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Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
442 points by sanity on Dec 15, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 210 comments
Back in 2010 I had an idea for a service that would allow people to easily create semi-permanent email aliases so that they could give an email address to people and websites without revealing their real email address. These aliases will continue to work indefinitely unless you choose to block them.

My brother and I spent a few months building the initial version and launched the website in July 2010. For the first year we had about 50 signups per month, by 2013 this had increased to 1500 and it's currently around 3500 per month.

Similarly, our revenue grew consistently but slowly - doubling about every 18 months, reaching its current level of around $8k/mo.

Over this time we redesigned the website, and found a company to create an explainer video for the service (both through 99Designs).

We have not spent much on paid user acquisition, we experimented with it a bit a few years ago without positive results. I think the difficulty is that some user education is required for them to understand what the service does and the value of it.

The website is called 33Mail (https://33mail.com/).

My plan is to spend the next few weeks focussed on trying to accelerate 33Mail's growth, in particular I want to try Google and FB advertising, and we've also been thinking about setting up an affiliate program through something like Commission Junction.

But before diving into that it would be really helpful to get some feedback and suggestions, it can sometimes feel like we're too close to it to see it objectively.

I would be super grateful if you guys could take a look at it and see if any suggestions come to mind.




The comments can be so funny on HN sometimes. You built something and committed to it for a decade. That’s so freaking cool! Take all feedback with a grain of salt. You’ve been around longer than most apps that launch on Show HN. Keep it up!


What comments can be “funny”?

I just went through the top 40 comments on this post and I couldn’t see nothing but praise and congratulations (with a couple suggesting to raise prices, which I think are with good intent).


You'll know that the top 40 comments are dynamic.

The world doesn't revolve around you!


They are ordered by a mix of recency and upvotes as far as I know. Which means the top 40 comments that I see are the same as you see, if I am correct, at the same moment.

I understand the misunderstanding and the urge to correct me. I don’t understand the need for your accusation of egocentrism. Why did you do that?


Not GP, but there seems to be a ~8h difference between your comment and the one you were responding to. It's possible the comments they saw then were different from what you saw. For whatever reason you didn't think of that.

I agree that accusing you of egocentrism is uncalled for. It does nothing to raise the quality of the discussion here, in fact it lowers it. Thanks for not taking the bait and staying reasonable in response. I hope you get an answer to your question.


I thought of that, but 40 root comments are a lot to go through. Not all of those are recent. The accusation that HN is not friendly to small lucrative endeavors seems very out of place to me and usually it’s just nitpick of very rare dismissive comments among hundreds of supportive comments. That’s why I asked for the go to point those out.

Maybe I couldn’t find the “funny” comments because I am not sure what “funny” means. Dismissive? Negative feedback? Aggressive? Accusatory?


(Apparently there was a response to your question already, but it didn't load until after I wrote mine.)


Because there's sand beneath your statements. In which case better to avoid the comment altogether.

I wouldn't take it to heart though. The (!) was an attempt to make the accusation light hearted. I guess it failed.

Anyway, I'm no authority here. Just here for potshots!


I don’t know what “sand beneath your comments” means, if you care to explain.


It's poetry :-)


Thank you :)


I signed up over 8 years ago and never gave a second thought about this. It still works. This is wonderful. Am still in the free plan. I'm going to upgrade even though i very rarely use it.


Thank you!


Done. I'm now on the $12 plan.


Congratulations! That's amazing and as someone mentioned, much more successful than over 99% of startups in the history of mankind.

Notes: I really like the theme, the barbershop candycane aesthetic does cry out "mail's here!" ... I think that the text on steps 1-3 is a bit dense and could be thinned out, or reduced somehow. The comparison chart on the price page is nice and clear except I would suggest adding some sort of icons to each of the row descriptors to make it clearer to understand at-a-glance. Great idea for a product and proud of your success!


It’s airmail aesthetic, not barber, but i agree it looks good.


Thank you for the kind words :)

Agree completely re: the steps 1-3 text being too dense, I'm going to try to make those much shorter just as soon as my current A/B test is done.


