Moncton-native Dan Martell has another exit on his resume.
Tech entrepreneur and angel Martell, who sold Moncton-based Spheric Technologies in 2008, is a co-founder of Flowtown, a San Francisco online gift marketing enterprise, which sold out today to San Francisco-based Demandforce for an undisclosed price.
Flowtown helps companies deepen customer relationships by sending gifts over Facebook and Twitter, and the service will now operate off the platform of Demandforce, which offers a range of services that help small businesses retain and enhance customer relationships.
“When Dan and I founded Flowtown, we had the dream of building simple and powerful
marketing tools that helped small businesses get and keep customers,” said CEO and co-founder Ethan Bloch in a blog today. “If Dan and I continued to build Flowtown independently, Demandforce is exactly the kind of organization we envisioned building.”
In an email to Entrevestor, Martell emphasized the Canadian contribution to Flowtown’s five-member team. He divides his time between Moncton and San Francisco, and other staff members are from Toronto and Montreal.
He declined to discuss the financial details of the exit but said ``our investors are extremely happy.’’
A group of angels sank $750,000 into Flowtown just 13 months ago, and it appeared late last year the ending would be anything but extremely happy.
Flowtown was originally designed as a social discovery service, that is, helping businesses to make and keep customers over social networks. However, press reports last November accused some parties of selling people’s email details after taking them from Facebook so several social discovery services, including Flowtown, were shut down by the networks. Flowtown emphasizes it never sold anyone’s details, but it had to abide by the social networks’ rules.
So last November, its five employees regrouped and began a new service under the same name, which launched in February and now has 26,000 customers. Eight months later, Flowtown has sold out to the No. 1 online marketing company for small and medium-sized businesses, which will be able to accelerate the company’s growth by a factor of 10.
The Flowtown team will join Demandforce.