I Hit $115k/Month with a Status Quo Improvement

https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-i-hit-115k-mo-with-a-status-quo-improvement-c45d11ad17

by JamesIH • 7 years ago

407 274 7 years ago

dgritsko• 7 years ago

Most successful businesses aren't based on revolutionary ideas, but rather improvements to the status quo. The media tends to focus on the revolutionary ideas, so it's easy to think that an idea isn't worth pursuing if it's not groundbreaking. But in my case, email marketing had been around forever when I started GMass but I found an unfulfilled niche and built a business out of it.

This is a really great paragraph. I think the part that I get hung up on is right at the end - how does one actually go about finding an unfulfilled niche? It seems like they are kind of difficult to find almost by virtue of them being unfulfilled.

yters• 7 years ago

I've heard one of the best ways is to work at a company for awhile and identifying what they have problems with.

giarc2• 7 years ago

Another neat approach is to use Google auto complete to help. If you are a Excel wizard, type "I wish Excel could..." and let Google complete the rest. You might find some interesting use cases that people are searching for.

astrodust• 7 years ago

If you roll around in enough problems you'll eventually find one that's not solved properly and yet is fairly prevalent.

davidsawyer• 7 years ago

Another similar approach is to see what crazy process they're trying to jam into Excel or Google Sheets, and then you can build a more tailored app for that process, ideally if other businesses could benefit from it.

Edit: I should've read giarc's comment below! We're essentially saying the same thing.

GuiA• 7 years ago

how does one actually go about finding an unfulfilled niche?

Start with things you already have some domain knowledge of (better even, try to find unrelated things you know about that overlap in interesting ways and where few people have domain knowledge of both) ;

find what problems/frustrations practitioners in that field have and do your best to solve one of them in a very immediate, low cost of adoption way;

fail fast .

pmilla1606• 7 years ago

This is also something I struggle with.

I think that they are incredibly difficult to find and most people (me included) can't identify "problems" in their day to day that could be improved by something - in hindsight - relatively simple.

I'm constantly asking myself: where are the pain-points in my daily interactions with computers/software etc.

So far there's nothing and I know that can't be true.

cooperadymas• 7 years ago

A big part of this is when you work on computers / with software all day, you're looking for pain points in the same place that most other developers are looking. There is certainly room for improvements in this market but it's generally much more saturated than others. (Hence the common advice to go work or talk with people out of the industry for awhile.)

Otherwise the best advice I'd give for finding problems is to start making a log of every time you get annoyed or frustrated at something. Your package didn't get delivered on time, you realize you have no milk when you're in the middle of cooking a meal, a driver on the highway is endangering people, your phone is too big for your pocket, radio stations all seem to play commercials at the exact same time, your home ran out of heating oil and no one will deliver until Monday, your hard drive failed and you realized your backup program wasn't including a new folder of vacation photos, even though you make an appointment at the barber/doctor every time you show up on time you show up you still wait 15-20 minutes, there's no Mexican restaurants that deliver to your house, you never know how your child is doing in school until they get their report card at the end of the semester.

There are dozens of tiny annoyances that we run into every day. Some have easy solutions, some less so, but they're there if you know what to look for.

davidivadavid2• 7 years ago

That's because thinking of it in terms of pain point isn't necessarily helpful, since people have different "pain tolerance" when it comes to technology.

Try to think of it in terms of outcomes.

What are you trying to do with computers/software, and how could the outcome be massively improved/democratized?

z3t4• 7 years ago

Im a bit jealous of people building a billion dollar business that solves a problem that could literally be solved in ten minutes. The business are rarely about a better solution, its more about a better business model and better marketing!

SatvikBeri• 7 years ago

In the successful businesses I know, finding that niche was often 1-2 years of exploration/iteration, where the final result looks vastly different from the initial hypothesis.

HeyLaughingBoy• 7 years ago

It's difficult to go looking for niches without guidance or some direction on what to look for. And when you do find the online ones, you may find that it's hard to shake the incumbents loose because (a) the niche is tiny and (b) the market is already satisfied with the current producers.

The niches I have found always come by accident: "hey, we notice you have this product that's close to what we need. Can you build us a version that does xxx" where xxx is some trivial change that results in a product I can sell to others in that niche. Or "we know this has to be possible and it shouldn't be difficult, but we don't have the skills do it. We'll buy xx units if you can build it for us."

The second-order problem is that often even if you know the need exists and you have a customer, without good knowledge of the domain, it can be hard to figure out how to reach other customers (they may not be online much) and make more sales.

I had a site that would consistently rank in the top 5-10 for google queries, yet I had fewer than 10 hits/day for those queries.

Another issue I've come across is that when you're approached by someone with a specific need, it can be hard to decide if you've found a new niche or just a custom design for one customer.

None of this is to suggest that you shouldn't try, but that it can be harder than it seems at first glance.

coldtea• 7 years ago

It's difficult to go looking for niches without guidance or some direction on what to look for. And when you do find the online ones, you may find that it's hard to shake the incumbents loose because (a) the niche is tiny and (b) the market is already satisfied with the current producers.

Still much much easier than finding a 1 in million unicorn idea and getting VC and getting users.

