Leave Me Alone

We've launched Inbox Shield today! ✨

Inbox Shield 🛡 is a screener for your inbox. When a sender emails you for the first time you get to choose what to do with it - block forever or let them email you 🙌

It's like Hey’s screener - but it works for your EXISTING email address ⚡️

You have complete control with our 2 super simple options:

• ☑️ Allow all new emails and selectively choose which you want to block
• ❌ Block all new emails and choose which you want to allow
  You won't miss anything as we'll send you an email every day showing the new emails you received so you can decide what to do with them!

We categorise the new emails into "social", "spam", and "cold emails" so you can quickly decide what to do with them. Plus you can create your own lists to block too!

Oh and if you unsubscribed from something and they STILL email you they get automatically blocked so they won't be able to pester you any more 😇

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We're offering 40% off YEARLY plans for today only - head on over to Product Hunt to get the deal 🚀

Leave Me Alone Rollups is finally live and ready to help you love your inbox again!

What is Rollups?

Rollups lets you combine your favourite newsletters into beautiful weekly digests.

1. Create digests for different topics in your inbox; Tech News, Social Media, Shopping, Long Reads etc
2. Decide what day and time to receive your digest
3. Settle down and enjoy reading the newsletters when you want them, instead of when you don't have time to read them!

To celebrate our launch we are also offering our first ever lifetime deal with a limited number available. The first people to know about the deal were our existing paying customers. We wouldn't be here today without them so it was only fair they get the first chance to get Leave Me Alone for life! 🙏

One of our customers posted the deal to a couple of lifetime Facebook groups and then we shared it on Twitter. Plus we are posting here! So we are starting to spread the word a little more but we don't plan to launch on Product Hunt until at least next week.

So far in 24 hours we have sold 27 lifetime deals at $100 each and there were only 100 available at this price. After the 100 sell out the price will increase. Hopefully we sell all 100! Let's see :)

If you're interested in the deal then the details are on our Rollups page here along with more info about Rollups, but I'm mainly sharing this here so people can follow along and see how our lifetime deal does from an Indie Hacker perspective!

Hey IH, it's been a while since I last posted an update about Leave Me Alone. We've all had a pretty crazy year and I kind of dropped off social media for most of the summer. Sorry about that! However, James and I were still working hard on Leave Me Alone and last month we released our new homepage with a brand new look and improved on-boarding flow!

#1 New Brand

We felt like it was time for Leave Me Alone to have a slightly more professional feel but we still wanted it to be fun and friendly at the same time. To us, this meant getting rid of the emoji logo, designing most of our own illustrations with a fun twist, removing nearly all of the emojis from our landing page, and sharing more social proof.

Our new logo is still an envelope but the emoji is gone! It feels good to have a real logo for Leave Me Alone after 2 years :)

We kept it fun and friendly by using the Kawaii style in our illustrations (aka all of our illustrations have cute faces ^_^) and choosing a header/accent font that was a little swirly and different!

The color scheme is the same with a couple of little tweaks; we changed our button colors from bright/angry red to a more friendly/happy yellow, and changed our border colors from red or pink to a softer grey.

James in particular worked really hard designing all of our new illustrations and we are both so happy with the result! I think it really brings the product together.

I mean how cute are our trees!?!

#2 New On-boarding

We also completely overhauled our on-boarding process to make some of our more complicated flows (like connecting Gmail accounts) much easier to follow.

The main things that we have changed are:

Intelligent account connection

We created an intelligent account connection process that removes almost all of the manual process of connecting most accounts. You just enter your email address and password and we select the settings you need to connect. This replaces the old process of selecting the account type (e.g. Yahoo) and having to find and enter the host and port which are nearly always the same.

Step-by-step guides

Connecting a Gmail account to Leave Me Alone is pretty simple but it has 3 steps you need to follow. We were seeing quite a lot of users signing up with Gmail but never completing on-boarding because this process was too complicated. We now have instructions with screenshots and arrows to guide you through each step, and an "ask for help" button always visible to chat with us if you get stuck.

Moving unsubscribed emails

We can now move your unsubscribed emails to a folder! This is something our customers have been asking about for a while and it's finally here! If you want to enable this you can do during the on-boarding process.

At the moment this is only available to new Leave Me Alone accounts but we're working on making it available to everyone soon (super sorry about this please bear with us!). And we are adding a way to move all of your previously unsubscribed mail to a folder so that you can go into your mailbox, select all, and delete forever if you wish!

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Ok so we're up-to-date now! We're currently working on another big asked-for feature: ROLLUPS! Yep that's right, Rollups are coming to Leave Me Alone!

Rollups lets you bundle all of your mailing lists into one email sent weekly to minimise your distractions. You can create multiple Rollups for different types of mailing lists and you can choose when you receive your digest email.

It's still a work in progress but here's a sneak peak at how it's coming along...

