Hum Client Spotlight: Scalero
Our Client Spotlight series features business leaders, entrepreneurs, and company executives from high-growth companies who have successfully fundraised via Hum’s Intelligent Capital Market. Each Q&A will discuss why they started the company, challenges they faced in scaling, and why they chose to partner with Hum.
Will Pearson is passionate about building and scaling businesses. He is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Scalero, a lifecycle marketing studio that helps companies build emails faster and create better designed emails more easily.
Founded in 2019 along with Brant Cebulla, Scalero now has over 30 employees across design, content, marketing, and engineering, and boasts clients such as Resy, The Org, and Vivino.
In this Client Spotlight Q&A, Pearson discusses the Scalero platform, its differentiation in the market, and why it raised capital via Hum and the Intelligent Capital Market.
Q: Thanks for taking the time, Will! First, can you provide a brief overview of Scalero and the different platforms offered?
A: Scalero is a full-service lifecycle marketing studio. We have two main business models: tech-enabled services and platforms. Our tech-enabled services business helps fast-growing companies grow and scale their lifecycle marketing programs. On the platforms side, we have two, both named after Italian desserts: Tiramisu and Cannoli. Tiramisu is a project management tool for emails, helping companies collaborate on creating emails and building scalable templates.
Cannoli is our newest product; it takes any Figma design and automatically turns it into email code.
Q: Scalero was founded in 2019. Can you share more on the company’s founding and what you saw was missing from existing email platforms?
A: My co-founder, Brant, and I had worked together for many years, and we saw the power of email marketing at Vivino, where email was contributing to over half of the company’s revenue. As we grew our teams globally at Vivino, we found that it was very difficult for them to collaborate, and the process was clunky going from design to code to deployment of email, so we sought to close that gap.
Q: With so many email and marketing automation platforms in the market, can you share how Scalero is different? What is Scalero’s value proposition?
A: Scalero is focused on workflow. We don’t compete with Klaviyo, Braze, Simon Data, and the other tools like them. Instead, we focus on the process of creating emails and making that easier for companies so they can quickly and efficiently send dozens of emails weekly that are fresh, creative, and on-brand.
Using Scalero’s offerings will allow companies to make better emails, which then enables the tools listed above to do what they do best: finding the right audience and sending relevant emails.
Q: What made you and the team decide to raise outside capital to grow the business?
A: We have been growing rapidly since our inception in 2019, and keeping up with growth has been difficult from a hiring and business development perspective. Partnering with Hum will allow us to hire more quickly and better service our customers while also focusing on product development.
Q: How did you discover Hum and what was the experience like working with Hum’s team and raising capital via the Intelligent Capital Market (ICM)?
A: We were searching for less traditional methods to raise capital as we didn’t feel our business model was a great fit for venture capital at this stage. Hum has been well-organized, responsive, and helpful throughout this process. The team at Hum seems to be as invested in this partnership as we are, and we’re excited to see where things go.
Q: Ending with a fun question! How did you come up with the name Scalero and what is the backstory?
A: Brant and I have a spreadsheet of 500+ names that we considered before landing on Scalero. We would do “blind voting” sessions and see which names rose to the top, and Scalero continued to outperform the other options. We knew we were going to build an international, global business and wanted a name that would work across multiple languages, and having the word “scale” inside of it is a little hint into what we do.
This testimonial may not represent the experience of all clients and is not indicative of future performance or success.
