When I started Sendible 13 years ago, I didn’t think I’d be entering one of the most competitive markets in tech. With 245 competitors, some of whom had raised hundreds of millions in funding, my little bootstrapped company should never have survived.
Yet, we’ve gone on to be recognised as one of the top 4 social media management tools in the world. And recently, we made the list of top 20 marketing products of 2021.
How was this possible? How could a tiny company with fewer than 50 employees and no investment achieve so much?
This was the very question I asked myself after we were acquired earlier this year. And on reflection, I realised it was always the more human things we did that most significantly propelled our business forward.
When our competitors were adding more automation, introducing bots, and exponentially increasing ad spend to take more market share, we were repositioning ourselves as the more authentic, human alternative.
It was our only option – as a bootstrapped company, we just didn’t have the resources to compete at the same scale. And I believed that our competitive advantage needed to come from the fact that we were smaller, more approachable, and that we could deliver a better customer experience.
So, I examined every touchpoint in our customer journey and came up with innovative and “unscalable” new ways to make our customers feel truly special.
I wanted them to know that they weren’t just signing up for another SaaS platform, but that they were being welcomed as members of the Sendible family.
And it really paid off.
Not only did we start to receive rave reviews from our customers, but they started to recommend us. Suddenly, we were breaking our own records for the number of new customers signing up every month!
And that’s when I realised that you don’t need to raise hundreds of millions in funding or add more AI to be truly memorable in a noisy world. You just have to be human.
To stand out from your competitors, you have to do “unscalable” things. And I want to show you how you can adopt these strategies in your own business to achieve unbelievable results.
On my new weekly podcast, Unscalable.fm, I’ll be sharing short, actionable, and “unscalable” tactics that you can implement immediately.
So, if you're looking for a fresh perspective on how to attract new customers – one that doesn’t involve ads, be sure to subscribe.
– GH
P.S. My first tip is to start with your brand, because no-one wants to be sold to.