I see that your tool is mentioned constantly in online forums: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Areddit.com+O... - that's 526 results. I suggest keeping an eye on those mentions and reply to any questions someone might have, or clear up any misconceptions.

You might think it's silly to interact directly like this for a product priced at $1, but keep in mind Reddit and Hacker News have very good SEO, so these questions (with your answers) will pop up when people search for your, or similar, tools online.

Moreover, for the same reason, you can monitor your competitors and recommend your tool when you have the advantage.

I don't think that at your price point ads will work for you.

I recommend that approach because that's what I've been helping people do for the past year. I'm the founder of Syften (https://syften.com). I'm happy to onboard you personally, I've sent you an email.


Hi, thank you for the feedback - yes, we do get quite a bit of positive mentions in online forums, we try to keep an eye out for them but we could be better about that.

Syften looks interesting, I don't think I've received an email from you yet though - did you send to ian [at] 33mail [dot] com? We can also be reached at support@.


This is inspiring. Thanks for sharing.

I think HN having a "Show HN for revenue making products" would be cool...Like "Indie Hackers" but doesn't necessarily have to be "indie", but both would be good. Could be like founders share

"Hey, my VC-backed startup is making 2K a month and growing at 800% yoy, here's some info about the journey so far..."

I think current show hn captures a good set of new things, but a section specifically for "we're earning money" could be really cool I think.


Show HN is where many products (by HNers) start, at which point they'll be making nothing. There aren't many places to launch a product unless you have a big enough marketing budget.


Oh i wasn't suggesting we overtake the existing HN show function, just that i think an additional one for products making money is a good idea.. much like this product!


Sorry I misread.

Most Show HN products are in the pre-alpha, pre-revenue stage. For them the feedback as well as the eyeballs are of great value. Though there are outliers, the value is usually tilted towards the creator rather than the readers (who are mostly just helping out).

OTOH, products with revenue in Show HN provide at least an equal value to the readers by way of lessons and execution strategies. So I agree that it's a separate class of "Show HN". However, if you put "Show HN: xxx generating $xK/month" it's very likely to bubble up to the top without needing a separate category. In fact, it might be better to not have a separate category since you might get more eyeballs if the links aren't split.


Please optimize your website for mobile use. I visited your main landing page on my phone and was not able to read anything but the larger headlines without zooming in. In my opinion this adds friction and increases bounce rate a lot. Depending on your traffic, it could be well worth it to add some CSS media queries to make this layout more responsive. I think plenty of people check websites out on mobile first, then come back later if the service is useful for them.


Yes, agreed - making it mobile friendly is fairly high on the todo list.


Are you taking portfolios/examples/resumes for help with this?


Not with $8k/month revenue they aren’t

They will just go to a contracting firm for a few hours of work, or not


We'll take a look for sure, although at $8k/mo in revenue our budget is fairly limited. You're welcome to send to ian [at] 33mail [dot] com.


Definitely double the prices right now. Since there is a free version that is generous, it won’t be “selling out”. I’m sure it felt right back years ago, but think of how much the product has improved since then. You can grandfather all current customers in (or just a year) if it makes it feel better.

I am impressed by that video from 99designs. How much did you spend? Do you have a link to their profile?


This is basically saying: "You got them hooked, now squeeze every cent you can out of them", which I think is very dishonest advice. There is at least one costumer who won't (or can't) pay a penny more than they are currently paying, and "experimenting with prices" would be like telling them: "well, go away, there's a guy here in line with more dough than you". Given the very-skewed distribution of wealth, this line of thought leads to very expensive services for the rich, and the poor having to leave without them (housing market, I'm looking at you).


Let me explain a bit more. I don't suggest raising prices for early customers who are receiving the same product they signed up for originally. They can stay at the same price, which is grandfathering them in.

More typical though is Customer 1 signs up in 2015 when the product had features AB. Then in 2018 the product adds feature C. Is it fair to raise prices on them? Maybe, maybe not. In this case, I would still recommend today doubling prices for all new customers. You can go back to Customer 1 and say either:

1) we raised prices, but since you are an early supporter you get the current price for life with features ABC (if feature D is added, don't give it to them for free, they have to upgrade to the new pricing).

