From humble beginnings, Podia started out as a platform for selling online courses. Now, its comprehensive suite of tools empowers entrepreneurs in the creator economy to build websites, create courses, sell digital products, and connect with their audience through email. 

Podia's journey with Bird began nearly seven years ago when they were just starting out. Back then, email was a secondary feature, a nice-to-have addition to their core offering: course hosting and digital sales. However, as Podia expanded to include website building and marketing tools for creators, so did the challenges they faced in managing their email infrastructure.

"We always used to send emails," recalls Jamie Lawrence, Chief Technical Officer of Podia, "but now sending emails is a little bit more of a core competency that people come to us for."

With a small team of about 30 dedicated people, Podia found itself at a crossroads. They needed to scale their email capabilities to meet the growing demands of their users, but they needed more in-house resources to build out compliance. As a platform serving thousands of creators, each sending emails to their own audiences, Podia’s reputation — and, by extension, the reputation of their creators — hinged on maintaining strong email compliance. A single misstep could erode the trust they’d worked so hard to build with their user base.

"There wasn't an opportunity to build out a Trust and Safety Team or email reputation team and have that knowledge in-house,” said Lawrence.

Challenge: Growing pains and email strains

As Podia's user base expanded, the challenges of managing email at scale became increasingly apparent. When one sender encountered issues, it rippled through the entire account, potentially affecting all of Podia's users.

Podia struggled with banning entire accounts when one of its customers turned out to be a spammer. "Our compliance team would have to suspend the entire account if they saw spoofing or phishing," Lawrence recounts, highlighting the need for more granular control.

As their customer base grew, so did the complexity of their email needs. "I think it was a realization that we were getting large enough that email was important to our customers, and we couldn't just have random sort of failures, and we couldn't have emails just not being delivered to Microsoft, to Gmail," Lawrence noted.

The tipping point came about three years ago when Podia’s rapid growth pushed them beyond the capabilities of Bird’s self-service tier. To support their next phase of growth and maintain their stellar reputation, they needed the email reliability, expert guidance, and advanced feature set offered by Bird’s Enterprise plan.

Solution: A better, more robust email platform

The company turned to Bird’s Enterprise plan so they could "sleep at night” while sending emails on behalf of other customers and needing to uphold compliance standards. 

By doing so, Podia gained access to a suite of tools and features that leveled up their approach to email management:

How Bird improved security through email validation

One of the initial drivers for Podia's upgrade was the need for better email validation. With Bird's Enterprise solution, Podia could now efficiently validate email addresses during import.

"We wanted to be able to validate email addresses so that we could build an importer and people could upload a CSV file. We would then be able to classify those emails as spam or not spam," Jamie reiterates. This feature significantly reduced the risk of spam complaints and improved overall deliverability for Podia's users.

Email validation improvements allowed Podia to create an overall account configuration framework for better compliance monitoring. This framework mapped each sender to a sub-account and gave them unprecedented control over their email ecosystem. 

These sub-accounts also served to isolate potential issues when they occurred, protecting the integrity of their entire system. 

"The concept of sub-accounts was beneficial,” said Lawrence. “We gained the ability to confine the risk for each user, to put them into a sub-account, and then we could just turn off that sub-account."

Now, if a single user encounters issues or violates policies, Podia can address the problem without affecting its entire customer base.

The result: a more robust, secure, and feature-rich email platform that could grow alongside Podia's ambitious creators.

How Bird strengthened creator branding through custom domains

As Podia's creators grew their businesses, they wanted more control over their branding.

"People wanted to be able to send from their own domain, so being able to do that and validate their domain was important,” said Lawrence. “Or even via the API. We didn't want to manually go into a user interface and add their domain."

Bird's API streamlined this process. Creators could now send emails from their domains, enhancing their professional image and improving deliverability. This feature was particularly crucial for Podia's more established creators, for whom brand building was a critical need.

