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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I Built It: $6M/Year Email AI Platform (Bootstrapped)
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- [00:00]
A
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 De Souza 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 warm ups, campaign automation, centralized inbox, etc. We're going to jump into it today. Alan, you ready to take us to the top? Of course.
- [00:57]
B
Okay. Okay.
- [00:58]
A
This feels like a very crowded space. What? You know, there's lemless, there's instantly, there's clay.com touching this space. How is ReachBox different?
- [01:07]
B
Yeah, so when we started Reaching Box, I think the intent was to kind of build a tool that can, you know, automate hyper personalized emailing at scale. And it was built out of a pain area for us itself. We would 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 resonated 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 there's, 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.
- [02:05]
A
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?
- [02:15]
B
Of course, of course. So we started towards December 23 and then we were kind of in beta till about June 24th. In June 24th was when we started setting out to selling our MRR plans. In the last 11 months, we now clocked about 6 million in ARR and growing about 25% month on month.
- [02:40]
A
That's wild. So 6 million in AR as of today, correct? We're recording this May 6th, 2025.
- [02:45]
B
Yes, that's right.
- [02:47]
A
Okay, so just to be clear, we're talking, well, 6 million ARR, right? So that would be 83,000amonth times 6. You did about 500,000 bucks in revenue last month.
- [02:58]
B
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [02:59]
A
What are people paying the most for? We're on your feature page right now. What's the thing driving the most revenue?
- [03:05]
B
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 are at once you're within Reach inbox, you can also get your email info from within Reach Inbox. You can find, you can do lead enrichment from within Reach Inbox. You can use AI credits within Reach Inbox. Right. So on an 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.
- [03:46]
A
And how many paying customers do you have today?
- [03:49]
B
Today we're roughly at about 4,500 paying customers.
- [03:52]
A
How did you get the first hundred?
- [03:55]
B
The first hundred 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? And you know, what did you say though, Alan?
- [04:15]
A
Though people. 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 soft. Like who were you targeting specifically and what would you put in the subject line?
- [04:24]
B
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 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? How can Reach Inbox help them acquire customers at scale? What should they do? If they were using Reach Inbox, what are the top three things that they need to do to get more customers? So we would 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, 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 that video. If they like it, they'll respond back.
- [05:31]
A
Yep. Well, take, take me because I want to make sure, you know, we get a. 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 bucks a month in revenue. This was April 1st, pretty quickly. And then you gave some sort of insights, insight, intel into insight into how it worked. When you say you talked to 1500 users, explain to me how you did that. How did you methodically interview or talk to 1500, capture their data and then build it into your product?
- [05:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one thing that was very clear for us was we, we would, 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 8 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.
- [06:31]
A
Okay, so got it. So These weren't necessarily 1500 individual interviews. They were like intercom interactions, email loom videos, things like that?
- [06:38]
B
Yes, that's right.
- [06:39]
A
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?
- [06:55]
B
No, it's, it's not exactly I tried this, I didn't 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, 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, cold outright still feels 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.
- [07:55]
A
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 of 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 of tools like this have really high churn rates. What's your churn rate?
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B
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 are around 7 to 7.5% churn rate right now.
- [08:30]
A
7.7% of logo churn per month or revenue churn per month?
- [08:34]
B
Yes, logo churn per month.
- [08:36]
A
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?
- [08:45]
B
So new customers are still coming in from referrals. We have built a pretty strong affiliate, you know, cycle where people who come in they kind of further refer users and they get in their friends in as well.
- [09:00]
A
Tell me about that. I see it here. You're paying 20% commission. How many affiliates have signed up and how many have made, have driven at least one sale?
- [09:07]
B
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.
- [09:18]
A
So there's 280 affiliates who have driven at least one. You, at least one new customer?
- [09:22]
B
Yes, yes, yes. A lot of them have driven more than one customer, but yes.
- [09:26]
A
How many total customers out of your 4,500 came from affiliates, do you know? Or a range?
- [09:32]
B
I would say about, about roughly. I think should be about 30%, 30 to 35% of our users should be coming from affiliate.
- [09:41]
A
Wow, that's, that's big. Why, that's a big deal. I mean I interview a lot of folks with affiliate programs. What's the secret? Why are people, you know, spending so much time and energy promoting your product?
- [09:50]
B
I think it's pretty simple, right? When you, when you have a product which solves your need, which solves your problem, you, you and, 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.
- [10:10]
A
And you like told you're running your affiliate program on told it's working well for you.
- [10:14]
B
Of course, of course. That's a big product.
- [10:17]
A
Is it 20% commission in perpetuity or just for the first year?
- [10:20]
B
It's an, it's for the lifetime of the user.
- [10:23]
A
For the lifetime. Okay so your expenses like last month your top line revenue was something like 500,000 bucks. At the top of that, you know, at the top you, you paid out what, something like $40,000 to affiliates last month?
- [10:34]
B
Something like that should be roughly around those numbers. Yeah, yeah, I don't have that on top of my mind, but yes.
