Carving out a small niche in a big market and bringing in $10k+ MRR

Elie Steinbock built a tool to scratch his own itch that that — at the time — had no competitors. Now, competitors are everywhere, but he's carving out his niche and bringing in $10k+ MRR with Inbox Zero.

Here's Elie on how he's doing it. 👇

Scratching his own itch

When running a previous business, I spent way too much time on email, following up with clients, and staying on top of what mattered. I would have loved to have an assistant to help manage this, but assistants cost thousands of dollars per month.

Instead, I was like, "Why can't an AI do this for me?"

That's what originally motivated me to start working on Inbox Zero — to be my own human assistant for email, and help other people be more productive along the way..

Today, Inbox Zero is AI executive assistant that manages your email for you. It organizes your email, drafts replies, and helps you get to Inbox Zero — fast. We're currently at $10k+ MRR.

Building before AI was up to speed

It took a few months to build the initial version. When I was originally building it, the AI models weren't that strong, so it was difficult to get good results.

Today, it's much easier to get good results, and the models have improved tremendously. But there are still a lot of challenges that we face every day in areas of the product we want to improve.

Our tech stack is:

• Next.js

• TypeScript

• React

• Prisma

• Neon

• Vercel

• PostHog

• Sentry

• Axiom

• Upstash for Redis and queues

• Shadcn

• Tailwind

Focus on one use case

The biggest challenge has been creating a good UX that makes it easy for users to get value from the product, fast.

Initially, I tried a few different features because I wanted to see what would catch on, and there was some value to that. But I'd much rather do one thing really, really well than a lot of half-good features.

Also, users only have so much attention, so if you try and tell them we do ten things, it's too much. You really just need to make the value clear, and offering fewer features makes that easier to do.

There are a lot of products that get way too bloated. Many consumers go for less-powerful products which are just simpler to use — because they have focused on providing the value they need.

So, if I were to start over, I'd really focus on just one use case instead of spreading my efforts across multiple different features.

Open source as a growth lever

We get users from lots of different places.

• Our product is open source, and we've been #1 on GitHub trending, which brought in a lot of users.

• We've been number one on ProductHunt.

• We initially had a lifetime deal, but we closed that off after a few months. It brought in some good early revenue to start the business up.

• We rank first for the term "Inbox Zero" on Google.

• We also get people inviting each other via referral.

Parting advice

I already touched on this, but my main advice is to focus on a specific problem. Adding more and more features isn't going to fix your product. Doing one thing and doing it well will provide you with a lot more value. And there's still plenty to do even if you're a one-feature product. You need to make sure your copy is good. You need to make sure your landing page is good. You need to make sure people can find you. You need to make sure you're providing real value to people, and that this is a validated market. And the list goes on.

But beyond that, you don't want to be reinventing the wheel. Inbox Zero was a new product category, but I wouldn't recommend doing that.

And make sure you know how you're going to charge your users. Understand that different pricing tiers mean that you can use different marketing channels to grow your business.

What's next?

My goals are to continue growing the business. There's a big opportunity in front of us right now, and the challenges are to onboard bigger customers and continue to provide value to our users so that they can benefit from managing their inboxes and their businesses as a whole.

You can follow along on X, YouTube, and GitHub. And check out Inbox Zero.