How I Built a $10K/month AI App for Email

November 1st, 2025

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About
Business

Elie Steinbock

Founder, Inbox Zero

$10K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Inbox Zero

getinboxzero.com

from Tel Aviv

started June 2023

$10,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Who are you and what business did you start?

Hey, my name is Elie Steinbock, and I'm the founder of Inbox Zero. We're an AI email assistant that helps you achieve inbox zero fast.

Our primary customers are anyone who uses email for work, or frankly, anyone with an overflowing inbox, which is a very broad audience.

What makes us unique is that we're an AI that helps manage your inbox. There are actually a few companies doing this right now, but all are relatively new, so I would still consider this a unique category. We don't replace an email client. We continue to work alongside it. People continue to use Gmail, Outlook, or their preferred email client.

Today, we bring in over $10,000 in revenue every month.

My image

How do you come up with the idea for Inbox Zero?

I came up with my idea because I was spending too much time on email running previous businesses. I wish I had an assistant who could help manage my inbox. A human assistant is expensive, so I thought, why not an AI that could do it? This is around the time that GPT-3.5 was the top model.

I chose this business because I enjoy helping people become more productive, and this opportunity felt like a good fit for me. It's something I really enjoy and something with a real need. It's also nice that I can explain to anyone what I do, and people immediately understand it.

Very early on, there were definitely conversations I had where people immediately said, "Yes, I need this." And not in a way to satisfy my ego. And I can see today that's even more true. Almost everyone I speak to has a messy inbox and would love for it to be more organized, and spend less time on email.

I've run numerous businesses over the years. I felt like in the past I ran a lot of marketplace businesses, which can be nice businesses. I used to run a freelance network, which generated a steady income. Some other marketplace businesses are extremely challenging to get off the ground. I also did a bunch of stuff in Web3, so I was coming away from that. It was different in that sense from anything I had done previously.

My expertise in this business is that I have previously run multiple businesses, where I utilized email extensively. I knew what I was doing day-to-day as a founder and how much time I was spending on email. I knew that having a tool to help me spend less time on email would be valuable. I had also been a heavy user of various productivity tools, and I knew what was available on the market, as well as what could help me become more productive. I had also spent a good amount of time refining processes in my agency business and helping other startups do the same. So in that sense, it felt like a good fit for my background and what I enjoyed doing.

In terms of idea validation, I knew there was a need for it just because I needed it myself. Speaking to people very quickly, it was clear that many had a need for this.

There are different forms of validation as the business progresses. Even though I knew the rough problem I wanted to solve, the final form factor was difficult to achieve. And so, problem validation was there from the beginning. However, the exact solution needed to be validated, and it took a considerable amount of time to arrive at. As I released features, spoke to customers, and got feedback, I validated the product more and more. Each feature release still needs continual validation and iteration to make it valuable to people.

How did you launch Inbox Zero and get initial traction?

When I initially launched the business, I told friends about it and posted about it on Twitter, as well as in various online communities I was part of. I was part of a mastermind group on Trends.vc, where I received feedback from other founders in the group on what they'd want to see from the product.

From the very beginning, I set up a waitlist, and I had around 150 people signed up before fully releasing the product. The V1 launch, which feels very much like a V0 today, was featured on Product Hunt and actually brought in thousands of users and my first 100 customers. People often say that Product Hunt is useless, but without Product Hunt, Inbox Zero wouldn't exist today.

I also run a YouTube channel about open source and AI. Each week, I cover a different open-source project, examining the code behind it. This was a nice way for me to discuss Inbox Zero as well, since Inbox Zero is also open-source. GitHub Trending also attracted a significant number of users.

I also launched the product on Hacker News, a platform where I've never gone viral before. Here I got a nice 150 upvotes, and that actually drove even more traffic than Product Hunt did. Although I think the conversion from there was lower.

From the launch, I learned about the power of Product Hunt and Hacker News, understanding how much attention they can actually generate, even though it's only a short burst of traffic.

Looking back, I'd do many of the same things when it comes to the launch. I would say it was quite successful. I did a good video for my launch, which is another thing I learned: you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on a video. You can simply open Loom or Screen Studio and start recording, which will take you a long way. It doesn't need to be perfect.

I honestly can't remember the first sale or how I even got there, but I do remember the third sale I made. This was because I had joined a Facebook group chat with the intention of promoting Inbox Zero. Someone in the chat tried Inbox Zero and really liked it, and told me, "Wow, this is amazing." I think that person is still a user today, and he's even invited some friends to it. His tiny piece of feedback was significant, as it was what encouraged me to go ahead with the Product Hunt launch. And because of the Product Hunt launch, I went from 150 signups to roughly 2,000 signups. And so, Inbox Zero might not even exist today without that tiny piece of feedback that he really liked the product.

I attracted my first few clients largely via Product Hunt, as I mentioned, but even before I was doing stuff on Twitter and even this Facebook group I had joined, which, honestly, I wouldn't have even remembered other than this one person I interacted with in the group chat.

I don't remember exactly how long it took to make my first dollar, but I was building the product for a couple of months part-time. I think the Product Hunt launch happened around 5 months into building.

I've learned a lot about the business, I'm always learning new things. One thing I've learned is how important and easy onboarding and strong UX is. And when it comes to launch, I would say focus on one thing. But also Inbox Zero launched with 2-3 main features. If I had skipped one of those features, the business might look quite different today. There was a time to explore, and I don't regret having built these multiple features. The downside of having these features is that it made it more complicated to define what am I? What is this business? Each feature gets to 90% completion in a good case, and so if you can just focus on one thing and do it really well, that is sort of what I would look to do in any future products that I build.

