Assembly

attacking zombie companies like Buffer.com

Author

Stan Rymkiewicz
July 05, 2023

Welcome to the Category Surfers where we break down go-to-market strategies so you can build the best growth engine for your SaaS.

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How Assembly is building a $100M company

Assembly is a marketing calendar that lets you draft, edit and publish content on social. Founders are ex-YC, ex-Linkedin, and ex-Flexport. Meet Karine and Francisco.

Here is Assembly’s GTM strategy:

What is it?

There are a ton of social media post scheduling tools that are built for individuals or big legacy corporations. Most of them are platform-specific (TweetHunter) or just useless (Buffer).

Assembly is taking a content calendar approach and adding AI features to help write better posts faster. Think of it as your marketing team’s Asana board had a baby with ChatGPT.

What is their strategy?

They are targeting small marketing teams at startups with an all-in-one tool. The pitch is that you can drop using spreadsheets and docs to manage your content.

As for their growth strategy, I think the primary way will be community-led. They are early, but here is what I’d do:

  • “Free tools”: create a free tool that shows you the best content in your industry for inspiration. This is what Hubspot did, and it helped them get valuable signups fast.

  • “Content awards”: make a ranking of best content marketers. Give awards quarterly/monthly to the best viral posts + maybe do interviews. This can be an ABM play where they could target their dream accounts.

  • “Content agencies list”: list of best content freelancers or agencies for hire. They also sell to agencies, so could be a solid way to get them as customers or for content teams to find great freelancers.

How big is the market?

The social media management market is growing 13% annually and is worth about $19B. This is a lot, but I think it’d be hard to build a $1B company again in this market.

Social media management category

Assembly defo has a shot at building a $100M company! I’ve been an early user and am loving it so far!

That’s it!