A Conversation with Massimo Arrigoni of BEE
Simple is hard, and simple is incredibly valuable. An email editor should be simple, but one company has made an email editor elegant, simple and technologically advanced that thousands of companies and millions of users adore it — BEE.
CEO Massimo Arrigoni has helped BEE grow steadily from in-house project to worldwide service. He shares his ideas and insights on product-driven growth and frictionless experiences in this wide-ranging conversation.
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
Hi and welcome. I'm Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of Email Marketing podcast and I'm delighted to say that my guest today is Massimo Arrigoni, CEO of BEE. Massimo, would you mind doing a quick introduction of yourself and your company and your role there?
Massimo Arrigoni
Of course Thanks Matthew for having me on the show. Great to be here. Like you said, my name is masimo and sounds like an Italian name and it is I I grew up in Italy and then during my college years I studied at UCLA and then yeah, that's how I ended up in the in the United States met the person that became my wife and so I moved here not not for business reasons. But I became also the place office lady where I had my career and I've been in product and marketing for for a long time. And I got into email about 10 years ago or so, I had a company that focused on e commerce software and e commerce is you know, so so close to email for so many reasons. And so that's how I got in touch with email space and after I sold the e commerce company, I started working for an email company called mail up and eataly based company right and we had done some some business together. And and so there I as a product person I became their their product manager and head of product and about Five years ago, at mailup, we were working on our internal drag and drop email editor. And we thought we did a pretty good job. And so we took this product and, and put it out on the web to see if somebody wanted to use visual builder separately from whatever tool they were actually sending an email with. Right. And that was 2014. When we first put out the the first MVP, yeah, and people loved it. I started playing with it, and that became B. And the funny thing is BEE was kind of the internal project name,
Matthew Dunn
Best Email Editor. Right,
Massimo Arrigoni
exactly. And so that Yeah, and that's been growing the last several years.
Matthew Dunn
I want to delve into to be a bit more because it's fascinating, but first, let's do a speed round. We're gonna help you get people to know you. So first thing off the top of your mind. Okay. cats, dogs, both or neither.
Massimo Arrigoni
I have a dog.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Okay. Her name is Coco. Coco, cool. Name a favorite place
Massimo Arrigoni
for you. favorite place? Oh, there's so many of them. I love I love traveling. But, uh, you know, next week I'm going up to Lake Tahoe with with my family love dies.
Matthew Dunn
There you go. That's it. That's a good top favorite place. Okay. Two more one name of favorite book or favorite author. there too.
Massimo Arrigoni
There's a there's many so many. So I've been and I tried to read both business books and, and fiction. Yeah. Um, so now I'm reading the one that I'm reading right now. It's a book about product strategy. And it's about Yeah, it's it's it's called when the coffee and kale compete it's so that's that's the it's a good product strategy book. So it's something to look at in terms of motivations is to prep to purchase.
Matthew Dunn
I definitely want to pick your I definitely want to pick your brain about about product. Allen Clement, for those of you who are listening a la NKLEM e n t when coffee and kale compete. I last question coffee, tea or other?
