GMass makes $450k a month

GMass is an email platform that lets you run email campaigns through your Gmail account.

Launched in 2015, it now has a conservative user base of 1.5 million, with just 4 full-time employees and 20 part-timers.

Yet Another Mail Merge is a Gmail + Google Sheets-based email marketing plugin

He had been following email marketing since 2002, when he created JangoMail to compete with MailChimp before eventually selling it.

In 2013, he noticed Gmail had launched an API that could be used to send bulk emails. At first he named it Wordzen to handle Gmail messaging, and GMass was built as an internal tool to help run Wordzen. But GMass ended up getting all the attention while WordZen nobody cared about or used. (It ended up being used for the broadcast reminders.)

So he pivoted to focus on bulk email, launched it on Product Hunt, and sure enough, a lot of people signed up. He then spent $5,000 to build the official website and go live.

Stick to what works:

One strategy is writing blog content on how to do email marketing while naturally weaving in his own product. The other is testing paid ads, spending about $20,000 a month on advertising.

Lessons learned:

GMass grew by hiring low-cost labor in Africa and the Philippines. The talent pool overseas is great, and wage arbitrage can save you a lot of money. But as the company scales, you need to hire some higher-paid, Western-educated business strategists—because cognitive limits will otherwise bottleneck business efficiency.

Once you hit a certain scale, pouring money into ads becomes wasteful. Keep a baseline level of exposure; there's no need to keep spending big ad budgets. (He went from $20,000 down to less than $10,000.)

Also, if you need advice, you probably shouldn't be running your own business. Asking any entrepreneur for advice is a bad idea because they can never truly walk in your shoes. It's better to share experiences instead—learn from other people's successes and avoid repeating their failures.