With over 15 years of experience in email marketing, complemented by 25+ years in software development and a lifelong passion for entrepreneurship, Dmitry Kudrenko, Founder & CEO of Stripo, brings a unique blend of skills and knowledge to the table. This diverse background enables him to leverage his business acumen to develop highly efficient marketing strategies and implement them rapidly.

One of his core principles is a fondness for Lean methodologies. He embraces Lean principles in his everyday approach, particularly when it comes to email marketing and marketing automation. For the uninitiated, lean email marketing revolves around the idea of quick learning, delivering value at a rapid pace, eliminating wasteful practices, fostering quality, and effectively organizing knowledge.

Dmitry strives to learn from data and feedback, allowing for rapid iterations and improvements, while adopting lean principles in email marketing. He prioritizes delivering value to customers swiftly, ensuring that every communication resonates with their needs and desires.

Through streamlined processes and targeted campaigns, he aims to minimize wastage, while optimizing resources for maximum impact. He emphasizes building quality into every aspect of email marketing, from content creation and user experience, to enhance customer satisfaction and engagement.

Lastly, he prioritizes organizing knowledge effectively, leveraging data and insights to inform decision-making and refine marketing strategies further. Overall, his approach to email marketing combines the power of Lean principles with a deep understanding of the industry, enabling him to create efficient, effective, and impactful marketing campaigns.

In an interview with Eventible, he speaks in great detail about his journey so far, Stripo and its mission, his experience speaking at Mail Con Last Vegas 2023 and his biggest takeaway from it, among other things.

1. Can you tell us about your background and how you came up with the idea for Stripo?

I am a programmer, but I am always recognized as a marketer because I develop specialized tools for direct and retention marketing.

I started my “software developing” journey with my friends 25 years ago.

And about 15 years ago, we launched a customer data platform. It had an embedded email template editor.

We soon noticed that back then, most marketers were struggling to build an advanced email, as it required strong coding skills, or else the email design did not look the way it was intended. It was a common problem for all tools.

So, we analyzed the experience of our customers and our personal insights into email production to come up with a solution to this problem — an email template builder that is simple yet allows building advanced emails with no coding skills at all. This empowered marketers to shift their focus from technical challenges to their primary role: marketing.

But we didn’t stop there. Recognizing that this problem was not limited to our CDP customers, we wanted to make this tool universally accessible, a tool that could assist individuals from all corners of the globe. This led to the birth of Stripo.

In Stripo it is easy to create professional email fast with no technical skills and then export to any system or format for sending, from Gmail and Outlook to Mailchimp and ActiveCampaing or simple html archive.

Today, Stripo stands as a testament to our dedication to simplifying the lives of marketers, boasting a user base of approximately 1 mln people worldwide.

2. What is Stripo’s mission, and what problem are you trying to solve in the email marketing industry?

It is “Shaping the evolution of email marketing.”

For us, it means creating a seamless experience where recipients receive impeccable, highly functional emails while marketers are able to leverage innovations in email production easily.

Why is it important?

Currently, email has no clear standards and remains quite conservative out of data security concerns.

Various email clients strive to pioneer changes within their own parameters. For instance, Google enabled AMP in email to make emails interactive and more functional to bring more value to recipients. Apple Mail, on the other hand, leans on HTML5 and CSS for interactive capabilities. Microsoft’s Outlook has its unique language, VML, used for specific design elements like rounded corners. This divergent approach results in the absence of unified standards. The key issue that arises from this is that marketers often need to be skilled coders first to ensure an email appears as intended across different email clients and devices. 

And as a result, recipients, just like you and us, suffer from it the most. So, we feel like it is our duty or at least that we can remove all those obstacles that stand in the way of a global revolution in email marketing.  

What steps are we taking in this direction?

1. Enable innovations in email

We are the first to support and implement innovations in email and invest in experiments like AMP, Google’s email annotations for promo tabs, accessibility, etc.

2. Work on ease of implementation

We provide users with everything they need to build an email with no coding skills as fast as possible. Put simply, with us, they build emails that render as planned across all major email clients and devices and add interactive elements, games, and real-time content in emails all without the users realizing that such features require sophisticated coding skills.

3. Maintain stability

The quality, data security, and stability of our product are our priorities.

If any of the innovations or any new feature can cause any vulnerability, we either find a way to fix this problem or do not implement it at all.

3. Can you walk us through the features and capabilities of Stripo?

Ohh, I can talk for hours about it. But of course, I won’t. I’ll try not to.

We started working on Stripo seven years ago, and today there are over 70 employees on the team. So we release new features almost every day now.

Among other features, I am highly proud of our modules, aka modular email design. 

Today, most people understand this as just dragging pre-built modules/elements of email, using the same email elements again and again across different emails.

With this approach, you generally:

• standardize your emails, i.e., make sure all your emails look consistent with your company’s brand styles;
• speed up email production. There are some prebuilt modules where you only slightly modify the design and content when using them for your emails. While in modules, like footers and headers, you do not need to change a word — you just drag and drop this unit into your template, and it’s done. This also results in cost-effective email production;
• get flexibility and creativity. You mix and match modules to create new emails.

