{"id":33508,"date":"2011-10-14T06:10:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-14T02:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=33508"},"modified":"2012-07-10T10:07:42","modified_gmt":"2012-07-11T06:07:42","slug":"dan-martell-co-founded-flowtown-acquired-by-demandforce","status":"publish","type":"magazine","link":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/magazine\/dan-martell-co-founded-flowtown-acquired-by-demandforce","title":{"rendered":"Dan Martell co-founded Flowtown acquired by Demandforce"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This morning Flowtown announced it has been acquired by San Francisco marketing automation company <a href=\"http:\/\/www.demandforce.com\">Demandforce<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re part of any startup community across Canada then you&#8217;ve likely heard of Flowtown and co-founder Dan Martell. He&#8217;s an informal angel investor who advises (and helps launch) startups and small businesses using metrics driven marketing tactics.&nbsp; He started the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.MapleButter.com\">Maple Butter blog<\/a> and he&#8217;s particularly fond of Canadian startups.<\/p>\n<p>Martell waves his Canadian flag stronger than most expats doing business in Silicon Valley and has never forgotten his New Brunswick roots. As a result more than half Flowtown&#8217;s team is Canadian and they continued to operate a Canadian division after headquartering in Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n<p>Co-founded by Ethan Bloch and Martell, Flowtown is an impressive story.<\/p>\n<p><!-- pagebreak --><\/p>\n<p>Founded in 2009, they built the company to 26,000 businesses, near profitability, a team of 8, and a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techvibes.com\/blog\/canadian-dan-martells-flowtown-raises-750000-in-seed-funds-from-host-of-angel-investors\">$750K seed round<\/a> in less than 11 months only to face the decision to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flowtown.com\/blog\/the-new-flowtown\">shutdown the company or start from scratch<\/a> on an entirely new product. The original Flowtown product was a social discovery service built on user data from social networking sites. In October of 2010 the Wall Street Journal <a href=\"http:\/\/share.flowtown.com\/b31e4482d249f163\/?web=961358&amp;dst=http%3A\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968.html\">published an article<\/a> slamming Facebook for leaking user data and as a result Facebook data dried up. And so did Flowtown&#8217;s social discovery service.<\/p>\n<p>Bloch and Martell pivoted to the Gift Marketing space with a new version of Flowtown which allows businesses to easily give gifts to their fans, followers and customers.<\/p>\n<p>The pivot worked. Less than one year since restarting Flowtown has been acquired by a premier SMB marketing company. Flowtown&#8217;s products, technology and team will be joining Demandforce.<\/p>\n<p>Congrats Dan!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This morning Flowtown announced it has been acquired by San Francisco marketing automation company Demandforce. If you&#8217;re part of any startup community across Canada then you&#8217;ve likely heard of Flowtown and co-founder Dan Martell. He&#8217;s an informal angel investor who advises (and helps launch) startups and small businesses using metrics driven marketing tactics.&nbsp; He started [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1358,"featured_media":33510,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"magazine-region":[],"magazine-series":[],"magazine-topic":[],"class_list":["post-33508","magazine","type-magazine","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine\/33508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/magazine"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/1358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine\/33508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/33510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33508"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-region?post=33508"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-series?post=33508"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=33508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}