Hello hello 👋🏽,

Welcome to this 18th and special edition of Marketers Help Marketers.

I'm trying something completely new today.

For the past few months, this newsletter has been about distilling career wisdom into bite-sized insights.

For this edition, I'm doing something different, taking you behind the scenes of how one startup built its entire marketing function.

Today's deep dive features Zeeshan Akhtar, Head of Marketing at Mailmodo. He joined as their first marketing hire when the company had just launched and has built the team to 8+ marketers while navigating one of the most crowded spaces in SaaS: email marketing.

This edition covers how marketing gets built when you're late to a crowded market, have limited resources, and need to differentiate against giants like Mailchimp.

Fair warning: this is longer than my usual editions. But if you're an early-stage marketer or curious about startup GTM motions, I promise it's worth your time.

Let's dive in.

When Mailmodo launched in 2020, it entered a category already dominated by over 200 players, including giants like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Constant Contact. 

Mailmodo’s founder, Aquibur Rahman, who came from a marketing background himself, believed that the way to compete in a crowded space was to find a wedge that wasn’t about shouting louder, but about offering something genuinely new.

That wedge turned out to be AMP emails - a Google-backed framework that allowed interactivity right inside the inbox. Instead of clicking out to forms and surveys, users could respond, rate, or play directly inside an email.

This wasn't just feature development; it was innovation as positioning. Mailmodo positioned itself as the first interactive email platform, not another email marketing tool.

Their first major proof point came from Razorpay, one of India’s most respected fintech brands. Mailmodo helped them embed an NPS survey inside the email itself, leading to a 257% increase in responses. This became the foundation of their story, not because of its scale, but because of its impact.

But internally there was also a debate: 

Should they position as "another Mailchimp alternative" or as "the first and only interactive email platform"?

Go too niche, and you limit your market. Go too broad, and you drown in the noise.

They chose to thread the needle: become synonymous with interactive emails while building all the core email marketing capabilities (email editor, automation, deliverability, campaigns) that customers actually need.

Once the wedge was clear, the next challenge was to find distribution.

💡 In crowded markets, novelty isn't optional; it's your table stakes. But differentiation alone isn't enough; you need to bundle it with what customers expect from the category.

Mailmodo leveraged a key advantage of crowded markets: established playbooks to copy and improve. Instead of starting from scratch, they focused on superior execution.

The first bet was on SEO. They saw how Mailchimp dominated search results for every possible query around email marketing. So they decided to learn from that playbook and apply it with discipline.

When Zeeshan joined, Mailmodo was at about 300 monthly visitors. By building a consistent content engine around keywords that mapped to actual user questions, that number scaled into the thousands. The results didn’t come immediately, but they did come steadily, and the SEO foundation built then still fuels their growth today.

The second bet was on founder-led marketing. Aquibur’s LinkedIn presence became a primary distribution channel. Every post from him that spoke authentically about the product led to a noticeable spike in product sign-ups and traffic.

And then there was community. Before creating their own, they joined others. Zeeshan and Aquibur spent hours listening to conversations in places like Email Geeks and Clubhouse rooms. They weren’t pitching; they were learning.

The approach - borrow distribution before you build it - became central to their early growth strategy. The focus was on channels where competitors were already winning, then executing those plays better.

When they launched on Product Hunt, Mailmodo hit #1 of the day. That validation was priceless because it proved the category still had room for something new. More importantly, it proved that marketers were ready to try it.

The early phase was a continuous loop of testing, listening, and refining to validate.

That mentality set the tone for everything that followed.

💡 Don't overthink early channel selection. In crowded markets, start with what obviously works for leaders (like SEO), leverage founder distribution, and validate positioning through community engagement.

At some point, every SaaS startup faces the same problem: once the initial channels start working, what next?

For Mailmodo, the answer was to turn curiosity into authority.

It started with a simple experiment - an ebook on email subject lines. They expected a few hundred downloads; they got seven hundred in a week. There was no benchmark for that then, but the response was enough to show demand for high-quality, original insight.

The success led to an ambitious idea: why not build an industry-wide report on the state of email marketing itself?

They called it The State of Email, and it became Mailmodo’s signature project.

