12 Email App Business Success Stories [2024]
Tired of cluttered inboxes and inefficient email management? An email app business might be the solution. This idea involves developing an application to streamline email communication, sorting, and organization.
You'll be creating a platform that offers users intelligent filtering, prioritization, and perhaps even AI-driven responses. This addresses a real need in a world increasingly dominated by digital communication, making it a venture with significant potential.
Building and launching this app requires a solid understanding of software development, user interface design, and market research. You'll also need to focus on features that set your product apart from established competitors like Gmail and Outlook.
With the increasing demand for efficient communication tools, an innovative email app can capture a substantial market share and provide a valuable service to both individuals and businesses.
In this list, you'll find real-world email app business success stories and very profitable examples of starting a email app business that makes money.
1. Stripo ($4.8M/year)
Stripo's founder, Dmytro Kudrenko, a seasoned programmer-turned-entrepreneur, identified a major gap in the email marketing industry when he realized HTML email design required coding skills that marketers usually lack. Launching in 2017, Stripo rapidly grew to one million users worldwide, generating approximately $400,000 in monthly recurring revenue by offering an intuitive, coding-free email template builder with seamless one-click exports to over 80 platforms.
How much money it makes: $4.8M/year
How much did it cost to start: $100K
How many people on the team: 70
Case study about Dmytro Kudrenko and his flagship product, Stripo, an email template builder for marketers that went from zero to one million users worldwide and has a monthly recurring revenue of about $400,000 in an effort to simplify the email creation process and provide flexibility in email design without coding skills.
2. Mailbird, Inc. ($2.04M/year)
Michael Olsen, leveraging his software experience and entrepreneurship lessons from past ventures, co-founded Mailbird in Denmark to fill the void of modern Outlook alternatives for Windows. After a TechCrunch feature crashed their site with traffic, Mailbird rapidly evolved into a multi-million dollar email client, integrating various apps and securing over 10,000 pre-orders for their Mac launch.
How much money it makes: $2.04M/year
How many people on the team: 28
Mailbird, a bootstrapped tech venture co-founded by Michael Olsen, leveraged strategic PR, SEO, and user-centric features to transform into a multi-million dollar business with over 150,000 monthly visitors and 20,000 installs, eventually boasting a 35x revenue increase since 2015.
3. Thexyz ($1.8M/year)
Perry, the founder of Thexyz, initially started as a traditional French polishing shop but quickly realized the slow business during Toronto's summer months. To boost his business, he decided to design his own website and found that people were more interested in having him build their online presence. Reluctantly closing his shop, Thexyz was born on October 7th, 2007, and has since become a successful email hosting service.
How much money it makes: $1.8M/year
How much did it cost to start: $50K
How many people on the team: 30
Thexyz is a self-funded email hosting service generating over $100k of recurring revenue each month, offering uncomplicated privacy and fantastic customer service, and expanding through international sales.
4. Mailman ($360K/year)
This founder has built 25+ side projects. Most of them failed but a few brought in some revenue. After failing small and big over two dozen times, he had one product that investors wanted to invest money in, and after five years of growing it, sold it, and took some time off from making stuff. He started advising and investing in startups, especially crypto startups.
To find time from all the chaos happening in his inbox, he wrote a small script that would make sure that emails landed in his inbox only every four hours, in batches. Nothing comes in between. He used this script to find time to find good ideas that he could be building next.
That’s when he saw a tweet from Andrew Wilkinson (Dribble owner), and he immediately emailed him with the script and a video tutorial. His reply was, “What if we make this into a business?”
How much money it makes: $360K/year
How much did it cost to start: $30K
How many people on the team: 5
Mailman, a tool that allows users to control when and what emails should land in their inbox, is a year-old company bringing in approximately $30k in MRR, while its upcoming features will improve users’ newsletter-reading experience and automate redundant tasks.
5. Leave Me Alone ($120K/year)
These founders also run a web development agency. Leave Me Alone was born because they took their own advice and stuck to solving their own problems. Both were spending a lot of time sorting through emails, so they went searching for a service that would help them find and unsubscribe from the unwanted ones.
Found a few that would help for free, but a closer look revealed that they didn’t charge because they were selling all of their user's data for marketing. Faced with the dilemma of a messy inbox or all of their email data being exploited, they decided to build their own solution.
How much money it makes: $120K/year
How much did it cost to start: $1K
How many people on the team: 0
Leave Me Alone, a web service that helps users easily unsubscribe from unwanted emails, launched in January 2019 and made $1,186 in revenue in its first month, with a successful Product Hunt launch and a focus on being an open startup contributing to its success.
