Products Are Becoming Commodities – Relationships Are the New Moat

01 /The Concept

Levitate built a relationship marketing platform that helps companies maintain genuine connections with their customers – and convert those connections into repeat business.

The toolset is fairly standard on the surface: websites, email and SMS campaigns, social media posts, surveys, review collection, and even physical greeting cards printed in unique handwritten fonts.

The real differentiator is Levitate's AI engine, which rewrites any outbound message in a style tailored to a specific customer segment. The sender provides the original text, specifies the audience category, and dials in the desired personalization level and tone. The AI handles the rest.

Because configuring all of this isn't trivial, Levitate pairs every client with dedicated "success specialists" – personal account managers who help design the overall communication strategy and guide teams through day-to-day execution.

And it actually works. The average email open rate across the industry sits around 20%. Levitate-powered campaigns hit 60% – and 10% of recipients write back.

More than 8,000 companies now use the platform. Levitate is also pushing into new verticals: last November it completed certification for use by healthcare providers.

The company just closed a new $16M round, bringing total funding to $71M.

02 /Why It Matters

Levitate's founder is a serial entrepreneur. His previous company – also built for small businesses – was acquired by a larger player.

Working closely with small businesses, he noticed a pattern: recurring revenue only showed up in companies that kept meaningful relationships with their customers. But most small businesses simply don't have the bandwidth for that.

He looked at the CRM market and found it dominated by tools designed for large enterprises – built for volume, not depth. Small businesses needed something different: tools that help them maintain high-quality relationships with a modest customer base. That gap is what Levitate was built to fill.

A similar thesis drives Magic ([related review](/review/v-sfere-uslug-samoe-glavnoe-jeto-otnoshenija)), which raised $10M last October for a personalized client communications platform aimed at brick-and-mortar businesses. It started with restaurants and cafes, but the roadmap now covers hotels, retail, salons, and gyms.

Magic's founder laid out the vision in a post she called "The Loyalist Manifesto: How the Hospitality Industry Must Evolve in a Digital World." The core argument: the entire hospitality sector runs on human connection – and AI should serve that connection rather than replace it, drawing on every available source of customer data without breaking down at scale.

Magic also takes an expansive view of "hospitality," arguing it applies to any service business – because every customer-facing company should treat its clients the way a good neighborhood coffee shop treats its regulars: by name, by preference, by history.

That logic extends even further. The same relationship-first approach applies just as much to B2B companies and product sellers as it does to service providers.

One proof point: Agency ([related review](/review/masshtabirovat-biznes-mozhno)), which targets B2B software developers. Agency's central insight is that "closing deals is easy – serving customers is hard." And the harder you scale, the worse it gets.

Agency uses small companies as its reference point: even without CRM software, a small business owner somehow remembers the preferences of hundreds of regulars and instinctively suggests things they'll love. Customers feel seen – and keep coming back.

The same is true for early-stage startups. But as the customer base grows, those personal relationships get replaced by templated blasts where "personalization" means inserting a first name at the top of an email.

Agency built an AI agent named Kai to maintain personal relationships with every customer across the full lifecycle – from onboarding through upsells and renewals.

03 /Opportunities

Why is investor interest in relationship marketing platforms surging right now? Personalized communication has been around forever.

The answer is obvious once you see it. It's AI – specifically, the fact that AI is making it dramatically easier to build software products. Virtually anyone can now assemble a functional web service or app on an AI coding platform. The result: a flood of nearly identical competing products.

When that happens, product features stop being a durable moat. Any useful feature gets cloned in days by competitors using the same AI tools.

But when a dozen vendors are selling essentially the same thing at essentially the same price, customers keep buying from whoever they like. And they keep buying until the relationship breaks down – which, more often than not, happens at the relationship level, not the product level.

This dynamic only kicks in once the market has commoditized enough that the products are genuinely interchangeable. And that's exactly where most markets are heading right now.

Competition is shifting from the product layer to the customer relationship layer – meaning the companies that win will be the ones best at building and sustaining those connections.

And again, AI is the solution as well as the cause: it can be trained to build and maintain customer relationships at the same quality as a skilled small-business owner – if that owner had infinite time and energy. Which is precisely what these platforms are trying to deliver.

So the opportunity is clear: AI-powered relationship marketing platforms are having their moment. And the trend has legs – the more AI commoditizes products, the more differentiation shifts to relationships.

Even if building a platform for others isn't the goal, every company will eventually need to build one for themselves. Because in an increasingly commoditized market, product alone won't be enough to win.