Recognising the challenges faced by marketers in creating advanced emails without coding skills, they devised a solution: an email template builder that is simple yet capable of crafting sophisticated emails. This shift empowered marketers to focus on their primary role, leading to the creation of Stripo.

Stripo is a bootstrapped startup with Ukrainian roots. Stripo is an all-in-one email design platform with over 1,000,000 users worldwide for building emails of any complexity really fast. Stripo revolutionises email production by cutting time investment by at least 3.7 times. With over 1500 professional email templates, users can quickly find the perfect design for any occasion. Our modular email design allows them to create reusable elements, reducing the need for constant email tests. The platform is seamlessly integrated with over 80 ESPs and email clients, such as Mailchimp and Gmail, with just one click. Stripo's smart elements feature lets users build numerous product cards and email digests at once, and our AI-powered tools help them generate and optimise copy right within the editor.

Stripo also provides a plugin version of the editor that can be embedded into any CRM, CDP, etc.

At Stripo, our focus sets us apart. We are dedicated to simplifying email production for marketers. While Stripo doesn't send emails itself, it empowers users to easily create and export emails to various marketing platforms, such as ESP like Mailchimp or regular email clients like Outlook or Gmail.

With over a decade of experience and a deep understanding of email marketing, we identified the challenges marketers face in building HTML emails that display well across different clients and devices. This led us to create an editor that enables users to create professional emails without needing technical skills. Originally designed as part of a CDP, Stripo has evolved into an independent product.

Revenue

We've experienced consistent growth of 10% month-over-month for several years, bringing our Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) to approximately $381,499. In 2023, Stripo generated about $4,000,000 in revenue. We're thrilled to have surpassed the milestone of one million users worldwide.

Business model

Stripo’s business model combines both freemium and subscription options. Users can access a free version of Stripo without any time limits and choose from several paid plans that best fit their needs. For example, the Prime plan allows users to add up to 100 team members, offers unlimited projects, credits for testing emails on different clients, and includes access to a countdown timer feature.

We also have an affiliate programme for individuals interested in promoting Stripo. On average, our affiliates earn around $1,500 per month.

Creation of Stripo

Developing the first version of Stripo was challenging, mainly due to a small team and limited financial resources.

From the outset, we knew the importance of starting with a dedicated, high-quality team. We needed at least three developers, along with a QA specialist, a business analyst, the CEO, and a designer, given our focus on design and email coding expertise. Although our team was small, we engaged in constructive debates, often pushing each other to make smarter decisions. We were all developers by background, but we prioritised solving user problems and delivering quality over complex code.

Once the editor was built, we realised that we weren’t just competing with other email editors, but also with ESPs. At that time, the market was full of established ESPs, so to convince users to switch to Stripo for email creation, we knew we had to offer real solutions to their pain points. With our editor, users could only create emails and then export them, an extra step that they would only take if we genuinely addressed their challenges.

This insight shaped our approach: we aimed to enable users to build emails not just with traditional drag-and-drop blocks, but with modular design. We envisioned an editor where users could create content once, then adjust the data without changing the design, or tweak the design without affecting the data. This modular approach became a key part of our vision.

Initially, Stripo was offered for free. At the start, revenue wasn’t our main focus; instead, we prioritised confirming that our product delivered consistent value. Our primary success metric was user retention and recurring usage. After nine months, once we were confident in the product's value, we introduced a paid plan to cover our team’s expenses, which had reached around $20,000 per month.

To simplify the email creation process, we gradually integrated with over 80 ESPs. Instead of relying solely on APIs, we built direct integrations, allowing users to export their emails without needing to edit code. Our integration strategy was designed for efficiency; we set up a process to add new ESP integrations in under two days. Initially, we integrated with the major ESPs and later added new ones based on user requests.

Our initial adopters were marketing agencies of various sizes, ranging from five to over 1,000 employees. The founder and CEO, Dmytro Kudrenko, personally visited numerous agencies, and at times, even took flights to different countries to observe their practices and gather a diverse range of experiences and insights. Our active engagement with marketing professionals greatly benefited us, enriching our technical expertise with their insights.

In the beginning, we integrated with Gmail, a popular email client. To our surprise, we found that 30% of our users were exporting their emails to Gmail. When we reached out to them, we discovered that they were using our editor to create business emails in HTML format and then sending them to clients through Gmail. This discovery revealed that our product had uses beyond marketing. After that, we integrated with Outlook. This allowed users to send well-designed emails in Outlook. This choice attracted many users, including HR professionals who sent internal company emails, and others as well.

While financial success is often emphasised, our ambition has always been to make life easier for email marketers and improve the quality of emails in people’s inboxes.

Localisation

We planned to be global right from the start. Our user base spans the globe, and our website has been available in four languages, including English, since day one. Within a year, we expanded to include four more languages based on the regions where most of our clients are located.

Currently, our website is available in eight languages (English, German, French, Ukrainian, and others), and user accounts are aligned with the languages available on the site, in addition to Czech. We designed our platform with the capability to easily incorporate new languages, with translations being carried out by native speakers.

Three key differentiators for Stripo

1. Flexibility and ease of use: We have struck a balance that makes Stripo accessible to beginners, enabling them to effortlessly create custom-designed emails, while also providing advanced features that professionals need to optimise their workflows.

2. Modular email design: Our email template creation is based on a modular design approach, allowing users to build versatile and efficient templates.

3. Commitment to innovation: Stripo consistently integrates essential, cutting-edge features as soon as they become available. For example, we were quick to implement Gmail’s AMP4Email and integrate AI tools, ensuring our users have access to the latest advancements in email design.

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