We are hoping to have Rollups ready for our first beta test before Christmas 😱 so if you'd like to help us test please let me know!!

If you'd like to know when Rollups are ready you can add your email to this Airtable here and we'll email you when Rollups go live!

Stay safe y'all :)

Today, we talked to Indie Hackers about our journey over the last year with Leave Me Alone! Check out the interview here.

It's been an incredible year and thankfully we've had more ups than downs! We're definitely still learning and I don't think we'll ever stop - building a startup is a continuous cycle of learning new things, trying them out, and seeing what works.

We trying to make email better for everyone. We're always looking for ways to improve and to bring even more value to our customers! We have some exciting new ideas for our vision but don't worry, Leave Me Alone is still our primary focus, our flagship, and our baby :)

We are totally over the moon to have Leave Me Alone win the best side project category for this years Product Hunt Golden Kitty Awards!!!!! 🎉😍

We first launched Leave Me Alone v1.0 exactly 1 year ago yesterday and the response was absolutely incredible. We won #1 product of the day and week and made a bunch of sales which totally validated that our idea was something people wanted! We had an insane 48 hours and loved every minute of it. I wrote about the success of our first launch here.

Our journey since then has been an amazing learning experience as we improved the product, added features, and slowly gained more customers. We launched Leave Me Alone v2.0 in October last year and did this crazy live stream event and interviewed other makers/founders/nomads around the world. It was totally exhausting but one of my highlights from 2019!

Which brings us to a couple of days ago when we found out that we had won the best side project category! Leave Me Alone wouldn't be the product it is today without the support of all of you, our followers on Twitter, and the maker community. We are truly very grateful and humbled by your love and support over the last year - thank you all so, so much ❤️

We hope that you continue to follow our journey as we carry on trying to grow Leave Me Alone, work on launching our new product Subscription Score, and attempt to reach ramen profitability!

Peace and love - Danielle & James 🙂

It's exactly one year today since we took our first payment for Leave Me Alone!! 🎉🎈🎂- I managed to dig out the tweet.

It's been such an amazing year! I remember how good it felt when we made that first sale, and it still feels incredible when I get a payment notification. I am so happy that we have built something that people love and that helps people. When I look back, I am honestly blown away by how far we have come and the support that we have received from everyone 💜.

Some Stats

Here's some stats for the past year:

💰 $12.4k revenue ($600 from monthly subscriptions)
💼 $138 MRR (highest has been $180)
🚀 1.8k sales
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 16.1k users
🙌 $0.73 revenue per user (all time)
📬 46 million emails scanned
📨 2.2 million subscription emails
💌 281k emails unsubscribed from
🌳 186 trees planted
🤝 8% referral conversion (since v2 release)

Our monthly profit chart has fluctuated quite a lot, but overall we have made $12k in 12 months, averaging $1k a month 🎉. Not quite ramen profitable, but pretty awesome to be honest!

I'd like to work out what our revenue per user is since we released v2 - I think it's higher since we switched to credits pricing so I'll try to figure that out at some point!

Highlights✨

Some of our highlights this year:

• Launching v1 from Ecuador 🏖
• Being featured in Life Hacker 🗞
• Indie Hackers podcast🎙
• Starter Story interview 📕
• Live streaming v2 launch from Bali 🌴
• Getting first Teams subscriber ⭐

Low points 😓

Some low moments:

• Only making $300 month after launch (which is still great, but launch month we made almost $2k) 🔻
• Google API audit requirements 🙁
• Server troubles during Life Hacker traffic ☠
• First customer churn 😭
• Handling negative feedback 👎

The future

Leave Me Alone is here to stay! We'll continue to work on it, make improvements, and hopefully grow our teams customers.

We are also super excited to share our next idea with you and the beginnings of our suite of Leave Me Alone products - Subscription Score 💌.

Leave Me Alone is to clear out unwanted emails in your inbox!
Subscription Score is to prevent unwanted emails from ending up in your inbox in the first place!

The last couple of months were kinda crazy with a few big press mentions, our v2 launch, and several interview features. These things all helped us to make a huge $2,129 in revenue!

We knew it would be difficult to beat that this month as things settled back down to normal but we are super happy to have just hit $1,000 for November so far! As always, you can see our stats on our open page.

To reach "ramen profitability" we need to be making ~$2000 per month.

Stats for Ramen Profitability

I've actually just worked out the numbers...

The last few months our costs have been an average of 13% of our revenue.

October costs were 12% our revenue - $257.32 on expenses and $71 on planting trees.

September costs were 10.5% of revenue - $159.97 on expenses and $44 on planting trees.

August costs were 18% of revenue - $81.07 on expenses and $11 on planting trees.

To sustain ourselves we need €1500 (EUR) which is ~$1650. This means we need $1650 + 13% = $1864.5 to live, plus a little extra for security, making my estimate of $2k pretty accurate!

