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Teplow and Faden confessed to being taken aback by the extent of the clamor to invest in their email marketing based start up.
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Joe Teplow and Trever Faden have succeeded in raising $2 million in seed funding for their RebelMail start-up , with the pair confessing that he modestly expected to raise a few hundred thousand dollars and were taken aback by the interest in their company.
Leading the funding round were venture capital firms Vaizra and Boldstart , with Lerer Ventures, Box Group, Vayner RSE with a number of angel investors also taking part.
Formerly known as EngageInbox, Washington, D.C. based RebelMail, provides an important service to the email marketing committee by providing them with the option to add an instant checkout to an e-mail message, instead of redirecting potential customers to the company’s website, a process which has created considerable problems for online marketers for many years.
RebelMail incorporates powerful software eliminates tedious multi-step purchasing process and the considerable risk of losing the customer in the process, by providing a “ one-stop” shopping facility from e-mail to sale.
Joe Teplow and Trever Faden recall that they came up with the RebelMail concept together, based on a prototype model that Teplow had designed and produced on behalf of of not-for-profit email foundation that encouraged its subscribers to donate 25 cents to charity every day.
Encouraged by the success of the charity email list, which grew from ten of Teplow’s close friends to a project that succeeded in raising more than $30, 000 for charities annually, Teplow and Faden began to realize that the concept that had been developed as a means to helping others had major commercial possibilities
Joe Teplow recalls that when he first met Trever Faden through a project which Faden had developed that would allow people to get to know each other through social networks by an introductory email, one of which he received.
At that point Joe was in the early stages of investigating the commercial strengths of using email as a marketing interface, and was intrigued to discover that Trever Faden has succeeded in creating a workable form field in an email.
The pair soon established contact began working together on a project, which would allow both a form field as well as an instant checkout facility to be incorporated into an e-mail.
Originally entitled the slightly ponderous EngageInbox, which rapidly became RebelMail, Teplow and Faden spent a number of months working in close cooperation with smaller e-commerce companies to beta-test RebelMail’s new, interactive email system and to iron out any potential glitches.
According to Joe Teplow the greatest possible comparison that could be made was request that the companies who are participating in our tests to mount an e-mail marketing campaign, with some of mail shots being issued through traditional static emails and a similar proportion through RebelMail driven interactive emails, with the difference in reaction and conversion between the two systems being “mind blowingly” in favor of RebelMail.
Teplow and Faden announced that they intend to utilize the seed capital raised to dramatically increase their staff in order to meet what appears to be an already overwhelming demand from some of the largest e-commerce organizations.
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