Judging from number of successful companies in both categories, it's several orders of magnitude easier (which is obvious).

davidivadavid2• 7 years ago

This particular product is pretty easy to think of if you have a little bit of experience with marketing.

What it does is add a common feature found in marketing automation/CRM systems to Gmail, a massively used platform.

It essentially unbundled a feature from a specialized product and made it available as on add-on on a prosumer product.

If you look at large platforms like Gmail, you can probably find isomorphic ideas.

wetpaste• 7 years ago

Have you ever used a product recommended thinking it's going to work a certain way and it works completely differently and it was not nearly as intuitive or helpful as you thought? Take those experiences and apply them to your own version of the product. See where it goes. Talk to people in various niche sectors: Librarians, movie ticketing, museums, etc. whatever. Ask them if the software they use has problems that are not being fixed or if they software has changed over the last 10-20 years. Most likely there is and nobody has taken the time to figure out how compete in that area and then like start from square one and build something good/modern/fast to use for the folks that need it.

I'm kind of talking out of my ass because I've never built a business but I've seen some terrible software that people are forced to use and been in many company-specific or industry-specific situations so I have buttloads of ideas. Most of my ideas come from hearing those pain-points or having my own pain points and searching for the right software and not being able to find it (or not finding what I need because I don't know the right way to look for it, which is another thing that should be a thing which is like, how do you figure out what kind of product you actually need?)

TheHegemon• 7 years ago

Unfortunately the problem with the kind of niches you're talking about there is that the buyers of the software rarely have to actually use it which leads to the terrible situations of the users.

gammateam• 7 years ago

Also you dont need hockey stick growth if you dont take VC capital or any outside capital

Businesses like this make more for founders when they dont take outside capital. With obsessions on growth and liquidation preferences, a business like this likely wouldnt result in a windfall for a founder during an exit event.

readhn• 7 years ago

Amazing story!

Congrats to founder!

xamuel• 7 years ago

In today's world, a status quo improvement is revolutionary, because the default is for everyone to seek to create nothing but revolutionary products.

In other words, you might say OP is disrupting the disruption industry.

rglover• 7 years ago

Not to mention a lot of disruptive ideas are poorly executed leading to wonderful headlines but sub-par products/assets.

sfopdxnonstop3• 7 years ago

I'm happy for people who find personal success according to their own value system, but my personal measure of self wouldn't increase if I spent my days expanding the amount of email advertising in the world.

maxxxxx• 7 years ago

You can do it like a lot of philanthropists. First make your money through cut throat business tactics and then become well-respected by giving away some of your money.

sciurus3• 7 years ago

An $8,000 a month AWS bill is surprisingly high for this service.

pnathan• 7 years ago

I thought so as well. But, if he's okay with it and the numbers pencil out well, there's not a lot of reason to improve it: probably better ROIs elsewhere.

teacpde• 7 years ago

I didn't read thoroughly, but why does it need to run on AWS? Does the plugin send requests to a back end server and the server send the mass emails out?

My naive thought is that some frontend JS (without the help of a backend server) would be able to accomplish some of the features.

ddebernardy• 7 years ago

Just spitballing, but he mentions working around gmail hanging for minutes when sending thousands of emails somewhere, so I presume he's storing the addresses on a server and looping through them in gmail in bite sized chunks.

eloff5• 7 years ago

Yeah, I think you should be able to get that under a $1000 without trying too hard. But at $130K/month revenue, it's hardly a priority.

Kiro2• 7 years ago

$1000? $5 should be enough.

jumbopapa2• 7 years ago

I had the same thought and I'm curious how he was paying the AWS bill before making this a subscription service.

mbrameld2• 7 years ago

The article says he's tracking when recipients open emails and click links. So for every email one of his users sends there's some potential network traffic and data to be stored. He was probably able to offer the service for free originally because those features weren't added until after the subscription service launched. His AWS bill before adding those features was probably a few hundred dollars per month at the most. He also mentioned he is financially secure from selling a previous spam tool he created, so he could afford to run it for free for a while.

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

Open/click tracking doesn't add much in terms of cost. That traffic is minor. The bulk of the traffic is the transmission of the emails.

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

Here's January's bill: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wt2qofjla2lnsg7/Screenshot%202019-...

eloff5• 7 years ago

So roughly $1300 in bandwidth, possibly could cut some there by putting Cloudflare in front of static assets, but no idea how much of that is from static vs dynamic assets.

Most of the compute cost ($2400) goes to an m4.xlarge and an m5.2xlarge. That could be reduced by using reserved instances - but there's other gotchas there if you're likely to change that anytime soon. Google cloud is much nicer in this regard with the auto discounts for continuous usage.

The provisioned IO for EBS $2500 makes me sick, but may be necessary to get adequate performance.

Honestly you could move everything onto two dedicated servers (one as a hot backup) and cut this down to $1000/month and get better performance. But that's the AWS tax.

