I've never understood why we pay for tools instead of results.
That sentence has driven every decision I've made as a founder. It's the reason I built an AI-first marketing agency. It’s the reason we build our own agentic AI products. And it’s the reason I believe the job of an 'email marketer' is already obsolete.
For years, the industry has been stuck in a loop. Agencies charge retainers, brands hire teams, and everyone gets very busy doing marketing. The core of this dysfunction is the tool-based model. You pay a subscription to a platform like Klaviyo or Mailchimp, you pay salaries to the people who operate it, and you hope that the flurry of activity results in revenue. The platforms get paid regardless. The staff get paid regardless. The agency gets paid regardless.
This is a fundamentally broken incentive structure. It rewards activity, not outcomes. It encourages complexity, not efficiency. And it’s about to be completely dismantled by agentic artificial intelligence.
My name is Kasim Javed, and I'm not here to sell you another SaaS tool. I'm here to propose a new model entirely.
Think about the last email campaign you signed off. How many hours were sunk into it? How many people touched it?
First, there’s the strategy meeting. Then the copywriter writes three versions of the subject line. A designer fusses over a banner image in Figma. Someone who calls themselves an 'email developer' (a job title that shouldn't exist in 2024) battles with archaic email client rendering. A manager approves it. Finally, someone logs into the ESP, builds the audience, schedules the send, and spends the next day manually pulling a report from three different dashboards.
Our internal analysis of over 50 UK e-commerce brands shows a consistent, and frankly depressing, pattern: 80% of the time spent on email marketing is dedicated to low-leverage tasks that generate just 20% of the commercial result. It's a perfect Pareto Principle of wasted effort.
Hours are burned on template adjustments, list uploads, and manual A/B test setup. The actual strategic thinking—what are we selling, to whom, and why?—is a footnote. The focus is on the vehicle, not the destination.
This inefficiency is not an accident; it's the business model of the email SaaS industry. Platforms like Klaviyo, Ometria, and Mailchimp are brilliant pieces of software, but their commercial model is built on a lie. They charge you per-contact or per-seat, meaning their revenue is tied to the size of your list and the number of people you have operating the tool. They have no incentive to make the process more efficient. Why would they?
If one person could do the work of ten, that’s fewer seats. If an AI could manage the entire process autonomously, you wouldn’t need to log in at all. Their valuation is directly correlated to your inefficiency. You pay them £5,000 a month for the privilege of using their tool, then you pay your team another £10,000 a month to operate it.
That's £15,000 a month for the potential to generate revenue. Not for the revenue itself. It's paying for a hammer and a carpenter, not for the finished house.