Out of Stealth: Introducing Singulate!

I’m thrilled to publicly announce our new company Singulate and a $2.3 million pre-seed funding round.

My cofounders Nicolas Klein, John O’Gara, and other members of the early Hopin and StreamYard team are back together to solve the biggest problem we saw in events and marketing communication.

This is a $60 billion age-old problem.

On average, 35% of a business’s revenue comes from their email marketing program. Compared to other channels like social and SEO, email marketing remains the most efficient growth channel for B2b businesses.

The problem we — and hundreds of thousands of our customers — saw was despite having loads of data on our users from our events, product, and CRM, we still sent email “blasts” that were 98% the same message to everyone on a list with only static “personalization” sprinkled in (e.g., Hi First_Name). Despite having an industry-leading marketing automation platform, agencies, and smart ops team, we left millions of dollars in growth on the table.

And every email marketing platform today offers some form of segmentation and personalization. But the ops work and today’s tools make it too hard for marketers to easily segment and meaningfully personalize their messaging for the individual at scale. This explains why the average open rate for email marketing is 22% and average click through rate is ~1%. It can be so much better.

So that’s why we’re building Singulate, a technology that will shape the next 10 years of large-scale communication, starting with email.

Singulate is the first generative AI personalization marketing platform — a mouthful way to say it’s the easiest way to segment and meaningfully personalize marketing messaging using the data you have.

Many tools say they do this, but nobody is doing what we’re doing. Which is why we needed to coin a new word.

We’re introducing “singulation” — the future of personalization. This is where the name comes from: to singulate means to “break off into one.” Singulate lets a copywriter use generative personalization to write unique content in an email for each person.

Singulated emails perform better than blast emails because they’re tailored to the individual. We are just a few months into development but beta tests have shown very promising results, including 5-10x higher click through rates on campaigns.

As a marketer, a writer, and a person obsessed with copywriting, this is the tool I always wished we had at Hopin.

You might ask: Isn’t this just another AI writing tool?

Let’s be clear. I strongly dislike AI writing. I would never build just another AI writing tool.

I’ve studied the market very carefully and there are two important points to make here:

1. We’re not building (yet) another AI cold outreach tool directly, but rather we’re focused on engagement — nurturing in-funnel leads through relevance-personalization to build longterm trust with customers.

2. It’s important to call out the difference between editorial writing and marketing copywriting and how Singulate balances both:

In editorial writing, communicating an objective truth and the style of the message is the purpose — the message shouldn’t change depending on the audience. This is the writing we find in books, news, opinion pieces, longform writing, and broadcast television.

In marketing, the purpose of copywriting is the relevance and resonance of the message with a target audience, often to move them to take action. The messaging and positioning of a product or service adapts to the needs of the target personas. This is what Singulate is best at.

The following phrase from Frank Luntz, author of Words That Work, captures it well:

This is the driving ethos of Singulate’s product. You need to use what you know about your audience in your communication in order for it to land.

Singulate is the first platform that gives copywriters the tools, the control, and the depth of personalization to write well while partnering with an LLM to bring in data and research into their content and verify it. The result is high quality communications with greater relevance for the individual at scale.

So let me ask you: given the choice between a smart human copywriter writing a blast email versus AI-researched relevant content written for individual, what would you choose?

Well, now you don’t have to choose. With Singulate, you get both.

Want to see a demo of the product? Drop your email on our new landing page. We’re looking for event marketers, agencies, design partners, and growth professionals to work with us.

Finally, a huge thank you to our investors, Bowery Capital in New York and Seedcamp in London, as well as our angel investors, including the Hopin founder Johnny Boufarhat, Indeed founder Paul Forster, Alex Theuma founder of SaaStock, Allen Gannett, Alen Cvisic, Liz Willits, Dillon Scanlan, Johnathan Kol Bar, Draper Startup House, and more.

You can read more about our announcement in our press release here.

Thanks for following along on our journey. I’m looking forward to sharing more about what I learn as a founder here in Entrepreneurship Handbook now that we’re no longer in stealth.

Lots of work ahead. Lezgo 🚀

Dave
Cofounder/CEO @ Singulate