I use AWS all the time for work, but I would never build my own business on it.

aboutruby3• 7 years ago

Could save (edit: not $3600) $1873 per month by using Linux instead of Windows. I see you are using SQL server, probably C# for the code, might be worth looking into running it with Mono.

henryw• 7 years ago

Also, I sleep with a CPAP machine, and I've found that it's enabled me to get by with only five to six hours of sleep, allowing me to be productive during most of my waking hours. Before my CPAP, I was sleeping 9-10 hours a day just to feel normal. It's weird, but my CPAP machine has been the biggest contributor to my productivity gains in the last few years.

This is my first time hearing about CPAP. Has anyone else tried this?

tdb7893• 7 years ago

If you have sleep apnea it's useful.

toomuchtodo• 7 years ago

It helps if you have sleep apnea. If you don't have sleep apnea, I'm unsure you're going to see cognitive or productivity gains, as your brain is already getting enough O2 during sleep.

EDIT: Now if you could find a drug that promoted the ability to more rapidly clear waste using cerebrospinal fluid while you sleep, that'd be a possible route to still maintaining high levels of wakeful productivity with limited sleep (without causing harm later in life).

chatmasta• 7 years ago

My knowledge of this is little more than yours, but my understanding is most people use CPAP machines to cure sleep apnea (extreme snoring basically). I've never heard of someone using one as a sort of sleep-hack. I imagine the machine is fairly uncomfortable? Would be curious to hear more about this.

pbhjpbhj• 7 years ago

I assumed that the OP was saying as they'd mitigated the effects of their apnea they now managed on only 6hrs of sleep instead of 10 [ie 6h of good sleep is enough, 10h of poor sleep was what they were getting before].

giarc2• 7 years ago

Sleep apnea is actually much more than just snoring. It's actually a period of time during sleep where the person stops breathing.

cosmie3• 7 years ago

Just to note, there are two kinds of sleep apnea.

The one you typically hear about that presents with extreme snoring is obstructive sleep apnea. It's pretty much as the name implies: sleep apnea caused by an obstruction. Your body tries to breath, but for a variety of potential reasons, your airway is obstructed. The snoring is your body's attempt at overcoming the obstruction.

Then there's central sleep apnea. With central sleep apnea, there's no obstruction blocking airflow. Your central nervous system just periodically... decides not to breath. Doesn't even attempt to contract the muscles necessary to intake or expel air. Then at some point, it... decides to start back up. There's no snoring or other loud noises involved like there is with obstructive sleep apnea.

They're both sleep apnea, and both have the same impact on the body if left untreated, but they present in almost complete opposite manners. Obstructive sleep apnea is loud because your body is trying real hard to do it's job. Central sleep apnea is generally pretty quiet, because its the absence of your body doing it's job. It just decided to take a little breather from it's typical life-sustaining duties, then (hopefully) after a ~10-30 second break it gets back to doing what it's supposed to do. The loudest you might hear is a bit of deep, heavy, or irregular breathing as it handles the backlog of oxygen needs that built up while it was on break.

I spent years being misdiagnosed with stuff like depression and hypertension, because I'm pretty much the exact opposite of someone at risk of obstructive sleep apnea (don't snore, not overweight, not old). It took paying for a home sleep test out of pocket and giving my physician the results before I finally got any traction from a doctor to explore that route. Turns out I have central sleep apnea, and treating that has been revolutionary on my life. I don't sleep through alarms anymore, I'm learning to love waking up early, I'm not mentally and physically drained at the end of the work day, and all kinds of little things.

You can order a home sleep test online for $150. And if you have an FSA, you can use your FSA dollars on it without even having to go through a doctor. If you're constantly dragging ass during the day, have a wonky sleep cycle, wake up randomly at night, or just happen to be curious. At that price, it's well worth taking a sleep test just to rule it out as a cause.

mr_tristan2• 7 years ago

CPAP is a machine that forces continuous air through your nose via a mask. When you have sleep apnea, you're actually not breathing, thus, wake up during the night. The CPAP machine keeps the air moving, thus, you don't wake up.

I have _mild_ sleep apnea (you go through tests for diagnosis). With a CPAP machine, I've been able to add a solid hour per night of sleep, from about 6.5 hours to 7 .5-8, with it being continuous. Ergo, I don't make the "midnight trip to pee" with it on. With it off, I snore loudly, and wake up at least 1-2 times during the night.

It's possible that Ajay here actually has worse apnea, and the "9-10" hours from before was actually spent waking up, then trying to get back to sleep. Thus, the "6 hours" is just purely continuous sleep, instead of hours of tossing and turning.

Sleep apnea tests are comfortable take home tests. You basically just wear a couple of sensors for a night. If you're not prone to apnea, don't bother with a CPAP. It's not cheap, and some people can't get used to putting the mask on.

denverkarma• 7 years ago

Do you have any recommendation for an at-home test? I've considered doing a lab study, but at-home sounds much better. I didn't realize that was an option.

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

Right, I do have moderate-to-severe apnea, which is why I use the machine. But still, going from 10-11 hours/night to 5-6 and feeling great has been a big productivity booster.

OmarIsmail• 7 years ago

As one of the founders of Streak and someone who helped build the InboxSDK this is so cool to see. Congrats to Ajay!

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

Hi Omar! I'm eternally grateful to you, Chris, Aleem, and the entire InboxSDK team.

slap_shot• 7 years ago

Most products really do not need to be revolutionary, and very few are.