2) we raised prices since adding feature C is providing more value, but as an early supporter we are going to keep you at the original rate for 1 more year.


Surely that depends what the price right now is. As the cheapest paid version is $1/month, I don't really think doubling it to $2/month would be excessive.


We'll definitely give pricing some thought, you're right that it's probably time to revisit.

Re: the video, actually now that I look back we used a company called xp-studios.com - we just provided the script. I believe it was around $3k but this was back in 2013.


I came to suggest the same. The prices feel way too low. If you haven't experimented a lot with these, I'd recommend trying it. If you have paying customers now, I suspect you could increase new monthly revenue by several multiples.

You mentioned wanting to play with paid ads. I think you'll quickly find that your current LTV is way too low to justify any campaigns (unless your enterprise plan is converting like crazy?)

(Unpopular opinion) Also consider experimenting with killing your free plan if your goal is to increase revenue. I'm not saying you definitely should kill it long-term - just experiment with removing the option in an A/B test and see how it impacts conversions on paid plans. Freemium normally benefits products with network effects. It's not totally obvious to me how your product might benefit from that.


Disagree, he's taking advantage of the freemium model which is probably giving him more chances of getting real users.


They're not suggesting getting rid of the freemium model, but to raise prices of the paid plan.


I'm an early user of your service, and I love it.

The only problem I have is it's too cheap!

I paid almost nothing for it years ago ($12?)

I'm worried about relying to heavily on a service that might go out of business any day.

Can you convert to a SaaS and let happy users like me support you.


Thank you for being an early user :)

We're not going out of business, don't worry - 33mail is profitable even at our current surprisingly low monthly cost :)

If you don't mind, what would you consider a fair price for the service? What features would we need to add to convert to a SaaS?


My friend is a SaaS pricing expert. She normally charges upwards of $578 USD per hour for her consulting services, but she was happy to take a look at your site for free.

Here are some of her recommendations:

* Lite should be called Free and it should be lower on the Pricing page compared to the paid plans.

* Paid plans should segment customers by value.

* Premium and Pro plans can be combined into one Premium plan for $29 per month minimum.

* Enterprise pricing should be on request ("Call Us") or $249 per month minimum.

* You should be price testing via list offers.


Thank you and your friend for the advice, we'll take a careful look at each of her recommendations.


I don't know what your conversion rate is from 'free' to 'premium' to 'pro', I'd definitely argue against these SaaS pricing 'expert' guidelines. $12/yr - $60/yr are what I like to call 'support the dev' pricing, hey I like your product and $12/yr is < less than a coffee a few times a year, $60/yr is a manageable expense for someone being a power user, $29/month is $348/yr, and while I see the benefit of your product I would never pay that for the features provided as a power user. And this is my problem with a lot of businesses they go from $0 to $15/month for their tiering, then $50/month, then "enterprise", for a product I like that I'm not using for business or something that I can't live without that's a hard sell ($10/month+).

Now the approach I might suggest would be raise premium to $2/month, if you buy for the year pay $12. Premium, $6/month, $60/yr. enterprise really depends on how an enterprise uses the product, but $50/month might be a little cheap, but again I really don't see the use case for an enterprise (>500 employees) for something like this.


What exactly does SaaS mean to you? Sounds like nothing but a buzzword to me. The website in question is already software and a service.


Thanks for asking! I’d also like to know how the emperor’s new clothes look like because I sure as hell can’t see them. Let’s all hope he actually meant an API behind a paywall.


I like that your web site has contact info and pricing. Amazing how many don't.

I also like that it's easy to navigate. I know it's not fashionable to have actual clickable links right at the top for "Home" "Help" "About" etc. Thank you for not hiding the navigation below an annoying full screen slideshow or behind a hamburger.


Any plans to allow forwarding mail to a webhook instead of via SMTP? A lot of residential ISPs block port 25, which prevents running a self-hosted mail server... but a web server is fine. By delivering messages via a webhook, a service like 33mail could act as a “mail relay”. A 200 response would mean the message was delivered successfully; 4xx or 5xx would queue the message for retrying. Use nicely structured JSON (“to” and “cc” arrays comprised of one or more name/email keys, “date”, “subject”, etc., a “headers” dict for all the other/less-important “X-“ headers, then “text” and “html” keys for the body) to make it easy to parse and process...


