LetterBucket

We sent 70+ cold emails, had 20+ conversations, and pitched 15 funds. Every single one passed. Here's what happened next.

About a year ago I was sitting in front of yet another video call with a VC partner, walking through the LetterBucket deck. The call ended the same way the previous 14 had ended.

A polite pass, and then this line (almost word for word from multiple funds):

"The newsletter market is saturated. We don't believe a written format can still grow."

We had sent over 70 emails to get to that point, spoken with more than 20 investors and pitched ~15 of them. The consensus was unanimous: newsletters were a dying format, and building LetterBucket for them was a bad bet.

Well, VCs don't decided what we build.

The irony is that every single one of those VCs has a newsletter. Their portfolio companies send newsletters. The tools they use to run their own funds send newsletters. Email is the one channel that nobody owns except the sender.

The VC rejection didn't discourage us. They can have great insights or provide some interesting information, but at the end of the day, the value they provide is a commodity. Don't let them dictate what you can do!

What we built

LetterBucket is a newsletter platform built for creators, founders, and operators who want to own their audience, not rent it (Substack, I'm looking at you with your policy changes).

We bootstrapped. Every line of code, every customer conversation, every deliverability incident handled with lots of coffee and not enough sleep.

Where we are today

The story is not pretty from day 1. We took too much time coding the first version of the platform. Turns out that email infrastructure is way more complex than it seems.

We launched, we had a few dozen users sign up immediately, and turns out it totally broke the platform. So we had to reject them for a couple months and rebuild most of the things that were broken from scratch. Btw, AI didn't code so well back then so our team of 5 engineers were putting out fires as soon as they appeared.

We launched again and in the first week we got our first paying client. He literally said that he had been waiting for this platform to appear for months. He operated newsletters for a living and in his trajectory he has already sold more than 15, some of them in the millions of subscribers, pretty impressive if you ask me!

Today we are sending several millions emails per month. It's easy to lose track of how much that is, but when you are scaling, numbers sometimes don't make sense anymore!

We host more than 1,000 newsletters, from Indie hackers with a few hundred subs, to newsletters with +2M followers. And best of all, we get to meet our idols since we are readers of some of our clients!

What's next

I'm sharing the journey because some people reach us to ask how we did it without funding and think rejection from VCs means that the business doesn't make sense. Well, sometimes it does!