Hitting $5M ARR in a saturated market by doubling down on branding

Adam Nathan found an underserved niche in the incredibly crowded market of AI content creation. Then, he doubled down on branding to stand out.

Three years later, Blaze just crossed $5M ARR.

Here's Adam on how he did it. 👇

Helping the overlooked

I come from a long line of entrepreneurs. My parents are small business owners and still work together today. My brother runs a popular direct-to-consumer kitchenware company. I've always felt that small businesses have really been underserved, especially from software companies.

The US economy is really built on the courage and creativity of small business owners, and is powered by the American ideal of entrepreneurship. Yet, a lot of software has been built exclusively to help bigger companies and Fortune 500 companies grow, and the small businesses have largely been overlooked.

So I was really drawn toward helping solopreneurs, freelancers, creatives, and other founders get off the ground, going from 0 to 1. Helping them thrive is my primary motivation.

With AI, there were initially tools out there like Jasper and CopyAI that were helping marketers create content, but they were really serving professional marketers, enterprise companies, and upmarket segments — not small business owners, entrepreneurs, and other teams of one.

Our hypothesis was that small-scale founders needed a tool like Blaze ten times more than a professional marketer on a huge marketing team. And we validated that hypothesis through 100 customer development interviews, where the folks we talked to were literally begging to get access to what we built, partially out of fear of falling behind with AI.

Hitting $5M ARR

Blaze is a virtual marketer that helps small businesses and entrepreneurs with the entire lifecycle of creating marketing content: from brainstorming to creating, editing, publishing on marketing channels, and analyzing performance to replicate for future success.

We just passed $5M in annual recurring revenue and we're on track to double in size this quarter.

It's actually our second product. Our first product, Almanac, was a wiki tool for remote teams, and we built that for three years before pivoting and spinning Blaze out of it.

Your brand is your growth lever

In the space we were trying to play in — AI content generation — there were already huge incumbents in the market, a ton of noise in the media environment, and lots of new entrants.

We faced the question a lot of startups do: How do you get a foothold, gain traction quickly, and grow faster and more efficiently than bigger competitors?

For us, it started with branding. We believe strongly that a brand is the ultimate growth lever. The world's biggest and most valuable companies are also the world's best brands: Apple, Tesla, Starbucks, Disney.

They make people feel things and they create meaning above their product’s functional value, so people start to identify with the company on an emotional level and do things that the average consumer might not: spend more, retain longer, talk about it to their friends, buy merch, etc..

Few tech companies understand this. So many tech companies and startups have cold, colorless, personality-free branding. And, while that might convey seriousness and product value, it might not form an emotional bond.

So there was obvious strategic value in investing early in our brand to stand out from the crowd and stop the scroll to really catch people’s attention.

How to leverage your brand

Find your meaning

First, we had to figure out the broader meaning behind our product. For me, it’s personal. It started with my parents’ experience as independent retailers who struggled to make the leap to e-commerce. We anchored Blaze’s meaning in the reality that some of the hardest workers in America are so underserved by modern growth tools.

Extrapolate your values

We then extrapolated this meaning into brand values like speed (to serve busy entrepreneurs) and fun and memorable storytelling (to reflect what the best marketing accomplishes).

Visualize your values

Then, we figured out how to visualize these values to translate them to something our potential customers would get: We decided to sample cultural touchstones from 1950s and 60s superhero pop culture.

Inject the brand

Then, we hired an amazing designer to inject the brand everywhere. We invested in key moments, making sure there was consistency across our website, brand communications (like our first mission video), and onboarding/lifecycle touch points.

Growth beyond branding

Invest in influencer marketing

So we had a brand that stood out, but we needed a couple more things to turn on growth. When you’re sub-$1M in revenue, you don’t have a ton of options: paid ads are inefficient/expensive, organic content is hard without an installed base, and product-led growth doesn’t work if you don’t have customers yet.

So we invested in influencer marketing. We identified fast moving water/trends to hop on and picked young, low-cost channels like TikTok. It helped that we were doing something in a brand new market, so there were a lot of folks looking for content. This strategy is a more expensive and less effective strategy if you play in a more established market or your customers live in more expensive/traditional marketing channels.

We placed a lot of small bets, quickly. Initially, we paid influencers sub-$300 per short video and got to almost 20M impressions. We measured results and doubled down on the winners, and turned our most viral videos into ads.

Get customer-led growth

Influencer marketing helped jump-start our growth, and we’re now able to get a lot more out of customer-led growth to keep our CAC down. This has been effective, in large part, because people actually love our product. If your customers aren’t enthusiastic enough to want to evangelize you, you’ve got to make sure your product really is solving your customers’ urgent needs dramatically better than the alternative. 

We built a customer engagement ladder that gave our best customers opportunities to engage first by joining a webinar, then by creating reviews and other social proof, and gradually getting more involved with referrals or our affiliate program. 

Our growth engine will keep evolving, and we’ve recently invested even more in customer-led community and mid-funnel levers like partnerships and conferences.

Parting advice

Company culture

We spent years building Almanac in a completely different market before launching Blaze. That meant a lot of sweat and tears building a sophisticated collaboration tool that just wasn’t growing as quickly as we wanted it to, and there were some tough times on the team. It’s hard to feel like your hard work isn’t translating to exciting results.

We got through it, in part, because we built a very intentional, robust culture that valued learning from mistakes and failures, so I’d advise you to do everything you can to build the same. It’s the most predictable way to keep smart, capable people motivated through challenging times.

A well-calibrated bullshit meter

I’d also say that to make sure you know how and when to pick your market or pivot, you should develop a well-calibrated bullshit meter to distinguish between technology bubbles that you shouldn’t waste your time with and truly generational shifts like today’s AI.

Sussing that out quickly enough to make the right strategic decision is never as obvious in the moment as it is in hindsight, so pay attention to patterns, surround yourself with technical thinkers you respect or become one yourself, and when you see the right opportunity, get comfortable with taking the risk of investing.

Know your "why"

My final piece of advice is to make sure you have a solid "why". Building anything lasting is hard work, so you need to think seriously about what motivates you. Blaze’s story is extremely personal to me and to everyone on my team

Find what that is for you and let it drive what you build. You have to care.

Follow along

You can follow along on X and LinkedIn. And check out Blaze.