Thanks for the suggestion.

We're thinking about this feature, trying to decide whether it would be best as part of 33mail or a separate sister product.


I usually use mailinator.com for this purpose. In the past I found other similar services through Google search, but certainly didn't find yours. Probably working on your website SEO will increase your organic sign-ups. One thing I love about Mailinator is that all inboxes are public, this completely removes the overhead of creating a new email even in a disposable email service like yours. So probably something you may check for your product. Congrats for the achievement!


Mailinator addresses (including its random domains) are somehow banned on ~90% of sites that I've recently tried it on.

Other, smaller anonymous mailboxes tend to work though. So it's a rare market that shows the opposite of "too big to fail".


I appreciate mailinator, but mailinator’s domains are blocked in a lot of sites online; I know from experience some of their paid business is from companies using it for internal testing, which is far from great, and won’t sustain long-term, most likely.

Hats off to 33mail, though! Try not to get blacklisted.


I don’t see how 33mail would get blacklisted.

Mailinator allows sending emails, but this is to only receive emails.


The reason Mailinator is blacklisted in many sign up processes is because websites want to have users real email addresses, not disposable ones they don't care about.


Just checked it out and I love how easy it is. I was thinking I would have to handle the hassle of account management by logging into your site every time I wanted to make or delete an alias, but the fact that creation is automatic and removal is a click away in the message itself makes it really painless.

My only suggestion is (at least on my phone browser) there's a couple spots on the "how does it work?" where two words are run together likethis. Oh, and for free accounts you say "generous bandwidth limit" but I have no idea what that is. Maybe give a ballpark from the average email size you see or top of the bell curve how many of those send/receive per month.

Well done, congrats on the growth and $8k milestone! I'm signing up and sending to my friends.


Thanks for the compliment and the feedback :)

Agree re: wordsrunningtogether on the front page, that will be fixed shortly. We'll also think about how we can provide more visibility into how the bandwidth limits translate to reality, I've added it to our todo list.


Congrats! That is really cool. I recently built something very similar out of annoyance with spam that I was actually interested in: https://pobox.host/ The difference is you don't need an email to register. I am happy to see that the idea is validate and people actually pay for the service.


Thank you. pobox.host is very nice, I like the simplicity of it.


I'm not really sure but maybe it will be useful for the users to have your service integrated with HIBP[1] to check if their mail aliases are in any security breach? IMHO, biggest threat is giving up mail alias but keeping some registrations on it so if some abandoned mail alias is in the breach it seems good to inform customer about it.

[1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/


Interesting idea, we'll give it some thought, thank you :)


I created a similar service, https://idbloc.co

However I’m probably going to pivot away to email infrastructure because:

A) The market for paid users is tiny (when we had free users we had 1000s of sign ups, but they were mostly setting up spam accounts and would never convert)

B) Most companies will mark you as a temp email address and block sign ups, effectively making it useless

It’s frustrating as it’s a great idea. I think the best implementation is Apple IDs version, as they don’t need to care about A and have the reputation to solve B.

Great job getting to 8k MRR and good luck. I think 33mail (or idbloc) would be awesome if integrated with a password manager, might be a good place for you to find new growth.


> B) Most companies will mark you as a temp email address and block sign ups, effectively making it useless

This is valid point, I see both 33mail.com and users.idbloc.co are already on disposable blocklists (e.g. https://github.com/ivolo/disposable-email-domains/blob/maste...)


The frustrating thing is that 33mail and idbloc are not disposable or temporary email addresses. They don’t expire or run out, they continue to forward until the user turns them off.

But then again, email spam prevention is very much a block everything and see who complains hard enough game.


I understand your point. Though, being too rigorous, 33mail.com tagline is "Unlimited free disposable email addresses" so it somehow fits disposable-email-blocklist


Can't you just buy domain names on a regular basis and use random ones? As long as you don't publish the list of the domains you have would be good.


You can - but it's an arms race at that point.

