Our Story
How Next Marketing Technology Ltd. evolved from a digital agency into an AI-native product company building tools for the next generation of marketing teams.
Next Marketing Technology Ltd. is the latest chapter in a thirteen-year arc that started with one founder, one agency, and an obsession with making marketing measurable.
Origin
Emre Elbeyoglu co-founded Flatart Digital Marketing Agency in 2013 at age 24, having left Bilkent University to operate it full-time. Flatart grew to a 30+ person team and consulted hundreds of brands across SEO, performance marketing, and content. More than anything, it became a laboratory. Years of running campaigns for other people's businesses turned up the same patterns, and the same gaps in tooling, again and again.
By 2019, the gap was obvious. The work that genuinely moved the needle for clients wasn't agency hours; it was repeatable systems. So we started turning those systems into products.
The pivot to product
2019 — Popupsmart founded
Popupsmart was co-founded to productize the conversion-optimization patterns from the agency into a scalable SaaS. Its thesis: most websites lose more conversions to bad on-site marketing than to bad traffic. Build the tool that fixes the on-site part.
2020 — Popupsmart MVP ships
After a year of product development, the public MVP launches.
2021 — Popupsmart hits 4× MRR growth
The product is selected as a Product Hunt Golden Kitty Finalist in the e-commerce category. Team grows. The thesis is working.
2022 — Next Marketing Technology Ltd. incorporated
Incorporated in the UK as the parent company behind a growing product portfolio. Companies House registration: #14384054.
2023 — LiveChatAI launches
LiveChatAI launches as the conversational-AI layer for customer support, built on GPT-4, Llama, and Mistral. It reaches 200+ active users in its first months. Early proof that an AI-native product can grow without a traditional sales motion.
2024 — GrowthMarketing.ai launches; LiveChatAI in WIRED
GrowthMarketing.ai ships as an AI-powered platform for growth strategies, case studies, and experiments. LiveChatAI is featured in WIRED for its work across multiple foundation models.
2025 — LiveChatAI ships WhatsApp Business + Shopify
LiveChatAI ships WhatsApp Business as a Meta Technology Partner and launches on the Shopify App Store. Popupsmart announces AI-generated popups for conversion-optimized creative. The portfolio is now AI-native end to end.
What this story is really about
Three threads run through every chapter:
- Operator-led, not theory-led. Every product started from running campaigns ourselves, hitting the same wall repeatedly, and building the tool we wished existed.
- Compound, don't churn. Each product builds on the last. Popupsmart taught us on-site conversion, LiveChatAI taught us conversational AI, and enricher.io taught us the data layer that now feeds WebSearchAPI.ai, markdown.new, and Growthmarketing.ai.
- AI-native, not AI-labeled. From LiveChatAI onward, we've shipped products that wouldn't exist without large language models. We don't retrofit AI on top of pre-AI workflows.
What this story is not
It's not a unicorn fundraising trajectory. We've never optimized for it. We've optimized for shipping products that real customers pay for, run by small, deliberate teams. That's the chapter we're still writing.
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