How I Built It: $6M/Year Email AI Platform (Bootstrapped)
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Alan D'Souza built Reachbox.ai from zero revenue to 6 million ARR in just 18 months. He added $5 million in revenue in the last six months alone. He's got 4,500 paying customers, growing 25% month over month.

But here's the crazy part. 35% of their customers come from just 280 affiliates. They're paying out $50,000 per month in affiliate commissions for life. And their customers pay an average of $110 per month with only 7.5% churn. 27 employees generating $230,000 in revenue per employee. You're about to learn the exact playbook that generated 6 million ARR in 18 months.

Hey folks, my guest today is Alan DeSouza and he has thrown his hat in the ring into the AI space. He's building reachbox.ai, which is an AI powered cold email outreach platform, altering, offering things like email warmups, campaign automation, centralized inbox, et cetera. We're going to jump into it today. Alan, you ready to take us to the top?

Of course. Perfect. Okay. This feels like a very crowded space. There's Lemless, there's Instantly, there's Clay.com touching this space. How is Reachbox different? Yeah. So when we started Reachbox, I think the intent was to kind of build a tool that can automate hyper-personalized emailing at scale. And it was built out of a pain area for us itself. We were...

trying out all possible tools. We're trying to use everything that was needed. And we're still not able to achieve the level of hyper-personalization or reach the inboxes, and hence the name Reach Inbox, right? You know, what we wanted to do was we wanted to craft emails that were extremely relevant to the target audience and also kind of...

resonate with what they're looking to solve for their business instead of just sending out a blank email to everyone. And that's where we saw the opportunity of AI coming in. We said, okay, if we can hyper-personalize based on recent activity, based on the likes of the user, nothing better than that, right? So yeah, crafting a personalized offer for every target audience that's there.

Yep. Well, help me understand because I don't want to lose the audience, right? They're going to be watching this and going, oh, it's another email marketing tool. But you guys have some pretty incredible growth. Can you share your growth just so people stick around for the rest of the show to learn from you? Of course. Of course. So we started towards December 23 and then we were kind of in beta until about June 24. And June 24 is when we started selling out to – selling out MRR plans.

In the last 11 months, we now clocked about 6 million in ARR. And we're growing about 25% month-on-month. That's wild. So 6 million in ARR as of today, correct? Yes. And we're recording this May 6, 2025? Yes, that's right. Okay. So just to be clear, we're talking...

uh, well, 6 million ARR, right? So that'd be 83,000 a month times six. You're, you did about 500,000 bucks in revenue last month. Absolutely. Absolutely. What are people paying the most for? We're on your feature page right now. What, what's the thing driving the most revenue?

I mean, it's the... So once you get onto the plans, you have various add-ons that are there. So for example, you can buy a subscription for Reach Inbox. And once you're within Reach Inbox, you can also get your email info from within Reach Inbox. You can do lead enrichment from within Reach Inbox. You can use AI credits within Reach Inbox, right? So...

On average, when a user comes in, he kind of uploads about 10,000, 15,000 leads. He then wants to enrich those leads. He wants to use his email infra. He wants to ensure that the warming is done properly, and he wants to use AI to kind of do a proper outreach to all of them. So it's a combination of all of these factors that lead to users spending higher on our platform. And how many paying customers do you have today? Today, we're roughly at about 4,500 paying customers. How did you get the first 100?

The first 100 was all using reach inbox. We kind of were using our own tool to kind of do an outreach, reach out to people who were in the SaaS space, in digital businesses and introducing and telling them, okay, listen, this is the email. This email reached your inbox. So probably you can reach the inbox of your customers as well, right?

What did you say though, Alan? Because people will hear that and go, well, be specific. I mean, what did you put in the subject line? So you were targeting B2B software. Who were you targeting specifically and what would you put in the subject line? Our first initial customers were only SaaS. And we would understand the SaaS. For example, let's say there was a SaaS company which does, you know,

website visitor optimization, right? For example, they create multiple copies of the same website. So we would tell them what exactly can reach inbox do for them? Like how can reach inbox help them acquire customers at scale? What should they do if they were using reach inbox? What,

what are the top three things that they need to do to kind of get more customers, right? So you tell them, okay, listen, if you go and send a case study to your customers with this thing, you would probably get much more replies. If you do this, you get much more replies. So top three things that they can do and then a personalized link to a personalized video for them about what they can achieve.

So adding more value than expecting them to come and sign up, right? So if you just go and send out an email saying, okay, listen, why don't you come and sign up? Why don't you try a demo here? People are not going to do that. If you go and send that, okay, these are the top three things, but I've also created a video link with a personalized demo for your company. People will click on the video. If they like it, they'll respond back.

Yep. Well, take me in it because I want to make sure, you know, there's a lot of people online that they don't have proof to back up what they talk about. You have proof. You posted your Stripe screenshot right to LinkedIn here showing zero to $400,000 a month in revenue. This was April 1st pretty quickly. And then you gave some sort of...

insight into how it worked. When you say you talked to 1,500 users, explain to me how you did that. How did you methodically interview or talk to 1,500, capture their data, and then build it into your product? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one thing that was very clear for us was we would handle support

within our core team itself. And whenever people would come on the support channel, which is Intercom, we would kind of understand and listen to them and maybe get book calls with them, right? We would, I mean, even till date, we do about eight to 10 calls a day and talk to all of our customers who are in the pro plans and understand what are the problems that they're, how are they using our products? What are they using it for? How do they achieve whatever they're using it for? Right, so that's what we do.