The question is - is this really the way we should be communicating online? Why can't we set up an anonymous account on a service?

The next step to all of this is an Oauth provider that's built around privacy. Imagine if you could sign in to apps with something other than facebook or google. "Sign In with <privacy provider>" would be awesome. It's all technically possible today, and Mozilla nearly did it with persona, but gave up for some reason.

If anyone wants to fund this, for a mere 10-20 million USD I think it would be possible to create the service and market it to enough devs and end users to get traction.


I think you're describing Sign in with Apple[1]? Though I can see there'd be value in having this be standalone.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT210318


I think if you can secure $20 million USD dollars in VC or Angel funding, there might be more profitable ideas to work on.


Becoming one of the main identity providers online would be hugely profitable. You could easily add on payments (a la paypal) and other services that generate enourmous revenues


Interesting. This just gave me a possibly incredible idea.


Hey, I'm a subscriber to this! Didn't expect to see it here. I love the service, very useful at a reasonable price, thanks for offering it!


Thank you!


Great to hear your success. I've been in a similar price range and recently updated my pricing from $10.99 to $23.99 a month.

While MRR has jumped, be careful with churn, trial conversion rate, and even chargebacks.

Where people love the service and see the value, moving up market means new issues. Also LTV is better but not dramatically as people may let the lower cost subscription ride longer out of laziness or whatever.

I like your idea, and could use it. I could see highlighting use cases and making tiers for those. "Personal", "Marketer", and "Developer" come to mind.

I say dev as I can't test my onboarding easily as Stripe doesn't honor gmail's + extension and testing is a pain without new email accounts.

Hope that is useful.

GL


Your best marketing people are your current users.

Reach out to your fans and consider offering some incentive for them to sign-up their friends and family if they are not doing that already. Something like get 6 months free for each new account that you refer when they sign up for a year.

All it would cost to implement is a carefully worded email and messaging in the user's dashboard and the time to build in how you want to track the referrals - whether your users each get an individual coupon code they can share with family and friends or have a built-in function (personally I find "share with a friend" emails to impersonal and more likely to be ignored).


Thank you for the suggestions.

We do have a referral program, free upgrade if you refer two people - however referrals only account for 2% of our signups which doesn't really move the needle.

We are thinking about trying affiliate marketing through something like Commission Junction, where we would pay affiliates directly for conversions.


I have been making my living selling software online since 2005. I know lots of other people who do the same. We've almost all tried affiliate marketing and almost none of us have had any worthwhile results from it.

Affiliate marketing also attracts a lot of bottom feeders and scumbags. For example they will advertise an non-existent discount for your product, stuff a cookie for anyone who finds that 'discount' via web search and then take their affiliate commission if they buys later. Also your LTV is probably too low to attract any decent affiliates.

I'm not saying affiliate marketing never works, just that it almost never seems to work for small software companies. So I would put trying it very low on your TODO list.

Also don't bother with Google Adwords unless you are prepared to put in some serious effort and money to learning the system. I have also been doing PPC ads for 15 years. During that time the cost per click and the complexity of Adwords has just gone up and up. PPC works best when you have a high LTV and there are clear, unambiguous phrases that convert. Do both of those apply to you?

Have you tried partnership? Try approaching someone who already has distribution and a complementary product. See if they will push your product to their existing customers for a percentage. Perhaps a VPN vendor. That might be a case where affiliate marketing could work.


Thank you, great suggestions. I've had some interest from potential partners, I'll look for other opportunities.


Second that: the partnership/cross-promotion suggestion is a good idea.


Additionally, they could take advantage of email signature - the hotmail growth hack method.


Could you elaborate?


They are suggesting to add a footer to outbound emails that says something like “My privacy was preserved when sending this email by 33Mail. Sign up to 33Mail for free to hide your email address and stop spam”


The more I think about this, the less I like it. the whole point of 33mail is to hide your email address, if you're sending out emails that say "hey this isn't even my real email address, gotcha!" that may not go over well.


I would be ok with something like this if conversions were traced back to me and I got the "commission"


Well presumably it would only appear on free accounts.

