Most marketing emails get lost in teeming inboxes—just more subject lines for overwhelmed email users to swipe into their delete folders. So last year, a Raleigh-based startup worked out a way to reach consumers more directly: through their calendars.
InviteJet was co-founded by Paul Davis and Brian Watson. The startup partners with brands to create calendar invite campaigns, marketing through calendars rather than over email. This strategy was born out of the hope to give consumers more agency to “accept” an individualized deal or brand invitation, Davis said.
“From the brand perspective, they send the invite, it lands on your calendar as tentative, so the customer can decide to accept, decline, [or] do nothing,” Davis said.
Davis had first tested the concept of marketing through calendar invites in 2019, when he launched a kickstarter campaign for his tea infuser product (Mosi Tea) and manually sent out thousands of invitations. His team met its goal within five hours and raised over half a million dollars. If it had worked once, he knew it could work again.
Davis hoped to find a solution that could send out mass numbers of calendar invites—like MailChimp for calendars—but found that existing calendar technology was largely antiquated. Few people understood it well enough to help him improve it, and his idea went to the back-burner. But that all changed in 2023 when Watson overheard Davis talking about calendar marketing on a bus.
The two had wound up on the same church mission trip in Ecuador, and though they had never met, it just so happened that Watson, a seasoned product engineer, also had experience in calendar technology. Together, they launched InviteJet’s MVP in 2024.
Watson said the company’s first step was to prove that their calendar marketing works better than other marketing tools.
The InviteJet Difference
“We’re still an early company, but the thing that we wanted to prove was: Could calendar invites be used instead of email, and could they outperform email?” Watson said. “And we are outperforming email—we’ve proven that.”
That much is clear in the numbers. Where email averages 30% open rates, InviteJet’s open rates are more like 60%. The company’s click-through rates are over four times higher than email’s. Most telling is the conversion rate: Only 3% of emails result in a sale, while 9% of calendar invites compel the consumer to purchase, Watson said.
“And so for brands, if you’re a $500 million brand, a 1% increase is quite a bit,” Watson said. “When you look at numbers like ours versus emails, it’s a no brainer, once people find out about it.”
InviteJet’s outreach also tends to be more effectively targeted. Using current brand marketing strategies, companies send an average of six emails for one promotion. It’s a shotgun blast in the dark, without taking into account things like buyer behavior, purchase profile or time zones. InviteJet, on the other hand, takes a more surgical approach using time-based marketing. Instead of a shotgun blast, Watson said that paying attention to the buyer’s shopping habits and sending one invitation at the right time can improve the consumer experience.
“There’s no sense in sending me an email about a sale on a Tuesday afternoon,” Watson points out. “Because I never buy anything—I don’t even shop online on Tuesday afternoons. I’m solely a Saturday morning shopper through and through, so why would you not try to target me on Saturday morning versus a Tuesday afternoon?”
InviteJet’s invitations can integrate into any type of digital calendar. The company makes revenue from offering monthly subscriptions, primarily targeting e-commerce customers that make over seven figures in sales and have customer lists of around 100,000 people or more.
Notably, if customers aren’t interested, they can easily unsubscribe from calendar marketing invitations. But Davis said that the company will prioritize tasteful calendar marketing, ensuring that customers are not overloaded and that they always have a choice.
“Putting the decision making process into the customer’s hands is definitely unique to the calendar invite,” Davis said. “You only have to send one of those.”
Davis said that rapid growth in customers through this approach helped the startup get into Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH Accelerator, with demo day approaching in late January. Recently, the founders also found out that they were among the top-20 applicants out of thousands to go on a Shark Tank-esque podcast called The Pitch Show.
QUICK BITS
Startup: InviteJet
Co-Founders: Paul Davis and Brian Watson
Founded: 2024
Team size: 2
Location: Raleigh, NC
Website: https://invitejet.com/
Funding: Raising pre-seed
Watson said that one of his favorite moments building the company took place under a children’s rope course. InviteJet was in its beta stage when one customer sent out hundreds of thousands of invitations and the server crashed. While still taking photos and yelling out support to his climbing children, Watson pulled out his computer and rebuilt the entire infrastructure from scratch—formulating it to support millions of calendar invites.
It’s safe to say that kind of adaptability is paying off for the calendar marketing innovators so far.
