17 Email Automation Platform Success Stories [2024]
Here are some real life success stories of starting a email automation platform:
1. COLDINBOX ($420K/year)
Arthur Backouche came up with the idea for Coldinbox while looking for a new job in growth/digital marketing. He discovered a tool to send bulk invitations on LinkedIn with personalized messages and used it to successfully engage with startups and generate leads. Seeing the potential, he decided to develop his own SaaS product, Coldinbox, which is now being used by B2B entrepreneurs, consultants, and business development managers.
How much they make: $420K/year
Current team size: 0
Two entrepreneurs developed Coldinbox, a bulk LinkedIn messaging tool that assists B2B business development managers in converting high-value prospects into leads and customers, resulting in $35,000 in monthly profits.
2. Dux-Soup ($4.8M/year)
Will van der Sanden, the Founder and CEO of Dux-Soup, came up with the idea for his business after his wife expressed frustration with manual lead generation for her publishing company. Recognizing the potential in LinkedIn scraping, Will saw a gap in the market for a product that offered more value at a lower cost than existing options. The result was Dux-Soup, a LinkedIn automation tool that now has over 70,000 users and nearly $5 million in revenue.
How much they make: $4.8M/year
How much did it cost to start: $0
Current team size: 20
Dux-Soup is a LinkedIn automation tool that helps business owners and sales & marketing professionals generate more leads, increase efficiency, and save time; with over 70,000 users and revenue of nearly $5 million, it offers automated top-of-the-funnel LinkedIn outreach activities, targeted LinkedIn campaigns and multi-touch & personalized LinkedIn drip campaigns for lead generation.
So... can you actually make money with a email automation platform?
Of course. There are millions to be made in this industry.
But how?
- Research real, profitable businesses and see exactly how much money they make.
- Study exactly what works, and what doesn’t.
- Take action, because now you have the roadmap.
Join Starter Story and build your next big thing:
3. lemlist ($1.2M/year)
Guillaume Moubeche came up with the idea for Lemlist while running a B2B lead generation agency and seeing the impact of personalized images and videos in cold emails. Dissatisfied with the lack of personalization features in existing tools, Guillaume sold his shares in the agency and teamed up with two tech geniuses to build Lemlist. They quickly gained traction, becoming the #1 product on Product Hunt and attracting thousands of customers.
How much they make: $1.2M/year
Current team size: 19
Lemlist co-founder Guillaume Moubeche shares how he and his tech genius co-founders built their cold-email automation platform to $600,000 ARR, acquired 8,000+ customers worldwide, and grew at a 30% Month over Month growth rate through their unique approach to personalization, community building, and using their own product.
4. Parseur ($480K/year)
Sylvestre Dupont, the co-founder of Parseur, came up with the idea for the data extraction tool during his sabbatical break year in 2013. While building a travel map website, he realized the tedious task of manually entering travel confirmation emails into the app and thought it would be great if the app could automatically extract the relevant information. This sparked the idea of building an email parsing tool, which eventually became Parseur.
How much they make: $480K/year
How much did it cost to start: $1K
Current team size: 0
Parseur, the data extraction tool, helps businesses automate their data entry process, catering to multiple industries such as food delivery, real estate and marketing, and has grown to over $40k in revenue per month since its launch in 2017.
So... can you actually make money with a email automation platform?
Of course. There are millions to be made in this industry.
But how?
- Research real, profitable businesses and see exactly how much money they make.
- Study exactly what works, and what doesn’t.
- Take action, because now you have the roadmap.
Join Starter Story and build your next big thing:
5. 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 they make: $42K/year
Current team size: 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.
6. Acumbamail ($1.02M/year)
Ignacio Arriaga and his partner, both technical individuals, identified a gap in the Spanish email marketing market and recognized the potential for a profitable business venture. Leveraging their coding expertise and previous business experience, they bootstrapped Acumbamail and launched the platform within 4 months. With a focus on serving Spanish SMBs and providing dedicated customer support in Spanish, Acumbamail has now grown to over 3,500 paying customers and generates an average monthly revenue of $85,000.
How much they make: $1.02M/year
Current team size: 7
Spanish email marketing software start-up Acumbamail achieved an average revenue of $85,000 per month, while providing a service to almost 40,000 clients, after bootstrapping the company from scratch with $4,000 in start-up funds.