How Bird unlocked advanced analytics via webhooks

Webhooks are automated messages sent from apps when something happens, telling one system that something occurred in another system. For Podia, Bird’s webhook implementation opened up a whole new world of email analytics by enabling real-time data collection and processing. 

“We could send an email and get a webhook back,” Lawrence explains. “Then, we could collect all that information and then build out email analytics inside our app, driven by the webhook events coming from Bird."

This meant that Bird would notify Podia's system whenever an email was opened, a link clicked, or other significant event occurred. This real-time data flow allowed Podia to provide creators with detailed analytics about their email campaigns. Creators could track key metrics like open rates and click-through rates, helping them optimize their email marketing strategies and improve engagement with their audiences.

Results: Navigating complex email challenges with confidence

Due to its small team, Podia recognized the need for external expertise from a partner like Bird to effectively manage and validate its email operations. With Bird, Podia has enhanced its email deliverability, reduced spam complaints, and increased revenue through email verification and validation processes. 

“We have our support team in Bird so that they can search for someone's email address and say, ‘Oh yeah, we see these events for that customer, or we see that email was sent and delivered,’” said Lawrence. “That's an ability we didn't have before.”

For a small team like Podia's, leaning on Bird's wealth of knowledge has been invaluable. When facing issues like Microsoft changing parameters within links or triggering unexpected clicks, Podia could turn to Bird’s technical account teams for guidance and answers to questions they couldn’t resolve independently. Thanks to Bird, Podia can confidently tackle more complex email delivery challenges. 

This partnership enabled Podia to solve technical challenges and help its customers scale more efficiently. By enhancing its email functionality, Podia transformed email marketing from a secondary focus to a primary revenue driver. 

"You could have a creator paying $39 a month and making $200,000 a year, but our percentage on that doesn't change. However, if that same creator uses Podia email and adds another 20,000 people to their list, they will upgrade their Podia email plan. So that's what allows us to get more expansion revenue,” explained Lawrence.

Looking ahead, Podia plans to expand its email capabilities by integrating email with other features, such as its new blog tool. This will allow creators to automatically send new blog posts to subscribers, fostering deeper engagement and driving more frequent email use.

“We’ll be tying existing and new features into our email functionality, encouraging users to send even more emails,” shared Lawrence.

With Bird’s support and the evolving email feature set, Podia is well-positioned to continue scaling and providing value to its creators. This alignment of creator success with Podia's growth has created a win-win situation for both the platform and its users.

About Podia

Podia is an all-in-one platform where entrepreneurs, small business owners, and teams of one can build their online business. Our customers use Podia to sell online courses, build beautiful websites, run blogs, create digital downloads, grow an audience, and send newsletters – all with one easy tool.

Podia also has advanced marketing features like affiliates, automations, sales funnels, and built-in customer messaging so users can grow their businesses in any direction they want, without having to learn all new tech. 

And because everything is already connected, our users can focus on teaching hula hoop fitness, or selling sketching classes, or hosting photography webinars, or building a birdwatching newsletter, without technical headaches. All in one place where everything just works. 

About Bird

Bird is an AI-first CRM for marketing, services, and payments. 

Our mission is to create a world where communicating with a business is as easy as talking with a friend. We power communication between businesses and their customers — across any channel, always with the right context, and on every corner of the planet. If you’ve ever ordered takeaway, returned a package, contacted customer service, or requested a login code, it’s almost guaranteed your interactions have been powered by Bird’s technology.

Our platform, our applications, and our APIs help businesses streamline conversations through their customers’ preferred channels — like WhatsApp, Email, SMS, Voice, WeChat, Messenger, Instagram - and build powerful and engaging experiences. Bird's out-of-the-box functionality and omnichannel expertise tips the scales for knowledge workers and helps them be productive right away, with tools to build great marketing campaigns, customer service experiences, or automated business processes.

Headquartered in Amsterdam, Bird processes over 6.5 trillion interactions for 50,000+ customers, including Google, Facebook, and Uber.