
I Hit $115k/Month with a Status Quo Improvement - JamesIH
https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-i-hit-115k-mo-with-a-status-quo-improvement-c45d11ad17
======
gk1
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...](https://www.gmass.co/blog/you-can-now-send-10000-emails-with-gmass-
and-gmail/)

~~~
ajaygoel
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.

~~~
gk1
> 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.

~~~
ajaygoel
The text you're quoting has to do with how we distribute volume, NOT how we
enable spammers. High volume campaigns does not equate to spamming. You can
send a 10-email campaign that IS spam and a 10,000-email campaign that is NOT
spam.

~~~
ericpauley
This is effectively structuring for email. Would it be immoral to sell a
system that allows people to bypass money laundering restrictions by
automating structuring? I don't see how this is any different.

~~~
sjg007
Structuring email isn’t illegal.

------
jfk13
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...](https://www.gmass.co/blog/how-to-cancel-your-paid-gmail-mail-merge-
subscription-to-gmass/)

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

~~~
ajaygoel
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.

~~~
thestepafter
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.

~~~
ajaygoel
Cancellation is instant and doesn't require an email being sent. You'll see
that in the post.

You may be right. A better solution might be to build an external UI for
account management, but I've shied away from that, wanting to keep everything
inside Gmail. Maybe in the future though.

~~~
daveguy
I think you should have the email set up not to bounce and cancel accounts
sent to that address just as readily as you cancel when they press the magic
button. A lot of headaches and bad will considering anyone can cancel with
their credit card and you might get screwed by your payment processor.

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

~~~
giarc
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.

~~~
tacon
I tried letting Google complete that for me and it didn't offer a single
completion. Go figure. A great general approach, though.

After sorting through a bunch of junk about making an Excel wish list, here
are some pages about suggested Excel improvements:

[https://www.thespreadsheetguru.com/blog/excel-weaknesses-
a-w...](https://www.thespreadsheetguru.com/blog/excel-weaknesses-a-wishlist-
for-improvements)

[https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/msoffice/forum/all/excel...](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
us/msoffice/forum/all/excel-wish-list/174196bf-6a23-4687-937d-d5cdee3d8d43)

------
jondubois
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_2211
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.

~~~
jondubois
>> 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.

~~~
seem_2211
You make a good point, and a lot of sense, but also a very abstract point.
While I agree, it's good to think about business processes in a macro sense,
most of the time that won't solve the problem of where you can add value.

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

------
danra
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.

~~~
tempestn
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.

~~~
danra
> 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?

~~~
chii
Is an arms manufacturer at fault when there's war?

China is always going to censor. Google facilitating it or not make no
difference. Might as well make the money, and also hope to influence the
system from a position of power rather than a position of weakness (i.e, not
involved at all)

~~~
danra
Spam is always going to exist. Might as well facilitate, make money, and try
to influence the system from a position of power?

~~~
tempestn
That's like saying theft will always exist, so you might as well go steal
things. Tools like this actively add to the quantity of spam out there, making
it worse for everyone.

~~~
chii
the analogy isn't to do stealing, it's to make lockpicks.

------
sfopdxnonstop
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
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.

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

~~~
martin_a
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.

~~~
daveguy
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.

~~~
chii
Why would one use the same email to sign up, and to send spam?!

~~~
martin_a
Because that is how this works. There is so much wrong about this service,
this is just another tip of the iceberg.

------
WaltPurvis
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.

~~~
ajaygoel
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.

------
deathanatos
> _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
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.

------
ajaygoel
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
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.

~~~
dang
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](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.

~~~
sah2ed
Dang! The was a very even-handed correction.

You are exceedingly good at your job :)!

~~~
dang
Well, that was nice of you. It's mostly just a lot of practice, but there's an
interesting part too, which is learning to observe one's own reactions so one
doesn't unconsciously just feed them back to the other. Slow process.

------
samstave
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...

~~~
airstrike
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

~~~
samstave
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?

~~~
rmah
What sort of monthly subscription fee would you be willing to pay for a
subscription hub? :-)

------
henryw
> 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?

~~~
chatmasta
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
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].

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

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

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

~~~
ajaygoel
Here's January's bill:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/wt2qofjla2lnsg7/Screenshot%202019-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/wt2qofjla2lnsg7/Screenshot%202019-02-20%2013.28.10.png?dl=0)

~~~
eloff
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.

~~~
cobookman
the benefit is outsourcing operations. If he used dedicated instances he'd
need to manage his SQL server, disks, deal with hardware failures...etc.

7k$/month is cheaper than hiring an additional head.

~~~
penagwin
I'm not sure I agree, now I have no clue where he's from, but assuming he
would save 7k a month that'd be 84k a year.

Obviously there's other overhead/costs involved, but surely he could find
somebody for 60k+ a year (I make less then that at my current development job
but I'm from Michigan)?

~~~
brucen
That single person you are paying a sub-par wage won't be providing 24/7/365
support, which is a big benefit of AWS / cloud providers. It's also a bit of
insurance on your hardware in case of failures, free replacement. Finally, if
something catastrophic was to happen, with a recent-ish offsite backup it's
usually pretty trivial to setup on a different region or even cloud provider.
With your own hardware, that's a bit harder.

I agree though with one of the parents, AWS costs here can likely be
significantly reduced. I cut costs in half by (a) reserving instances and (b)
thinking about EBS and downgrading / downsizing where possible rather than
using the defaults.

------
slap_shot
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
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...

------
drieddust
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?

~~~
aboutruby
> Doesn't this violates Google TOC?

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

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

~~~
rajacombinator
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.

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

~~~
ajaygoel
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.

~~~
gk1
> 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...](https://www.gmass.co/blog/you-can-now-send-10000-emails-with-gmass-
and-gmail/)

~~~
tomp
Isn’t an opt-in email spam already? Personally I’d prefer to _not_ get opt-in
emails (as I’ve already opted in on the website where I put my email into the
“subscribe” box) so looks like this product works OK...

~~~
martin_a
Anyone could enter your email into that subscribe box. You totally want double
opt-in.

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

------
Strom
> _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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19191241)

------
jamieweb
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.

------
samebreath
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.

------
oops
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.

------
mikob
Really shady:

From chrome extensions page ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gmass-
powerful-mai...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gmass-powerful-
mail-merge/ehomdgjhgmbidokdgicgmdiedadncbgf))

"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"

------
ausjke
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.

------
joering2
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.

------
aboutruby
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)

------
atsaloli
Any plans to integrate with Streak?

------
readhn
Amazing story!

Congrats to founder!

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

------
gammateam
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.

