In 18 months,
Instantly.ai grew from $0 to $15M ARR in the crowded email-marketing space while their competitors outspent them at least 10:1. Here are the 6 key strategies they used to succeed in a saturated market:
The story of Instantly is a beacon of hope to all new market entrants operating in a saturated market.
Despite the odds, they defied conventional wisdom to compete against established brands and built a scalable business.
MARKET OVERVIEW:
Phase 1 (2000’s): Mailchimp, ConstantContacts - SMB and DTC accounts
Phase 2 (2010s): Salesloft, Outreach - B2B Enterprises
Phase 3 (2020s): Lemlist, Reply, Mailshake, Apollo, Klenty, Mixmax, Amplemarket, etc - B2B Small Businesses
By the year 2022, the email outreach market was saturated with 50+ established vendors in the space. All demands were already met with the available solutions with limited opportunity for a new entrant.
Despite this, Instantly pops up out of nowhere and scales to $15M ARR.
How’d they do it?
Here’re 6 key lessons to succeed in a saturated market:
1. Identify a Market Niche:
Instantly recognized the pockets of unmet demands in agencies craving for multiple email IDs for the same accounts and bulk outreach capabilities at an affordable price point
2. Stay Very Close to Early Adopters:
By intimately understanding their early customer's needs and using their own tool within their agency, Instantly stayed agile and rapidly iterated based on high quality user feedback.
3. Be Remarkably Different:
In a sea of similarity; Instantly stood out by offering unlimited email IDs per account, email warmups and bulk outreach at $37/mo, providing a highly differentiated solution that agencies could not resist.
4. Build Brand Early:
Content and Storytelling became the cornerstone for sustainable growth, as instantly delivered high quality content tailored to their target niche right from the get go. Most startups fail to invest in content early on in their journey.
5. Progressively Expand your Vision Beyond the Niche:
Leveraging their initial success, Instantly strategically expanded beyond their initial niche into other market verticals.
6. Take Advantage of Emerging Market Trends:
Rather than chasing feature parity with market leaders, they rode the wave of emerging market trends, evolving their solution to address shifting dynamics such as the Gmail restrictions and increase in use of email burner domains.
As we reflect on instantly’s inspiring journey, we are reminded that in the face of adversity and tough market conditions; agility, strategic thinking and strong execution can pave the way for unprecedented success.
While its impressive to note how quickly Instantly got here, I am curious to see what strategies they use to further scale this business to $50M or $100M ARR.
What I can tell you is that, “What got them here will not get them there” and the team will have to further innovate and reinvent themselves.
I will be watching!
