How I Built It: $6M/Year Email AI Platform (Bootstrapped)

Alan de Souza built Reachbox.ai (Zapmail), an AI-powered cold email outreach platform offering email warmups, campaign automation, and lead enrichment. He scaled from zero revenue to $6 million ARR in just 18 months, serving 4,500 paying customers at $110 average revenue per user while growing 25% month-over-month with only 7.5% churn rate. His 27-person team generates $230,000 in revenue per employee, with 280 active affiliates driving 35% of all customers through a 20% lifetime commission program that pays out over $50,000 monthly. In this episode, Alan reveals how he added $5 million ARR in just 6 months using systematic customer feedback from 1,500+ conversations, why he still does 10 customer calls every day, and the exact affiliate strategy that turned his customers into a revenue-generating army earning lifetime commissions.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Alan De Souza built reachbox.ai from zero revenue to 6 million ARR in just 18 months. He added $5 million in revenue in the last six months alone. He's got 4,500 paying customers, growing 25% month over month. But here's the crazy part, 35% of their customers come from just 280 affiliates. They're paying out $50,000 per month in affiliate commissions for life, and their customers pay an average of $110 per month with only 7.5% churn. 27 employees generating $230,000 in revenue per employee. You're about to learn the exact playbook that generated 6 million ARR in 18 months. Hey folks, my guest today is Alan De Souza, and he has thrown his hat in the ring into the AI space. He's building reachbox.ai,

• 0:45Speaker 00

  which is an AI-powered cold email outreach platform, offering things like email warmups, campaign automation, centralized inbox, etc. We're going to jump into it today. Alan, you ready to take us to the top?

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Okay, this feels like a very crowded space. You know, there's Lembless, there's Instantly, there's Clay.com touching this space. How is Reachbox different?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when we started Reachbox, I think the intent was to kind of build a tool that can automate hyper-personalized emailing at scale. And it was built out of a pain area for us itself. We were trying on all possible tools. We're trying to use everything that was needed. And we're still not able to achieve the level of hyper-personalization or reach the inboxes, and hence the name Reachbox, right? You know, what we wanted to do was, we wanted to craft emails that were extremely relevant to the target audience and also kind of resonated with what they are looking to solve for their business. Instead of just sending out a blank email to everyone. And that's where we saw the opportunity of AI coming in.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  We said, okay, if we can hyper-personalize based on recent activity, based on the likes of the user, nothing better than that, right? So yeah, crafting a personalized offer for every target audience that's there.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Yep. Well, help me understand, because I don't want to lose the audience, right? They're going to be watching this and going, oh, it's another email marketing tool. But you guys have some pretty incredible growth. Can you share your growth, just so people stick around for the rest of the show to learn from you?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Of course, of course. So we started towards December 23. And then we were kind of in beta till about June 24. And June 24 was when we started selling out to selling out MR outlines. In the last 11 months, we're now clocked about 6 million in ARR. And growing about 25% month on month.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  That's wild. So 6 million ARR as of today, correct? And we're recording this May 6, 2025?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  Okay. So just to be clear, we're talking, well, 6 million ARR, right? So that'd be 83,000 a month times 6. You did about 500,000 bucks in revenue last month.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  What are people paying the most for? We're on your feature page right now. What's the thing driving the most revenue?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  I mean, it's the, so, once you have, once you get on to the plans, you have various add-ons that are there. So for example, you can buy a subscription for reach inbox. And once you're at, once you're within reach inbox, you can also get your email info from within reach inbox. You can find, you can do lead enrichment from within reach inbox. You can use AI credits within reach inbox, right? So on an average, when a user comes in, he kind of uploads about 10,000, 15,000 leads. He then wants to enrich those leads. He wants to use his email info. He wants to ensure that the warming is done properly and he wants to use AI to kind of do a proper outreach to all of them. So it's a combination of all of these factors that lead to users spending higher on our platform.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  And how many paying customers do you have today?

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Today, we're roughly at about 4,500 paying customers.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  How did you get the first 100?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  The first 100 was all using reach inbox. We kind of were using our own tool to kind of do an outreach. Reach out to people who were in the SaaS space, in digital businesses and introducing and telling them, okay, listen, this is the email. This email reached your inbox, so probably you can reach the inbox of your customers as well, right? And, and you know, just that.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  What did you say though, Alan, though, and people, because people will hear that and go, well, be specific. I mean, what did you put in the subject line? So you were targeting B2B soft, like who were you targeting specifically and what would you put in the subject line?

