Founders Everywhere: Bethany Stachenfeld
Founders Everywhere: Bethany Stachenfeld
Bethany Stachenfeld is the co-founder and CEO of Sendspark, an AI-powered video platform to make personalized videos at scale.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
The power of video is transformative - captivating and engaging audiences in ways that nothing else can. That’s why Sendspark is a game-changer for businesses to connect with customers in a more meaningful and impactful way. They harness the power of AI to streamline the video creation process, enabling users to craft personalized messages at scale. Imagine opening an email with a personalized video that starts with “Hey, your name here…” and the image includes your website or logo. I bet you’re a lot less likely to click the trash can button right away. Well you’re not alone, and the data shows it. Sendspark is empowering customers to forge deeper connections and drive conversions.
Co-founders Bethany Stachenfeld and Brandon Escalante worked together at two previous startups, Bethany handling growth marketing and Brandon in charge of product design. Together they discovered the effectiveness of personalized video messages for reaching out to potential customers, but found it wasn’t scalable compared to email automation. So they brainstormed and sketched out the concept of Sendspark to solve the scalability and analytics issues they personally faced. Bethany was named by SalesIntel as one of the Top 100 Female B2B SaaS Pipeline Pioneers of 2024 and she shares more about how Sendspark is reshaping the landscape of digital communication, one personalized video at a time.
What’s Sendspark’s North Star?
Our primary focus at Sendspark is customer happiness and success. We offer a video platform, but our goals extend beyond just creating videos. We say that other platforms help you “create videos,” but Sendspark helps you “create customers.” We aim to empower our customers to achieve tangible outcomes such as booking more meetings, driving revenue, and accelerating the sales process through personalized video outreach.
What sets Sendspark apart?
With my marketing expertise and my co-founder's design skills, we've been able to create a product that operates more like a flywheel, enabling us to continually improve and offer a better experience for our users. We’ve created a strong brand and we incorporate efficiencies into our processes. Unlike many competitors that rely on costly human-assisted onboarding, we've designed Sendspark to be self-service, making it more accessible and affordable.
Tell us about some recent milestones Sendspark crushed.
We recently launched our dynamic video feature, which allows users to create personalized videos at scale by incorporating variables like the recipient's name and company details. It's a real game-changer, unlocking video use cases previously unattainable due to scalability constraints. This is great for sales prospecting, marketing automation, onboarding and customer success.
We currently integrate with over 90 different platforms including Gmail, LinkedIn, HubSpot, Outreach, SalesLoft, Zendesk, Chili Piper, Calendly, Mixmax, Clay, and we just partnered with Apollo and Amp on some exciting events.
What’s on the horizon for Sendspark?
Looking ahead, we're committed to pushing the boundaries of personalized video. Our focus is on partnering with other platforms in the sales space to enhance sending capabilities and exploring avenues to enrich the video experience further, based on user data. Our ultimate goal is to automate and personalize every aspect of the customer journey through video.
Any advice for other founders?
Make sure you really enjoy working with everyone around you. Obviously your co-founder and your team, but also your customers. The biggest burnout I've seen with other founder friends is either related to co-founder relationship issues or not loving their customers. It’s so important that you genuinely are excited to help the people that you're building a product for.
Fun fact: I enjoy doing aerial silks and recently had my first performance. Here’s a clip from the dress rehearsal.
Check out Juan Camilo González Trujillo with Kyle Geoghan on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Insuring in the Future, Listen now on Apple and Spotify and listen to all our past episodes here!