And if you are on a free account and want to get paid too... then lol


I created a similar service called SimpleLogin. [1] and hope to have a similar success some day! Using email aliases is an efficient way to protect our privacy and hopefully the concept becomes more mainstream in the future. I'd suggest removing the "disposable" mention as otherwise email aliases would be put in the same category as temporary email services, which increases the risk of having your domain blocked.

[1] https://simplelogin.io/


I really like your website, it's a simple and elegant design.

Agree re: "disposable", we're currently running an A/B test but once it's done I'm going to try new copy that doesn't include that.


Love the idea, I'm sure I'm not the only person who's thought about this pain point and somehow didn't come up with the elegant solution you did.

Right now I have an O365 account that lets me create unlimited (I think) aliases, the issue is how annoying it is to create them and then manage them. Yahoo has a similar service, but again you need to create the alias first, your solution of accept all, deny later is much smarter.

My only question about price brackets is I don't have a great understanding of how much bandwidth I use monthly, or even how many emails I'd funnel through your service, not to mention we're kinda at the mercy of the senders, if they send a lot/ or send large emails, we end up needing to move up a bracket. On avg do your Premium users get close to the limit?

Which brings me to my next question: what happens if I do indeed use up my entire bandwidth allotment for the month? do emails just get bounced? do I just get upgraded automatically?

I get where your coming from by charging for bandwidth, from your perspective you're aligning your costs with the price.

When I tried to sign up, the username I wanted was taken, but the error message wasn't obvious and I was left wondering what happened until I saw it above the signup button. For the record I had ublock enabled and it was blocking 15 things, so it's possible it caught something... you might wanna look into that.


Thank you for the kind words :)

Most people don't hit the bandwidth limit unless they're really using 33mail a lot. I've been using 33mail heavily for a decade and my monthly usage is 40MB which puts me in the premium tier, but I'm near the top percentile of bandwidth usage.

The premium tier also has a lot of other benefits, like custom domains and anonymous replies - so lots of users upgrade to it without being close to the bandwidth limit.

If you do hit the limit we'll first make sure that it's not just a temporary spike, and then we'll send a few warning emails.

At this point you can entire upgrade or block some aliases you don't need that are using a lot of bandwidth, this is fairly easy to do in our UI.

It is extremely rare that we've had to block a user due to excessive bandwidth usage, in fact I'm not sure we've ever had to do that.


Cool, thanks I signed up and set up a custom domain so hopefully I won't get caught by the disposable email blacklist that other commenters were talking about.

the only other issue I'm seeing is that the website isn't really great on mobile, my wife mostly does stuff on her phone (despite us having like 10 computers lol) and that might be a small barrier, though after sending a test email I see that it can be managed inside w/e email client you use, so that shouldn't be too much of an impediment for her.


Thank you. Yes, making the site mobile friendly is high on our todo list.

However, you are correct that most of our users rarely need to login to our website after initial sign up.


Hey so I had one more question, I noticed that the premium account gets you one more username but you're still stuck with only 1 custom domain... wouldn't it make sense to get 2 domains to match the number of usernames?

I guess the same kinda applies to pro, you actually have 6 usernames but only 5 domains...

Thanks


Incredible project! I've been using custom email aliases for the better part of the last decade (I'm running my own mail server) but it never occurred to me that this could be a profitable business.

My main pain point with my current setup is the following: It takes a few minutes to set up a new email alias. I therefore wonder: How long does it take with your service? Would your users maybe appreciate an app (a super simple one) for Android/iOS that allows them to create a new alias within seconds?


Hi and thank you for the compliment!

It takes no time at all to set up a new email alias, you just make up an alias and it will be created automatically the first time it is used, it couldn't be easier.

Most of our users rarely login to our website.


So does that mean it's catch-all?


They don't need to register a new one, just have emails going to it. They have a sub domain so that it knows who to forward the mail on to.


Does any alias work? If someone gives out tribble@joesmith.33mail.com, and they typo it to tribbl@joesmith.33mail.com, would that still work, or do the aliases need to be created first?


Yes that would still work, aliases don't need to be created in advance.


As said in the tagline, your service is grouped with others that serve _disposable_ emails.