Markets are unimaginably large and complex, and they're always changing. Sometimes even the most basic feature can divide huge portions of markets.

blunte• 7 years ago

Indeed. But knowing how to market to the right audience is very important.

There are so many good X (where X can be anything from a potato peeler that doesn't clog to a fantastic musician that you've never heard of or even a software service you need).

I'm definitely in the camp that sees needs and pain points and solves them, but doesn't know how to market...

WaltPurvis• 7 years ago

This is a good story, but I'm surprised Google allowed this extension to exist, especially if it's true that it was widely used by spammers.

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

All the extension does is provide a conduit between the Gmail UI and the Gmail API, really. Google's systems for detecting spammers are pretty good, so they're more likely to shut down a spamming account rather than my extension.

samstave3• 7 years ago

I would like to not have to have a monthly subsription model to every gosh darn interesting service.

How about "Try us unlimited for $10" for X days.

For example - I have a campaign I would like to send out. to >2,000 addresses... I'd like to try that for $10 and not have a subscription...

jcims• 7 years ago

Some kind of federated payment model would be nice too

smnplk• 7 years ago

Yes, some kind of JPM coin :P -- joke

airstrike2• 7 years ago

Companies have every incentive to create recurring revenue. Wall Street these days is all about repeat business, from Tech to Industrials to residential services like security cameras and alarms.

Some companies like Adobe were extremely successful in changing their business model to that end, so investors expect all other companies to follow suit and severely punish those who don't

samstave3• 7 years ago

I get that.

But what you're missing from my comment is that companies all think to themselves "Well cmon - $X/month isnt that much money"

But also forget about subscription fatigue, as well as the fact that a company/individual might want/need >a dozen "subscription" services to accomplish what they want. So if you're paying ~$10 to $20 per month for every thing you need....

Thats a lot.

What we should have is a subscription hub - where all these startups can place their services and with a single account - I can click the services I want access to.

Eliminate payments across thousands of little subscription startups, allow me one account, one dashboard, one resource to find all the various tools... let me see results and reviews from users etc...

All in one place.

So - who is going to apply to YC with this for 2019?

UncleEntity2• 7 years ago

I'd like to try that for $10 and not have a subscription...

$25 prepaid credit cards are pretty hard to keep billing after the first monthly bill and you spend the rest at McDonalds (which is awesome for that but they look at you kind of funny if there's only 35 cents left on the card).

atsaloli3• 7 years ago

Any plans to integrate with Streak?

atsaloli3• 7 years ago

Any problems with Google shutting down accounts due to mass mailing? We run our business on G Suite, getting locked out would be catastrophic.

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

It does happen, but it's rare. You have to be a true spammer or phisher to get shut down, and we've found that Google is a lot more lenient with G Suite accounts than regular gmail.com accounts.

atsaloli3• 7 years ago

Thank you!

sjs382• 7 years ago

It does happen, but it's rare.

How do you know it's rare? Is there a number you can cite? What's that number based on? Like the OP said, getting your G-Suite account banned is pretty catastrophic, so I hope that's not just a(n informed) guess.

Google is a lot more lenient with G Suite accounts than regular gmail.com accounts

Can you provide evidence for this assertion?

gk15• 7 years ago

You have to be a true spammer

And what exactly is a "true spammer," in your view? Your product allows people send 10,000[1] emails at once to people who never opted-in.

You and your product enable spam. Shame on you.

https://www.gmass.co/blog/you-can-now-send-10000-emails-with...

drieddust• 7 years ago

I am really happy with his success. He is a classic case of blowing his own trumpet in world chasing next unicorn.

One question though. If he is enabling his users to send mass emails using Google's infrastructure. Doesn't this violates Google TOC?

aboutruby3• 7 years ago

Doesn't this violates Google TOC?

Users risk having their account locked if they send too many emails (mine was for 1 day)

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

Hey everyone - someone just alerted me to this post. I'm Ajay, the person interviewed in that article. Let me go through now and respond to people's comments.

grepthisab• 7 years ago

Maybe I'm cynical, but I have a hard time believing that the brand new user JamesIH created three hours ago whose only submission or comment is posting a link to your indiehackers page, and then you, a relatively savvy SEO person from skimming the article, suddenly show up because you were "alerted" to the post, when the post has a specific link to HN in its sidebar. My guess is that the simplest explanation is probably the right one: you created the JamesIH account, posted the link to your content, then were "alerted" to the post to post here and help give it traction. A better story than posting it yourself to be sure, but also kinda scammy.

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

I absolutely did not create the JamesIH account. I have no idea who that is. From the "IH" part of it, I'm guessing someone that has something to do with Indie Hackers.

