Kostyantyn Makarov did what ambitious software founders are supposed to do. He moved to New York for four months, joined an accelerator, studied the market, hired two American sales managers and pointed them at cold leads. SendPulse already had a cheaper email-marketing product. The United States had the customers. Put the two together and wait for the graph to bend upward.
It did not. After six months, SendPulse ended the experiment. The lesson was less flattering and more useful than “sell harder.” Businesses had already wired incumbent email providers into their operations. Changing one meant paying engineers, retraining staff and accepting the risk that a crucial campaign might break. A modest edge in price and features could not repay that hassle. Customers moved only when their current vendor failed or a newcomer offered something they considered indispensable.
to learn “cheaper” was not enough
Two costly U.S. hires chased cold leads in a mature market. Integration expense and customer inertia beat the pitch. SendPulse's American sales were already roughly 10% to 15% of its total, but the dedicated push did not unlock the leap management wanted.
The failed launch had a hidden product brief
SendPulse had begun in 2015 as a browser-based email service, built by a team of 13 after Makarov and his business partner, Evgeny Medvednikov, concluded that installed marketing software was fading. Its first version appeared in Russian and English. Web push arrived the same year. The company added event-triggered Automation 360 in 2017 and a Facebook Messenger bot builder in 2019.
The failed U.S. push clarified the company’s real opportunity. It was not to become another slightly cheaper email sender. It was to remove the stitching work that smaller businesses could not afford. If the lead came through a website pop-up, asked a question in WhatsApp, moved into a sales pipeline, bought from a landing page and later enrolled in a course, why should the owner assemble five products and hire somebody to make them talk?
“Switching to a new service is very expensive.” The line that killed one sales plan became the argument for a connected suite.Kostyantyn Makarov, translated from a Minfin interview
The resulting product can look almost comically broad on a menu. Email campaigns and transactional SMTP sit beside SMS, web push, live chat and chatbots for WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Viber and TikTok. There is a CRM, a website and store builder, smart pop-ups, an omnichannel inbox, an email verifier and an online-course platform. Automation is the hallway connecting the rooms.
This is SendPulse’s difference from an email-first rival such as Mailchimp and its answer to a much larger suite such as HubSpot. It aims lower in complexity and entry cost, then wider in channel coverage. A small shop can begin with one free tool instead of buying the entire platform. A specialist product may go deeper; SendPulse tries to make the handoffs disappear.
Free was not charity. It was distribution.
Early on, SendPulse had almost no organic traffic for two years, according to Makarov. Paid acquisition was expensive and the brand meant little. The company’s first sharp growth move was a free allowance for 2,500 subscribers. People began talking. The team then concentrated on activation - getting a visitor far enough into the product to send an actual campaign. Makarov later claimed that half of site visitors eventually sent a mailing.
The current free allowances are smaller or larger depending on the job: email supports up to 500 subscribers and 15,000 sends; chatbots support 500 subscribers, three bots and 10,000 monthly messages; CRM allows the owner plus four invited users; web push supports up to 10,000 subscribers; and the course builder covers one academy, one course and 200 students. Paid plans expand according to the resource that costs or creates value - contacts for email, users and pipelines for CRM, students for courses, messages for SMTP, impressions for pop-ups.
That menu is not as tidy as one universal subscription. It is, however, copyable: charge on the unit customers already understand inside each product, and make cross-product automation the reason to stay. The free tier gets a business to its first useful action. The suite raises the cost of leaving only after it has earned a place in the workflow.
These are SendPulse’s own 2025 figures, not independently audited numbers. The company also reported more than 500,000 active chatbots, 330,000 websites created, 17,000 education projects and 1.4 million students.
The map followed the phone, not the pitch deck
SendPulse’s largest office remained in Ukraine while regional teams took shape in Brazil and Mexico. The company learned that “global” did not mean translating the same email pitch. Makarov once used Nigeria as the blunt example: personal computers were scarce, people carried multiple phones, and SMS and WhatsApp mattered. The correct product mix changed with the market.
Latin America rewarded that flexibility. Instead of arriving with two generalist American salespeople, SendPulse built local operations, support and content. Its support now works across English, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian and Russian. The company names Brazil, Mexico, Ukraine, the United States, Turkey, Poland and Spain among its largest user communities. Customers it publicly cites range from small sellers to Swatch, Kärcher, PwC, Radisson Blu Hotels and LOT Polish Airlines.
The capital story is just as un-Silicon Valley. SendPulse disclosed a $130,000 seed round tied to Starta Accelerator in August 2016. Later, Makarov said the business had become profitable and was growing 40% to 50% annually, so it was not seeking more investment. “We do not know how to spend what we earn effectively,” he said, “and we do not want to spend it ineffectively.” It is not a forever principle, but it explains a company that expanded by attaching adjacent revenue tools rather than buying growth at any price.
AI arrived after the plumbing
By 2025, SendPulse was adding artificial intelligence across the suite: chatbots that can interpret voice notes and customer files, assistants that sketch an automation flow, prompt-generated website and pop-up designs, and image generation inside the email builder. The practical advantage is not that an AI writes a jaunty subject line. It is that a small team can turn a conversation into a tagged contact, route the contact into a pipeline and trigger the next message without becoming a part-time systems integrator.
There are obvious limits. A company needing sophisticated enterprise governance, exceptionally deep CRM customization or a best-in-class tool in one channel may prefer HubSpot, Salesforce, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, Manychat or another specialist. The bundle also carries a cognitive tax: review summaries on G2 praise affordability and multi-channel convenience while some users describe the interface as crowded or uneven. Breadth makes the pitch simple and the product harder to keep simple.
SendPulse’s partner data supplies a useful antidote to the automation story. In 2025 it passed more than 2,000 qualified leads to agencies and experts. The biggest request, 42.3%, was email design and coding. Chatbot setup accounted for 29.8%; email and SMS configuration, 8.3%. Customers did not merely want software. They wanted somebody to make the software behave.
The parts worth stealing
- Instrument the first completed job, not the signup. SendPulse cared whether a visitor sent a campaign.
- Use failure to identify the real switching cost. Then design the product to remove it.
- Localize the channel mix, support and operating team - not only the landing-page language.
- Bundle around a customer journey. “More products” is not a strategy unless the handoffs become easier.
- Let services partners absorb the last mile that no-code tools still leave unfinished.
That playbook is conditional. It works when customers value convenience more than specialist depth, when the products share data cleanly, and when a free user can reach value without expensive human support. It weakens when compliance demands a tightly governed enterprise stack, when one channel drives nearly all revenue, or when the bundle’s interface becomes more work than the integrations it replaced.
SendPulse has spent a decade trying to become what Makarov once called a Ukrainian HubSpot. The comparison is useful, but the failed American adventure makes the company more interesting than the label. SendPulse learned that the mature market’s obvious door was locked. So it stopped rattling the handle and built more doors - one for the inbox, one for WhatsApp, one for the sales pipeline, and, somewhat improbably, one for the classroom.