Massimo Arrigoni
You know, depending on the time of the day, I have a nice coffee in the morning, but then I switch to tea in the afternoon and I love it. A cup of tea and yeah, oh,
Matthew Dunn
okay. Okay. Okay, switch hitter. I love it. For full disclosure, I should note that I'm fortunate enough to work with, with BEE and with Massimo as, as a partner. So I've got some familiarity with the company already. And I love their product and everything about the company. So I thought I thought what a great guest and what a great opportunity to bring a real innovative side of, of email, software and SAS more broadly on in the person of someone with a whole bunch of experience in the space. onto this podcast on you talked about a little bit it's, it's it was an in house editor that you said maybe other people will use. But I wonder if you could delve a little bit more into on what I think is quite distinctive about what be brings to the market, you you talk to a sass company. And one of your options with with the editors to say will become your email editor. that's a that's a mighty big thing for a company to take on one of their key user interfaces to be delivered by someone else. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Massimo Arrigoni
Yes. Well as you build software to. And whenever you build any product that you know, you're constantly making a decision on what you're going to focus on, and you know, it's always a make versus buy and you can't do, you can't build everything. And so a lot of marketing, applications, CRM, engagement platforms, you name it, they take care of a lot of things, a lot of jobs. And the the visual builder component may actually not be really their core, or maybe they're an email platform where they're really good at sending emails and deliverability, etc. So our pitch has always been from the beginning. Look, we can give you a user interface that's really good. And you may be able to save money and time so that you focus those resources on something else that's really core to you. Yeah. And I remember without naming a couple of platforms that I would that we were not able to sell to you They sell they they've told us the opposite. They said, okay, that the visual builder is such a core component was that I can't I can't use yours. I have to build it myself. Right. Yeah. So, but the applications for which that is true, they're very few.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And so for everybody else, then we can become a good a good, good option. You know, so they and and and I think one of the critical things about the value prop that I love, you know, the technology side of it, the fact that, like, there's a relatively small bit of code inside a sass platform, and boom, this this beautiful editor shows up, you know, it's JavaScript and react if I recall, right, like, this whole package comes down and just unfolds magically, inside someone else's platform and, and does the job. That's terrific on but we're not talking about JavaScript and react innovation, we're to talk about email. The second thing about the second thing about your platform, and I'm focusing a little bit on the plugin, I suppose, I want to talk about the the other editor uses but for the plugin as well. It's not like you stopped innovating, inside that that plug in that you're like a platform within a platform, so that the customer that you talked about, who said, you know, okay, I guess we will use yours keeps having the opportunity to bring new things to their business and by extension, their customers? And can you talk to that a little bit because that That, to me, is a real winner for everybody?
Massimo Arrigoni
Sure, fundamentally, with email, there's been an issue with it for a long, long time that has just to has to do with empowerment and speed. Like a lot of people within our organization actually want to be able to create emails for all sorts of things, for all sorts of reasons. And we send emails and as a company, any company sends all kinds of emails for all sorts of reasons. Yeah. And imagine billing, emails, HR, emails, not just marketing, right, all kinds of things. And so there's a lot of people within our organization that that have been wanting to be able to get those things done without having to wait for weeks or months reports, it's, they say, okay, it takes a company weeks to get an email done. Now that that cannot be a step. So that's the first thing a BEE does. It allows a lot of people non technical people to get in and go fast. Yeah. Now, depending on what they need to get done, they may need different levels of sophistication of the content, they may need to reuse content that someone else created, right? They might, they may need to drag and drop products from a catalog and just drop them into an email without having to re enter the information from scratch. So there's all kinds of scenarios. So we've what we've been doing is building out capabilities so that these applications that embed be within their UI, can customize it so that it gets the joBEE done. For those people that that need it. And we're embedded now in hundreds and hundreds of applications. Yes, like I said, it's all kinds of things like from it from an HR from an HR platform to a CRM for dentists, you know, automation, for the, for a car dealership, revenue, event management. And so in all of these scenarios, the content that you're creating, and the things that you're trying to get done, vary quite a bit. Yeah. And so that's one of the reasons why we've been able to be a good fit for a lot of different applications, they can customize this drag and drop editor to do what they need.
Matthew Dunn
Well, and and and I mean, it's fascinating, I'll see your dentist example, because that's awesome. If you're a CRM for dentists, and I'm gonna pick on one of your favorite recent features in the editor, their CRM for dentist, you might not have the development resources to say, let's allow co editing where the two people or three people could be working on an email at the same time. I that's just amazing. But would would it make the cut of the resources for a CRM company for dentists? Maybe, maybe not. But if they're if they're a big customer, then they go, okay, you know, should we turn this on for the gold tier, because big offices are more likely to have multiple people involved in that whole design and communication process of email? Like you're you're, you're bringing innovation into them and jumping across industries to do that, and that's a huge value prop seems to me.
Massimo Arrigoni
Yeah. And and also the end user, who says that the content editing experience in a Google Doc Yeah, should be different than email. Who says that like the end user, actually Well think, no, I actually need kind of the same thing. Right?
