Martha Bitar and
the business of
being understood

Before Martha Bitar had a software company, she had people coming over for coffee. Small business owners would sit in her home and try to make their emails look right. They knew what they wanted to say. Making the message resemble the business they had worked so hard to create was another matter. Bitar could help them wrestle with the tools. Eventually, she began wondering why the wrestling was necessary.

It is an unglamorous place to find a business idea: beside someone else’s unfinished newsletter. There is no obvious announcement to make. There is a person, a task, and an afternoon slipping away. Bitar’s particular talent was to take that afternoon seriously.

Today she is Flodesk’s co-founder and executive chair, having handed the CEO role to fellow founder Rebecca Shostak. The company reported passing $36 million in annual recurring revenue for 2025. Bitar is also co-founder and CEO of Stencil, a newer venture that helps people create software without writing code. The distance between those living-room conversations and two companies is considerable. The question connecting them is quite small: what is keeping this person from doing the work?

The job she did not get

Bitar had intended to become a government analyst. When that plan fell through, she interviewed for a sales position at Oracle. Selling database products introduced her to founders building technology companies. A career she had not planned gave her a close view of businesses she had not imagined starting.

A recruiter later brought HoneyBook to her attention. She joined the company and spent roughly five years working across sales, marketing, and business development. Independent businesses became the center of her working life. Their resourcefulness was appealing; so were the possibilities she could see around them. Watching people build something of their own made the prospect contagious.

There was a social texture to the work, too. Asked for a favorite team memory in 2019, when she was HoneyBook’s director of business development, Bitar recalled colleagues making a fancy meal together during an offsite in an apartment office. Her description of the team was cheerfully frank: plenty of movement, plenty of challenges, and a fair amount of chaos. Anyone hoping for a perfectly labeled filing cabinet had probably come to the wrong apartment.

She had grown up in Mexico until she was 17. Spanish was her first language. That history matters to the way she describes her work: she connects her upbringing with an understanding of success as something people contribute to together. A company, in that telling, has obligations to the people around it.

An inbox with a dress code

Shostak arrived at the problem from design. She had sold templates to creative businesses and encountered customers struggling to put those designs into existing email tools. Bitar had been spending time with much the same sort of customer through HoneyBook. They were approaching a shared frustration from different directions.

A photographer’s website could be carefully composed. Their photographs could be distinctive. Their email might look as though it belonged to somebody else entirely. For a person whose name is also the name on the business, that mismatch feels personal. The design has to carry the same care as the work being sold.

Bitar, Shostak, and engineer Trong Dong began developing what became Flodesk. The early work stretched across evenings and weekends, including calls with Dong from Shostak’s kitchen table. In the summer of 2019, an influencer friend used an early version to send an email and mentioned the product at the bottom. Requests to try it started arriving before the formal launch.

The founders also set themselves an unusual test: keep refining the demonstration until a prospective customer was moved to tears, in a good way. Bitar initially doubted that email software could inspire that response. Eventually, a demo did. The task had looked mundane from the outside. To the person struggling with it, relief was a considerable event.

“I grew up in Mexico and my first language is Spanish.”

Martha Bitar, 2024

The people who left got a call, too

Bitar made customer conversations a routine. The team spoke with people who had recently joined Flodesk and people who had recently left. They spent time in the online groups where customers discussed their work. Their own Facebook group became part of the research process. The essential follow-up was the shortest one: why?

That approach asks something awkward of a founder. Someone who has canceled is unlikely to deliver the version of the story you rehearsed. They may have wanted a different result. They may have misunderstood the product. They may have understood it perfectly and found it wanting. Listening means keeping all three possibilities open long enough to learn something.

Bitar has also emphasized a distinction between hearing a customer’s difficulty and accepting their proposed solution. A person can describe precisely where they get stuck without knowing what should be built to fix it. The founder still has to make that decision. A feature request starts a conversation; it does not finish the design.

For an independent business owner doing their own marketing, the cost of confusion is time taken away from the rest of the business. The question is practical: can they complete the thing they came here to do? That gives the software team a more useful ambition than filling another screen with options. A customer has other plans for the afternoon.

A small line at the bottom

The founders planned to launch in August 2019 and set a target of 500 paying customers by the end of the year. They reached that number within days. Investor rejection had already made the conventional route harder: even after participating in Y Combinator’s Startup School and receiving a $10,000 grant, they were turned down by its accelerator. Customer demand offered another way forward.

At the bottom of a Flodesk email, a link could introduce the platform to the next person. An affiliate program gave members another reason to recommend it. The company’s growth became attached to work customers were already sending into the world. The distribution mechanism was almost comically modest. A footer generally has the social standing of a coat check.

By 2020, Bitar was discussing $5 million in annual recurring revenue achieved in less than a year. In October 2024, she reported $27 million ARR and 80,000 paying customers. These are snapshots of a private business, rather than a smooth line measured every month. They do show how far the original customer circle had expanded.

Growth also exposed the limits of enthusiasm. During the company’s first Black Friday, the platform went down when it was supposed to be serving customers’ time-sensitive campaigns. Bitar has described the failure as a lesson in preparation and scaling. A warm relationship can make a product worth trying. Keeping it working is how you honor that relationship after the introduction.

A company explained to your grandmother

Bitar is willing to puncture the tidy version of the origin story. Early on, she explained Flodesk through the technology the founders were developing. People were unimpressed. A friend suggested explaining it to her grandmother. The pitch became simpler. The first website, she recalled, was made in a day as a placeholder. Then the business became busy enough to give the placeholder a surprisingly permanent job.

Another deliberate choice was to let customers’ identities lead. The tool would help their brands appear as themselves. This is a useful discipline for a software company selling to creative people: the maker of the tool need not be the most conspicuous person in the room.

Her relationships include people who have shaped her own decisions. At HoneyBook, CEO Oz Alon gave her advice she still repeats: “remember that you’re working with humans.” She has also described sending Sophia Amoruso messages for years before they worked together. When the opportunity finally came, Bitar made clear that she considered the persistence worthwhile. Even founders with a substantial business sometimes have to keep knocking.

Her view of the customer relationship extends to the channels a business uses. Bitar and Shostak have written together about the uncertainty of building an audience entirely on social platforms. They favor combining social media’s ability to introduce a business with an email list that gives it a more direct connection to customers. For someone whose livelihood depends on reaching the same people again, that distinction has consequences. A following is useful. Having a dependable way to continue the conversation gives the business owner more room to plan.

The customer becomes the builder

In January 2026, Flodesk publicly confirmed the leadership change. Shostak became CEO, while Bitar moved into the executive chair role. Bitar described her focus as long-horizon strategy and decisions whose effects accumulate over time. The company had grown large enough for the founders’ responsibilities to change with it.

Stencil brings her back to a familiar audience with a different obstacle. The platform helps people turn ideas into apps, tools, and memberships without writing code. Its proposition begins with practitioners who already understand a customer’s problem and have something useful to offer, but lack an engineering team. The distance between understanding a market and building software is the distance it wants to shorten.

There is a pleasing continuity here. At Flodesk, Bitar helped business owners send work they could recognize as their own. At Stencil, the invitation is to build a product from knowledge they already have. The test will again be what happens when an actual person sits down to use it. That unfinished task in the living room still has plenty to say.