Optimite co-founders Sushant Yadav and Nishant Yadav join us for an insightful conversation on their early beginning and the challenges faced on their journey to to a successful “email production house.”
Despite only being in business for four years, Optimite has created over 50,000 emails across 3,000 brands. For many clients, Optimite has become “a staple within their company,” allowing them to reduce costs by up to 60% while upholding the utmost quality.
The Fiverr days
“We started doing email template creation work during COVID. We created a really small gig on Fiverr, like $10, just to see if there was a demand.
Even though we were techies and our background was in website design and development, we wanted to focus on a small niche where we could really stand out. Also, in those beginning days, it was important that we could just execute everything ourselves without a team, so we thought - let's do email templates.
We started offering our services at $10, then scaled to $50 a month to $100 per month until we landed at $5,000 a month.
As we continued to grow, we started to think of scaling our services. We wanted to start custom coding emails in HTML, but with the volume we were seeing – we knew it wasn’t scalable.
That’s when we started looking for alternatives.”
Excerpts from our conversation with Sushant Yadav.
Edited for readability and engagement.
The road to scale
Sushant Yadav: “We started to look for alternatives but found that there weren’t many. Beefree was one of the options alongside Stripo, but we found that their platform’s learning curve was not that easy.
Eventually, we narrowed down Beefree as the platform on which we wanted to build our business on. 3-4 years later and here we are.”
However, the road to Beefree didn’t come without its challenges.
Nishant Yadav: “I remember the exact time that led us to start searching for a solution. We had spent two days figuring out how to create an email code, and Sushant came in and said, “I found this platform, and you can drag and drop.”
That felt contradictory. It just didn’t make sense. I thought, surely, this would not work for Outlook.
But then Sushant showed me the actual template, and once we loaded it on the platform, it worked fine. That was the moment we realized, “Okay, we found a platform, and from there onwards, we scaled it.”
Sushant Yadav: “Since then, we have grown together with Beefree. I remember that everything was very basic in the initial days and both our company and Beefree have come far since then.
I personally have seen the platform evolve and take care of all the use cases that we require.”
Excerpts from our conversation with Nishant Yadav and Sushant Yadav.
Edited for readability and engagement.
Implementing Beefree
What was the moment you realized “this is the right tool for us?”
“Our template creation process in the beginning was time-consuming. Think about it, building it from scratch and customizing each section is a process.
In the same amount of time it would take us to create one email template, we realized that we could now produce 10 or 12 templates…
Also, there is a higher chance of errors when manually coding emails. We spent a lot of time testing each template.
In those initial days, we did thorough testing on emails designed with Beefree on Litmus and across ESPs to check how they were being rendered.
Pretty quickly we figured out that the code and rendering was fine and everything became a lot more seamless and easy to scale.”
Excerpts from our conversation with Sushant Yadav.
Edited for readability and engagement.
Growing pains
Having used our platform for almost four out of the 10 years we’ve been in business, Optimite is recognized as one of Beefree’s early adopters. They know our platform just as much as we do and have experienced Beefree before it was what it is today.
Sushant Yadav: “In the early days, we thought Beefree’s code could not be run on Outlook. We approached this by manually deleting the MSO classes from the code and delivering it to the client. After 3-4 months of doing this, we started getting complaints that the code was still not rendering well on Outlook and that the client was getting a lot of CSS issues.
We were under the impression that this was something on the Beefree side, so we used Chamaileon to help solve some of those Outlook issues.
After some time of using Beefree, we realized that the Outlook issue was our mistake—we were deleting an important part of the code!
Once that was settled, we switched back from Chamaileon to Beefree.”
Nishant Yadav: “Over the last four years, the platform has helped us evolve and expand what we can offer clients. When we began using the platform, Mobile Design Mode was not as robust as it is now.”
Sushant Yadav: “Dynamic content was also not available, so we used to extract the code from Beefree and do some manual work to make it dynamic. Now, the platform has that function.
One thing that has remained the same throughout the years is how easy it is to use. It has been an integral part of our business, and we will cherish it forever because “we were able to build a million-dollar business.”
Excerpts from our conversation with Nishant Yadav and Sushant Yadav.
Edited for readability and engagement.
Where they are today
“Today, we partner up with other email marketing agencies as an extension to their team. Our goal is to help them scale “email production with ease.”
We work behind the scenes, creating email templates for big agencies that need their emails to work across multiple platforms. Beefree makes this process easy because we can work directly in the builder and export the HTML code rather than using the ESPs' native editor.
Personally, I’ve created over 3,000 templates in Beefree and if we combine our entire team, we’ve produced around 15,000-20,000 templates.”
Excerpts from our conversation with Sushant Yadav.
Edited for readability and engagement.
While Optimite’s systems, processes, and services have changed over the years, we are happy that Beefree is the one constant that has allowed them to scale their operations. To learn more about Beefree’s business impact on Optimize - read their customer success story here.