Matthew Dunn
Right, if I'm a millennial,
Massimo Arrigoni
so. So sometimes, you know, we kind of settle on whether that's the way it's been. But to the end user, that makes no sense, if they're getting used to a certain user experience that when creating, you know, a document, for example, in the G Suite, they probably want a similar experience when they're putting together an email or, or a landing page or something like that. And so that's also what we're trying to do you bring
Matthew Dunn
replicate, you bring that in, you bring that timeframe down for you, you reference the litmus report that says something like, two weeks or something for the average marketing email to get. Yes, done, bigs approved and all that other stuff like, oh, wow, that's painful timeline.
Massimo Arrigoni
And the interesting thing with with COVID, is that some of the things that you used to get done pretty quickly, when you were in the same office, if you were, you know, you're just asked to come over here, let me but what do you like this? Do you Is that Is this what you want it? You know, that kind of thing? You can't do it?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, look over my shoulder, not so easy. Exactly, exactly.
Massimo Arrigoni
And so then things like commenting and co editing and you know, being able to work together, then it becomes even more important. And in fact, there's been an acceleration, you know, of adoption of all this
Matthew Dunn
is betting betting, the, the, the other way I look at the the innovation cycle, for for sort of an intimate piece, like, here's the editor from someone else, is you also open up an opportunity for your customers to sort of switch on innovation at a pace that suits them separate from developing the innovation, right? If you're the CRM for a dentist, and you say, not everybody's ready for co editing, but we've got a set of customers that are, it's like a, it's like a few minutes decision for them to configure that for that group or class or whatever, as opposed to, you know, investing a year making a bet it's gonna be something that sticks and then whoops, not after all, right, I mean, you really enable, you really enable the pace of innovation to be separated from the set of development resources they might have in house.
Massimo Arrigoni
Exactly. It's it's definitely concept of the way we use now. The various platforms that we use when we build stuff, right, when we build software, you you, you start from a foundation that allows you to do things. And and so that's what we want to do with be in the content, design and content building part, we give you a foundation, a very solid foundation, we had over 36 million sessions of the across over 600 applications last year, like wow, that's an enormous amount of people building emails, yeah, and pages. And so that also obviously provides us with a very large amount of feedback. Yep. And so you can count on the fact that this tool will improve and be a pretty good, pretty good tool, unless we screw up,
Matthew Dunn
very well adjusted,
Massimo Arrigoni
and then you build on it. So you have a foundation, and then we you build on it. And for example, you've built a great add on for this tool that allows people that want to build on it to you know, to enable additional functionality for dynamic content, and etc. And so then they can build things around that and build additional user experiences. And so I'm a big believer in the concept that building applications is really is becoming kind of like a building a house, right? You, you don't you don't write everything from scratch, I guess, pick and choose the various building blocks. And you put your own style and your own, you know, value on top of it.
Matthew Dunn
I was reading about a study, I think it was in a Simon wardley post on medium. And he referenced another study where someone someone actually did the work to say, if if we were going to do something fundamental, like light bulbs or something like what would it cost to actually make a light bulBEE as opposed to going and buying it off the shelf, you know, for five bucks and it was it was 1000s because all of the underlying technologies you know, refined metal and manufacturing and vacuum and glass and etc, etc. Like you think of them is just available but if you were really doing it from scratch, I think the aluminum cans is another example of that that someone someone cited was like the first if it was the only one aluminum cans in the world, it would be a manufacturing miracle. And we talk about recycling without thinking about it now like wow, yeah, so that's the cycle Hey, you reference something I did want to hit on a little bit. There was a fork in the road where became not just an email editor but a page editor. Correct.
