Sellscale uses generative AI to create better marketing emails • TechCrunch

Anyone with email knows what canned email marketing looks like (and has probably deleted tons of them). For sales development reps, automated emails are necessary to create the volume of outbound inquiries they need to get a decent number of leads. But poorly written emails lead to few responses and also give companies a bad image. SellScale wants to do away with standard “spray and pray” campaigns with a platform that uses generative AI, including GPT-3, to create personalized, more natural emails at scale.

SellScale announced today that it has raised $3 million in funding led by Pejman Nozad of Pear.VC, with participation from Eric Chen of Ovo Fund and Joshua Browder of Browder Capital. The startup says its revenue has doubled month-over-month over the past three months.

Founders Ishan Sharma and Aakash Adesara met in high school and were roommates at UC Berkeley. After graduating, each of them moved into positions where they worked closely with the sales and growth teams. Aakash was in growth engineering at Nextdoor, while Ishan held a position in McKinsey’s growth, marketing and sales service lines. The two met at healthcare startup Athelas, where Sharma was in charge of marketing and Adesara led growth engineering.

In parallel, the two launched DailyDropout.FYI, a weekly newsletter that focuses on one startup per week and has 80,000 readers. They sent cold emails to the founders, researching their backgrounds and products to say why they wanted to feature them. The process was time-consuming, so Adesara decided to train OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model on 100 emails Sharma had written.

These emails were able to achieve 35% conversion rates, so they also started using language models to reach potential advertisers. As a result, the two say they’ve been able to grow DailyDropout.FYI by six figures a year.

SellScale was founded after the two decided to bring the tools they created for their newsletter to larger teams. To use SellScale, sales development reps first pull the best outgoing emails written by their teams to train GPT-3 and other language models used by the platform. SellScale then personalizes these emails by pulling data from customers’ CRMs and publicly available information from over 40 data sources, including social media platforms, RSS feeds and articles. As more and more emails are sent through SellScale, its AI continues to use successful ones to refine its models.

To help streamline a growing team’s workflow, SellScale integrates with tools like Gmail, Outreach.io, Apollo, LinkedIn, and Zapier.

Sharma said SellScale takes the small details seriously. For example, if a healthcare customer sends emails to licensed doctors, they automatically adjust their template to write “Dr. [last name]instead of their first name.

SellScale also works closely with the sales team to help them achieve their quarterly revenue goals. Sharma said many have seen up to 70% more qualified conversions after starting to use SellScale.

Startups using GPT-3 to help marketing clients have garnered a lot of interest from investors lately. Some that TechCrunch has covered include Regie, ScaleNut, and Copy.ai.

Sharma said SellScale differentiates itself from other writing platforms that use large language models with its workflow automation tools that automatically generate, send and refine emails with minimal coaching. After their experience with growth teams at Athelas and Nextdoor, Sharma and Adesara wanted SellScale to require as little involvement as possible from sales development reps. »

“We don’t want to be another tool for their tens,” he said. “Many competitors measure the value of their product by how much time salespeople spend inside their product. We measure value by how much sales reps don’t need to use SellScale or prospecting tools to write abroad.