$2,000 MRR reached
by Andris ReinmanAnother hill conquered, the normalized MRR number for EmailEngine reached $2000 today. It was only in July that EmailEngine hit $1000.
If you look at the revenue tab on this page, you'll see numbers higher than MRR. This is because EmailEngine only provides yearly subscriptions, so people signing up on some months might bring a lot of revenue but keep the MRR value nearly the same, as they won't be paying anything for the next year.
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Hey @andris9 thanks for your hard tireless and probably often thankless work on
nodemailer-- awesome to see you succeeding at this commercial venture.Use your library (and most people on IH probably do as well) all the time.
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Thanks!
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Congrats on conquering the hill. Congrats on achieving a milestone. Congrats on the new achievement. The new achievement will serve as a foundation for conquering any new hill before you.
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Nice!!
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Congratulations - that's quite an achievement! Plus with your current growth from July... wow!
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Thanks!
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Congrats!
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Wow congrats
i just launched my dev company too https://criov.com/ i reached 4k but then things started fading hope you tell us how can you keep it stable -
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Congrats Andris!
Super interesting product :)
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Congrats!
I have a simple question: Do services like mailgun.com not provide similar functionality? I wonder if there's a key differentiator from those.
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congrats!
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@andris9 this is awesome🔥✌️
Congrats.
It’s strange as a business grows how we just normalise to numbers, I do love seeing it move up tho🤣
Take care!
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Great job, and keep on going! :)
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Congrats!
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This is a great accomplishment and a testament to your hard work. Keep up the good work .
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Congratulations.
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Hi Andris, congratz. Have you thought of building a SaaS-hosted version, similar to Nylas? It seems that this business model offers higher-quality service to customers and more predicted revenue. I've used the EmailEngine, and it did work well, but keeping up with versions/docs, and maintaining the infra required some substantial effort. We had to use Nylas for production. Dunno, but I think your offering could compete with them.
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I have thought about it, but can’t really offer a service, at least for now. EmailEngine is not a simple CRUD app, it’s challenging to maintain the infra for a single company and it would be even harder for a larger number of companies. There is no way I could run it solo, and at this point I’m not ready (and can’t afford) to hire a team to help me.
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Nice. I might need this one day.
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That's huge, Andris. Congratulations! On to the next goal 🚀
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Thanks!
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That's a fast growth! Congrats! 👏
And thank you for creating Nodemailer. 🙇
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How do you market your product and what are your most successful channels?
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I have a straightforward customer acquisition strategy. Over the years, I've built and published successful and free open-source projects like Nodemailer. The documentation pages of these projects get a lot of natural traffic, mostly from developers looking for information. I keep ad links to EmailEngine on these documentation pages, and as EmailEngine is usually somewhat relevant, it drives traffic. I get 2/3 of web visits from these documentation sites and 1/3 from Google. I get around 6k unique visits per month like this. Some of these visitors try EmailEngine out, and sometimes, after the trial has passed, they subscribe.
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Congrats! 🎉
I see ups and downs at the graph each month, what's your strategy for acquiring new users, what influences the most?
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I have a straightforward customer acquisition strategy. Over the years, I've built and published successful and free open-source projects like Nodemailer. The documentation pages of these projects get a lot of natural traffic, mostly from developers looking for information. I keep ad links to EmailEngine on these documentation pages, and as EmailEngine is usually somewhat relevant, it drives traffic. I get 2/3 of web visits from these documentation sites and 1/3 from Google. Some of these visitors try EmailEngine out, and sometimes, after the trial has passed, they subscribe.
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Great strategy, very smart! Keep it up! ✌️
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Nice, I used nodemailer before, thank you! :)
How long is the trial? How did you decide on the current pricing? I see you only have one plan available.
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The trial is 14 days. You can always reset the trial by deleting your EmailEngine instance (it's software you download and run, not a SaaS service) and reinstalling a fresh copy. Some customers do this over and over while building their integration. Once they want to go live and need a persistent copy for their production, only then they get a subscription.
The price is a kind of trial and error. I started out with 250€ /year. And then increased it several times to see if there was any reaction. So far, there isn't 🤷♂️ All existing customers stay with the price they signed up with, so the price change only affects new customers. There is only a single price because the software is the same for everyone. I could potentially limit instance copy counts or something, but it is hard to keep track of and limit. Maybe in the future.
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Thanks for the info!
(it's software you download and run, not a SaaS service)
I understand, I have the same for https://www.uxwizz.com, but in my case it's harder to have a single plan as the customers/use-cases are different (e.g. website owner vs web agency).
So, your license is only valid as long as you pay (yearly). Did you ever try perpetual license + paid updates? I think for self-hosted software, this makes sense, in my case I noticed less push-back on the initial purchase if the customer knows they can use the software forever without getting locked-out of their own platform, but for your specific product it might be different.
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All my customers are companies (mostly SaaS businesses like CRM providers, asset management, influencer management, omnichannel communication, helpdesk providers, etc), and these companies usually don't care about saving a few bucks but want solid software they can use in their systems. I release new versions with bug fixes quite often, so a subscription makes more sense than buying a fixed version.
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Congrats! Quick question: would you be interested in being featured in my newsletter, https://onepersonbusiness.substack.com/? I think you fit the profile quite well. Let me know!
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Sure, you can contact me at [email protected]
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what has been the best marketing channel for you so far?
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I have a single main marketing channel. Over the years, I've built and published successful and free open-source projects like Nodemailer. The documentation pages of these projects get a lot of natural traffic, mostly from developers looking for information. I keep ad links to EmailEngine on these documentation pages, and as EmailEngine is usually somewhat relevant, it drives traffic.
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Congrats , this is a great milestone !!
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Let's gooo
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Congrats man
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wow, that's the goal, congrats!
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Congrats Andris!
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Congrats !
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Hi @andris9, congratulations on the same. Quick question - how is your product different from sendgrid ?
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EmailEngine is an email client, like Thunderbird or Mac Mail, but for apps, not people. Sendgrid is like an email server. EmailEngine users, typically SaaS services, use EmailEngine to connect to email servers to read and send mail.
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Nice to see you have amazing results for your product!
If your customer leaves your product you can use a customer retention tool like https://churnfree.com to increase your business revenue by retaining your customers!
This tool can save up to 46% of customers' churned requests. You must try their free trail for your product.-
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Thanks for the suggestion!
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Congrats man. Can you share how did you acquire your first 100 users?
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I currently have 59 paying subscribers, so still some way to go until 100. These customers found EmailEngine mainly because I linked to it from my popular open-source project pages like Nodemailer. For people browsing SMTP/IMAP library documentation, EmailEngine might be somewhat relevant.
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Got it. That's great.
Thanks for sharing.
Good luck with your venture
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