ChanningAllen• 7 years ago

I run all of the content for Indie Hackers, and I recently hired James as our new managing editor for text-based interviews and a couple other content series. He is not Ajay Goel.

vinceguidry• 7 years ago

Given that it's perfectly fine to just post it yourself, and that you only really get one shot at making the front page, I personally don't really have a problem with people trying to find the right way to do these kinds of submissions, even if it feels a little gamey. Would be nicer if the community didn't take itself so seriously, but that's the world we live in.

timdavila• 7 years ago

I don't see anything wrong with posting your own content as long as it's not all you post. Way better and more honest than using a sock puppet.

highace• 7 years ago

Maybe I'm cynical

Confirmed.

dang2• 7 years ago

Please don't post like this to Hacker News. It's really easy to convince yourself that you've uncovered a sinister plot that simply must be true—everything adds up! and then it's hard not to come out blasting. But because you're working with incomplete information, most of the time it's just not true—and the people on the receiving end of the blast are as human as you are, and basically it just really sucks. This is covered by the site guideline that asks: "Assume good faith." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Sure, a small portion of the time, you guessed right and your suspicions were correct. But the upside of being right isn't worth the downside of being wrong. Statistically speaking, it poisons the commons, even though your intention was to protect it.

jfk133• 7 years ago

If that were my service, I'd be pretty embarrassed by the number of unhappy users who have commented on the blog posts about cancellation[1] and refunds[2]. Doesn't seem like a good look.

[1] https://www.gmass.co/blog/how-to-cancel-your-paid-gmail-mail...

[2] https://www.gmass.co/blog/request-a-refund/

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

It's not something I'm proud of, but I'm not embarrassed by it either. The upset commenters are the minority of our users. Some parts of our UI are a little difficult -- most commands have to be done via the Gmail Compose window, because we want the entire experience to be inside Gmail. That workflow is unnatural for some.

smrtinsert• 7 years ago

Great story, thanks for sharing.

jcmoscon• 7 years ago

ajaygoel you are an inspiration! Thanks for sharing your story!

jfk133• 7 years ago

Still, given the number of people who seem to be having trouble with it, maybe it'd be worth re-thinking that design?

thestepafter• 7 years ago

I hear you, except you don’t address the refunds and cancellations concerns. I now have a habit of only using software that makes refunds and cancellations pain free. I shouldn’t have to email you to cancel, this is just creating a false barrier to make your users life more difficult so maybe they won’t cancel and you can get another charge out of them. The fact that you believe this impacts a small minority of users and your overall response to this is very disconcerting. This impacts all of your users, only some of them are complaining. I also guarantee that you aren’t reaching your full potential because people are reading those comments and not signing up in the first place.

azhenley• 7 years ago

What about the upset users who just don't publicly comment? Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean users are happy with it.

fbelzile2• 7 years ago

It might help to separate out business functions from the product itself.

From your comment on the blog: > Like I’ve explained above, cancel@gmass.co is not an email address.

To the average user, it certainly looks like an email address. Maybe just have it act like a normal email and list it under the support section of your website: https://www.gmass.co/#contact

kokokokoko2• 7 years ago

You clicked the wrong button. Please re-read the instructions.

Probably not the best customer response I've seen from someone doing customer service.

As a learning lesson for others out there with a SaaS service. If you cannot have a phone number for support, absolutely provide a clear and easy to find email address for support. The people who tend to be the most likely to not understand the cancellation process, or have other similar issues, have a large intersection with the people who will have difficulty contacting you via something other than phone or email.

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

Agreed. I was arrogant in some of my blog post comments. I've changed my tune since then. For me, gaining confidence in my product and gaining traction turned me into a more customer-service friendly person.

jfk133• 7 years ago

> You clicked the wrong button. Please re-read the instructions.
Probably not the best customer response I've seen from someone doing customer service.

Right. It may be perfectly accurate, but it doesn't come across as at all sympathetic or helpful -- especially to an already-frustrated user. I also suspect a good number of those users are not native English speakers, making the (lengthy) instructions even more likely to be a source of confusion.

koolba• 7 years ago

If you don’t have support@ as an email address that actually reads the inbound messages you’re doing it wrong. Ditto for billing@, legal@, dmca@, and shibboleet@ (unpublished of course).

trextrex• 7 years ago

About 90% of the complaints there seem to be from users who have obviously not read the instructions in the linked page. About 10% seem to be from users who are being charged after cancellation which is a bit worrying.

noir_lord• 7 years ago

Users not reading the instructions... what a world.

Also I find it helpful when dealing with users to mentally replace users with people or humans, users sounds like someone with a drug addiction, they are people each of which is different and has their own priorities - genuine empathy goes a long way with people, treating them as interchangeable blobs not so much.

HumanDrivenDev• 7 years ago

If that were my service, I'd be pretty embarrassed by the number of unhappy users who have commented on the blog posts about cancellation[1] and refunds[2]. Doesn't seem like a good look.

And if my business was turning over $115k/Month I'm not sure I would let that keep me awake at night.

onlyrealcuzzo• 7 years ago

I'm sure he's happy to have made $115k in a month and he doesn't really care about anything else.

gk15• 7 years ago

This product lets people send up to 10,000 emails[1] at once to a cold list of contacts (ie, not opted in). Let's not kid ourselves: The use case is spamming.

The reason it's making $115k/month is because most other ESPs (Mailchimp, etc) don't allow spamming, so spammers flock to (and pay for!) products that look the other way.

To the creator: Good on you for creating a successful business. I hope you take these resources and do something positive for the world.

