Meet Rimantas Griguola – CMO of startup called – Sender.net, an easy to use, powerful and affordable email marketing application. It allows user to manage contact lists, create campaigns using drag&drop editor and analyze results. Rimantas tells us more about Sender.net and this highly competitive market in this interview.

So what is Sender.net? How it works?

Sender.net is a simple and straightforward email marketing tool that is equipped with the tools and functionalities you need to create and send the perfect emails for sales and marketing purposes. Its drag and drop email editor allows you and your team to prepare stylish, attractive emails in mere seconds and you don’t have to be skilled with HTML to do that.

When creating newsletters, all you have to do is choose and create your template and then tweak the elements, including text, images, and videos until you find the right mix and balance. To further increase engagement and conversion, Sender.net lets you personalized your newsletters to match your subscribers’ tendencies, preferences, and motivations.

What are your competitors and competitive advantages?

Unfortunately, Email Marketing Software is super highly competitive, so around the world we have hundredths of competitors, including local and global market. Starting from million-worth business worldwide known brands till local players with only few users. Some of the features are similar across all software, some of them are unique.

Probably the most obvious difference is our focus on our customers. Under that definition fits everything: we do our best to help our customers achieve results, give the right tools and features, answer all the questions the live support gets asked and go an extra mile by showing the shortcuts and tips, create a reasonable pricing system (a rarity nowadays), simplify the interface as much as possible, etc. We do understand that not all of our users are designers or developers, so we try to simplify the tasks into one-bite clicks, so they could simply use and don’t worry about all the technical things. And probably that’s the main reason why our customer base is growing daily.

What were the reasons behind coming up with this idea and launching this product?

Actually Sender.net started as a simple tool for a couple of our founders clients’ needs. He used to work as a coder and a website creator and after getting loads of same requests, he decided to create a tool that will fit his clients’ needs. Other solutions on the market were either not affordable or way too complicated. At the very beginning in 2012, Sender.net was a simple tool with only a few buttons, but had a powerful back-end. All of the new features and a more intuitive design came after the requests of the first few clients. That’s why the tool is so simple and user-friendly, yet retaining tools needed for effective email marketing – the communication between users and our developers. During the next few years the Sender.net became one of the biggest software vendors in the local market mainly using the word-to-mouth method only. Only in the year 2016 the decision was made that local market was already too small to grow, so we decided to go global. This was the game changer. For example, over the last year, we doubled the number of Sender.net users. We are still not one of the big players in the global market, but Sender.net never puts the guns down without a fight. It’s just a matter of time and effort 🙂

What are main challenges while working on this product and how are you overcoming them?

Sender.net had a few stepbacks overtime. In this industry the biggest challenges are the technical things and tough competition, new players comes to a playground and leaves. Our clear vision and strong belief was the only things that kept us going, investing and developing the service. That’s why I put the grit and persistence as priority no.1 for success.

How are you funded? Do you seek extra funding?

From the very first day Sender.net is self-funded start-up and never got any investment rounds. Of course, earlier this might slow down development a bit, but yet saves from making lots of mistakes and never-used features. Growing sustainably and organically makes you double the check the need of the certain feature and triple-check it before launching. I would count the organic growths one of our strengths, not as a weakness.

Please introduce your founders, your core team and your broader team?

Edgaras Vaitkevičius – our Founder and CEO, business-man and genius developer. Sender.net started as one-man company, now working in a small team of 5 people. We strongly believe in working efficiency, eventhough that sometimes the workload gets a bit stressful, but Train hard, fight easy ! Moveover, I would say that often our small team become our competitive advantage of flexibility and team allignment. We never face major corporate struggle – internal communication. In our team – we communicate each day on latest news and events, we share the ideas and thoughts on the go.

How has business been so far? Could you share some numbers to illustrate this (users, sales, etc)?

4200 was the number of last month. This number grows with each and every day. And the growth cheers me up every morning when I come to the office:) I can reveal a small secret that is a game changer in the email marketing industry. The most important distinction among email marketing softwares is that Sender.net has it’s main focus on customers and users! Love your users and take a good care of them, and they will definitely love you back. In our case, we have a competitive advantage – the experience in the fields our customers are now from. So we do understand what they feel, what they’re looking for, what’s important to them, because we’ve been there ourselves. Of course, we keep our eyes and ears open for feedback, so we could improve further. And you know, under the “focus on customers” definition hides everything we strive to be and are: Easy-to-use interface

Future plans, ambitions? Simply speaking – what’s next?

We are implementing new features all the time. In the near future we will launch totally new and revolutionary email marketing automation tool, which will give professional tools for all of our users. Until now, similar automated email marketing tools where available only for large businesses or corporations with huge marketing departments. We are super excited about it, it really could be one of the biggest game-changers in the email marketing industry. A bit later-on we have plans to establish new support branches in other countries in order to provide a multi-language support 24/7. Lots of new, more efficient features are being released every month. Sign-up for our email marketing blog (link) – we will keep you updated as well as share best email marketing practices and tips.