Mail Sweeper

We have a little over 1K users now, with thousands of emails deleted per day. By the end of August we expect to have 1M emails deleted for our users and approaching 100GB in storage saved.

Paid marketing efforts have slowed down, but we have a steady trickle of organic traffic and conversions.

For early users of the product, we offered a $1 "Very Early Bird" special promotion. This sold out within a few hours of our Betalist promotion.

The reception of the product was great, and we now had our first dozen users. Some of them purchased the product for multiple email addresses, which inspired an idea for later...

I wanted to promote my product to a small number of users. Hopefully get some initial feedback, fix bugs, and then launch to a larger audience.

Betalist was a good option, even though it's paid. Users from Betalist are typically pretty accepting of a product with a few bugs, hence the name of the directory site.

The initial reception was pretty good.

I started by having my mom try the product. I wanted the product to be simple enough that she could use it.

The first walk through of the product went pretty well, but I saw a few things that I could do better.

I fixed/improved a few things, and then had my wife try the product next. Afterwards, my brother. Then my other brother.

Now I had a few users that had tried to the product, they loved it.

While on vacation, received a notification that our certification was successful. This was the last thing I was waiting on to launch.

Now that certification was complete, I wanted to test the flow of the application. Naturally, the first person I tried this on was my mom.

The product was ready, but for my features to work as intended I have to undergo a security audit.

Mailsweeper sends some basic usage data (number of emails deleted, and size of the emails) to an external service. This required my to receive CASA tier 2 certification.

This process took a few weeks going back and forth with the auditor. No code changes were necessary, as the app was secure because it did not do anything with personal data.

After a few encounters with the same problem, I wanted to make a product with the solution.

I first tried to see how I could deploy this with minimal cost. I wasn't sure how many people would purchase the product, so I wanted to keep any recurring costs at near zero. This would allow me to price the product competitively and hopefully get some easy traction.

A few days after I had solved the mystery of the unknown subscription, I was visiting my parents' house.

My mom was sitting at the kitchen counter with a laptop, intently focused, and clicking many, many times. I couldn't see what it was at first, but I peeked over her shoulder. She was clicking through her Gmail inbox, it looked like she was bulk deleting emails.

Me: "Mom, what are you doing?"
Mom: "I'm deleting emails, Google wants me to pay for more emails"

This was now the second time in a few days I had seen the same problem: EMAIL OVERLOAD

I wanted to do something to help my mom, and my wife.

Once upon a monthly budget review I found a peculiar line item:

Google Cloud Storage $1.99

I noticed that this charge had been occuring for over a year, but I had no idea what it was. I am on the free tier, so I wasn't sure where this originated.

After some digging, I asked my wife if she knew what the charge could be. She said she wasn't sure, but she thinks she might have "upgraded her Gmail". Turns out, she accumulated emails over 10 years and exceeded the free storage capacity offered by Gmail. This prompted her to upgrade her Gmail.

I helped my wife clean up her inbox, by first deleting larger emails, and then going through old emails. Emails from shopping websites, notifications, ads, confirmations, and more. SO MANY EMAILS.

Even though most of the emails were tiny, they added up. Afterwards we were able to downgrade her Gmail storage back to the free version, and save $2/month.

I didn't think much more of this for a few days.