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Our first initial customers were only SaaS and we would, we would understand the SaaS. For example, let's say there was a SaaS company which does, you know, website visitor optimization, right? For example, they create multiple copies of the same website. So we would tell them what exactly can reach inbox do for them? Like, how can reach inbox help them acquire customers at scale? What should they do if they were using reach inbox? What, what are the top three things that they need to do to kind of get more customers, right? So you would tell them, okay, listen, if you, if you go and send a case study to your customers with this thing, you would probably get much more replies. If you do this, you get much more replies.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  So top three things that they can do and then a personalized link to a personalized video for them about what, what they can achieve. So adding more value than expecting them to come and sign up, right? So if you just go and send out an email saying, okay, listen, why don't you come and sign up? Why don't you try a demo here? People are not going to do that. If you go and send that, okay, these are the top three things, but I also created a video link with a personalized demo for your company. People will click on that video if they like it, then respond back.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Yep. Well, take, take me in because I want to make sure, you know, we get a, there's a lot of people online that they don't have proof to back up what they talk about. You have proof. You posted your Stripe screenshot right to LinkedIn here showing zero to 400,000 bucks a month in revenue. This is April 1st, pretty quickly. And then you gave some sort of insights, intel, insight into how it worked. When you say you talked to 1500 users, explain to me how you did that. How did you methodically interview or talk to 1500, capture their data and then build it into your product?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one thing that was very clear for us was we, we would, we would handle support within our core team itself. And whenever people would come on the support channel, which is into com, we would kind of understand and listen to them and maybe get book calls with them, right? We would, I, I mean, even till today, we do about eight to 10 calls a day. And talk to all of our customers who are in the pro plans and understand what are the problems that they're, how are they using our products? What are they using it for? How do they achieve whatever they're using it for? Right? So that's what we do.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Okay, so got it. So these weren't necessarily 1500 individual interviews. They were like intercom interactions, emails, Loom videos, things like that.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Okay. And what were they saying? Like, I'm trying to position you against the rest of the market because everyone, like, there's a lot of tools in the market. So did these people say something like, I tried Lemlist, but X didn't work, or I tried Instantly, but Y didn't work, or I tried whatever and it didn't work?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  No, it's not exactly, I tried this, I didn't, and it didn't work. So a lot of these users were newcomers to the space as well, right? A lot of these users didn't really know what they need to do to kind of reach the inboxes of users. Right? So this is what, this is what the challenges were. So cold outreach itself, though we think it's a very saturated space, it's still pretty new out there. A lot of businesses still don't use cold outreach because using Google Ads, using Facebook Ads is pretty simple for SMB. Cold outreach still feels like rocket science. They need to know what is DNS records, what are, how do you set up cold email infrastructure? How do you find these leads? How do you address these leads? What do you do? How do you even verify these leads? All of this.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  So it becomes pretty tiring for people. They try to avoid going the cold outreach route. And I think that's what we kind of solved for them. That's and when we were solving, we would understand, okay, that this is where they find it difficult. How do we simplify that? So we went on simplifying the user experience for anyone who came to us.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Okay, that makes sense. So the onboarding, when you go into Zappmail, it's a super clean experience. You've really optimized. You got your first million bucks here of revenue. You posted this back about seven months ago. And you said, really, most of the initial, I saw some people in the comments asking how you got them. It was really you sending out your own emails back into your tool. We've seen a couple of tools like this have really high churn rates. What's your churn rate?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean churn rate in our industry is also pretty high, but thankfully we are at a single digit churn rate. We are in the, we are around seven to seven point five percent churn rate right now.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Seven point seven percent of logo churn per month or revenue churn?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yes, logo churn per month.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Logo churn per month. Okay, interesting. And how are you getting new customers today? Is it still cold email or is it SEO or something else?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  So new customers are still coming in from referrals. We have built a pretty strong affiliate, you know, cycle where people who come in, they kind of further refer users and they get in their friends in as well.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Wait, can you tell me about that? I see it here. You're paying 20% commission. How many affiliates have signed up and how many have made, have driven at least one sale?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  We have, okay, so most users sign up, but actually the affiliate spread is between about, say roughly about 250 to 280 users who have actually driven sales.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  So there's 280 affiliates who have driven at least one, you, at least one new customer?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. A lot of them have driven more than one customer, but yes.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  How many total customers out of your 4,500 came from affiliates? Do you know or a range?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  I would say about, about roughly, I think should be about 30%, 30 to 35% of our users should be coming from affiliates.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Wow, that's, that's big. Why? That's a big deal. I mean, I interview a lot of folks with affiliate programs. What's the secret? Why are people, you know, spending so much time and energy promoting your product?

• 9:50Speaker 01

  I think it's pretty simple, right? When you, when you have a product which solves your need, when it solves your problem, you, and then you see that, okay, I can invite my other friends, other people in the space and get a month on month and lifetime commission on this. People go out there and speak about it and there's nothing better than your users speaking about it.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Uh huh. And you like Tolt? You're running your affiliate program on Tolt? It's working well for you?

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Of course, of course. That's a great product.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Are, is it 20% commission in perpetuity or just for the first year?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  It's an, it's for the lifetime of the user.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  For the lifetime. Okay, so your expenses like last month, your top line revenue was something like 500,000 bucks at the top of the, you know, at the top, you paid out what something like $40,000 to affiliates last month, something like that?

