Social marketing startup Flowtown has been acquired by marketing software as a service company Demandforce, a mere thirteen months after it announced $750K in seed funding from angels Dave McClure, Travis Kalanick, Mitch Kapor, Brian Norgard, Steve Anderson, Mark Goines, Auren Hoffman and Brian Hoffman.
Flowtown has iterated upon multiple products since it launched in November of 2009. It’s perhaps best known for its service that let companies add useful social information like related Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn accounts to their marketing contact lists.
Because of a Facebook TOS change, the company veered away from that product in October 2010 and pivoted into gift marketing, allowing its customers to easily give referral rewards to their customers through Facebook, Twitter, etc. The gift marketing service never publicly launched but was profitable through a few select campaigns.
Flowtown also built out a product called Timely.is which helps users schedule and automatically send tweets at optimal times, based on prior tweeting patterns. That product is now integrated into Demandforce’s small business marketing software.
“Anything they do to make their product social is important,” Flowtown co-founder Dan Martell tells me, and brings up an anecdotal analogy from Demandforce’s dentistry vertical, “The 20% of people who don’t go to their regularly scheduled dentist appointment means $80 million in year in lost potential revenue.” Marketing successfully to those people is big business, obviously.
Co-founder Ethan Bloch describes the relationship between the two companies as “complete vision alignment,”We get to integrate our products and move 10x faster than we could if we remained independent and raised our Series A. It’s a major win for our team, products and investors.”