Safe use cases for services providing disposable emails are somewhat slim. If you sign up using a disposable email, and later the account ends up being less disposable than you thought, for example because it contains some personal data from you, then you're taking a huge risk in not either using an email service that's too-big-to-fail, or your own domain.

It's easy to forget this, and use disposable emails for everything, so the users' biggest risk is you exiting or the service going out of business with the domain hijacked.

If you could somehow reduce the risk of using 33Mail to lower than it is to mess with big email services or custom domains - yes, I saw you can use custom domains with 33mail, but you still have to keep it renewed yourself I assume - then I'd be happy to pay whatever you ask for the service.

For how to guarantee to users that you will outlast the services they sign up for, I have no answers.

As we've learned many, many times, even recently with things like Oculus, promises mean nothing.

Other than that, I'd love to see a feature for having the option to generate anonymous aliases. That is, aliases in the format of <random-unique-string>@<domain-that-is-the-same-for-everyone> for cases where you don't want to give your username to everyone.

Actually, having those two, a guarantee that your service is safe to use and unlimited anonymous aliases, would make 33Mail unique and something I'd actually use instead of custom domains. Because with custom domains the domain still links all my accounts together, becoming both a privacy and a security issue.


Thank you for the feedback.

Yes, I agree that it can be a disadvantage to be grouped with disposable email addresses, we have aliases that are a decade old that are still forwarding emails.

With respect to the longevity of the company, it makes a healthy profit and due to my brother's great sysops work it is fairly low maintenance except when we're making improvements.

Also, our friends and family all use it, they'd disown us if we shut it down or sold it to anyone that wouldn't respect its users :)


That would be a terrific quote on the website. Totally sells me


First, this is a great idea, and congratulations on hitting $8k/mo in revenue. The fact that you've stuck with the business for this long and grown it is great, and better than most people do.

I Strongly recommend engaging directly with your customers whenever/wherever possible (Twitter, Slack, Discord, etc). One thing I immediately noticed on Twitter is that your name overlaps with a email newsletter published by @Doctor_V

Lastly, I would do a quick read over of your site and content. If you're going to start advertising, make sure everything is professional. For example, when I opened the link, I immediately noticed this:

"with ...@joesmith.33mail.comwill be" - that missing space between .com and will is super glaring for someone like me. Make sure you clean that stuff up before you start advertising. When I see that kind of stuff, I go from "this is a professional service I might pay for" to "this is not a real business." I know it seems small, but just being honest.


I've been using unique emails since 2000. It's been fun, for example when I got marketing e-mails for Viagra on the mail I use for my bank. At the time, I was surprised a bank would sell your e-mail!

Right now Apple ID includes this very concept. They give each site a unique email instead of your actual Apple e-mail.

Seems to me there's good value in bringing this to many people. Good luck!


My first impression was that I like the look of the site.

My second impression was when the obnoxious cookie manager pop-over attacked me (ten times worse than having a site plant trivial cookies on my computer without my permission). These of course are increasingly common, they're a plague on the Internet.

So I engaged with the cookie notification monster, wanting it to go away. I clicked on show details and immediately regretted it. What is all of that shit? I've been building complex applications online since the mid 1990s and my brain instantly spun around looking at that: I have to actually burn my time to figure out all those layers of cookie crap and what they all do or mean.

I immediately abandoned your site at that point. I'm not spending the time. It was annoying as a pop-over, it was doubly annoying to engage with.

To make matters worse, your site hung multiple times when trying to load it due to consent.cookiebot.com causing a loading delay. Ditch that pile of gargage immediately for a more simple cookie control engagement approach.


I’d love to chat with you about your process over the last 10 years. Only today I tweeted some stats for a product similar to yours that I launched earlier this year:

https://twitter.com/rikkipitt/status/1338790202463182848

Let me know if you have time to link up over Twitter or email.

Best, Rikki


Will msg you on twitter.


Minor thing, but I'd make the 'Premium', 'Pro' etc labels of the pricing table clickable. Bottom of the page felt somewhat unintuitive for the only signup link.

Not sure if this is in-scope, but I noticed the link over to EmailEngine.io, and wanted to note some sort of trial period is usually nice to test drive the service.