We show our daily revenue on our open page, so to reach this goal we would need to be making $62.15 each day. This seems super achievable, and we will hopefully get there soon as we grow our monthly subscription revenue from our Teams customers!

Cost of living

This is for 2 people (myself and my partner James) usually spending 6 months travelling around SE Asia and 6 months in low cost European cities like Berlin, Lisbon, and Budapest.

We budget €50 per day for the both of us which includes everything; accommodation, food, drink, motorbike rental, taxis, laundry, visa extensions, flights etc.

We have no trouble sticking to this, but we usually spend a little extra on things like scuba diving.

If you'd like to see our expenses for the last 3 years I track them all in spreadsheets:

• 2019 to date
• 2018
• 2017

Blog post 👉 How We Share All of Our Company Stats and Metrics Publicly

I get a lot of questions about our open page; how we built it, where the data comes from, and why we share our revenue. This blog post has been on my list for a long time and I've finally written it!

We've always shared everything we can about Leave Me Alone from the very beginning. We had our open page before we had any revenue to show on it 😅.

Some people say it's just a marketing trick, and there's no denying that it helps us - being open and transparent is part of our brand and although not totally unique, it is still quite rare in the startup world. I am an extrovert and I love sharing absolutely everything about Leave Me Alone. I hated when working on previous projects where I would want to tweet something and would have to think twice about how that was going to "look" and reflect on the company. Now I just talk openly about everything going on both with myself and my product and it feels GOOD!

Anyway, this is an overview of what goes into our open page, the stats we collect, and the information we share. If you'd like a more in-depth and technical post about how it's coded then please comment or DM me and I'll write a tech blog about it :)

https://blog.leavemealone.app/how-we-share-company-stats-and-metrics-publicly

I sat down, and wrote about the entire journey to get where I am now. From the very beginning and my own personal history, to leaving the UK 3 years ago to go remote, including all of the setbacks, mistakes, and failures, that have lead to Leave Me Alone being the successful, open, and, user-driven product it is today.

A few weeks ago @thepatwalls asked if I would like to share my story on Starter Story. I said yes, but I was nervous.

Most of the founders he interviews are more successful than me; they are making more money, they have super detailed marketing strategies, they use lots of acronyms to determine advertising returns, and have great advice to give. I experienced a big ole' chunk of imposter syndrome and was really worried that I didn't have anything worth sharing alongside these successful people.

After a couple of weeks procrastination and talking to people about my concerns I realised I didn't need to be measuring my success against other people. What I define as success is different, and that's ok.

I found my angle for Starter Story, and I ran away with it! I realised I had plenty of knowledge and insight to share, and I was super excited for everyone to read it. I shared a lot of personal stuff about my journey getting into software development, previous project failures and how they helped shape the direction of Leave Me Alone, and my own struggles with imposter syndrome. Honestly, when I finished it was grinning ear-to-ear and pestered James to read the all 5,000 words immediately!

I talk a lot about how important it is to share failure and concerns. It really has made a huge difference to me being able to share how I got to today. I can't wait to look back in a year and see how far I have come - next time I get offered a big interview like this I don't think I'll be nervous as I am starting to realise that people are interested in the way I do things, the way I view the world, and how I got here.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this. If anyone wants to talk or needs advice about anything I've talked about send me a message! 💛

https://starterstory.com/digital-nomads-app-development/

Over the weekend I shared that we had our first subscription customer churn, but this morning I woke up to find we had just hit $10,000 in revenue (by 35 cents hah)!

Leave Me Alone will be a year old at the end of next month. It's been a really long and slow journey to spread the word about our service, but I think people are finally starting to share outside of our bubble!

Last month and this month have been crazy, and will probably end up being outliers on the revenue graph since we had a load of big boosts in coverage when we were featured in Lifehacker, launched v2.0, and I was on the IH podcast.

It would be absolutely incredible if we could reach $12k by 29th November - averaging $1k a month for our first year. I'll keep you posted!

For our next move I have just finished creating landing pages targeting searches for alternatives to our competitors (thanks @harrydry for the excellent marketing tip) - these will go live in the next few days and hopefully we'll see some more organic traffic for "Alternative to Unroll.Me" etc.

Something else I'm going to focus on is customer engagement. We have used Intercom in the past to automate messages to customers who signup but don't convert etc, but their privacy values do not align with ours (they track the shit outta everyone). I am going to write some emails for various events like this, and we'll be sending them ourselves - manually at first, and then automated with a cron, to hopefully get some feedback on some pain points users are experiencing!

A lot of you have been asking for me to share more about how we built Leave Me Alone, the struggles, and how we have been making our money - there's always stuff on [our blog] but I also sat down and wrote 6,000 words for StarterStory.com (thanks for having me @patwalls), which will be going live on Thursday (24th Oct)!