What made it special wasn’t just the data they gathered. It was how they gathered it. They used Mailmodo’s own interactive AMP emails to run the survey - respondents filled out forms directly in their inbox. Six hundred plus marketers took part that first year, and their responses formed the backbone of the report.

It was a brilliant example of product marketing meeting content marketing. Participants experienced the product while contributing to research.

Mailmodo's content strategy started with their own questions as marketers. They became their own ICP, answering what they needed to know themselves.

The report brought immediate traffic and sign-ups. But its real value was long-term: backlinks, SEO authority, and brand association with email marketing itself. In a few months, people were quoting Mailmodo data in their own blogs and case studies.

It was the kind of earned authority that can only be built through work that genuinely serves your ICP.

Over time, The State of Email evolved into an annual tradition. This year’s edition even included an interactive chat version powered by AI- a fitting upgrade for a company built on interactivity.

When Zeeshan joined, marketing was essentially him plus the founder. As traction grew, so did the workload. That’s when the real evolution began, building a team without losing the 0-to-1 spirit.

Early hires were freelancers and specialists mostly helping with content writing. But soon they needed dedicated owners for key channels like SEO and product marketing.

The team was structured in pods -

As they matured, Mailmodo froze their structure into pods based on what worked:

Their hiring philosophy was simple: hire for problem-solving attitude over pedigree. They looked for people who were self-aware about what they didn’t know and curious enough to figure it out.

That clarity helped them build a team of people who could move fast without constant supervision.

Over four years, the team shifted from everyone doing everything to a structure that balances specialization with flexibility. That scrappiness never went away; it just became more focused

By the time Mailmodo had its core channels and team in place, their next challenge was: how do you stay fresh in a category as old as email itself?

The answer was to lean into creativity.

Zeeshan’s team began experimenting with pop-culture campaigns that blurred the line between education and entertainment, i.e., edutainment.

One of the first was the Money Heist campaign. They used the character Arturo, arguably the most hated character in the series, as a metaphor for bad email practices. The message was simple: “Don’t be like Arturo.” The campaign was playful, educational, and instantly shareable.

Then came Lady Whistledown from Bridgerton. “What if she had a newsletter?” the team wondered. They tested voice-overs on Fiverr, then pivoted to AI voice generation when it sounded more authentic and logistically more feasible. The result was a piece that felt alive - a love letter to email as a medium.

My personal favourite was the Taylor Swift subject-line series. A team of self-confessed Swifties turned her song titles into subject-line frameworks - catchy, emotional, and clickable.

What stood out to me was the rigour behind the whimsy. Every campaign started as an idea, then moved through a structured process of brainstorming, scripting, design, and iteration. They didn’t ship until everyone on the team was genuinely impressed.

Of course, creative bets raise questions.

Is this too soft? Does it drive pipeline? But their view was clear: brand recall is its own ROI. Without novelty, a brand shifts from being a voice to being noise.

Those campaigns made Mailmodo a brand marketers wanted to listen to and more importantly, talk about.

I asked Zeeshan how campaigns like Lady Whistledown ever made it out of the brainstorming doc. It's one thing to think of them; it's another to get sign-off for something that doesn't scream "ROI."

The answer was trust.

Marketing experimentation depends on trust, not title or budget. Since most experiments fail by definition, creative freedom only exists where that trust has been built over time.

At Mailmodo, that trust didn't appear overnight. It was built through consistent communication, grounding every creative pitch in business context and timing. They didn't run brand campaigns when the pipeline was dry; they ran them when the foundation was strong enough to afford it.

They learned to frame creativity not as a cost, but as a compound investment. Brand campaigns work subtly, slowly seeping through the audience, educating them about the product in positive, unexpected ways.

It was a grounded way of thinking about creativity. Not as indulgence, but as something you make space for when the time is right, because that's what keeps the brand human.

Not all campaigns are created equal.

Here are some of their biggest wins and the experiments they killed. Among the wins, a few stood out immediately.

First, one of the programmatic SEO projects on subject lines. The team noticed that people were searching for hyper-specific email subject line templates, such as “welcome email subject lines,” “newsletter subject lines,” and “re-engagement subject lines.” Instead of writing individual blogs for each, they built a scalable programmatic system that generated optimized landing pages for all variations.

Within a quarter, traffic jumped from zero to nearly twenty thousand visits. It wasn’t just volume; it was qualified traffic.

