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Startup Of The Week

Startup Of The Week: Soundest
2017
Sep 11

Please meet Paulius Milišauskas, Project manager at Soundest. What is Soundest, how it works and how do they deal with the main challenges in market, Paulius reveals in this interview.

 

So what is Soundest? How it works?

Soundest is an easy-to-use email marketing service dedicated to ecommerce. Not only does it help  you to send effective campaigns to your email subscribers, but it also helps you to turn your visitors into subscribers with many signup forms, popups, interactive forms, landing pages and much more. In that way, Soundest is a comprehensive, omni-channel platform that is focused on improving ecommerce conversions and boosting sales.

What are your competitors and competitive advantages?

Our main competitors are Mailchimp and Klaviyo. One of Soundest’s most prominent advantages is that we are really easy to use and implement. Our entire platform is built around making email marketing painless, effective and fast. In our many 5-star reviews on Shopify, for example, the phrases that continuously comes up over and over again are “easy-to-use,” “very easy,” and other variations on that. This is what really sets us apart from our competition, which is that while we have lots of great features, it’s actually very easy to use those features and see great results.

 

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

Before we focused on email marketing, we were a web agency focused on various parts of creating and promoting websites. What we soon discovered was that our clients had quite a difficult time working with clunky email service providers in order to get the desired results. We then focused on ecommerce as we realized that it required different and higher-value features in order to meet their marketing needs.

 

When exactly did you launch, what were the main challenges before launching?

We launched in 2014 but didn’t really hit the gas until 2015. At that point, we went full throttle and put all of our energy into creating our email marketing service that anyone can use out of the box. Our main challenge before the launch (and which we’re still facing in some ways today) is the need to define our customers’ pain points and find new, effecitve and innovative ways to solve those problems.

 

What are your target customers? Both in terms of user profile and geography?

Our target customers are those ecommerce businesses of all sizes that are determined to improve their conversions through email marketing. We target users around the world, but our main base includes brands from the US, Canada, the UK, India, Australia and Western and Northern Europe.

How are you funded? Do you seek extra funding?

We had initial angel round funding early on, but the best investors we have are our customers who pay us on a recurring basis. Currently, we are profitable and are not seeking external investment.

 

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

The core team has been working together now for more than 6 years, as we started off together in our web agency days. As our core product has grown and developed, so has our team. That is one of our greatest strengths—that the core team has built a strong, tight-knit relationship over the years and work really well together. Recently, we’ve expanded the team, having doubled our numbers since last year and focusing on building our team culture, which is result-oriented and emphasizes that each team member have a strong ownership of their responsibilities.

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

Business has really taken off over the last few years. We’ve been building up our brand consistently and currently have more than 30,000 users. As we mentioned, we’ve doubled our team since last year and this year expect to double our revenue in terms of year-over-year growth.

 

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

We are focusing on growing our customers in our current markets and expanding the product to non-English markets. We’re also focusing our core product more on omni-channel communication so that our users have even more opportunities to interact with their customers.

Thank you, Paulius, for his interview!