So... can you actually make money with a email automation platform?
Of course. There are millions to be made in this industry.
But how?
- Research real, profitable businesses and see exactly how much money they make.
- Study exactly what works, and what doesn’t.
- Take action, because now you have the roadmap.
Join Starter Story and build your next big thing:
7. CLOSEM ($360K/year)
Richard Miles, co-founder of CLOSEM, came up with the idea for the business after realizing the missed opportunities for follow-up in his own experiences with service providers. He reached out to his friend and co-founder, Laura Betterly, who loved the idea and saw the potential. Together, they created CLOSEM, a software tool that helps entrepreneurs and small business owners automate the process of following up with leads and increasing sales.
How much they make: $360K/year
Current team size: 1
CLOSEM is an AI-powered software tool that helps entrepreneurs and small business owners automate the time-consuming work of following up with leads, prospects, and customers, and increasing sales, grossing around $200,000 this year and confidently targeting $12MM next year.
8. Taximail ($1.44M/year)
Phaiboon Trikanjananun, a computer engineer and serial entrepreneur, came up with the idea for Taximail while sitting in his garden in 2012. Drawing on his experience in the digital business, he saw a need for a locally homegrown email marketing platform that could cater to all types of businesses. Today, Taximail serves over 5,000 reputable organizations in Thailand and continues to grow.
How much they make: $1.44M/year
How much did it cost to start: $10K
Current team size: 60
How a Thailand-based email marketing platform, Taximail, grew to serve over 5,000 organizations in Thailand and generate $3.6 million per year through tailored features, close customer collaboration, and utilizing AWS services.
9. GreenRope ($1.92M/year)
metrics for our business are our customer satisfaction and retention rates, which remain consistently high. We currently have over 1,000 customers in over 20 countries, ranging from startups to universities and municipalities. Moving forward, we plan to continue evolving and improving our platform to meet the changing needs of businesses and provide even greater value to our customers.
How much they make: $1.92M/year
Current team size: 15
GreenRope, a self-funded CRM and marketing automation platform with over 1,000 customers in 20 countries, was built organically and focused on creating a positive, customer-centric culture without outside investment, with an all-in-one interface solving challenges in managing sales, marketing, customer service, and operations.
10. Electric Sauce ($90K/year)
The founders initially started as Shopify developers but quickly realized the need for email marketing strategies in the eCommerce space. They used Upwork as a platform to find clients and focused on providing valuable services at reasonable prices. Their dedication to simplicity and accountability helped them attract and retain customers, with their main client being acquired through Upwork.
How much they make: $90K/year
How much did it cost to start: $2K
Current team size: 0
Electric Sauce, a data-driven, retention-focused, email marketing micro-agency founded by two Seans, generates $12,500 a month through pricing their services from $3,500 to $5,000 for established brands, and $1,500 to $2,500 for startups through patient learning, frugality, simplicity, extensive outreach on Upwork, and utmost accountability while using tools like ClickUp, and exposure to thought leaders on YouTube and courses like Klaviyo and Smart Marketer.
11. Market Hero ($3.96M/year)
How much they make: $3.96M/year
Current team size:
Market Hero, founded by internet entrepreneur Alex Becker, is a leading provider of marketing optimization software that supports small businesses in connecting with target audiences and improving ROI.
12. Nureply ($48K/year)
Wanted to find alternative solutions to finding customers. And did not want to only use paid advertising or cold outreach on LinkedIn.
Learned about email marketing and started exploring how to use it to attract customers.
After realizing he was writing the same outreach nearly every day, he wondered if he could build an AI-based tool for emails.
With a background in Machine Learning (ML), and AI topics, and a working knowledge of GPT-3/OpenAI, he started developing an AI-based email marketing tool.
How much they make: $48K/year
How much did it cost to start: $200
Current team size: 0
Onur Geneş founded Nureply to help SaaS and agency owners boost their revenue through email marketing, growing to $4,000 in revenue per month in just four months, without any paid advertising campaigns yet.
13. Stripo ($4.8M/year)
How much they make: $4.8M/year
How much did it cost to start: $100K
Current team size: 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.
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- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
