7 GTM Lessons From Flow’s Journey: When Email Beats Innovation
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Sivan Iram, CEO and Founder of Flow, shared the kind of GTM lessons that only come from nearly running out of money. His company spent 18 months building a platform that customers paid for but didn’t use. Then they did something that seemed insane: abandon the technology and go back to email.
A year later, they’re tripling revenue every month.
- Platform Fatigue Is Real—And It Kills Adoption
Flow’s first product was a self-service portal where retail insurance brokers could log in and place business directly. The vision made sense. The execution was solid. But nobody used it consistently.
“We found even though we had pockets of success, you could see that there was no brush fire. There was no product market fit moment,” Sivan recalls.
The culprit wasn’t the technology—it was cognitive overhead. “Everybody has a platform today, carrier portals and platforms and whatnot. And we found that there’s a true concept of platform fatigue.”
Your users already have too many logins. Adding another one creates friction that kills adoption, even if your product is better.
- Understand What Job Your Customers Actually Hire You For
The deeper problem with Flow’s platform wasn’t the login screens—it was a fundamental misunderstanding of value.
“The bigger issue was that they were looking to us as their wholesaler, not only to get connected with our markets, which they could on the platform, but they needed our expertise, they needed our guidance, they needed our advice and insights,” Sivan explains.
Brokers didn’t need a portal to connect with markets. They needed expertise, judgment, and someone who would actually respond. Flow built for the job they thought customers had, not the job customers were actually hiring them to do.
Before you build distribution infrastructure, understand the core value proposition. Sometimes the job-to-be-done isn’t efficiency—it’s human expertise delivered efficiently.
- Work Within Existing Workflows, Not Against Them
After 18 months and significant capital spent, Flow made a radical decision. “We decided about a year ago to bring this platform in house and work with our agents in the way that they love to work with wholesalers, which is the email.”
This seemed regressive. Email is slow, unstructured, and archaic. But it’s also universal, familiar, and requires zero training. By keeping the interface traditional while revolutionizing the backend with AI agents, Flow eliminated adoption friction entirely.
“We take in submissions via email with attachments. And we employ technology to be really efficient with the way that we place. We structure that data with AI agents,” Sivan shares. “We do all that with AI agents, but we always have a broker in the loop, we always have human supervision.”
The technology still delivers enterprise-grade service. It’s still faster than competitors. But it works within the workflow brokers already use. The GTM lesson: your innovation should feel familiar, not foreign.
- Speed Wins When Everyone Else Is Slow
Flow’s differentiation comes down to response time. Traditional wholesalers take two weeks to respond to small accounts. Flow responds in 15 minutes.
“They send out a request for a $5,000 account and they don’t hear for two weeks versus us, where they get the response in 15 minutes, they get the first quote in an hour. And typically they can bind, you know, within the day,” Sivan reports.
The impact: “In the past nine months, we’ve been tripling our top line every single month.”
When your entire industry is slow, speed becomes a moat. But you need to maintain quality. That’s where Flow’s hybrid AI-human model creates leverage: automated efficiency with human judgment.
- Target the Segment Incumbents Can’t Serve Profitably
Flow deliberately targets small and mid-market accounts that traditional wholesalers deprioritize. “Our specialty is small commercial and mid market accounts. As you know, they don’t get the love and affection of brokers because those deals are just not profitable,” Sivan explains.
The math: “If you make 20%, you make 10% commission on those deals, you know, and it’s a $10,000 deal. You can’t really spend a lot of time on it if you’re a traditional player.”
AI changes the economics. “For us it’s very different. We’re able to place business with our carriers very quickly and allows us to really invest a lot in every size account.”
Start where incumbents can’t compete profitably, build sustainable economics through technology, then expand upmarket.
- Cold Outreach Fails Until You Earn the Right to Use It
Flow’s early cold email campaigns generated zero conversions from large prospect lists. Two years of failure convinced them the channel didn’t work.
Then they tried again with two changes. First, they personalized the sender. “Instead of coming in from a generic company email, we addressed it from our existing brokers and it is still very much a relationship driven business,” Sivan explains.
Second, they found message clarity through experience. “We have a much crisper, clearer, better elevator pitch. Whether I meet you in the elevator or whether I send you a cold email, we see better conversion numbers because we can tell the story, we distilled the value better.”
The recent campaign to just a few hundred prospects generated bound deals. The lesson: cold outreach doesn’t fail because the channel is broken—it fails because you haven’t yet earned the right to use it effectively through product-market fit and message clarity.
- Lower the Barrier to Trial to Essentially Zero
Flow’s GTM strategy centers on making it trivially easy to try them. “People just need to send us a submission and see the magic happen. We don’t need any appointments, we don’t need any agreement signed. We’ll do that after.”
This transforms cold outreach from a complex sale into a simple request: just send us one submission. When your product is genuinely better, remove every obstacle to experiencing that difference firsthand.
The Meta-Lesson
Flow’s journey reveals a deeper pattern: listen to what customers do, not what you think they should do. That gap is where companies die—or pivot successfully.
The platform failure cost 18 months and significant capital. But it taught Flow where real value lives: using technology to deliver better outcomes within familiar workflows.
For founders in established industries, Flow offers reassurance and warning. The reassurance: you can disrupt legacy markets without forcing behavior change. The warning: innovation that ignores how your market actually works will fail, no matter how good the technology is.
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