Turning a saturated market into 142 opportunities for Gen-Zero

Gen-Zero helps businesses cut one of their largest fixed costs by buying energy collectively. By pooling demand, it locks in fixed rates ahead of the market and secures pricing structurally below what a single business could negotiate alone. The service is free to the customer, and Gen-Zero is paid on commission by the supplier.

Before closed:in, acquisition was entirely manual: self-sent cold emails, cold calls, and lead lists pieced together by hand. The market itself was never the problem. Effectively every business needs an energy contract, so the addressable market is enormous. That size is exactly the trap. The obvious high-consumption niches are saturated and over-pitched, which turns outbound into a price war in the inbox. The brief to closed:in was simple, and hard: find a niche with high energy use and low competition, and do something nobody else is doing.

closed:in does not buy lists and blast them. For Gen-Zero, they engineered the entire Dutch prospecting layer from scratch, then ran it on Instantly's sending infrastructure.

In about 13 weeks, the system produced 142 opportunities from 27,455 businesses contacted, a steady rate of one opportunity for roughly every 193 reached. With the conversion proven and the unit economics healthy, scaling was the obvious move: closed:in increased volume 50%, from 1,000 to 1,500 emails a day, and the conversion held. Across those opportunities, at Gen-Zero's deal economics, the program represents a six-figure potential in annual contract value, and the investment paid for itself within the first two months.