first thing that people at my work are going to ask me is how the content is licensed. It's possible that it's somewhere and I'm just not seeing it.
The ToS says:
> Nothing in this Agreement grants any right, title or interest in or to (including any license under) any Intellectual Property Rights in or relating to the Software
Are the templates part of "the Software" and so I don't have any license to the templates? I'm not allowed "to access the source code of the Software...or create derivative works based on the Software" so am I allowed to modify the the source code of the templates and use that?
I kinda know that you don't mean that I can't use the templates. I just know that I'm going to get hit with the "can we really use these". Maybe my place is too worried about stuff, but I'm a little surprised that there isn't terms of use or a license around the templates. Are they public domain?
Bee Plugin looks awesome, but I'd love to know what the situation is around the templates given that I know I'm going to be asked that.
Also, just as an FYI, the editor launches with the copyright notice showing MailUp and it looks like you're now Growens.
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#36This looks really cool. I can't find anything on your website about any license that the templates are offered under. I'd love to use this, but I know the first thing that people at my work are going to ask me is how the content is licensed. It's possible that it's somewhere and I'm just not seeing it. The ToS says: > Nothing in this Agreement grants any right, title or interest in or to (including any license under)…
Thanks for the note and for your interest in what we do! You can use the templates freely to design emails and pages on beefree.io. If you want to embed our visual builders in your application (i.e. you want to use BEE Plugin), and you also want to create a template catalog within your application, you can purchase our template catalog (all of it or a portion of it). I would recommend getting in touch with our team for that so that they can give you all the details: https://beefree.io/get-in-touch/
Thanks again!
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#37I've used BEE editor many times before, and I've always always loved it. When I found out the company was founded in Italy (my home country) I was very pleasantly surprised, as tech companies with such well designed products are very rare over here. Building a friction-less editor for engaging, reliable email layouts is a complicated engineering problem, and what your team built is absolutely outstanding. Good job, r…
Thanks so much for the kind words. Truly appreciated. And yes, most of our product and development team is still Italy-based, across many regions of Italy :-)
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#38Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#39That's great! I'm happy for you. Is this a bootstrap business or a VC-funded business? I'm just curious. "we" -> how many co-founders?
BEE is a startup within a larger company (https://www.growens.io/). The parent company funded the startup. At the very beginning, it was a team of 6 (2 of which part-time), if I remember correctly.
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#40Great success story. For me personally, I've always found that plain text emails get a much higher engagement rate than the best designed newsletter.
Thanks for the note. Email is such a versatile tool: all kinds of use cases and all sorts of ways to address those use cases. You're absolutely right that - for some of the use cases - plain text is the way to go.
BTW: BEE is now a visual builder for more than emails. In fact, going with a couple of from a landing page to an email (and vice versa), is one of the really cool things you can do with it.