Zinc

Stacey Epstein joined Zinc not as a traditional founder, but as CEO to a company that already had a product with history. Kotap, founded by former product leads from Yammer after Microsoft's acquisition, had built a work texting app—essentially a WhatsApp for enterprise. It operated on a freemium model with a handful of customers, but had stalled on the go-to-market side. Together with the board, Epstein came in and made a bold move: they took Kotap's core assets, built them out significantly, and relaunched as Zinc in mid-2016. "The heritage of Kotap is just the core product," Epstein explained. The insight was clear: freemium wasn't going to work for a work communication app. "Nobody's looking for another messaging app to put on their phone," she said bluntly.

Zinc kicked off with a $5 million seed round from Emergence Capital and CRV. The founding team used those dollars strategically—heavily investing in engineering to build out the product beyond its shell, and aggressively funding sales and marketing to acquire customers. The product architecture was intentional: designed for adoption by workers who don't use technology all day for their jobs. "You can't give them some complicated swipe here, dropdown there. It literally won't work on a phone," Epstein explained. They focused on making the solution frictionless so field service technicians, hotel workers, and construction crews would actually use it instead of reverting to unsanctioned consumer apps.

Zinc's first 10 customers came from rollups of the legacy freemium model, but Epstein quickly realized that approach wouldn't scale. She shut off freemium after six months and pivoted to free trials for smaller companies and formal pilots for enterprise. The strategy worked. The company built a direct sales team—three account executives supported by six SDRs and two sales consultants—and began heavy outbound prospecting. One early win illustrated the product's speed to value: they took thousands of technicians live at Dish Network in just two weeks. By the time of this interview, Zinc had landed 70 enterprise customers representing between 10,000 and 100,000 employees each.

Epstein emphasized that they're still in "heavy outbound market awareness mode." Unlike SuccessFactors (where she was CMO and helped fuel triple-digit growth), Zinc is building a market that doesn't yet exist in the buyer's mind. "This is not something that's on PG&E's list to buy. They're not searching, they're not typing it into their Google browser." What has worked is a simple, one-flavor product that doesn't require heavy customization. Communications platforms work broadly the same way across hotels, telcos, and utilities—the product is easy to implement and delivers quick time to value. The company still fiddles with sales ratios and acquisition channels constantly. Epstein revealed that she's a risk-taker who says yes to new channel experiments at small scale if they could move the needle. Her payback period threshold is roughly three to four months on a new customer acquisition.

Zinc has passed the $1 million ARR milestone with growth between 100-150% year-over-year. The company boasts remarkable unit economics: negative 17% net revenue churn, meaning they're expanding within existing customers through upsells. In April of the prior year, they raised a Series A led by GE Ventures (who saw themselves as a perfect customer), plus Hearst Ventures, with Emergence Capital and CRV following on. The team has grown to 30 people. Epstein's target is to reach $3-4M ARR by the end of the current year, with eyes on $5M ARR next year. She's thinking about the next round of funding at year-end. The company is proof that a product born from a failed startup can be revived, repositioned, and scaled when the right leader brings discipline to go-to-market.