If you’ve ever tried building HTML emails from scratch, you already know how painful it is. You’re dealing with nested tables, inline CSS, mobile layouts, and then Outlook comes along and breaks everything anyway. It’s one of those problems that nobody actually wants to spend engineering time on. But if you’re building a startup, you still need onboarding emails, product announcements, change logs, and launch campaigns.
Flodesk just released Studio, and it’s taking a pretty different approach to solving that problem. Instead of being another AI writing assistant that spits out generic templates, Studio is built as a dedicated email design workspace. The AI helps you get most of the way there, but you still have complete control over the final design. And when you’re done, you can export the HTML and use it with whatever email platform you’re already using.
Setting Up Your Brand Once
The first thing you do inside Studio is create your brand, because everything Studio generates builds on top of this. This part is actually more important than it might seem. Most AI tools start from a blank slate every single time, so you’re constantly repeating yourself or tweaking outputs until they look right. Studio works a little differently. Instead of recreating your brand for every email, you define it once, and then every future design uses those same brand settings as a starting point.
You upload your logo, add your brand colors by pasting in the exact hex codes from your website, and then upload your fonts. If you have custom fonts, you can use those. Otherwise, you just pick from the built-in options. Next, you have brand voice. Think of this like configuring a project before you start building. Instead of telling the AI how you want every single email to sound, you define it once. Something like authoritative, concise, developer focused, and avoid unnecessary marketing language.
Once that’s done, you now have a reusable brand that Studio can reference every time you create a new email. Instead of starting from zero for every launch, change log, or onboarding sequence, you’ve already established the design system up front.
Generating a SaaS Onboarding Email
Let’s actually build a first email. For this example, a SaaS onboarding email makes sense. You paste in a prompt like, “Create a clean onboarding email for a developer analytics platform. Introduce the product, highlight three core features with icons, include a product dashboard screenshot, and finish with a primary call to action button encouraging users to complete setup.”
Right away, this is where Studio feels a bit different from most AI design tools. Usually, when you generate something from a prompt, it feels like it was made from scratch. You get layouts that are technically correct, but they all kind of look the same. Here, the overall composition feels much more intentional because it’s building on top of professionally designed components instead of trying to invent an entirely new layout every time.
Why the First Generation Isn’t the Final Version
Of course, the first generation usually isn’t the final version, and that’s actually the point. The prompt gets you most of the way there, then you take over. Maybe you want the headline to be a little shorter, so you just edit that. Then there are images to replace. You swap in your app logo at the top, drop in a screenshot of your app dashboard further down, and replace the other placeholder images with additional app screenshots.
You can also change the text on the button, move sections around, and tweak the copy however you’d like. If you want to make bigger changes, you can just go back into chat and ask for them conversationally instead of rebuilding everything from scratch.
Fine-Tuning in the Visual Builder
If you prefer editing visually, you can do that too. You have full control over the layout. You can adjust spacing, move elements around, change the styling of individual sections, and fine-tune everything until it matches exactly what you’re looking for.
That’s the workflow that stands out here. The AI handles the repetitive setup, but you’re still making the design decisions. It feels less like you’re prompting an assistant and more like you’re working inside a design tool that just happens to understand natural language.
Exporting HTML Without Migrating Your Stack
Once you’re happy with the design, this is probably the most useful part of the workflow. Instead of forcing you to send an email through a new platform, Studio lets you export the HTML directly. You click on export HTML, and just like that, you have the complete HTML copied to the clipboard.
This is where Studio makes the most sense for engineers and founders. Chances are you already have an email pipeline in place. Maybe you’re using Resend, Amazon SES, SendGrid, or you’ve built your own back end that handles transactional emails. The last thing you want to do is migrate your contacts, automations, and infrastructure just to get a nicer looking email. Instead, you can keep your existing stack exactly the way it is and just replace the design step.
Plugging Into a Developer Workflow
For example, you might have a simple Next.js application using Resend. Instead of manually writing HTML tables or editing an old template, you just paste in the exported HTML, save the file, and send a test email. What you get back is a fully responsive email that’s ready to ship without spending hours fighting inline CSS or debugging layouts across different email clients.
That’s really the workflow Studio’s aiming for. Design here, export the HTML, and send it however you already send email. It fits into your existing workflow instead of asking you to replace it.
Who Studio Is Actually Useful For
This makes the most sense if you’re a founder, engineer, or indie hacker who’s already shipping emails, but doesn’t want to spend hours building or maintaining HTML templates. Whether it’s onboarding flows, product announcements, launch emails, or change logs, you still need them to look good, but they probably aren’t where you want to spend your engineering time.
What’s surprising about Studio is that it doesn’t feel like another AI assistant trying to take over the creative process. It feels more like a dedicated workspace where the AI handles the repetitive setup while you stay in control of the final design. Then when you’re done, you can export the HTML and plug it into the email infrastructure you already have instead of rebuilding your entire workflow around a new platform.
Points clés à retenir
- Construire des emails HTML à la main est pénible et prend un temps d’ingénierie précieux, surtout quand Outlook casse tout.
- Studio n’est pas un assistant d’écriture générique : c’est un espace de conception dédié où l’IA fait le gros du travail préparatoire, mais vous gardez le contrôle du design final.
- Vous configurez votre marque une seule fois (logo, couleurs, polices, tonalité), et chaque futur email s’appuie sur cette base au lieu de repartir de zéro.
- La première génération n’est jamais la version finale. Le prompt vous amène la plupart du chemin, puis vous éditez le titre, remplacez les images et ajustez la copie.
- Les modifications plus larges se font de manière conversationnelle dans le chat, sans reconstruire tout l’email.
- L’éditeur visuel vous donne un contrôle complet : espacement, déplacement des sections, style de chaque élément.
- L’export HTML est direct. Vous copiez le code et l’intégrez dans votre pipeline existant (Resend, SES, SendGrid, back-end maison) sans migrer votre infrastructure.
- Studio s’adresse aux fondateurs, ingénieurs et indé hackers qui veulent de beaux emails sans y passer des heures, et sans changer toute leur stack.
The whole workflow, from setting up the brand to generating the email, refining the design, and exporting the final HTML, is built around a simple idea. You shouldn’t have to rebuild your email infrastructure just to get a design that doesn’t look like it came from 2008. Studio is free to use while it’s in public beta, so you can head over and try it yourself.