How I stopped client work to go all in on my SaaS after losing customers and fighting spam issues

Hey everyone 👋 I'm Vimal, founder of Yonoma

For the past few years I was running a small IT services business in India.

It paid the bills and taught me a lot, but I always wanted to build my own product.

In May 2024, I finally did.

The first version

The first version of Yonoma was a general email marketing tool.

Anyone could sign up and send bulk emails.

It worked technically, and we got a few early customers.

But soon a few users started sending emails to purchased lists.

That completely messed up our deliverability.

AWS SES flagged our account, complaint rates shot up, and I realised what I had built could easily be abused.

It was a painful lesson.

The pivot

After that, I decided to rebuild Yonoma from scratch and focus only on SaaS companies.

Founders who care about onboarding, activation, and retention — not cold emails.

We redesigned everything for SaaS use cases:

• Trial to paid conversion emails

• Feature activation triggers

• Churn prevention flows

• Upgrade nudges

And I realised something else too.

customer[dot]io is a great product, but it's built for large teams and enterprises.

Most early-stage founders find it complex, expensive, and hard to set up.

So we're fixing that.

Yonoma is meant to be what customer[dot]io would look like if it was built for early-stage founders.

The early traction

Once we made that shift, a few real SaaS founders signed up.

We even got a few paying customers.

That first Stripe notification felt like magic.

But there was still a problem.

I was spending most of my time on client projects.

Yonoma was still getting my leftover hours.

No marketing. No proper onboarding. No follow-up.

And slowly, those few customers left.

That one hurt more than anything.

The decision

In November 2025, I finally made a choice.

I stopped all client work.

I decided to go full time on Yonoma.

No more juggling two things.

No more safety net.

It's scary, but also freeing.

Now every single day goes into building Yonoma, talking to founders, fixing small things, and slowly rebuilding the right way.

Where we are now

We are still pre revenue.

Not many people know we exist yet.

But the product is live, clean, and focused.

Every day we move one step forward.

What I'd love to learn

If you are a SaaS founder or product marketer, I would love your thoughts:

What do you use for lifecycle or email automation today?

What would make you switch to something new?

I am not trying to sell, just learning from real stories.

The truth

We had customers.

We lost them.

Some misused the product.

And now we are starting over with a clear mission — to build an email automation tool that actually makes sense for early-stage SaaS founders.