And these all are great benefits.

But for us, modular email design is a new philosophy, and we’ve done a lot in this direction — in addition to all the aforementioned capabilities of modular email design, we enable our users to

• bulk update a number of emails at once by modifying one single module;
• generate emails based on data feeds;
• even use ChatGPT for product cards, webinar invitation emails, and blog digest emails for generating unified/consistent copy, where terms used in the title are also used in product/blog post descriptions.

And now, let me briefly describe some other features that require our attention:

• integration with over 70 ESPs, like Mailchimp, HubSpot, AWeber, Amazon SES, Amazon Pinpoint, and even email clients like Outlook and Gmail. So, you can use Stripo independently and then push your emails to the marketing automation platform/CRM/CDP you use, with no further code setup required, as the email code we generate is clean;
• flexible UI;
• 10,000+ modules built by our professionals (with gamification elements, smart elements, interactive content for a star rating and measuring NPS score, etc.);
• support for interactive and AMP content, like image rollover effect, anchor links, AMP forms, AMP carousels, etc.;
• brand guidelines kit generator so you build your brand book in no time to make sure your newsletters are brand-consistent regardless of who designs them;
• 1300+ prebuilt email templates for any occasion and all industries;
• email testing tool to preview your emails across 90+ devices and major email clients;
• no-code email annotations generator for the Promo tabs in Gmail.

People use Stripo not for marketing purposes only but for sales emails as well as for internal communication within companies due to seamless integration with Outlook.

4. How does Stripo differentiate itself from other email marketing tools on the market?

Our focus is on facilitating email production only, while most of the other tools do whole marketing automation process and need to focus on email deliverability, data gathering, segmentation, analysis, as well. So, we’re not a competitor for ESPs/CRMs/CDPs, but this does make us a partner for them.

I want to emphasize that we do not limit our users — they do not need to change a thing about their workflow or the tools they’re used to due to our rich integration with different tools. 

As we mentioned above, we’ve done a lot to simplify email design and make email content rich. Yet, our email builder is easy-to-use. One can create classic and advanced emails with no coding skills. 

Yet we managed to be flexible for worldly-wise designers as well — we provide them with an open HTML and CSS code editor along with the Drag-n-drop builder. It lets them either code emails from scratch or start in the Drag-n-Drop builder and then add custom HTML elements. They can use both the D-n-D email template builder and the HTML email editor simultaneously with no switching.

I want to take the opportunity and say that this month we’re launching the new feature we’ve been working on for the last two years — Real-time co-editing and commenting. It works just like Google Docs but for emails.

I’d like to add: we’re not competitors, but we are partners for ESPs/CRMs/CDPs.

5. How do you see the email marketing industry evolving in the next 5-10 years, and how is Stripo positioning itself to stay ahead of the curve?

I believe this could be a subject for a big interview. But I’ll try to keep it short.

Let’s look at email marketing from two different angles — email design and marketing automation.

As for the design, it will be no-code email development. We all will transition from using drag-and-drop editors to modular email design. We’ll widely use generative AI for copy and imagery.

As for the marketing automation… Currently, the prevailing approach among most companies is campaign-driven. However, I advocate for a goal-driven approach, wherein marketers focus on the overall objective of their email marketing communication with clients, rather than just executing isolated campaigns. Imagine being able to establish a goal and having a system autonomously undertake all the necessary steps to achieve it. Although it may seem impossible, consider how people initially doubted Tesla’s Full Self-driving capabilities. Today, one can simply input a starting point and destination on Google maps, lightly grip the steering wheel, and allow the car to handle the rest. 

The same principle can be applied to marketing. All we need is a “map” and pathways to gradually progress towards our goal. In my opinion, the essential map lies within the Customer Journey, which encompasses numerous aspects that can be enhanced by the system. This includes determining the optimal send time, communication channel, message quantity and frequency, as well as optimizing the quality of collected data. Although numerous challenges exist, they can propel us from a campaign-driven to a goal-driven marketing approach, where machines and AI handle mechanical and repetitive tasks, enabling marketers to focus on their work and goal-setting.

As for Stripo’s role, well… 

Not only did we enable our customers to use modular email design and use AI for copy in email, but we are also working hard on approaching the moment when email marketers can utilize goal-driven marketing. When marketers will operate with high level abstractions like content items rather than blocks (buttons, images, texts).

Other changes we should expect soon:

• personalization will improve a lot;
• the way customers interact with email as email marketing is evolving. For instance, Gmail released its Email annotations for the Promo tabs, it’s where people can see multiple product cards, product descriptions, and prices in their inboxes without the need to open the email, GDPR, etc. 

6. Can you discuss any recent product updates or new features that Stripo has released or is planning to release in the near future?

Sure, I’d love to highlight a few upcoming features here:

• the real WYSIWYG editor… I call it “real” because users can literally switch between the modes, for instance, desktop and mobile, to work on a necessary version of an email; 
• dark mode UI for email preview so that you can see how your email will render on a device with a dark mode on and adjust your design to it;
• real-time co-editing and commenting, which I’ve mentioned above;
• spell-checkers to ensure error-free copy;
• email accessibility precheck so that one can build emails that are accessible to each and every person out there.

