Understory Unfiltered: How SendSpark Scaled Personalized Video with AI

TLDR: Video minutes pricing beats per-seat models for adoption-resistant tools

Bethany Stachenfeld, CEO and founder of SendSpark, has built a video personalization platform serving 1,500+ paid customers by solving a fundamental scaling problem in sales outreach. While most SaaS companies charge per user seat, SendSpark uses a video minutes pricing model that acknowledges a simple truth: not everyone wants to be on camera, but everyone benefits from personalized video at scale.

Listen to this episode to learn how SendSpark timed the AI boom perfectly to accelerate growth after five years of building, why their marketing plus design co-founder structure outperforms traditional sales plus engineering teams, and how early integration partnerships with Clay and Smartlead created competitive moats before these tools exploded in popularity.

Meet the guests: Bethany Stachenfeld, CEO and founder of SendSpark

Bethany Stachenfeld is the CEO and founder of SendSpark, a video personalization platform that enables scalable, AI-powered video outreach. With a background in marketing automation at two startups before founding SendSpark, Bethany experienced firsthand how video worked well for cold outreach but wasn't scalable. She built SendSpark to solve this problem: truly personalizing video at scale by changing variables and attributes while maintaining authenticity.

After building for just over five years, SendSpark now serves 1,500+ paid customers. Bethany's co-founder Brandon brings design and technical expertise, creating an unusual marketing plus design founding team rather than the traditional sales plus engineering pairing. This is a combination that proved especially powerful for a visually-driven product with deep marketing automation integrations.

Chapters

[00:01] SendSpark's origin: from marketing automation pain to personalized video at scale

[01:29] Perfect timing: how the AI boom created explosive growth after five years of building

[04:56] Competition landscape: why Vidyard and Loom don't compete on AI personalization

[10:16] Rejection and resilience: learning from investor feedback without taking it personally

[13:59] The moment to go all in: choosing startup risk over corporate jobs

[17:17] Co-founder structure: why marketing plus design beats traditional sales plus engineering for visual products

[20:58] Pricing innovation: video minutes model solves user adoption resistance

[24:28] Integration strategy: betting on Clay and Smartlead before they exploded

[25:43] Current scale: 1,500+ paid customers and systematic integration prioritization

Key Insights

AI adoption waves matter more than AI features for SaaS growth timing.

SendSpark built personalized video technology for over five years before ChatGPT sparked mainstream AI adoption. The breakthrough wasn't their AI voice and lip-sync capabilities, though those improved the product. "AI sparked a movement in people who are in sales and marketing that you should be using AI and you should be using tools like Clay and Smartlead and automating more," Bethany explains. "It forced people to think about how can I automate, and so we were able to just be part of that market shift."

Product-market fit sometimes emerges not from iterative improvement but from external market shifts that suddenly align with existing capabilities.

Per-seat pricing creates adoption barriers for tools requiring personal comfort levels.

Most video platforms charge per user seat, but SendSpark pioneered a video minutes model acknowledging human psychology. "You're going to find some people that love video, they live it, they breathe it. And then other people that are like, I would rather die than record myself," Bethany notes.

As we discuss in the episode, Alex experienced this firsthand when his sales leadership mandated Vidyard adoption. Some reps thrived while others resisted, yet traditional per-seat pricing forces companies to pay for reluctant users. SendSpark's approach lets high-performers create videos that scale across the organization without adoption friction.

Early integration partnerships with rising platforms accelerate distribution before competition intensifies.

SendSpark's growth accelerated by identifying and partnering with Clay, Smartlead, and similar automation tools early in their trajectories. "We were very early to work with Clay. I remember just seeing the product and seeing the customers of ours that were recommending them and they were clearly the early adopters of tech," Bethany shares. "We're like, this is going to blow up and be huge. We want to be early in their ecosystem."

At Understory, we see this pattern constantly as a Clay enterprise partner. The companies that integrate early get distribution advantages before the ecosystem becomes crowded.

