Welcome to the Kit family, FanBridge

Inside Kit
Updated: August 26, 2024
Welcome to the Kit family, FanBridge
4 min read

We’ve got some fun news: Kit has acquired FanBridge, an email marketing company for musicians. You can read all about it at Billboard: Read the article »

Back in 2013, I founded Kit as a side project to build a better email marketing platform for my business as a creator. Over time, I reached out to friends — mostly bloggers and podcasters — to ask them to use the tool as well. Fast forward eight years, and we’ve been working to build the best marketing platform for all creators, and that includes you.

Today, we’ve served nearly 500,000 creators and have helped them create connections to over half a billion of their fans. As we’ve grown from a small, bootstrapped side project to a (still bootstrapped) team of 60+ wonderful humans generating over $27M in annual revenue, we’ve expanded to serve many different kinds of creators including musicians and artists like Tim McGraw, Mary Lambert, Drew Holcomb, Mat Kearney, and many more.

One of the things we love about building a company with no investors is that we can build from a place of joy and fun. We’ll always be rooted in the community of bloggers, podcasters, and video creators who fueled the early growth of Kit. As our growth has expanded naturally into the music industry, it’s exciting and fun for us to deepen our offering for musicians by bringing FanBridge into the family.

A little bit about FanBridge: it was founded in 2006 exclusively to serve musicians, enabling a direct connection with fans via email (in a day when friend counts on MySpace were the vanity metric du jour). Since then it has powered over 600 million fan relationships for artists such as Amanda Palmer, Ice Cube, Mandy Moore, Maggie Rogers, Def Leppard, and DEVO.

“We’ve worked with artists on FanBridge for years and we’re excited for our friends at Kit to acquire FanBridge and continue to build powerful tools for musicians.”

— Kyle Kuhns, Founder and CEO, XX Artists

As a part of the acquisition the FanBridge team, led by FanBridge’s General Manager Scott Englund, has joined our team. They will be working with all of our existing music creators as well as helping migrate FanBridge customers over to Kit to use the full features that you all know and love.

So how does this acquisition affect you?

In all the good ways! This does nothing but help serve your mission as a creator, no matter what kind of creator you are. A lot of the new features coming that are inspired by musicians will likely be helpful for you, too. For example:

  • Countdown timers were heavily requested by musicians for album launches and live shows, but also by coaches and marketers for webinars.
  • Embedding from Spotify is great for both musicians and podcasters.
  • Video in email (coming soon) is perfect for music videos but also any creator that uses video to connect with fans.
  • Kit Commerce and our Patreon integration give all types of creators options to get reliable financial support from your fans.
  • And of course, there will be plenty of features that work for all creators, like the ability to repeat sequences (our top requested feature from advanced creators), easily embedded tweets in your emails, and customizing the email preview text.

Acquisitions, if not done right, can affect the customer experience in a negative way, and trust me, this is something we’re going to make sure doesn’t happen. We’re excited to keep building the creator ecosystem with you. Our acquisition of FanBridge will help us welcome even more creators into the Kit family while also allowing us to continue serving creators like you.

Thank you so much for supporting Kit over the years and allowing us to keep investing in the creator community. We wouldn’t get the chance to do this work we love without you.

The future belongs to creators!

Connect with your audience

Share what you love to connect with your followers and grow your business with a free Kit account.

Create a free Kit account
Nathan Barry
Nathan Barry

In previous careers Nathan has been a designer, author, and blogger. After learning the power of email marketing he gave up a successful blogging career to build Kit. Outside of work Nathan spends his time playing soccer, woodworking, and chasing after his two little boys. (Read more by Nathan)