6. Mailmodo ($102K/year)
Aquibur Rahman, the founder and CEO of Mailmodo, came up with the idea for his business while working as a marketer at a fintech company. He realized the importance of email for business growth and saw the potential of AMP emails when Google announced them for the Gmail app. Seeing the gap in the market for a no-code platform that supports AMP emails, Rahman decided to create Mailmodo to help marketers improve email conversions and engagement.
How much money it makes: $102K/year
How many people on the team: 25
Mailmodo, an email marketing software that enables marketers to send app-like interactive emails, accelerated to 100k+ ARR in just five months after launching the public version in January 2021, with a focus on attracting and retaining customers through organic growth and product-led solutions.
7. Bluetick.io ($42K/year)
Mike Taber came up with the idea for Bluetick.io after experiencing the frustration of sending follow-up emails and tracking responses manually. He validated the idea by conducting customer interviews and collecting prepayments, and then hired a team of developers to build the product. After improving the website and launching, he focused on email marketing to attract and retain customers.
How much money it makes: $42K/year
How many people on the team: 0
Bluetick.io is a self-funded SaaS app that helps salespeople, customer success reps and busy founders close the loop with their customers using sequences of automated email follow ups, achieving $1,000 MRR without writing a single line of code through customer validation and prepayments.
8. Mutant Mail ($24K/year)
Abhishek, the founder of Mutant Mail, came up with the idea for his business after facing a server outage and receiving a DMCA complaint due to email monitoring negligence. Realizing the need for a solution to easily manage multiple domain emails, Abhishek and his team developed Mutant Mail, the only server-side solution to this problem. Within two weeks of its soft launch, they acquired 10 paid customers, and within five days of their AppSumo launch, they gained another 100 paid customers.
How much money it makes: $24K/year
How much did it cost to start: $500
How many people on the team: 2
Mutant Mail, a SaaS product from Fresent LLC, allows entrepreneurs, small businesses, marketers, and individuals to effortlessly manage all their domain emails from a single inbox, with a max usage account managing close to 245 email ids across 29 domains and acquired 10 paid customers within 2 weeks of its soft-launch and 100 more within 5 days of its AppSumo launch.
9. Baxter Inc. ($12K/year)
The founder was having a tough time managing his Gmail inbox when he came up with the idea of a dashboard. He then interviewed dozens of regular American adults to see if the idea was appealing. Soon, he found out that the majority of people preferred a simple tool rather than a dashboard. This motivated him to build Baxter.
How much money it makes: $12K/year
How much did it cost to start: $50K
How many people on the team: 1
A case study on the founder of Baxter, a browser extension that helps Gmail users organize their inboxes by unsubscribing from newsletters, deleting unneeded emails, and automatically labeling and organizing emails, which generated over $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue in just nine months and successfully acquired an existing Gmail Unsubscribe extension to drive organic user growth.
10. weMail ($1.44K/year)
Tareq Hasan and his partner Nizam Uddin founded weDevs in 2008, a company focused on building successful WordPress products. After experiencing the need for an affordable and WordPress-based email marketing platform, they developed weMail to save money and offer quality features. Their strategy of targeting the WordPress community and utilizing content marketing has helped attract and retain customers.
How much money it makes: $1.44K/year
How much did it cost to start: $500
How many people on the team: 4
weMail is a WordPress-based email marketing tool that boasts affordable email automation and boasts features such as third-party sending APIs and the ability to integrate for free, with over 12K downloads and 500 active installs.
11. antoniarasheva3614 ($1.2K/year)
Antonia Rasheva, an artist and designer by heart but tourist by profession, tapped into her love for abstract art to start a custom fashion and home products business in 2015. Despite initial financial roadblocks, she constantly advertises on social media, aiming to turn a $100/month profit into a sustainable full-time venture.
How much money it makes: $1.2K/year
How many people on the team: 0
This case study follows a Bulgarian artist and designer who sells custom products featuring her hand-painted designs, with an average monthly profit of $100, relying heavily on advertising via social media and offline to grow her business.
12. Lotus ($252/year)
Vadim, a software engineer, came up with the idea for his business, Lotus, while working as an open-source maintainer. He struggled to keep up with GitHub notifications and was inspired by the transformative email service, HEY, to create a similar tool for GitHub developers. Since launching last week, Vadim has already earned $261.74 and has been sharing his journey through a weekly newsletter to maintain accountability and keep readers updated on Lotus's development process.
How much money it makes: $252/year
How much did it cost to start: $0
How many people on the team: 0
Lotus app creator Vadim shares the story of how he created a Mac app for managing GitHub notifications and earned $261.74 in his first week as an indie developer, through consistency, careful feature selection, and a powerful toolset including Excalidraw, Buttondown, and Vercel.
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