All these features will be released with the new version of the editor, which we call Stripo 2.0, this year.

7. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs just starting in the SaaS space?

You started this interview with an excellent question, “What problem does your product solve?”

So, my piece of advice would be — Focus on solving the problem, not on the method of solving it. As a developer, I tend to understand a problem and fall in love with a technical solution. But it’s not how it is supposed to work. So, I strongly recommend that all those who want to start their own startups read “Fall in Love with a Problem, not a Solution” by Uri Levine. This book is new, but one of the best books I’ve read so far.

If you’re a startup in the marketing industry, use partners’ products like Stripo (a moment of self-promo 🙂 ), don’t waste time building them on your own, and focus on the main things instead.

8. How do you approach leadership and building a successful team at Stripo?

Our secrets to being a productive team are:

• we all work towards one goal,
• and we love working on a product that is changing the world for the better.

Our developers are not just coding, they know what they are doing this for. Along with the product unit, they constantly track how clients use new features. 

Our marketers do not write articles, but every article is a start for some serious research that may result in significant changes or improvements to the product. Recently, we have investigated Email gamification and Multilingual email marketing thoroughly and published two eBooks on these subjects. 

Our support department does not just help a client to solve their problem, but every time they do their best to find the core of the problem and come up with suggestions on how to improve the product so that no one else will not experience this problem ever again.

We are trying to build a product that will change the world for the better. These are not just words. This is what drives us.

9. Can you share any upcoming plans or exciting developments that Stripo has in store?

We’ve mentioned earlier that we’re working on a new editor, which will see the world this summer. It will have lots of excellent features.

But our processes are built the way that we always have some other projects in progress. For instance, now:

• HTML-powered games; we started this project while getting ready for MailCon. Previously, we’d enabled our clients to build games with AMP. However, we loved the idea of building games without AMP so much that now we’re about to launch a generator that will allow customers to generate code for their games — up to 10 different options — based on AMP and based on HTML. Still, users will not have to deal with code — they will only do it through the interface, then copy and paste the code into their email templates;
• last month we integrated ChatGPT into Stripo so that email marketers can easily optimize their copies right in the Stripo editor;
• in the future, we will also use it for our prebuilt email templates. We’ll parse your brand name, logo, and industry via the link you provide us with, and AI will generate copy that is aligned with your website’s tone of voice and your industry. Simply put, existing texts in current templates will be optimized and adjusted to your business. This will save marketers time.

We’ve also finalized some projects this year — released the email signature generator, the “Add to calendar link” generator, simplified email localization, etc.

We noticed that people also need landing pages, such as “Thank you” and “You’ve been successfully subscribed” pages for their emails. So, we’ve added a Landing Page builder to our roadmap.

But landing pages are not the only thing besides email itself that email marketers need. Website widgets, like forms for collecting contacts, forms for running surveys, sidebars, and popups, are something people need, and we have expertise in them. So, last year we released our new product Claspo.

10. Tell us about your experience at Mail Con Last Vegas 2023. What was your biggest takeaway?

Even though this may sound a little bit flattery, I want to confess that I love this and all previous events by MailCon. It is a great event to meet experts in email industry, get new connections, inspire with ideas.

This year’s takeaways:

• as I mentioned above, I learned that games based on HTML could be functional and interesting enough. Earlier I was focused on AMP for interactive emails. Cyrill Gross from Mayoris and I hosted a workshop on it, it gives the start for the series of micro-applicatioins for generating interactive widgets with and without AMP
• I discovered Nancy Harhut’s book, “Using Behavioral Science in Marketing: Drive Customer Action and Loyalty by Prompting Instinctive Responses.” 
  • the power of storytelling;
  • even really smart people decide based on emotional reasons;
  • FOMO does increase sales;
  • the power of social proof — people will rely on reviews from people like them;
  • etc.

I find this book awesome and extremely useful. We already started work on embedding some principles from the book + AI to help marketers do effective emails. Look to our subject line AI generator to see the result.

I want to thank Kristen and her team for organizing this amazing event. I’d recommend everyone to attend MailCon whenever you get a chance.

11. Eventible.com is a review platform catering to B2B events. Given how review-driven our lives have become today, will reviews bring transparency to the events industry? Would you rely on event reviews from other speakers if you had to make a speaking decision?

G2Crowd and Capterra, Amazon Customer Reviews and Yelp, Trip Advisor and Booking.com have proved that such platforms work. I always check reviews whenever I buy anything online. I mean, who doesn’t?

So, I am sure Eventible is supposed to be useful for those who are going to attend different events.

I like that this tool shares both positive and negative reviews, I believe they are honest. I also like the list of criteria they use for “reviewing” an event, for example, the criterion “Networking opportunities.” Attendees longing to meet new people at an event will know if the event meets their needs and expectations.

So, I would definitely rely on such reviews, no matter if I think of attending the event as a speaker or a guest.