To Sell More, Sell Less

01 /The Concept

Cohora built a platform that helps e-commerce brands generate 30% more revenue from their existing customer base.

The startup just raised $2.5M – described in press materials as "additional financing," though no prior funding information appears to be publicly available.

The core mechanics look familiar at first.

The platform aggregates data on how customers interact with a brand across every available signal: purchase history, support correspondence, survey responses, behavioral patterns, and anything else it can access.

From that data, it automatically segments customers based on interests, purchase habits, engagement levels, and other attributes.

It then enables targeted marketing campaigns for each segment – campaigns designed to re-engage customers and bring them back to make another purchase.

Straightforward so far. But the concept underneath is more interesting.

02 /Why It Matters

Most brands communicate with their customers through what you might call transactional engagement: discount emails, flash sale alerts, re-purchase reminders, cart abandonment prompts. Everything explicitly designed to push a transaction.

Cohora's thesis: brands that engage customers beyond that direct-sell mode generate more revenue from their existing base.

That sounds counterintuitive. The conventional logic is: more selling = more sales.

Cohora argues the relationship runs differently. The number of sales is proportional not to the volume of promotional messages sent – but to the number of customers who actually like the brand. And that loyalty can be cultivated through non-selling engagement that moves customers through a progression:

- Dormant customers – bought once, haven't engaged since.

- Loyal customers – regularly active, including through interactions beyond purchases.

- Brand advocates – actively recommend the brand to others.

Segmentation on the Cohora platform therefore runs along two axes: customer interests and purchase behavior, and loyalty stage. Different segments get different engagement tools – matched not just to their preferences but to where they are in the loyalty journey.

The non-selling engagement toolkit is broader than you'd expect.

First: quizzes, polls, and surveys. Customers receive invitations to participate rather than the same promotional emails they've been ignoring.

Second: games and competitions with brand prizes.

Third: review and feedback requests that serve double duty – they generate social proof and provide a real-time read on satisfaction levels.

Fourth: a brand community that can be stood up quickly on the platform. Activity within the community is itself a loyalty signal. Posts, questions, and discussions also generate non-selling content that can be repurposed in future communications.

Every customer action within these non-selling activities is tracked and weighted. A customer's activity score over a given period becomes a measurable "customer health index" – a proxy for current loyalty level, used as an additional segmentation parameter.

Actionable ([covered here](/review/nashi-dengi-jeto-ih-schaste)) takes a related but distinct approach: it measures what they call customer "happiness" Their platform analyzes all customer communications with a seller, identifies the specific drivers most correlated with satisfaction, and generates a happiness score for each customer.

The founders of Actionable argue that direct surveys are unreliable: 80% of customers either won't respond or default to "everything's fine," so satisfaction has to be inferred from indirect signals.

Cohora takes roughly the same epistemological position – loyalty is best read through peripheral activity rather than direct declarations. The meaningful difference: Cohora's platform actively creates the non-selling engagement opportunities that generate those signals, while Actionable (for now) only measures the signals that already exist. Actionable has still raised €2M in its first round, despite only launching in April and running with just seven beta clients.

03 /Opportunities

The central takeaway: purchase volume depends far less on product variables – price, quality, features – than on how the buyer feels about the seller.

From a "good" seller, we'll pay slightly more than we would elsewhere. We'll forgive mistakes we wouldn't forgive from a competitor. So the primary objective isn't optimizing the product – it's becoming "good" to your customers.

That starts with understanding what "good" means in your specific context: which concrete interaction patterns drive satisfaction, not abstract categories like "service quality." Mapping and measuring those drivers is what Actionable does.

Because customer affinity is a separate property from the product itself, it can be cultivated through means entirely distinct from product promotion or advertising.

Blunt example: if there are ten coffee shops near home – ten is realistic in many neighborhoods – which one does a regular visit? Not necessarily the one with the best beans or the most expensive machine. The one where the staff started using their name on the third visit, seemed genuinely pleased to see them, and asked where they'd been after a week away. None of that has anything to do with the coffee.

Becoming the "good" coffee shop is relatively achievable. Becoming the "good" online retailer is harder – customers are remote, buy different things, and arrive with different habits. But the principle is the same: find non-selling ways to build a real relationship, so the customer keeps coming back. Cohora provides the tools to do that, along with a way to measure whether it's working.

For anyone selling anything, the required first step is identifying what non-selling engagement actually means for your specific customer base.

The practical questions for any specific context: which non-selling touchpoints actually matter to your customer base, whether you can measure their effect on loyalty, and whether loyalty shifts reliably predict repurchase.

Building platforms that enable this at scale is the bigger infrastructure opportunity.

Cohora is a useful reference point, but the toolkit they've built can be extended and improved. And vertical-specific versions are probably more powerful than horizontal ones – the right non-selling engagement for a beauty brand is different from what works for a children's product retailer or an outdoor gear company. A specialized platform with purpose-built tools for a specific category could be more compelling than a general solution.

In which specific category, with which specific tools, could you most effectively engage customers in ways that have nothing to do with selling? And how would you prove that the engagement actually changes buying behavior?

The direction is worth taking seriously. On any competitive market, product differentiation converges toward parity over time. The next competitive dimension is the seller relationship itself – and the brands that figure out how to compete on that dimension first will be very hard to catch up with. That moment is coming. The early movers are building now.