Massimo Arrigoni
Yes, and that comes from the fact that again, when we think of email, those of us that have been in this space for a long time, we love, we love email on it on its on its own because it has all these properties to it, but really to, to the marketer, or the publisher, or it's a piece of a larger equation, right? That's the end. And typically, if it is a marketing campaign, you'll have an email and you know, probably a landing page and some social, etc, etc. It's fascinating to see, for example, something like MailChimp, you know, the way MailChimp has grown in the last four or five years, they still send an enormous amount of email, but they were listening to their small business customers that said, Look, MailChimp, I need to do a lot more than email. Yes. And so it wasn't them trying to say, Okay, how do we, how do I increase revenue? I'm sure there's that component, too. But it's also just listening to a customer that says, You're one piece of a bigger puzzle, give me some of the other pieces of the puzzle, because otherwise, I go nuts trying to find all these pieces. Yeah, so with BEE word kind of responding to that, because all of the applications that have embedded our email editor started asking for more, they're basically saying the same thing. Look, I want our customers to have to have that visual building experience to build other stuff, too. They don't, they don't just need email, they need other stuff. And so gradually, we'll respond to, to those additional needs. And presto, you've got a you know, the same
Matthew Dunn
really easy fluid experience when you're putting a landing page together that you might have gotten accustomed to, which conserves the learning curve to write if you're, yes, you've got a designer who's really used to the, to that editor for email, he's like, when use the same one for pages. I don't have to start over or remember that this is different in some way, shape, or form. Yeah, that's, that's Yeah, it's good to leverage.
Massimo Arrigoni
And another component to it is, when is a marketing team? Not in a hurry? To finish a campaign? Right? It's it never happens that you go, oh, wow, I have tons of time left. Yeah. Oh, wow, that campaign is ready. And it doesn't need to go out for another week, like, right? Never, always in a hurry. Yes, as you're you're working all kinds of marketing activities, they all make sense to get them out. So by using the same platform to do multiple pieces of content, we're going to enable people to switch from one piece to the other within seconds. So now, you know, you created the page, you go turn into an email, yeah, you remove the form, you change a couple of things. and off you go. And that component of speed, coupled with empowerment, like I can get it done and I can get it done fast. Yeah, there's, there's tremendous potential there because, you know, it's just a clear reason to exist.
Matthew Dunn
Clearly. Yeah. And, and, and get are taken obstacles out of the way and addressing the reality of as you said, you know, when the market or not, you know, in a hurry and, and, and time pressed on. There's something implicit in in that, in going ahead and addressing what the customers are asking for there. I think we share a bit of a fondness for Clayton Christensen and jobs to be done, don't we?
Massimo Arrigoni
Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and by the way, the book that I told you about earlier, it is a book about kind of the same, same concepts. Yeah, the motivations to purchase, you know, why are these people really trying to get it done? Yeah, like they're there. They're just trying to, you know, go from A to B, and if it is a marketing team, going from A to B, a lot of times means getting from, you know, I have no assets from my campaign to I've got all the assets ready. And, and so. And there's the other thing that's really powerful about this is that again, it's not just marketing, there's a lot of people they need to get digital content done for all kinds of all kinds of reasons. And so this way, you're really enabling a large amount of people to do things that earlier they before they couldn't do, or it was a lot slower or more expensive. Yeah. One of the things that that we love for example, is our the hosted version of being Yep. is available for free to nonprofits and and so we have hundreds and hundreds of nonprofits that they use it and because creating a A nice email for a fundraising campaign, right? It's something that that can really make a difference in the life of a nonprofit. And typically, those are non technical people. Yep. And they still need to get it done fast, they need to be responsive, all of it right. And so I love that concept of allowing anyone that needs to get it done to get it done. Right and fast. And there's a lot of other applications right now that are kind of riding on the same way. Canva, for example, is a great example of it, you know,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. What's the one you like, correspond but so design tool starts with a simpler said something like that. Um, I forgot sorry, on completely completely lost it thread here. I did take one of the one of the folks at Campaign genius and forced him through coding an email template from scratch. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. Young, developer trade, etc. He's like, okay, yeah, that'll be easy. And I said, Yeah. Yeah, let me know when you're happy with it new and it passes all the litmus tests and doesn't break and stuff. And, and I think he started getting why, you know, tools like yours. And in a, you know, narrower sense tools, like campaign genius, have a value proposition of helping someone do the job. But if you're a designer, you don't want to learn HTML, you want to put out a beautiful email, the joBEE to be done is put out a beautiful email or create content. And you realize how painful the underlying wiring and plumbing and stuff, it's like, you know, it's like the building a light bulb, you don't really want to go into aluminum smelting, you just want to, you know, light up the room and read a book, so that the tools that take care of that joBEE for you, value prop goes way up. The lateral for a second, on, you mentioned this early that that be as a product came out of an email company, and you you had a an exact role there. And still, you're still involved as well, on how do those two things play off of each other.