[1] https://www.gmass.co/blog/you-can-now-send-10000-emails-with...

VectorLock• 7 years ago

"I Hit $115k/Month with a Gmail Span Cannon" might not have produced the levels of engagement he was looking for.

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

Just FYI, I didn't come up with the title for the interview. The editors at IH did.

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

You're confusing a couple of issues. It's not that we're looking the other way. It's that I wanted to design a system where we don't have to look at all. GMass doesn't actually send any emails through its own servers. Emails are sent either through users' own Gmail accounts or through a third party SMTP service like SendGrid. Those actual email server operators (Gmail or SendGrid) have pretty sophisticated systems to detect spammers. THEY will shut down a user's account before I could ever even notice it. I don't have to look, because the owner of the email server will do the monitoring.

gk15• 7 years ago

Those actual email server operators (Gmail or SendGrid) have pretty sophisticated systems to detect spammers.

Yes, and your product helps spammers bypass those detection systems. You even explain it in the post I linked:

GMass will automatically send 500 emails/day or 2,000 emails/day if your email campaign has more than 500 or 2,000 recipients, respectively. You can also control, however, how many go out per day with the new Spread out setting under the GMass Settings arrow. If left blank, GMass will use 500 (regular Gmail) or 2,000 (G Suite) automatically, but you can override this by setting your own value.

And...

It's not that we're looking the other way... we don't have to look at all.

That is what the phrase means.

periya• 7 years ago

Aka I’m going to assume no liability

turdnagel• 7 years ago

Huh. Does it matter if you shoot someone with a gun labeled "Gmail" vs. one named "SendGrid"?

ransom15382• 7 years ago

"(Gmail or SendGrid) have pretty sophisticated systems to detect spammers"

Yes, but, the evil genius of the idea is that the email will be from a gmail domain. Emails from gmail to gmail with your own 5 year old account will have a ridiculous conversion rate. In my tests with email, if the email is from the actual gmail domain other carriers TRUST it more. Spam systems rely heavily on DNS/IPaddresses -- and this bypasses all that.

I feel for the smaller email providers. Gmail wont be able to patch this anytime soon, thus, the smaller ESPs without resources will have to change their rules to make the gmail domain less trusted.

jdietrich• 7 years ago

From your documentation:

We recommend that an unsubscribe link be added to all mass emails containing promotional or marketing content, but the decision is up to you.

An unsubscribe link is a requirement of the CAN-SPAM Act and the GDPR. Your own docs effectively say "We advise you not to use our product to break federal and EU law, but the decision is up to you". I can't speak for anyone else, but that doesn't really accord with my sense of ethics.

https://www.gmass.co/blog/unsubscribe-link/

sametmax3• 7 years ago

to the creator: Good on you for creating a successful business. I hope you take these resources and do something positive for the world.

Not good on him. It's an immoral business. I don't see why the hn community would endorse this just because it makes money.

If the emails were also a tool for privacy, decentralisation or some good objective behind it, i could see the pros and cons. But here it's all pros for him, and all cons for the rest of the world.

ajaygoel24• 7 years ago

Are you saying you've never received any benefit from an email you received that was part of a campaign? Like a discount to your favorite store? Not all uses are commercial, either. We have teachers who use it to communicate with all the parents of their students. A tennis club that emails out the week's upcoming schedule to all players. An HOA communicating with its residents.

gk15• 7 years ago

Also, shame on Indie Hackers for choosing to promote this.

supermw3• 7 years ago

This is Hackernews, as in whites, blacks, and gray hats.

Some people here make money through cool silicon valley startups that make for great success porn but don't forget that some people here also make money doing shady or even downright illegal things.

What we have in common in this community is our technology interests, not our morals or values. If you accept this fact, you can open your mind up to some great content and conversations.

diminoten7• 7 years ago

Yeah, but philosophically, what if he takes that immorally gained money, and does 10x the good? Is that immorally gained money immoral anymore?

samstave3• 7 years ago

You appear to be ignorant (meaning lacking of information, not 'stupid') of the history of social networks in the bay area:

Friendster

Hi5

Tagged

MySpace <-- LA

All about email lists and spam.

ALL of them.

All of them did shady things, founded by spammers, etc...

fasteo• 7 years ago

I guess this product is targetted to very small shops. It’s pretty usual to have the optin in a pc/pos without any email capability.

NeoBasilisk• 7 years ago

I'm glad it wasn't just me being sick and my mind muddled that was making me raise an eyebrow as I was reading his description.

CyberDildonics• 7 years ago

Not only is it a spam tool, but this post is an advertisement for his spam tool.

apo• 7 years ago

Reminds me of a HN story awhile back from a guy who built a business with eye-popping revenue. The article was cagey about what the product was - some kind of imported good.

