Overview
Dictation Daddy is an AI-powered voice-to-text transcription and typing software that converts spoken words into polished, formatted text across different apps and platforms. Amazing product but, the GTM motion was limited to organic social and SEO and the revenue plateaued at $5k MRR, with 250-300 paying users, all inbound. The founder who was bootstrapping solo had neither the marketing budget to scale with ads nor the experience and time to allocate for experimenting with outbound GTM. Tidalstead built and executed the outbound motion from scratch. Within 1.5 months, the corrected ICP and a trust-first channel had surfaced up to 2,000 potential licenses, roughly $500k if the conversations convert. Those conversations are still underway.
Lack of clear ICP definition
Dictation Daddy is a horizontal AI product and the founder was pointing us to set up outbound campaigns for radiologists from his conviction. We found the analysis lacked depth and limited the total addressable market.
Doing GTM remotely
Hospitals, clinics and health-tech firms are drowned in busywork, cold calling wasn’t an option. On top of that, they’re barely active on social networks like linkedin after creating an account. The customer profile mostly hangs out in private groups and in-person events.
Heavily defended hospital inboxes
Healthcare email systems block outside emails heavily using Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Security Email Gateways(SEGs) and Behavioural AI filters.
Tidalstead’s Approach
We always start from first principles thinking. Our founders have been both GTM engineers and software engineers who built and scaled companies. We are curious and natural problem solvers. We don’t believe in building generic engines. Every product is different. Every customer profile is different. The curse of GTM engineering is that the distribution channels get crowded once people figure out something that’s working and conversion rates drop. It needs constant experimentation and that’s where we come in.
ICP Correction
This is something that we came in and did out of our love for the product. Even though the founder believed radiologists were the ICP in healthcare, we checked the product analysis data and found the general clinicians were using it a lot more than radiologists. It is easy to conflate with radiology dictation in theory. We ended up significantly expanding the addressable market for the product.
Bypassing inbox defenders
We did this by the books. Standard SPF, DKIM and DMARC. We were not sending mails with attachments, links or tracking pixels by default. Our domains were warmed up for more than 6 months in the healthcare domain. We could bypass a few but, most were not bypassed and the reply rate was negligible
Taking a step back and building trust
Building products is getting easier and selling them is getting harder day by day. We sat on this and decided to fall back to what always sold the product: trust. We created an ontology of the domain by mapping the relationships between stakeholders and made relationships with the people in loop. We ended up having a 75% reply rate with this approach. They got us a warm introduction to the ICP and that got us meetings booked.
Results
- Built and executed non-traditional cold email outbound systems from scratch
- TAM expanded from radiologists to general clinicians
- Up to 2,000 potential licenses surfaced, ~$500k if conversations convert; talks still underway
Conclusion
Dictation Daddy’s TAM expanded significantly, and the corrected motion surfaced up to 2,000 potential licenses within six weeks, through our non-traditional ways of approaching GTM. The conversations are still underway. The founder now focuses on iterating the product, with direct access to the ICP.