Speed matters more than perfection in marketing, being first with something useful wins.

And of course, the State of Email report remained a consistent win, one that continued to drive backlinks, sign-ups, and brand recall long after each edition launched.

Zeeshan was equally candid about experiments that didn’t work.

They tried building a Slack community to complement their newsletter audience. The idea made sense on paper, a space for marketers to discuss email strategy. However, the team eventually shut it down when it did not reach a decent level of engagement.

Rather than forcing it, they took it as a learning: community isn’t an extension of content; it’s its own product. Community building demands specific skills and setup. They decided to wait until they had the right mix of both.

Too often, teams cling to failing initiatives because they’re emotionally or publicly committed. Mailmodo did the opposite. They saw quitting as focus.

Picking your battles, focusing on what’s working, and not spreading too thin; that’s how Mailmodo built compounding results.

Every startup eventually grows out of its scrappy “try everything” phase. For Mailmodo, that inflection was marked by one word: consolidation.

The early 0-to-1 phase was about exploration - trying multiple channels, taking whatever small wins came first. But the 1-to-10 phase required focus. Zeeshan described it as “going vertical on channels.”

Take SEO, for example. In the beginning, it was just blogs and keywords. Today, it’s a deeply technical function that includes programmatic systems, page speed optimization, and backlink architecture. Instead of starting new channels every quarter, they double down on depth and quality within the ones that already work.

That shift also changed how the marketing team measured success. The KPIs evolved from simple vanity metrics (sign-ups, traffic) to nuanced ones that reflected true business impact.

At the team level, the primary metric became the qualified pipeline, which was shared with sales in a co-ownership model. The secondary metric focused on brand positioning goals: how well Mailmodo was being perceived in the market as the go-to for modern email marketing.

At the individual level, metrics became channel-specific. The SEO pod tracked traffic, rankings, and technical improvements. The brand pod tracked creative output, campaign resonance, and qualitative brand health.

Marketing and sales share responsibility for the pipeline because they're part of the same GTM motion.

This creates accountability but also removes finger-pointing. When everyone owns the outcome, everyone works together to move it.

Zeeshan shared two ways AI changed their team’s velocity: speed and possibility.

The speed part is straightforward. They used to rely on developers and designers to ship campaign microsites. Using Lovable, they reduced campaign page development from three days to one. They built entire campaign pages, like the SaaS Quiz website, in a single day.

Then came the Lady Whistledown campaign’s voiceover experiment. After a frustrating Fiverr search, the team pivoted to AI-generated voices, which sounded more authentic and saved days of back-and-forth.

With NotebookLM, they’ve created what Zeeshan calls “human-like podcasts.” The Deliverability Deep Dive series was built entirely on NotebookLLM, combining Mailmodo’s research data with natural conversational synthesis. It’s something they simply couldn’t have done before.

The latest State of Email 2025 included a RAG-powered chatbot that lets users query the report data directly without any scrolling through PDFs.

Internally, they use custom GPTs trained on support docs to help writers with product accuracy and speed up campaign research. AI has become an invisible collaborator that cuts their campaign turnaround time almost in half.

AI accelerated their work. But speed without strategy is just noise, and Mailmodo built both.

Mailmodo's journey is a reminder that marketing maturity isn’t about complexity. It’s about coherence, knowing what you stand for, knowing which channels to double down on, and knowing when to stop chasing what’s not working.

There are a few lessons I keep coming back to from this conversation:

A big takeaway from Mailmodo for me was: great marketing isn’t about being first. It’s about being fundamentally different, and then executing relentlessly until your ICP notices.

If you're in the trenches building your own marketing function, I hope Mailmodo's marketing journey gives you some ideas, validation, and maybe some courage to try that weird creative campaign you've been sitting on.

Remember: every great marketing team started with one person, limited resources, and a lot of conviction.

Want to hear the full conversation? 

The podcast episode launches in the next 1-2 days.

If you're interested, keep tabs on the YouTube channel to catch it as soon as it drops. 

Trust me, there's so much more we couldn't fit in this newsletter.

As always, I'd love to hear what resonated with you, especially with this edition which is so long. I’d welcome your feedback and thoughts.

Reply back or DM me on LinkedIn.

Have an amazing week ahead! ✨

Your marketer friend,
Mita ✌🏽