You know when someone wants to connect with you on Twitter or Facebook and you get an email alert with a little bit more information about them? Those are a pretty useful way for determining exactly who that person is and if you want to interact with them. But those are reliant on whatever service is sending the email. What if every email address could be tagged with similar relevant information?
That’s the idea behind Flowtown, a social marketing service that aims to better connect businesses with customers through their email addresses. Today, the service has just raised a $750,000 seed round to expand that idea.
Specifically, the money will be used to hire more people with a focus on more developers who can help build out their technology, co-founder Ethan Bloch says. To be useful to customers, they need to be able to look over a list of email addresses and quickly identify key people on that list that the companies should engage with. They do this by scanning to see what social elements this email address is associated with, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others. This information is then presented in an easy to understand format.
In the age of social media, it’s easy to forget that the email address is often the common bond between all these services. Flowtown is smart to focus on that connection to help brands.
Their seed round of funding has garnered an attractive group of angels. These include: Mitch Kapor (founder of the Lotus Development Corporation), Mark Goines (Mint.com board member), Dave McClure (of 500 Startups), Steve Anderson (of Baseline Ventures), Saar Gur (at Charles River Ventures), Travis Kalanick, Auren Hoffman, Brian Norgard, and Dan Gould.
Bloch launched the company in November 2009 alongside co-founder Dan Martell who is himself an active angel investor.
