20 Things You Didn’t Know About Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a tech company that provides clients with an email marketing platform with a powerful SMS marketing automation feature. It’s designed uniquely for online businesses to meet the unique needs experienced by business owners in the online environment. Klaviyo has experienced a period of tremendous growth recently and has caught the attention of investors throughout the world because of its rapid growth and a high potential for future success. If you’re not familiar with this new startup, or its innovative leadership, here are 20 things you didn’t know about Klaviyo to bring you up to speed.
1. Klaviyo has been in business for 9 years
According to Techcrunch, Klaviyo has been in business for less than a decade. It was originally founded in 2012. Although the company was started on a shoestring budget, it took off and became a giant in the industry of online communications for internet businesses of all types and sizes.
2. The founders are Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen
Klaviyo’s two co-founders are both young entrepreneurs who went in together to establish the company. They identified a problem in how internet businesses communicated with their visitors and sought to provide solutions. They two wanted to make it easier for businesses to gather information about their clients. They felt that certain data would be meaningful for marketing. It would help clients to assess what the real needs and demands were. This amounted to collecting the right kinds of data about visitors and target audiences. They knew that there was a lot of e-commerce data slipping through the cracks so they developed a program that would capture this useful lost data and provide it for e-commerce businesses to give them better insight into their clientele for better communication and marketing purposes.
3. Klaviyo didn’t include email at first
The email component of Klaviyo is one of its biggest attractions, but few users know this wasn’t a feature included in its first edition. This is a feature that was added later. It’s a fact about the company that not many of the current users know. It shows that the developers have listened to feedback and do their best to provide the best possible platform, upgrading features as are appropriate for client satisfaction.
4. The early days of Klaviyo were a struggle
According to Bialecki, the first few years of the startup were difficult. Both of the founders attempted to secure funding to establish and grow Klaviyo’s platform. They applied for funds from a variety of different venture capital firms and accelerators. Initially, they received multiple rejections. This bootstrapped the operation and made them keep everything lean. They often had to choose between dinner and paying bills when the first customers churned. All the revenue that came in from the early days of Klaviyo was necessary for keeping it running and trying to expand its features. This left little for the two businessmen to live on.
5. Bialecki is the tech wizard for Klaviyo
The two young entrepreneurs had no experience in launching a startup or running a business. It was Bialecki’s first attempt, but he had the technical skills to build the infrastructure of Klaviyo’s platform. He and Ed Hallen met when working at Applied Predictive Technologies, but also attended MIT together. Bialecki is an engineer who is skillful in designing software programs. He also has a flair for working with customers and a manner that puts them at ease with him.
6. Klaviyo offers clients a host of benefits
According to Omnisend, Klaviyo provides clients with a choice of options for using the service. This includes a free account for smaller businesses. the free account includes the newsletter, along with 250 contacts and 500 sent emails. It also provides the use of a responsive drag and drop email creator, AB testing tools, and segmentation.
7. Klaviyo offers premium accounts
If the free account doesn’t offer enough monthly contacts, the next tier up provides access to more email contacts with all of the services offered in the free account and more. The cost is $20 per month and up, depending on the size of your subscribers. Larger companies pay more. The advanced marketing automation tools allow for segmenting lists that are tailored by whatever factors you deem important. It also allows for customized integration with Facebook audiences that connects the two platforms. The sophisticated marketing automation allows you to build special rules or flows for any subscriber situation.
8. There are a few drawbacks to Klaviyo
Although the reviews of Klaviyo are generally positive there are a few things that reviewers found that could be improved. The first is that it can be tricky to operate. Although there are a lot of useful options available, there have also been many users that found them difficult to understand or to use. A little more work on user-friendliness would be helpful, or at least, a better explanation of the features, their value, and how to use them. Another concern is that the price for Klaviyo’s platform is high when compared to other companies for the premium edition.
9. Klaviyo is a versatile company
According to Crunchbase, Klaviyo falls under several different industries. It is classified under advertising for online businesses because it provides this as one of its services. It is also an e-commerce firm, marketing, marketing automation, and listed under software.
10. Klaviyo is also a tech startup
One of the main identifiers for Klavio is in the tech realm. It is a company that develops and offers software solutions for its clients. The software provides a system for setting up email marketing with a personalization component. It uses a total of 73 technologies that are dispersed through 62 technology products to run the website and the software platform. It’s’ complex set of processes that use HTML5, Google Analytics, jQuery, Viewport Meta, LetsEncrypt, iPhone/Mobile Compatible, and more.
