This post was originally published on Siftery blog.

Inkit enables you to create and launch highly-customized and powerful direct mail campaigns at huge cost and time savings.

Kevin William David interviewed Michael McCarthy, Co-Founder at Inkit to know more.

Hi Michael, Let’s get started!

So you tell us about Inkit?

Sure! The Inkit team is creating an easier, faster and less expensive way to send direct mail campaigns for companies of all sizes. We like to say it’s direct mail software.

Interesting!

Tell me more about why you are building this?

Direct mail is an inaccessible outbound marketing strategy for a lot of smaller companies. It’s expensive, and you need a huge mailing list to make it cost-effective. Which doesn’t seem fair. Small businesses make up 54% of all sales in the U.S. It should be easier for entrepreneurs to reap the benefits of outbound marketing to promote their small businesses.

What’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use Inkit?

We approach direct mail from a different angle than traditional printers, using technology to enable automation, flexibility and agility.

Inkit’s competitors are traditional brick and mortar printers. These competitors rely on manual printing, not software, and therefore require large mailing lists and batch sizes. They can’t even create unique pieces in each batch. Additionally, the whole process can take between 4–12 weeks when things are running smoothly! The time you’re waiting for the mail to be delivered to customers is money you’re not making from the direct mail campaign. That’s bad for business.

Inkit was developed as a solution to this problem because our one-of-a-kind software allows companies of all sizes to design and get material in the mail — fast! Inkit doesn’t have order minimums or batch sizes. Through Inkit, postcards reach customers’ mailboxes in days, not weeks. You’ll reach customers much faster, which helps to increase your bottom line. Send paper mail as easy as email with Inkit!

Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Inkit?

Most of our customers are businesses with 20–200 employees. Our average customer is a medium sized company that is looking to streamline and automate their direct mail campaigns. We’re used by marketing managers, chief marketing officers, and other related employees working on customer retention and success.

One of our earliest customers was Atrion Faoila, a key sales manager at Citizens Financial Bank. He found that adding Inkit to his repository of marketing tactics, “brings order to chaos. Businesses are growing faster than they ever could have by using this technology.” We’re grateful to Atrion and so pleased Inkit is working for him!

How are your customers using Inkit? Could you share a few different use cases?

Most of Inkit’s customers use the platform to execute their inbound marketing strategies. Many use it for customer retention by sending friendly postcards to customers who have been inactive for 30–90 days. Other popular ways that our customers use Inkit are: signing up new prospects, converting cold and warm leads to sales, and as a touchpoint for customer success.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Since its inception, Inkit has garnered the most traction through word of mouth due the platform’s efficacy and simple interface. Inkit’s rapid and continued growth is attributed to its lean, talented, and versatile team.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

One of the largest challenges our founders faced was narrowing their focus. They knew that Inkit’s infrastructure has so many possibilities for neat use cases. However, it was imperative that Inkit’s build was straightforward with clean UI and UX in the beginning.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

So far, some integrations we’ve added are the ability to send mail over zip codes and over designated lists. In the future, Inkit will be launching a HubSpot direct mail integration. This will enable Inkit and HubSpot customers to trigger mail based on events or actions using HubSpot workflows. We will also launch a Segment direct mail integration shortly thereafter. This will enable Inkit users to trigger direct mail based on their favorite CRMs or applications. These new offerings will enable companies to attack guerilla marketing from all angles via direct mail, analytics, automation, and more.

Before we finish, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

Our team loves using Slack to facilitate team communication, JIRA for project management, Bitbucket to manage our code repository, StatusPage to monitor our servers’ activity, Segment to track our data, Leadpages for generating new leads, and last but not least the Inkit + HubSpot direct mail CRM integration to send direct mail to our prospects and customers!