Non-traditional co-founder pairings can outperform conventional wisdom for visual products.

While most SaaS companies pair sales-focused and technical co-founders, SendSpark chose marketing expertise plus design vision. "Most people are sales and development and we are marketing and design, which is not as common, but I think it works," Bethany explains.

Her co-founder Brandon brings technical skills and design expertise, while Bethany handles marketing. This combination proved especially powerful for a product requiring visual appeal and marketing automation integration. Co-founder pairing should match your primary go-to-market motion rather than following conventional patterns.

Removing daily friction matters more than proving ROI for tool adoption.

SendSpark's AI personalization solves a psychological problem beyond just scaling. Even salespeople who see video results often resist daily video creation due to appearance concerns or time pressure. "With SendSpark, you can make one video that's a really good video and you can take two hours to record it if you need to. That's your video. You never have to record another video," Bethany explains.

This insight applies beyond video: adoption barriers often stem from daily micro-frictions rather than perceived value. Product design should allow users to front-load effort during high-motivation periods.

Fractional leadership roles accelerate startups when paired with full-time execution capacity.

SendSpark strategically used fractional executives to access senior expertise without full-time costs. Their CTO started part-time while maintaining another job, providing architectural guidance while full-time developers handled implementation. "We just need someone who's done this for 10 years, come guide us. We can't afford you full time," Bethany notes. "That can be better than hiring a junior full-time employee for the same role."

As we discuss in the episode, this mirrors how our head of GTM engineering worked on contract before joining full-time. The fractional-to-full-time path lets both parties validate fit before committing.

Investor rejection feedback becomes competitive intelligence when processed correctly.

Early investor rejections stung for SendSpark's founders, but feedback from rejections ultimately guided product development. One investor said, "I just think Loom is such a good product that you won't win," which motivated SendSpark to differentiate more clearly from screen recording tools.

Some investors who initially rejected later invested after seeing the team implement their suggestions. Most investors protect your feelings rather than share honest feedback, so those who provide genuine criticism offer valuable market insights worth processing rather than dismissing.

Competitive positioning should focus on job-to-be-done, not feature comparisons.

SendSpark competes with Vidyard and Loom despite serving different use cases because that's where customers start their search. "When people come to us, they're often using either Loom or Vidyard and doing manually recorded videos," Bethany explains. "Most people are coming to us because they're like, okay, cool video works, but it's taking a lot of time. How can we do this at scale?"

SendSpark doesn't need to beat Loom at screen recording. They need to solve the scaling problem that manual video creation creates for sales teams running high-volume outreach.

Integration prioritization requires balancing customer demand with partnership opportunity.

SendSpark prioritizes integrations based on customer requests and partnership potential. "It's a balance of which ones our customers use the most and are asking for as well as which companies will partner with us and help us build the integration and help us market and promote it," Bethany explains.

The team also considers companies gaining momentum that may become category leaders. For standard integrations, they fulfill most requests quickly through a systematized service request process. For complex integrations, they evaluate them as full development projects with proper scoping.

Failed startup attempts build pattern recognition that improves future execution.

Both Bethany and the Understory founders share histories of failed business attempts before their current successes. "I think it's cool when you talk to people about how many failed businesses they had first. Because I think that's the difference is you just keep on trying until it works," Bethany observes.

As we discuss in the episode, Ali and Alex tried launching an agency in 2019 that completely flopped while both worked corporate jobs. The lessons from that failure directly informed how they built Understory differently. Failed attempts aren't failures when they build the judgment needed for eventual success.

Want more insight on scaling video outreach and AI-powered personalization? Listen to the full episode on YouTube and subscribe to Understory's podcast for more insights on SaaS growth and marketing automation.

Looking to eliminate the coordination overhead consuming your growth team's time? Book a call with Understory to explore how coordinated paid media, outbound, and creative can streamline your SaaS growth without specialist management complexity.