Wishpond Announces Acquisition of Essential Studio Manager – a Provider of Business Management Solutions for Small Businesses

In addition to bringing more than 150 customers into the Wishpond family, the acquisition of Essential Studio Manager (“ESM”) expands Wishpond’s award-winning ‘all-in-one’ sales and marketing technology platform with additional new business management and CRM functionality.

Wishpond Technologies Ltd. , a provider of marketing-focused online business solutions, is pleased to announce that it has completed the acquisition (the “Acquisition”) of certain assets of Essential Studio Manager LLC (“ESM”). Based out of Wilmington, Delaware, ESM is a provider of business management software, including invoicing and customer relationship management (“CRM”) solutions for small businesses in the services industry. With this Acquisition, Wishpond has added another piece to its goal of offering a complete end-to-end customer lifecycle solution to small businesses which streamlines and automates their sales, marketing, and business management processes.

Ali Tajskandar, Chairman and CEO of Wishpond, commented on the acquisition, “We are extremely happy to announce our first acquisition of the year and the sixth acquisition since going public in December of 2020. We’ve begun to look at new tuck-in acquisition opportunities once again, and we are really excited about adding ESM as it furthers our mission to help small businesses grow and succeed. ESM has built a comprehensive suite of complementary business productivity solutions which we believe our customers will derive tremendous value from as part of Wishpond’s product offering. We expect this acquisition will provide significant benefits to small businesses, allowing them to streamline and automate their marketing and business processes, save time and money, and focus on growing their business.”

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Founded in 2013, ESM has more than 150 customers, primarily comprised of small services-oriented businesses from various industries. ESM helps these small businesses manage their financial and CRM-related processes such as invoicing, expense management, booking appointments, automated customer communication, contract digital signing, embedded forms, notifications, and more. These functions consume a significant amount of time and attention from entrepreneurs who have a limited time and budget. Instead, for the low cost of a monthly subscription, ESM allows small business owners to spend their time on growing their business.

Wishpond will retain ESM’s brand, website, and client relationships while providing operational support and offering cross-selling opportunities. ESM is expected to be integrated with Wishpond’s next-generation Propel IQ platform this year. Wishpond customers using Propel IQ’s sales and marketing platform will then be able to provide contract signing, invoicing and access other CRM functionality from one single platform.

Jordan Gutierrez, Chief Operating Officer of Wishpond, added “ESM is a natural fit for Wishpond’s customers as it complements our existing sales and marketing software and solutions. This acquisition expands our product offering and allows Wishpond to serve a broader range of small business customers. Furthermore, this acquisition will create cross-selling opportunities for Wishpond as we can offer ESM’s software to Wishpond’s existing base of over 4,000 customers, increasing the value of our customer relationships. We expect this acquisition will result in higher customer retention and an increase in long-term customer value for Wishpond. We believe ESM allows Wishpond to provide the most complete solution on the market for small business to manage their sales, marketing, invoicing, and customer relationship efforts.”

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