Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
Back in 2010 I had an idea for a service that would allow people to easily create semi-permanent email aliases so that they could give an email address to people and websites without revealing their real email address. These aliases will continue to work indefinitely unless you choose to block them.
My brother and I spent a few months building the initial version and launched the website in July 2010. For the first year we had about 50 signups per month, by 2013 this had increased to 1500 and it's currently around 3500 per month.
Similarly, our revenue grew consistently but slowly - doubling about every 18 months, reaching its current level of around $8k/mo.
Over this time we redesigned the website, and found a company to create an explainer video for the service (both through 99Designs).
We have not spent much on paid user acquisition, we experimented with it a bit a few years ago without positive results. I think the difficulty is that some user education is required for them to understand what the service does and the value of it.
The website is called 33Mail (https://33mail.com/).
My plan is to spend the next few weeks focussed on trying to accelerate 33Mail's growth, in particular I want to try Google and FB advertising, and we've also been thinking about setting up an affiliate program through something like Commission Junction.
But before diving into that it would be really helpful to get some feedback and suggestions, it can sometimes feel like we're too close to it to see it objectively.
I would be super grateful if you guys could take a look at it and see if any suggestions come to mind.
Published in 2020, this chronicle by @sanity31415 details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $8k/mo.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
As a data point: I pay Google $5/month to accomplish essentially the same thing.
I pay for Google Workspace, have a handful of domains configured, a single "real" user account and a catch-all rule that forward all mail to that real account.
Other than inertia and pricing (I have >10 domains, so I'd fall in the enterprise tier), there's one key feature that keeps me from switching: I can set up custom routing rules.
For example, when I RSVP'd for a wedding last year with a plus one, I set up a custom rule for that alias so that my plus one also got any updates.
I suspect you could build a significantly better UX around that, where someone could link additional recipients to an alias with some sort of special reply to the email, see that those other recipients are included when receiving messages (as a reminder they're "linked" to the alias), etc. I'm probably over thinking it, but I'd love to be able to somehow react to an email with "+friend@example.com for 2 hours". (Example use case: you place a food delivery order for a group of friends and want them all to get the rest of the confirmation emails until the meal is actually delivered.)
Random ideas:
It'd be interesting to have an easy way to "bind" aliases to a domain/sender. Most of the time when I invent a new alias, I only expect it to be used by whoever sends the first message to it.
It'd also be interesting to be able to have a "snooze" feature for an alias. I use this a lot on social media (e.g., Facebook makes it easy to say "don't show me anything from this person for 30 days") when I don't want to totally unfollow someone. I think I'd do that with some merchants' emails.
Maybe these could take the form of message headers that get added? That way, it's easy to configure a client-side skip-the-inbox rule (or mark it as low priority or whatever), so it's not in your face, while ensuring you can still search for stuff you think you might have missed.
As said in the tagline, your service is grouped with others that serve _disposable_ emails.
Safe use cases for services providing disposable emails are somewhat slim. If you sign up using a disposable email, and later the account ends up being less disposable than you thought, for example because it contains some personal data from you, then you're taking a huge risk in not either using an email service that's too-big-to-fail, or your own domain.
It's easy to forget this, and use disposable emails for everything, so the users' biggest risk is you exiting or the service going out of business with the domain hijacked.
If you could somehow reduce the risk of using 33Mail to lower than it is to mess with big email services or custom domains - yes, I saw you can use custom domains with 33mail, but you still have to keep it renewed yourself I assume - then I'd be happy to pay whatever you ask for the service.
For how to guarantee to users that you will outlast the services they sign up for, I have no answers.
As we've learned many, many times, even recently with things like Oculus, promises mean nothing.
Other than that, I'd love to see a feature for having the option to generate anonymous aliases. That is, aliases in the format of @ for cases where you don't want to give your username to everyone.
Actually, having those two, a guarantee that your service is safe to use and unlimited anonymous aliases, would make 33Mail unique and something I'd actually use instead of custom domains. Because with custom domains the domain still links all my accounts together, becoming both a privacy and a security issue.
i love 33mail. I've been a user for years and I think it's amazing.
I pay for it, and I have a custom domain (several maybe?) and use that in addition to the default free @___.33mail.com subdomain.
People often ask me about my custom domain and ask how they can do the same thing for themselves.
I explain it, and they are interested, but they never do it.
I think there's too much friction for non-technical people. Most people in my life have never registered a domain before. They don't know what an MX record is. Even for someone technical, it takes some effort.
If there was an onboarding flow for that paid plan that looked like: "make it easy for someone who has never registered a domain to get a custom domain set up with 33mail" I think that would be huge.
That experience might look like:
``` 1. Hello, user! Please pick a domain! ____ 2. Tell me where to forward all your emails: ____ 3. Enter your credit card number: ____ 4. Click "save"
Tada! Now anythingatall@thatdomaintheyjustregistered.com forwards to their email address!
``` Then you register the domain for them. You're either a registrar or you work with a registrar. You control the DNS for them (or maybe it gets added to your 33mail dashboard so they can add A records or whatever).
I love your service. I want it to make 80k/mo. Y'all have provided me a lot of happiness. And I've been pleasantly surprised when I've gotten support email responses from y'all.
Please keep up the great work.
Love the idea, I'm sure I'm not the only person who's thought about this pain point and somehow didn't come up with the elegant solution you did.
Right now I have an O365 account that lets me create unlimited (I think) aliases, the issue is how annoying it is to create them and then manage them. Yahoo has a similar service, but again you need to create the alias first, your solution of accept all, deny later is much smarter.
My only question about price brackets is I don't have a great understanding of how much bandwidth I use monthly, or even how many emails I'd funnel through your service, not to mention we're kinda at the mercy of the senders, if they send a lot/ or send large emails, we end up needing to move up a bracket. On avg do your Premium users get close to the limit?
Which brings me to my next question: what happens if I do indeed use up my entire bandwidth allotment for the month? do emails just get bounced? do I just get upgraded automatically?
I get where your coming from by charging for bandwidth, from your perspective you're aligning your costs with the price.
When I tried to sign up, the username I wanted was taken, but the error message wasn't obvious and I was left wondering what happened until I saw it above the signup button. For the record I had ublock enabled and it was blocking 15 things, so it's possible it caught something... you might wanna look into that.
I see that your tool is mentioned constantly in online forums: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Areddit.com+OR+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%2233mail.com%22 - that's 526 results. I suggest keeping an eye on those mentions and reply to any questions someone might have, or clear up any misconceptions.
You might think it's silly to interact directly like this for a product priced at $1, but keep in mind Reddit and Hacker News have very good SEO, so these questions (with your answers) will pop up when people search for your, or similar, tools online.
Moreover, for the same reason, you can monitor your competitors and recommend your tool when you have the advantage.
I don't think that at your price point ads will work for you.
I recommend that approach because that's what I've been helping people do for the past year. I'm the founder of Syften (https://syften.com). I'm happy to onboard you personally, I've sent you an email.