Boxy Suite
Beautiful Mac clients for Gmail and Google Calendar.
I remember when we started working on Boxy Suite, what feels like 2 years ago (but it's more like 1.5). Me and @frankdilo still had a full time job, but this was a passion project and we poured our souls into it.
We worked on it many late nights and weekends, and I must admit that, in hindsight, it was one of the biggest challenges of my life. But this product, the revenue it brought, and the journey it started, are the reason why we were able to leave our jobs and start our startup adventure.
We officially launched it exactly one year ago, so today feels very special. Boxy Suite has been profitable from the start, but we spike during some months, we also see some weak sales sometimes. But almost exactly one year after launch, as we recently wrote here on IH, it broke the 4K MRR barrier, so we're more excited than ever about its future. 🚀
Boxy Suite is truly special also because, by sustaining us, it allowed us to explore other projects and areas, and that's also why this year we've been able to launch Unreadit as well. So, here's to another year of Boxy Suite. And thanks so much to the IH community, you have always been incredibly supporting and encouraging! 🙏
I'm really excited about this milestone. We always had variable revenues, with some big spikes coming from lifetime sales, newsletters sponsorships, etc. But we now have a big steady revenue base with $4k MRR coming from our subscriptions.
This makes us feel confident about the product and our business, and excited to keep developing it. Also, we're going to see the very first renewals soon since we launched Boxy Suite ~1 year ago, so it's a very promising time.
We've learned a lot in this first year of Boxy Suite, and almost 1 year of launching our startup Superlinear, so shoot some questions if you have any!
-
5
Awesome. No better motivation than customers knocking on your door asking you to take their money ;)
-
1
amen!
-
-
2
The pricing options are interesting to me.
What’s the % of life timers?
Can you talk a bit about how you arrived at these options and what the future might look like
eg) more products, possible alternative pricing schedules etc. -
2
Congrats! How did you get your first 100 paying users?
-
1
Congrats 💰
-
1
Great job! How do you reach out to your customers?
-
1
Nice man!
-
1
This is fantastic, and congratulations - took a look at your product and it is delightful!
-
1
Congrats man! I always get stuck at $5k MRR. Good luck pushing past that, but for me this is where I always struggle.
-
1
Inspiring, you guys do incredible works, love what you're able to pull off just by the 2 of you
-
1
Thank you ❤️
-
-
1
Regarding MRR, I don't see on your site any monthly package. Did you achieve the MRR using annual packages then?
-
1
how big is the engineering team ? and what customer acquisition channels have worked for you ?
-
4
The engineering team is @frankdilo :D I always tell him he should write about how he manages to be a one-man dev team. I make his workload a little lighter by making the websites (gatsby js) and doing some light frontend work. We've just finished creating our own React UI Kit which will make development faster in the future, we'll probably say more about that in the near future.
Regarding customer acquisition, an important channel for us i an email list (20k+ subscribers) we've slowly built in the last few years, since we first created the original Boxy (Inbox by Gmail clients). Then every year we have 1-2 Product Hunt launches, but this channel is less and less relevant, so we're now shifting our attentions to other sources. Then we sometimes sponsor newsletter like Dense Discovery, and that usually have 1.5 - 2x ROI, and we also love supporting creators like Kai Brach.
We're always learning and exploring other sources though.
-
1
Very interesting.
Can you talk about the tech stack for the app?
-
-
We finally do it: we leave our jobs in a great tech startups to make the leap and go full time on Boxy Suite.
After months of work, and an exciting beta program with hundreds of testers, we finally ship Boxy Suite Beta. It includes clients for Gmail and Google Calendar, and a (100% native) status bar app that lets users control and quickly access their accounts.
Inspired by Framer X, we publish a small teaser video with a first look at the apps.
We tweet for the first time about the Suite, after working on already for quite some time in our spare time. It's our biggest side project to date.
6 Comments
Congrats, keep it up!
Congrats for milestone guys!
I am the technical co-founder of the project, happy to answer any questions you may have 🤓
Can't believe it has been one year 🙌
At what point did you two decide to quit your jobs and go in full time? What steps towards idea validation did you both take?
Hi Jerry, we quit our jobs 2 months in, after seeing the product was doing well and reached a point where we could match our own salaries at the current jobs.
It was a life choice more than anything, working independently on these products was much more appealing than working for someone else.
Congrats. You guys are living my dream that I hope to turn into a reality soon. Wishing y'all continuous success.