Turns out it was counterfeit watches. Ugh.

lumost• 7 years ago

This will be a pretty short-lived business once the spam traps detect what's happening.

throwaway53534• 7 years ago

Even YCcompanies sell your info for marketing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/ao8gav/carta_spread...

samebreath• 7 years ago

Love or dislike the business model, I really enjoyed the article. The candid look went beyond the survivor bias I'm used to reading when it comes to startup stories. Thanks for sharing @ajaygeol.

aloukissas• 7 years ago

I listened to your IH podcast interview last week - great job on filling a niche market need!

aboutruby3• 7 years ago

I actually built some ruby scripts that do that using the gmail gem :), got my account locked for one day after 500 emails :) (Google Apps domain)

rajacombinator2• 7 years ago

This is impressive but I’m surprised he thinks it’s possible to build a personal legacy from an email tool like this. Almost all web software is transient and will be forgotten in a few years. Certainly not the stuff of “legacy after I’m gone.” Even mega apps like Facebook or Instagram will likely be long forgotten before their founders die.

moneywoes• 7 years ago

What makes you think FB and Instagram will be forgotten? They are billiondollar companies

rajacombinator2• 7 years ago

Billion dollar companies come and go like dust in the wind, especially in something as fickle and quickly evolving as the internet. I’d estimate roughly 0% chance your grandkids will have heard of either of these companies.

joering2• 7 years ago

Devil’s advocate here: tens of thausands of deaths in car accidents on roads all over the world - shame on Toyota, Ford, BMW and everyone else allowing people to use 5,000 pound of metal to kill each other. We should just stick to horse riding. Also - 100 deaths per year wordlwide related to children choking on bubble gum. Shame on Hubba Bubba for creating product that murders children!

Now to the definitions part: “True spammer” - someone who utilizes his services with only intent to maliciously message people. “Not true spammer” - someone with no spamming intention who for example lacks knowledge which keywords create spam alerts and hence his spam score goes up thru algorythms and ends up of flagging him a spamer.

Also extra knowledge for you, free of charge: emails posted publicly for example on someone websites are not directly protected so long as emailer can prove they got your email from public source. Further a large excemption was created by congress to for example exempt emergency services and politicians from being labeled spammers even if they do send unsolicited no opt-in messages.

Finally - so long as he doesnt advertise or encourage using his tool for spam, there is absolutely nothing morally wrong with the tool he wrote.

You welcome.

sabujp• 7 years ago

This seems like a serious violation of gmail TOS and am surprised gmail isn't shutting down your customers and banning your extensions

martin_a3• 7 years ago

Having a look at some comments in the linked pages (further above) it seems like people get regularly banned by GMail for using this spam service.

daveguy3• 7 years ago

And when they get banned they have trouble cancelling their subscription, which is tied to their email account. Apparently to cancel you have to use the plug in from your email account. I think we figured out where a lot of the $115k/mo is coming from. Wouldn't be surprised to see some legal push back.

jondubois2• 7 years ago

I cannot wrap my mind around why growth hacking/analytics tools make such profitable businesses. They don't add any actual value to society, so it doesn't make sense that they should be profitable at all. All they do is deceive people into thinking that a low quality product is actually good (and distract them away from better alternatives). Why is it that so many profitable businesses these days add 0 or negative value to society?

It seems that the best way to make money for yourself these days is by destroying value; by obfuscating facts, masquerading, deceiving, pretending, laundering, coercing, manipulating, diverting attention, saturating the media, manufacturing hype...

seem_22112• 7 years ago

Adding "actual value to society" is a very vague term and very prone to opinion.

Adding value to a business process is much easier to define.

jondubois2• 7 years ago

> Adding value to a business process is much easier to define.

But the effects of a business process on society are really important.

Money is a social contract which is universal and fungible. It was designed to be a measure of the value that an individual brings to society and which that individual can redeem from society.

If we lose sight of that fact and focus only on thinking about individual business processes in isolation, then the economy will lose its substance; it will be all smokes and mirrors; and everyone on the planet will end up wasting their lives working on one silly trend after another instead of helping to make actual, lasting progress.

jrochkind1• 7 years ago

In Bullshit Jobs, American anthropologist David Graeber posits that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, but instead to "bullshit jobs": "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."

UncleEntity2• 7 years ago

Except for Microsoft and Facebook all the email newsletters/new product announcements/whatever actually add value to my life since I actually find them interesting or I'd click the unsubscribe link.

With Microsoft I try to get them to stop sending emails but it seems to not even be possible without some sort of advanced MSDN certification.

With Facebook they seem to come up with some new opt-out classification every time they get some bad press and start filling up my inbox with stuff I couldn't care less about.

vb6lives• 7 years ago

Because you are making a ton of assumptions. I'm sure there are some spammers using this service. But I'm sure there are lots of legitimate users too.

quickthrower2• 7 years ago

Growth hacking and marketing are all about targeting the right products to the right potential customers. So as tools they are fine and add value to society, because without them product discovery would be less efficient, and there would be more big companies keeping their claim and less chance for indie hackers. Some people may use them to promote bad products, but I would argue that those businesses are the problem, not the tools.

ZeroFries• 7 years ago

The positive value-added is well captured (through sales conversions), while the negative value isn't. The annoyance of the sendee isn't expressed as a charge to the sender. So it's a net-positive for the sender, even if it's a net-negative for everyone involved. It's a tough problem to solve the general case, even if some specific cases have been (mostly) solved (eg: some types of pollution).

arvidkahl• 7 years ago

I think it's related to the old "in a gold rush, sell the shovels" adage. And these are often phantom shovels.

anonytrary6• 7 years ago

If people value what is popular then the art of making things (appear) popular will always be in demand. Many things can be simultaneously valuable and "bad".