Massimo Arrigoni
Um, as a product person, I'm a huge, huge believer in being the first heavy user of your own stuff. And so and we tried to do this as much as we can, and so actually, so be as part of the group of companies called mailup. Group. And there's several divisions of the group that all use be. So mailup is an email service provider is one of them. So there's another company called khumba mail, which is a very small business. email service provider in Spain, also user heavy user of B, and they're using the landing page side of BEE two. Okay, there's another company at mailup group called Data tricks. In the Netherlands. It's a marketing, predictive marketing platform really. And same thing they you know, and so, the fact that you have within the same group of companies, heavy users of your tool creates that immediate feedback loop. And it was like this from the from the beginning. So it was very helpful. And, and there's no shortcuts like it's all like they have access to some some reversion. If from version, right, no, no. Which also means that if we screw up, or they're the first ones to yell at us, yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. It's
Massimo Arrigoni
Yes, that kind of stuff. Really, really keeps you honest. If you're, if you're serious about it,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. My, you know, many decades, you know, decades ago now, career Microsoft, it was eat your own dog food and dog fooding and, yes, there's really no substitute for No, no, no, you got to use it, right? You make shovels, here, you got to use your shovel to dig a hole. Tell me how you can make the shovel better. With with that dual footing for you between seeing a ton of sass companies, not just email companies, and then also being involved directly with a with a, you know, email centric, let's say, group of companies, what are what are some of the innovations on the horizon specifically in email that that that have your antenna up and like, what's what's coming down the pipe that's got you excited? Here,
Massimo Arrigoni
I thought that the kind of interactivity that amp provides, would convince more people to adopt that kind of technology. In fact, we did some work, you know, to be editor in the editor. You can use amp, and for example, an AMP carousel Hasn't hasn't happened as fast as I thought it would happen. You know, there's all kinds of reasons for it. But I think there's a, for certain things for certain use cases, having interactivity directly in the inbox just make sense. You know, replying to a comment are saying yes to a calendar. I mean, for anybody that uses Gmail and gets those things, it becomes obvious that that's the way you do it. And so I think there's, there's room for that for some interactivity. And so, we'll see, we'll see what happens there. Yeah, that's one. Um, and the other thing that I that I'm kind of, I think we're gonna see some some innovation and some some interesting stuff is all the movement that we're seeing right now, where journalism is partially moving to email three introduces letters, yep, stack. And, yes, Twitter that just got bought review the other day, yeah, it goes in the direction of long form, long form does so well, with email because it lends into your inbox, you can read it later, you can store it, you can really, you can easily find it later, you can even be offline, you know, all the good things that we know. Now, I think an evolution of that might be some interaction between you and the journalist, and maybe, you know, and so something that normally you don't have, right, and when there are interactions, through social, they get out of hand, they think, you know, yelling matches, etc.
Matthew Dunn
So I think if you put that together, maybe with some interactivity in the inbox, that could be something there could be something interesting there. Yeah, do the old the old dogs, the old dogs got some, some run left left in and, and and there's a shift, not back to email, but there's definitely a seems like there's a renewed interest. I know numbers are up. And I don't think it's just been a pandemic. I'm not in the office, I've got an email on I think there's also, I think there's also some renewed interest because after the explosion of social media, there's now a halt, hang on a second, let's look at this, let's look at the market structure, the dominant companies and maybe question whether it solves every case, where emails so directly a connection between company and, you know, subscriber company, consumer company, and partners, whatever else, do you have any, any perspective on how you think that's going to unfold over the next year? So
Massimo Arrigoni
I think for some reason, people thought that one was the replacement for the other, right, and you know, that they're, instead, they've always been very, very different tools for doing different things, and use that use it for different purposes. And that's why email never went away. In fact, he said, continues to grow, and any will be that way. And, and, you know, the, like, we were saying earlier, that the fact that you can store search, read later, offline, all these things are fundamental to one of the reasons why you use the inbox as a go to place, you know, and where you can actually find stuff, etc. and many, many people still use their inbox as sort of even a to do list. You know, I keep up the top the things that I need to do, like, how you can't do that on Twitter, like, right, but it's not that good or the thing that some people lost over the years it's it's not good or bad. It's not one is the evolution of the other. Yeah, no, yeah, they get done completely different jobs to get back to the you know, accept that then. And some people may not need, you know, those those those jobs to be done and therefore they may not use one or the other, but most of us actually use both because different phones Yes, yeah. And so and in general, I actually don't think that email is a particularly great tool for acquiring right customers so some people still try to use it for that but you you very quickly go into spam and and you know, and like okay, don't bug me Don't die. You know, I never asked I never asked you to contact me all that stuff. That's that's clearly not what Yeah, you know, it's for whereas social etc. It's much better for discovery and you know, you see something and catches your attention and like you're you're much more ready to discover new things there than you are when you're in your inbox.
