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Flowtown: Social media marketing startup providing social data enrichment, gift marketing, and tweet scheduling tools for small and medium businesses.
Flowtown has raised $750K across 1 funding round.
Key people at Flowtown.
Flowtown was founded in 2009 by Dan Martell (Co-Founder).
Flowtown has raised $750K in total across 1 funding round.
Flowtown was a social media marketing startup that provided customer list enrichment and gift marketing tools for small and medium businesses. The company initially operated a SaaS platform that appended social data from major social networks to existing corporate email lists, but later pivoted to referral rewards and tweet scheduling software following strict data policy changes in October 2010. Before its eventual acquisition by Demandforce in October 2011, the enterprise secured $750,000 in seed funding from prominent angel investors including Dave McClure, Travis Kalanick, Steve Anderson, and Mitch Kapor. The platform successfully scaled its operations to serve approximately 35,000 registered business customers, achieving consistent revenue growth of over 30 percent monthly while operating with a highly efficient team of just eight employees. Flowtown was officially founded in 2009 by Dan Martell and Ethan Bloch.
Flowtown was founded in 2009 by Dan Martell (Co-Founder).
Flowtown has raised $750K in total across 1 funding round.
Flowtown's investors include 10100, 14W, Andreessen Horowitz, Baseline Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Betaworks Ventures, CRV, Flex Capital, Human Augmentation Syndicate, Kapor Capital, LAUNCH, Lobby Capital.
Key people at Flowtown.
Flowtown was a social marketing SaaS startup founded in 2009 that initially built a social discovery service to help businesses find social media profiles (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) from email lists or names, serving small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) seeking to enhance marketing outreach.[1][2][4][6] It solved the problem of manual social media lookups by automating discovery and enrichment of customer data for targeted engagement, later pivoting to gift marketing (referral rewards via social channels) and tools like Timely.is for optimal tweet scheduling after Facebook's API restrictions disrupted its core product.[1][3][4] The company achieved rapid early growth to 26,000 users and near-profitability with a $750K seed round but was acquired by Demandforce in 2011 after 13-24 months of operation, integrating its tech and team into Demandforce's SMB marketing platform.[1][2][4][5][7]
Flowtown was co-founded in mid-2009 by Dan Martell, a serial entrepreneur from New Brunswick, Canada (previous exit: Spheric Technologies in 2008), and Ethan Bloch, a fintech entrepreneur, starting as a bootstrapped venture in Silicon Valley with a strong Canadian team presence.[1][2][3][5] The idea emerged from Martell's marketing consulting background, spotting social media's potential for businesses; they validated via customer interviews (30+ owners) and shipped a lead-capture landing page on July 3, 2009, but pivoted after minimal traction (600 sign-ups, 1 paying user).[3][6] In 2010, they raised $750K, grew 30%+ monthly via blogging, webinars, and coaches—hitting 26,000 businesses—until a Wall Street Journal exposé on Facebook data leaks and API changes in October 2010 killed their social discovery service, forcing a 60-day crisis pivot to gift marketing.[1][2][3][4]
Flowtown rode the early social media marketing wave (2009-2011), capitalizing on open APIs for data-driven SMB tools amid rising platforms like Facebook and Twitter, when businesses raced to connect offline lists to online audiences.[2][4][6] Timing was critical: pre-GDPR/Privacy eras allowed data enrichment, but platform shifts (e.g., Facebook TOS) highlighted concentration risks, influencing ecosystem norms for diversified APIs and compliant marketing tech.[2] It shaped SMB startup culture via Martell's advocacy for Canadian founders in Silicon Valley, customer development evangelism, and pivot playbooks, paving the way for resilient SaaS like modern HubSpot or Klaviyo integrations.[1][3][6]
Flowtown's 2011 acquisition marked a successful exit, folding into Demandforce (now part of Henry Schein) to amplify SMB tools like automated communications reaching 72M+ consumers.[4][7] Post-exit, Martell's wartime CEO strategies—from Flowtown's near-failure—evolved into SaaS Academy and investments, influencing scaling playbooks for today's AI-driven marketing amid privacy regs (e.g., iOS tracking limits).[2][5] Looking ahead, its lessons on pivots and platform independence position alumni to thrive in consolidated martech, potentially reviving social-gifting in Web3/referral economies or AI personalization trends. This scrappy saga underscores how agility turns API crises into ecosystem wins, echoing Flowtown's pivot from data drought to acquisition triumph.[1][2]
Flowtown has raised $750K across 1 funding round. Most recently, it raised $750K Seed in August 2010.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 1, 2010 | $750K Seed | 10100, 14W, Andreessen Horowitz, Baseline Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Betaworks Ventures, CRV, Flex Capital, Human Augmentation Syndicate, Kapor Capital, LAUNCH, Lobby Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, MIRAISE, Point Nine Capital, Practical Venture Capital, SoftBank Capital, Spark Capital, SV Angel, True Ventures, Evan Williams, Hiro Tamura, James Hong, Joshua Schachter, Philip Kaplan, Wences Casares, Auren Hoffman, Brian Norgard, Daniel Gould, Dave McClure, Mark Goines, Mitchell Kapor, Saar Gur, Steve Anderson, Travis Kalanick |
