Conversation
Highlights

The 18-Month Platform That Nobody Used: Inside Flow’s Brutal GTM Pivot

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Sivan Iram, CEO and Founder of Flow, shared a story that most founders dread: spending 18 months building exactly the wrong product.

Flow raised capital, secured carrier appointments, built technology, and even convinced customers to pay licensing fees for their self-service insurance platform. On paper, it looked like traction. In reality, they were weeks away from running out of money with no product-market fit in sight.

The pivot that saved the company required abandoning everything they’d built and embracing the industry’s most antiquated tool: email. A year later, they’re tripling revenue every single month.

The Platform Nobody Wanted

Flow’s original vision made perfect sense. Commercial insurance wholesalers help retail brokers find coverage for their clients through endless email chains and phone calls. A modern platform where brokers could log in and get instant quotes seemed like an obvious improvement.

“We took us about a year and a half to build the platform, to make appointments with carriers, and to go out and find agents who were willing to work with our product,” Sivan recalls. “And we did see revenue. We got paid for those early licenses. The vision was compelling and so were able to convince people to pay us the licensing fee.”

But the engagement numbers didn’t lie. “However, 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 where everything just, you know, works right and people just kind of calling you up, asking to join.”

The team identified two problems. First was platform fatigue—brokers were drowning in logins and passwords. But the real issue ran deeper. “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.”

Flow had built a solution for a problem brokers didn’t actually have. They didn’t need another portal—they needed better service.

The Pivot to Email

About a year ago, facing a critical inflection point, Flow made a counterintuitive decision: they killed the platform entirely.

“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,” Sivan shares.

The new model seemed regressive. Brokers would email submissions—exactly how they’d always done it. But behind that familiar interface, Flow rebuilt everything around AI agents.

“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 explains. “The core technology for Flow is a system of AI agents that help our brokers every step of the way.”

The system handles both modern and legacy processes seamlessly. “Sometimes it’s via APIs if the carriers have it. Sometimes it’s going to be with all traditional email. We definitely do not want to exclude them from the placement getting the quotes back, wrapping it with our insights and analysis, doing policy comparisons and sending out the proposal. We do all that with AI agents, but we always have a broker in the loop, we always have human supervision.”

Triple Growth Every Month

The results validated the pivot immediately. “In the past nine months, we’ve been tripling our top line every single month. We’ve been tripling our submission volume,” Sivan reports.

The speed differential became Flow’s defining advantage. “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.”

This solves a fundamental workflow problem. “Retail agents, they have 95% of their book is they just want to place this, I want to renew this book. I just, I don’t want to hear about it, I just want it done. And 5% is on fire,” Sivan explains.

Traditional wholesalers can’t profitably serve small accounts. “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 unit economics entirely. “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.”

Cracking Cold Outreach

Flow’s early attempts at cold outreach failed spectacularly. “The first two attempts, which happened two years ago and last year we got zero conversion from, you know, a large number of emails,” Sivan admits.

Then, two weeks before the podcast, a campaign to just a few hundred prospects generated bound deals. Two changes made the difference.

“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. The second factor was message clarity earned through brutal experience finding product-market fit. “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.”

Flow also lowered the barrier to trial to essentially zero. “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.”

The Lesson

Flow’s journey illuminates a pattern that applies far beyond insurance: sometimes the right innovation isn’t changing how people work—it’s making how they already work dramatically better.

The platform failure cost 18 months and significant capital. But it taught Flow where value actually lives in their market. Wholesalers exist to provide expertise, market access, and judgment. Technology that eliminates the wholesaler eliminates the value. Technology that makes the wholesaler radically more effective creates it.

For founders wrestling with distribution, Flow’s pivot offers a clear lesson: listen harder to what customers actually do, not what you think they should do. The gap between those two things is where companies die—or where they finally start to grow.