11. Klaviyo helps companies to grow their business
One of the primary benefits of Klaviyo is for clients to increase the volume of visitors and grow their business. The technology offers a way to automate marketing messages that may be customized for each contact if desired, or batched in group emails if preferred. It offers options for tailoring the program to meet the unique needs of each client. Users may interact with customer data sources to store data useful in decision-making at scale. There are also analytical tools to help clients assess the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns.
12. Klaviyo’s user base is growing monthly
Klaviyo is experiencing a surge in growth currently. The company is attracting more business than ever before. The monthly visits to the Klaviyo website have grown by an average of 2.09 percent. Although there are no statistics provided about the average conversion rate of visitors to paying customers, it’s assumed that the increased interest is generating yet more subscribers for the premium services. These figures show that more people are checking out the website and the available services. The average monthly visit statistic is a staggering 5,260,555.
13. Klaviyo runs on a small executive team
Klaviyo has run on a lean team since its inception, but it has grown so rapidly that it became necessary to add more executive leaders to the group. It currently operates with a team of nine. Andrew Bilecki is the CEO and co-founder. Ed Hallen is a co-founder and board member, joined by Ping Li as the other board member of the 2-person team. Rich Gardner is the vice president of global strategic partnerships. Joseph McCarthy is the director of performance marketing. Supryo Roy is the product design leader. Laura Stone is the senior site reliability engineer, Kady Srinivasan is the senior vice president and global head of marketing, and Eric Silberstein is the vice president of data science.
14. Klaviyo is a late-stage venture capital company
Although Klaviyo had a tough time finding investors in its early years, the floodgates of support finally opened. The company has participated in four rounds of venture capital funding raising $358.5 million in support. In November of 2020, a Series C round of funding was led by Summit Partners and Accel, generating support from 7 other investors, raising $200 million in funding.
15. Klaviyo is a privately held business
The owners of Klaviyo have not needed to take the company to the level of public trading. Since they were able to secure the help of venture capital investors, there has not been a need to look for this type of funding source. Bialecki and Hallen maintain a controlling interest in their company.
16. Klaviyo’s dry spell broke in 2015
Bialecki and Hallen were relieved when they received their first agreement for financial backing. The name of the investor was not announced by the funding Seed Round for Klaviyo closed on August 26, 2015. The first round raised $1.5 million to get the business on its feet. A round of Series A funding followed in August of 2017 with $7 million raised from Astral Capital. In April of 2019, a Series B round led by Summit Partners brought in an additional $150 million. The latest round was the Series C funding led by Accel in November of 2020. This is evidence that the years of struggle and continuing to ask amidst turndown and rejections from investors was worth the trouble.
17. Klaviyo’s board member is an investor
We also learned that the one board member who is not also an employee of the company is an investor. Ping Li sits as the sole non-Klaviyo employee as an advisor on the two-person board of directors. He is a general partner at Accel. He currently sits on a total of 17 different boards, representing Accel’s interest in the direction that their investments plan to take.
18. Klaviyo achieved unicorn status
The most recent round of venture capital funding sent Klaviyo’s valuation over the top for achieving unicorn status. Klaviyo joined this elite group of companies that have reached a valuation of at least $1 billion or more. According to Built-in Boston, after the most recent round of funding, Klaviyo is now valued at $4.15 billion. In addition to that, the number of users of Klaviyo’s subscription platform has more than doubled. The company has come a long way since the days when it was bootstrapped to hold on to the ground it had gained.
19. It looks like Klaviyo is getting ready for expansion
When we reviewed Klaviyo’s LinkedIn page, we saw evidence that there is set to be a decent-sized expansion of the operation. The company currently has nearly 900 filled positions and it’s looking to add more to its sizable workforce. We saw advertisements for 106 new job positions advertised on the site. It looks like there is an even split between open jobs in the San Francisco, California location and in Boston, Massachusetts. While many of the positions offered are in recruitment and for various technical specialists their e few senior management positions open as well. This suggests the possibility of new branches opening up, although this has yet to be confirmed.
20. Klaviyo is disrupting the communications industry
Klaviyo is a startup that has achieved remarkable success in the communications niche of the e-commerce industry. Its innovative platform is saving online businesses a lot of legwork by gathering and storing customized data clusters and providing them with the ability to tailor custom marketing emails to potential customers. The platform is effective in saving these online companies money in the amount of time saved by now automated processes. It also helps them become more familiar with their target audiences, for greater opportunities to grow and expand their operations. Klaviyo is a company to keep your eye on because it’s just getting started.