Matthew Dunn
Well, in its social, you've got me you essentially have a referee or a gatekeeper. Whatever the network is, whether it's Twitter or Facebook or something like that, and and one of the things that all of those companies seem to realize that they're inherently in a position do is to make those targeting decisions. phenomenally accurate. I don't think that's true of email, you know, you can you can make the mistake of buying a list that says it's, you know, it's just left handed redheaded accountants, but the likelihood that it's actually that accurately targeted? No, and you're not supposed to, you're not supposed to spam them in the first place. So yeah, very different purpose. I have had this phrase running in my head, that email is a civil media, not a social media, that it really works. When I've said, Yes, I want to hear from you. And I will keep hearing from you. And and you respect that, you know, that back and forth, exchange of value between the two of us who sticks around, and at the end of the day, I can unsubscribe, or, or, you know, stick you in a filter and say, Go away, I don't ever see it again. And I stay in control of that conversation. It's my account, not someone else's account. And I think that's a big difference. On last question, because I don't want to chew up your day. And I appreciate you letting me run over time a little bit on texting email. I hear this all the time. And I laugh because I don't get that many text messages. And if I got one from someone, a volume, I get email, I just throw my phone across the room. How do you see those two coexisting?
Massimo Arrigoni
a spike is mailup group, we have a company where we send an incredible amount of text messages, do you? Yeah, and it's and that's another technology that, you know, it was supposed to be dead way back. And yeah, everything was going to happen through push notifications or apps. It's and the reality is, there are two there are there are specific things that text messages are just perfect for. And, you know, obviously all the security codes that you get, and you know, all that stuff. It's, it's perfect. And for example, here in the in California, this this summer, we've had problems with fire, the fact that you can rely on text to to receive those those messages, you know, when the internet is not working and whatever in I mean, you were talking about fundamental, fundamental reasons to exist, which is why it's like that it's not going away. Now, is that a good marketing tool? Now? Normally, it's not, in fact, in most countries, you know, they're all the rules are very strict around that. Yeah. And with email, too, I think privacy regulations are going person, I think in the right direction. And and these these different tools actually do a good joBEE within those privacy framework. Is it you know, no, is perfect for Yes, I told you that, that you can message me and if I change my mind, I'll unsubscribe. Right? Yeah. That's perfect. And so I think text to is, is here to stay for
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, it's it's definitely got it's definitely got its place on but it's as you said earlier, it's not a substitute. It's not going to supplant. Yeah, you know, get some loose, you know, this is gonna take over the world. I say, do you have a radio in your car? Yeah, arrest my case, right.
Massimo Arrigoni
Yeah, ultimately, if there's a core reason for something to exist, it will probably continue to exist unless either that core reason goes away, which they normally don't for a long time. Yeah. Or it's really something comes along that does it so much better, but that also doesn't happen that often.
Matthew Dunn
Cool. Well, I thank you for making the time for a fascinating conversation. Once again, if you're listening, my guest has been Massimo arrigoni, CEO of B. Their website is BEE free.io. And if you want to see the most gorgeous email editor around and page editor, I recommend you take a look. Thanks again for your time, and I look forward to talking with you again in the future. masma
Massimo Arrigoni
Thanks so much, Matthew. Have a great weekend.