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Should be roughly around those numbers. Yeah, I don't have that on top of my mind, but yes.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. What's the team size today? Have you managed to stay pretty small or you guys have a bunch of, bunch of people?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're, we're pretty lean so far. We're about 20, 26, 27 people now, but majority of our, yes, yes. For time.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Okay. Interesting. That's still pretty healthy, right? If I do 6 million divided by 27, what is that? 230,000 of revenue per employee. Is there room to improve that? Do you need 27 people or are you hiring out of growth?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  I think we're hiring because we also have a couple of more initiatives getting launched in the coming months. So we have some more products coming out and that's where it is. It's we're investing in our future products.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  What? Can you give us a hint? What's coming up?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  More in the GTM space. We're, we're building around the future automation in the GTM space and trying to do things around the GTM space.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  Okay. All right. So GTM space coming up, affiliates are driving a lot of growth. Your own email outreach is driving a lot of growth. Any other growth? Do you do any SEO or no?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  SEO does definitely drive quite a bit of traffic for us, but it's, it's of course a very difficult channel for us, right? I mean, it's, it's not the best channel, I would say, but of course user referrals and, you know, what if mouth is driving the most traffic for us?

• 11:58Speaker 00

  What's your main site? Is it reachbox.ai or the other website related to Zapmail? You have a bunch of sort of subdomains, it seems like. Am I right or no?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. So what we did was we, we split between our main selling platform and our cold email infrastructure platform. So that users who wanted to use other platforms could also use cold email infrastructure from us and, you know, send it to other platforms as well.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Which is what Zap, okay, but Zapmail and Reach Inbox, they're owned by the same parent company?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  I see. Interesting. All right. Last question as we wrap, as we wrap up here. Where do you see sort of, you know, AI and LLMs and agents sort of taking the go to market space? Do tools like you get replaced, do you think? Do you replace yourself? What happens?

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a very interesting question and this is something you know, we've also been thinking of since we got started. I think, yeah, I feel that of course eventually it is about taking away a manual intervention as much as possible. But I feel a human moderation, human assisted outreach is what it's going to be like, you know, it's going to be that AI is going to set up most of your campaigns, everything, you know, find you the right leads, it's going to enrich all of that, do everything for you. But it's still going to be human assisted, there would be a human moderation needed and then it, you know, works very seamlessly where AI would do most of things and humans are just there to, you know, moderate things around it.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. That makes a lot of sense. We'll see sort of what happens. Before we wrap up, just want to make sure we get the growth rate right. Six million of ARR today. Where were you exactly one year ago?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Just starting, I think just before getting started, yes, but zero.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Like, like, so zero revenue one year ago?

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Zero, yes.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  And about, you hit a million revenue about what, five months ago?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  We had, we had, we had zero MRR a year ago. We had, we had, we ran a lifetime deal a little earlier, so we had, we had support coming in from our lifetime users on the beta version of our product. So that's where it was, yes.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Okay, six months ago, though, is when you broke a million of revenue, right? Somewhere around there?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  So you added five, you've added five million of revenue in the past six months. Is that accurate?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  It's a great growth rate. Would you do the lifetime deal again? A lot of people say, you know, you do those deals and it ends up with a lot of bad customers with a lot of support that don't want to pay a lot of money.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  I think, I think that's not the right, right feedback because we, we did get a lot of support coming in from our lifetime users. We had a pretty good set of lifetime users who came and gave us the right feedback, supported us early on and also were some of our earliest affiliates as well. So I think if you, if you're able to drive the right value through a lifetime deal and then eventually have sufficient upsells, it kind of works for everyone.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  How much, how many sales did, how many people purchased the lifetime deal on AppSumo?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Think about roughly a little over eight hundred, eight hundred plus people bought it on that.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Average value of about uh $200.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  200?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  Okay, so that was a good chunk. That's like 160 grand. Obviously, what does AppSumo keep, like 50, 60%?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  There's something around that, yeah.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  Okay, but still, it's a nice like 60, 70 grand into your bank account you can reinvest.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. And it was in the very early days, but more than the money, it's about the feedback that you're getting. It's about users who are coming in and who are being patient enough to see while you're growing, right? So that was the best part for us.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Yep. Well, Alan, if people want to test out your tool, where's the best place to find you online?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  I'm on LinkedIn, on Twitter, both of these places, but yeah, more active on LinkedIn.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Guys, there you have it. Zapmail had no revenue one year ago, and six months ago, they broke a million of revenue. They've added 5 million in new revenue over the past six months. One of the fastest growing companies in the go-to-market sort of AI space. They've got over 4,500 paying customers that pay an average of $110 per month. Their churn is a problem, but a lot of folks have churn in this space. They're turning about 7% of logos per month, and their number one growth channel, or one of the big growth channels is affiliates. Over 280 affiliates have driven them at least one customer, and 35% of their total 6 million of AR today have come from affiliates. Their team size is 27 people. They're looking to scale. Watch out for some new product launches here in the GTM space coming up. Alan, thanks for taking us to the top.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here.