- [10:40]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the team size today? Have you managed to stay pretty small or you guys have a bunch of. Bunch of people.
- [10:45]
B
Yeah, we're, we're pretty lean so far. We're about 20, 26, 27 people now, but majority of our. Yes, yes, full time.
- [10:55]
A
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? Are you hiring Ahead of growth.
- [11:06]
B
I think we're hiring because we also have a couple of more initiatives getting launched in the coming months. So we have some more products coming out and that's where it is. We're investing in our future products.
- [11:18]
A
Can you give us a hint what's coming up?
- [11:22]
B
More in the GTM space. We're building around future automation in the GTM space and trying to do things around the GTM space.
- [11:31]
A
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.
- [11:40]
B
SEO does definitely drive quite a bit of traffic for us, but it's of course a very difficult channel for us. Right. I mean, it's not the best channel, I would say, but of course user referrals and, you know, word of mouth is driving the most traffic for us.
- [11:59]
A
What's your main site? Is it Reach Inbox AI or the other website related to zapmail? You have a bunch of sort of subdomains, it seems like. Am I right or no?
- [12:06]
B
Yes, yes. Reachinbox AI.
- [12:07]
A
How do you do that?
- [12:09]
B
So what we did was we split between our main sending platform and our cold email infrastructure platform so that users who wanted to use other platforms could also use cold email infrastructure from us and, you know, send it to other platforms as well.
- [12:24]
A
Mm, mm. Which is what? Zap.
- [12:27]
B
Okay.
- [12:27]
A
But zapmail and Reach Inbox, they're owned by the same parent company.
- [12:30]
B
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [12:32]
A
I see. Interesting. All right, last question. As we wrap, as we wrap up here, where do you see sort of, you know, AI and LLMs and agents sort of taking the go to market space? Do tools like you get replaced? You think? Do you replace yourself? What happens?
- [12:46]
B
Yeah, it's a very interesting question. And this is something, you know, we've also been thinking of since we got started, I think. Yeah, I, I feel that, of course, eventually is about taking away manual intervention as much as possible, but I feel human moderation, human assisted outreach is what it's going to be like. You know, it's. It's going to be that AI is going to set up most of your campaigns, everything, you know, find you the right leads, it's going to enrich all of that, do everything for you, but it's still going to be human assisted. There would be human moderation needed and then it, you know, works very seamlessly. Where AI would do most of things that humans are just there to, you know, modern things around it.
- [13:26]
A
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. 6 million of ARR today. Where were you exactly one year ago?
- [13:34]
B
Just starting, I think, just before getting started. Yes.
- [13:38]
A
So zero revenue one year ago.
- [13:41]
B
Yes.
- [13:42]
A
And about. You hit a million revenue about what, five years ago?
- [13:46]
B
We had zero MRR a year ago. We ran a lifetime deal a little earlier, so we had support coming in from our lifetime users on the beta version of our product. So that's where it was. Yes.
- [13:58]
A
Okay. Six months ago, though, is when you broke a million of revenue. Right, Somewhere around there.
- [14:04]
B
Yes, that's right.
- [14:05]
A
So you added 5. You've added 5 million of revenue in the past six months. Is that accurate?
- [14:10]
B
That's right. That's right.
- [14:11]
A
It's a great growth rate. Would you do the lifetime deal again? A lot of people say, you know, 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.
- [14:20]
B
I think, I think that's not the right, right feedback because we, we did get a lot of support coming in from our lifetime users. We had a pretty good set of lifetime users who came in, gave us the right feedback, supported us early on, and also were some of our earliest affiliates as well. So I think if you, if you're able to drive the right value through a lifetime deal and then eventually have sufficient upsells, it kind of works for everyone.
- [14:47]
A
How much, how many sales did. How many people purchased the lifetime deal on AppSumo?
- [14:52]
B
I think about roughly little over 800. 800 plus people bought it on the price. Average value of about $200.
- [15:05]
A
200, yes. Okay, so that was a good chunk. That's like 160 grand, obviously. What does AppSumo keep, like 50, 60%?
- [15:14]
B
There's something around that. Yeah.
- [15:16]
A
Okay, but still, It's a nice, like 60, 70 grand into your bank account. You can reinvest.
- [15:20]
B
Absolutely, absolutely. And it's. And it was in the very early days. But more than the money, it's. It's about the feedback that you're getting. It's about users who are coming in and who are being patient enough to see while you're growing. Right. So that was the, that was the best part for us.
- [15:32]
A
Yep. Well, Alan, if people want to test out your tool, where's the best place to find you online?
- [15:37]
B
I'm on LinkedIn, on Twitter, both of these places. But yeah, more active on LinkedIn.
- [15:44]
A
Guys, there you have it. Zapmail had no revenue one year ago and six months ago they broke a million of 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 turning about 7% of logos per month. And their number one growth channel, or one of the big growth channels is a affiliates. Over 280 affiliates have driven them. At least one customer and 35% of their total 6 million of ARR 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.
- [16:22]
B
Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here.