They don't add any actual value to society, so it doesn't make sense that they should be profitable at all... Why is it that so many profitable businesses these days add 0 or negative value to society?

This is a contradiction. If it is profitable, then it is creating value. Society (or anyone) is allowed to value things you think are bad.

anoncake6• 7 years ago

No. If something is profitable, it moves value into someone's pockets. Bank robberies, advertising/spam and nigerian scams are all profitable but create no value.

mneubrand• 7 years ago

Unfortunately adding value to society isn't very correlated to profitability. The most extreme example I can think of is selling heroin.

ausjke• 7 years ago

Cant finish reading it, so you make money by spamming me basically, to me this is like selling drugs.

you probably wrote that article to get more spammer customers, shame on you.

danra4• 7 years ago

Funny, I don't see similar moral outrage at talented engineers working in Facebook and Google, doing no evil. (I do see such outrage at the companies themselves - but rarely at the developers working for them).

Yes, these companies do make useful products. But they have real negative effects on the world, which would have been better off if all those engineers had made these products for companies other than these lobbyist, competition-stifling, aggressive monopolies.

There's no real moral difference between selling your talents to the highest bidder and this specific case of running a spam service to make money.

tempestn3• 7 years ago

For one thing, facilitating spam is some distance further down on the benefits to harms scale than facilitating Facebook or Google. Google, especially, has created a enormous amount of value, and continues to do so^; spam, not so much.

^Which isn't to say that it's perfect, of course. Or even necessarily a net good, although my personal belief in the case of Google is that it still is.

danra4• 7 years ago

facilitating spam is some distance further down on the benefits to harms scale than facilitating Facebook or Google

So... Facilitating spam is worse than facilitating censorship in China?

StavrosK3• 7 years ago

Although this spamblaster is terrible, I consider Instagram to be a clear net negative for humanity. It has almost no redeeming traits, it just makes people insecure, envious and wastes their time.

WD-42• 7 years ago

Really? It seems moral outrage against engineers working at Facebook and Google has been pretty popular for the last ten years. First it was because they are displacing long term residents in places like San Francisco, and now it's because they are responsible for building giant surveillance machines.

danra4• 7 years ago

There’s far more respect among the tech community for the (truly!) talented engineers working in these companies than there is moral outrage.

sfopdxnonstop3• 7 years ago

Yes there is. And it's obvious.

jamieweb• 7 years ago

Isn't using this service just asking for your Gmail account to be banned? Even if the emails are legitimate, if only a small percentage of recipients report them as spam you'll probably be turned off.

deathanatos• 7 years ago

I was so excited to have a working version to play with that I paid the freelancer $5,000 dollars to build the backend that I needed under the condition that he delivered his part within seven days, which he did.
All of this happened while I was living out of a hotel room in Oahu, Hawaii. My then-girlfriend was getting her yoga certification there, and the program lasted a month.

Ah, if only we all used our hotel room in Oahu for a month, and $5k to drop on some developer to help! We could be building status quo improvements.

Seriously though, that just comes off as completely out of touch with reality to me, or some weird "humble brag". Most of us probably have day jobs. Not all of us are probably lucky enough to be in a regulatory environment where moonlighting is protected. But by the time I get home, more software is almost always the last thing I want to do. Mostly, I want to sleep, or eat. Or recover.

By the time my mind recovers enough to think about coding something that appeals to me, it's Monday again.

But perhaps I'm just not the type of person that'll ever get $115k/mo.

shishy• 7 years ago

Umm... I don't think he's insinuating that this is what it took to make it happen, but rather that's just how it played out in his case. I view it as him just being transparent. Maybe a humble brag but is that really a bad thing?

Plenty of IndieHackers get their product out as a side hustle after work; it just takes luck and patience since progress will be slower.

oops2• 7 years ago

The difference between me and this guy is I would never have gone to market with a product that locked up the UI when trying to send 1000 emails. And I’ve never made $130k/month.

aaaaaaaaaaab• 7 years ago

TLDR: he made a tool for spammers. What an enterpreneur!

mikob• 7 years ago

Really shady:

From chrome extensions page (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gmass-powerful-mai...)

"Writing a review Good day,

I would love to take Ajay Goel on his offer to refund my fee by writing a review, but I am getting a message stating I cannot because my email address is not authorize"

Strom• 7 years ago

I know one entrepreneur building an app who's too focused on the security of his app. Unless the fundamental offering of your app is security, you don't need to be concerned about that until you have some actual users to secure.

Ignoring security in favor of profits is exactly the reason why we get massive leaks like the most recent 2.7M medical calls one. [1] You can certainly make money by screwing over your customers, but I don't think this behavior should be promoted.

Security is not unlike brushing your teeth. It's about habbits. You need to do it correctly and consistently. If you skip brushing your teeth for years, you can't just spend days brushing your teeth to catch up.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19191241

I Hit $115k/Month with a Status Quo Improvement

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