Okay. So got it. So these weren't necessarily 1500 individual interviews. They were like intercom interactions, email, loom videos, things like that. Yes, that's right. Okay. And what were they saying? Like, I'm trying to position you against the rest of the market because everyone like there's a lot of tools in the market. So did these people say something like, I tried lemlist, but X didn't work or I tried instantly, but Y didn't work or I tried whatever and it didn't work.

No, it's not exactly I tried this and it didn't work. So a lot of these users were newcomers to the space as well, right? A lot of these users didn't really know what they need to do to kind of reach the inboxes of users, right? So this is what the challenges were. So cold outreach itself, though we think it's a very saturated space, it's still pretty new out there. A lot of businesses still don't use cold outreach because

Using Google Ads, using Facebook Ads is pretty simple for SMB. Pulled out, we still feel like rocket science. They need to know what is DNS records, how do you set up cold email infrastructure, how do you find these leads, how do you enrich these leads, what do you do, how do you even verify these leads, all of this.

So it becomes pretty tiring for people. They try to avoid going the cold outreach route. And I think that's what we kind of solve for them. And when we were solving, we would understand, okay, that this is where they find it difficult. How do we simplify that? So we went on simplifying the user experience for anyone who came to us.

Mm hmm. Okay, that makes sense. So the onboarding when you go into that mail is it's a super clean experience, you've really optimized. You got your first million bucks here revenue, you posted this back about seven months ago. And you said, really most that most the initial I saw some people in the comments asking how you got them. It was really you sending out your own emails back into your tool. We've seen a couple tools like this have really high churn rates. What's your churn rate?

Yeah. So I mean, churn rate in our industry is also pretty high, but thankfully we are at a single digit churn rate. We are in the, we're around seven to 7.5% churn rate right now. 7.7% of logo churn per month or revenue churn per month? Yes. Logo churn per month. Logo churn per month. Okay. Interesting. And how are you getting new customers today? Is it still cold email or is it SEO or something else?

So new customers are still coming in from referrals. We have built a pretty strong affiliate cycle where people who come in, they kind of further refer users and they get in their friends in as well. Wait, can you tell me about that? I see it here. You're paying 20% commission. How many affiliates have signed up and how many have driven at least one sale? We have... Okay, so most users sign up, but actually the affiliate spread is between about, say...

roughly about 250 to 280 users who have actually driven sales. So there's 280 affiliates who have driven at least one new customer. Yes, yes, yes. A lot of them have driven more than one customer, but yes. How many total customers out of your 4,500 came from affiliates? Do you know or arrange? I would say about...

Roughly, I think it should be about 30% to 35% of our users should be coming from affiliates. Wow, that's big. That's a big deal. I mean, I interview a lot of folks with affiliate programs. What's the secret? Why are people spending so much time and energy promoting a product?

I think it's pretty simple, right? When you have a product which solves your need, which solves your problem, and you see that, okay, I can invite my other friends, other people in the space and get a month-on-month lifetime commission on this, people go out there and speak about it. And there's nothing better than your users speaking about it. And you like Tolt. You're running your affiliate program on Tolt. It's working well for you. Is it 20% commission in perpetuity or just for the first year?

For the lifetime. Okay. So your expenses, like last month, your top line revenue was something like 500,000 bucks at the top of the, you know, at the top, you paid out what, something like $40,000 to affiliates last month, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Um, what's the team size today? Have you managed to stay pretty small or you guys have a bunch of bunch of people. Okay. Interesting. That's still pretty healthy, right? If I do 6 million divided by 27, what is that? 230,000 of revenue per employee. Is there room to improve that? Do you need 27 people or are you hiring ahead of growth?

Can you give us a hint? What's coming up? Okay. All right. So GTM space coming up. Affiliates are driving a lot of growth. Your own email outreach is driving a lot of growth. Any other growth? Do you do any SEO or no? What's your main site? Is it reachinbox.ai or the other website related to ZapMail? You have a bunch of sort of subdomains, it seems like. Am I right or no? Which is what ZapMail and ReachInbox, they're owned by the same parent company. Absolutely.

I see. Interesting. All right. Last question as we wrap up here. Where do you see sort of AI and LLMs and agents sort of taking the go-to-market space? Do tools like you get replaced, do you think? Do you replace yourself? What happens? That makes a lot of sense. We'll see sort of what happens. Before we wrap up, just want to make sure we get the growth rate right. Six million of ARR today. Where were you exactly one year ago? So zero revenue one year ago. Zero revenue. And you hit a million revenue about, what, five months ago? We had two.

Okay. Six months ago, though, is when you broke a million of revenue, right? Somewhere around there? So you've added five million of revenue in the past six months. Is that accurate? It's a great growth rate. Would you do the lifetime deal again? A lot of people say you do those deals and it ends up with a lot of bad customers with a lot of support that don't want to pay a lot of money. How many people purchased the lifetime deal on AppSumo? Yeah.

200? Yes. Okay. So that was a good chunk. That's like 160 grand. Obviously, what does AppSumo keep? Like 50, 60%? Okay. But still, it's a nice like 60, 70 grand into your bank account you can reinvest. Yeah. Well, Alan, if people want to test out your tool, where's the best place to find you online?

Guys, there you have it. ZapMail had no revenue one year ago. And six months ago, they broke a million in revenue. They've added 5 million in new revenue over the past six months. One of the fastest growing companies in the go-to-market sort of AI space. They've got over 4,500 paying customers that pay an average of $110 per month. Their churn is a problem, but a lot of folks have churn in this space. They're churning about 7% of logos per month. And their number one growth channel, or one of the big growth channels, is affiliates. Over 280 affiliates worldwide.

have driven them at least one customer. And 35% of their total 6 million of AR today have come from affiliates. Their team size is 27 people. They're looking to scale. Watch out for some new product launches here in the GTM space coming up. Alan, thanks for taking us to the top.