What was the growth strategy for Inbox Zero and how did you scale?

SEO has been a nice source of traffic. If you search for the term "Inbox Zero," we rank first.

My YouTube channel has been a nice source of traffic. Product Hunt, Reddit, newsletters, and GitHub Trending. This is a traffic source closed off to most businesses, but if you're an open source business, it can work really well.

It's funny because I didn't really choose to use any of these channels. It sort of just happened organically. I mean I have posted on Reddit and Twitter and so on, but I wouldn't necessarily say these are like choices. I've really decided to invest a lot in the SEO, and it was sort of lucky that the term Inbox Zero was already searched for and that we were able to rank top for it. Someone else could have thought of this in advance, but I didn't. I just sort of went with it, thought it would be a good name for the business, and eventually we ended up ranking in first place for it.

I think a lot of the tactics I used for launching the business will be helpful for a lot of people starting out. Just try whatever you can, speaking to who you can, posting where you can. There are so many communities online, newsletters, Reddit groups, Facebook groups. There's just so many places you can get free traffic and attention. I'd highly recommend people starting out utilize those channels as much as possible. There are a lot of ways to growth hack your business in the early days. Often it depends on your niche, though. Go to where your users are. For email, my users are almost everywhere though. The person reading this article is a potential target customer for me.

My image

What were the biggest lessons learned from building Inbox Zero?

Mistakes/poor decisions you made, missed opportunities, things you got blindsided by, things that were hard for you to do, things you had to learn, other challenges/obstacles

When I started, I knew what problem I was solving. But then, speaking to users, I noticed other problems coming up, and I felt like I had to solve all of them. Starting over, I would focus on solving one problem and solving it well. As I mentioned in a previous section.

Good decisions you made (e.g. marketing, partnerships, etc)

One really good decision I made recently was to sponsor Dagobert's wedding suit. I'm especially proud of myself because I got the number one spot on the suit and I paid the lowest amount for it. Dagobert didn't realize how valuable this spot was, even though it's the spot closest to his face and visible in all the pictures. Also, my logo is very visible and readable. This sponsorship cost 300 euros but led to hundreds of additional sign ups and a spike in my sign up chart.

Forces out of your control that helped, i.e. luck, timing, trends

There's so much out of your control: - What competitors do - What the market does as a whole AI email assistant is a new category, so I actually needed this market to grow. I needed a market to be educated. Timing was about right for this, maybe a little early. I was the first person to jump on the AI email category. Now it's grown into a much larger category.

The lessons you learned, and how you applied them (or could have applied them)

Do one thing, do it well, and make sure your users can get to value quickly, especially if you're a b2c/prosumer product like mine.

And that actually brings me on to another learning. Although my initial audience was prosumer, there's also a significant B2B market for what I'm offering, and that's where my focus has shifted more today.

Which brings me to something else. A lot of people try to box you into a certain product or category, and what you are able to achieve. The advice can be helpful, but also be ready not to listen to it and walk your own path.

The last lesson I learned is how important onboarding and making your product simple is, especially if it's a self-serve product at a low price point.

Helpful habits/abilities/skills that you possess

I don't know if this is helpful, but I've really been grinding on this product for a long time. I launched it almost two years ago, and I've been working on it for longer. We'll see if it was worth it in the end, because there's a big opportunity cost that I'm paying every day that I run in Box Zero.

I don't know if this is a tip or not, but if you believe in what you're doing, then keep going for it and block out the noise of what everyone else wants you to do or what you could be doing. I enjoy building Inbox Zero, and the financial results are secondary. I do want to build a really nice and good business, but I also just enjoy building what I'm building and the daily business challenges I face.

In terms of skills and abilities I possess, I'm a jack-of-all-trades. I've started a lot of businesses and made lots of mistakes. I've learned lots of things, and over time, I just feel like my skill set has steadily grown. Which is true for many successful indie founders. They have quite broad experience. They're quite good at development, marketing, sales, design, etc. They may not be experts in any of them, but as generalists score very highly. And I think the same is true for me.

Mistakes you often see other people making

Here are some mistakes I've noticed from others recently: 1. Trying to do too many things and not doing any one thing well 2. Poorly explaining what their business does. You land on their landing page and just have no idea what they're doing. Too much fluff 3. Jumping from product to product too often and not giving any of their products enough of a chance to really take off or to actually build something good and meaningful. Not to say that building a lot of products is a mistake - it can be great for marketing and building that muscle. And exploring markets. But if you really want to build something amazing and you've never had success before, it's a very difficult way to do it. Especially if you're an indie founder. 4. The last point I'll bring up is pricing. This is something that was drilled into my head by TinySeed, the accelerator I'm a part of. They invest in Bootstrap founders. Not enough people think about pricing, or understand pricing, or understand their market. Founders don't understand that a $10/month product is very difficult to build a $1M/year business around. Even $50/month isn't a high-priced product. It took me a long time to realize this because most of the products I use are $20/month. So when starting a business you have to ask yourself: how can you charge more? How can you upsell? How can you charge more to larger teams? How will you get these large customers and how many of them exist. That's a big question that every founder should be asking themselves when starting out.

Inbox Zero Acquisition: How much did Inbox Zero sell for and what was the acquisition price?

I haven't sold the business yet.

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