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£1m in revenue!

Just under 3 years ago, in December 2016, Jonathan and I went full-time on EmailOctopus. We’d reached ‘ramen profitability’, the point where we could just about cover our living expenses (in London, which is not cheap!) and the cost of running EmailOctopus. Now, 3 years on, we’ve reached another big milestone — £1 million in revenue.

I've written a long blog post here on Medium which you may find interesting, talking about how we got there and what we think has worked for us.

https://medium.com/@td_evans/just-under-3-years-ago-in-december-2016-jonathan-and-i-went-full-time-on-emailoctopus-3de84cbbd1a6

  1. 5

    Great piece, well done 🙂

  2. 3

    Congrats. I enjoyed reading about your journey. It is very clever that you minimized your risks, I feel like many bootstrap founders jump into it too fast And end up Failing. I’m three years in and going through a similar journey as yours.

  3. 3

    What a story! Super well done and wish you the best for the future!!

  4. 3

    Congratulations and interesting write up Tom! Lots of lessons in there.

    The 20% revenue increase due to the £ crashing made me chuckle.

  5. 3

    Awesome stuff, congratulations. I didn't know your story and the humble beginnings, thanks for sharing, it's inspiring. I'll need to integrate with EmailOctopus sooner rather than later now :)

  6. 2

    Congrats!
    EmailOctopus is my SEO inspariton website :)

  7. 2

    Here's the meta portion 😂

    There’s also a lot of plain bad advice out there, much of it given as gospel on Twitter or Indie Hackers. How many times have we read that it’s bad to create a software business and compete on price? Why does everyone advise that you do sales before marketing? Naturally there’s some survivorship bias when I say ignore that advice. But us surviving, while doing the complete opposite, tells you that the advice shouldn’t be taken as essential.

    Congrats on finding your own way to 1M!

  8. 2

    Nice! I tried Emailoctopus, does it have an api for sending? I could add that to the email design tool I've been making, called Letter :D - most updates on that are here-> https://www.indiehackers.com/product/email-otter

    1. 2

      We don’t yet, something we would like to add in the new year though!

      1. 1

        great thanks! I'm using Mailjet for sending rn - Mailchimp makes little sense for indie/self-run newsletters - they get too expensive, and there seems to be some feature bloat imo, so we need more affordable sending APIs :D

  9. 1

    Congrats! Best of luck with you next milestone.

    Ploughing through, writing code that might not become a product for months takes incredible patience and motivation.

    So true.

  10. 1

    I used your services before & I was really impressed!

    Keep it up..

    I really liked how quick your team responded to my Customer support query!

    Well done!

  11. 1

    Congrats guys! 🙂

  12. 1

    This is awesome, congrats to you and @jonathanbull ! Well done! \o/

  13. 1

    This is HUGE!! Congratulations on all of your hard work @td_evans

  14. 1

    Congratulations ! What an inspiring moment

  15. 1

    wow!!! Congrats. keep growing in revenue numbers

  16. 1

    Wow I love you guys! Congrats :)

  17. 1

    Gread read !
    may i ask you why did you add "not Amazon SNS " option ?
    and what do use instead ?

    1. 1

      We used to rely solely on Amazon SES, but saw a huge drop off from people who didn’t know or want to integrate. Signing up to 2 services was painful.

      We have the option still of doing this for advanced users, though the simple set-up using our own accounts is the default now

      1. 1

        so what are u using instead of SES ?

        1. 1

          We make use of up to 3 different ESPs. Namely Sparkpost, Sendgrid and Mailgun.

  18. 1

    Great work!
    A link to EmailOctopus on your Medium post will drive more visitors to your website :)

  19. 1

    Good work guys, seen and heard about you in a few circles - keep it up! :)

  20. 1

    Fantastic article, thanks for sharing.

  21. 1

    great, thanks for sharing

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 1

      We don’t by routine share that, but out of interest why are you keen to know?

      1. 1

        I understand that. I'm asking because you already shared your revenue number. MRR is a very important metric of the subscription model and I want to learn more about SaaS growth trajectory.

        1. 1

          Agree it’s an important metric - though sadly we choose not to share that and a few other bits.

          That said, growth is quite consistent but slowish. Took us 4 years to get to a £1m

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    This comment was deleted 7 months ago.

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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