As a data point: I pay Google $5/month to accomplish essentially the same thing.

I pay for Google Workspace, have a handful of domains configured, a single "real" user account and a catch-all rule that forward all mail to that real account.

Other than inertia and pricing (I have >10 domains, so I'd fall in the enterprise tier), there's one key feature that keeps me from switching: I can set up custom routing rules.

For example, when I RSVP'd for a wedding last year with a plus one, I set up a custom rule for that alias so that my plus one also got any updates.

I suspect you could build a significantly better UX around that, where someone could link additional recipients to an alias with some sort of special reply to the email, see that those other recipients are included when receiving messages (as a reminder they're "linked" to the alias), etc. I'm probably over thinking it, but I'd love to be able to somehow react to an email with "+friend@example.com for 2 hours". (Example use case: you place a food delivery order for a group of friends and want them all to get the rest of the confirmation emails until the meal is actually delivered.)

Random ideas:

It'd be interesting to have an easy way to "bind" aliases to a domain/sender. Most of the time when I invent a new alias, I only expect it to be used by whoever sends the first message to it.

It'd also be interesting to be able to have a "snooze" feature for an alias. I use this a lot on social media (e.g., Facebook makes it easy to say "don't show me anything from this person for 30 days") when I don't want to totally unfollow someone. I think I'd do that with some merchants' emails.

Maybe these could take the form of message headers that get added? That way, it's easy to configure a client-side skip-the-inbox rule (or mark it as low priority or whatever), so it's not in your face, while ensuring you can still search for stuff you think you might have missed.


When trying to sign up, I miss typed my password and they did not match and got the "Passwords do not match" error. I typed them again, making sure they matched, and got the same message. And again.

Opening Chrome, I tired to sign up, only to find my username was taken. I did not necessarily believe this; so, I tried the forgotten password link and entered my email address.

33Mail sent me the link to reset my password, which I did, and logged into the system.

I had a notification that I had not confirmed my email address -- I had never gotten the message -- so, I had it resent. The confirmation message arrived and I confirmed it.

Anyway, although I did not get past the "Passwords do not match" error, it did sign me up; but, did not send an email for me to confirm it.


Thank you for the bug report - apologies for the issues.

Would you mind sending it to support [at] 33mail [dot] com along with your username or email address so we can look at the relevant account?


There's an additional benefit worth talking about: if you use these addresses exclusively when creating accounts you can track who has been sharing your data. E.g. it would be obvious who is responsible if you found facebook@john.example.com in a data dump.


Congrats on your success and making it to 10 years! May I ask how you've promoted the service? I just started my own side project (see my profile) and this is the one aspect that I find challenging.

My feedback: I like the site. The video is helpful. The design of the page could be a little slicker, although I kind of like how it isn't super slick. It makes feel more like a small business I might want to support. A couple minor things:

- The text for the 3 steps is super dense. I honestly didn't even bother to read it. I'd try to reduce the copy a bit to one short sentence each.

- The artwork for the 33Mail logo and the icons for the 3 steps look a bit blurry. Higher res images here would make the page feel even more professional.


Yes, agree regarding those three steps being dense, it's my least favorite part of that page right now. I'll give it some thought if I can cut those down to 1 sentence each.

That's interesting re: blurry artwork, I hadn't noticed it TBH, but I see what you mean. Will add that to the todo list.

Really appreciate the feedback :)


Congratulations, you have a clear, efficient and great product which is profitable! Out of curiosity, does your domain get rejected by some sites? I know that some websites reject disposable mails such as mailinator.com at sign-up.


i love 33mail. I've been a user for years and I think it's amazing.

I pay for it, and I have a custom domain (several maybe?) and use that in addition to the default free @___.33mail.com subdomain.

People often ask me about my custom domain and ask how they can do the same thing for themselves.

I explain it, and they are interested, but they never do it.

I think there's too much friction for non-technical people. Most people in my life have never registered a domain before. They don't know what an MX record is. Even for someone technical, it takes some effort.

If there was an onboarding flow for that paid plan that looked like: "make it easy for someone who has never registered a domain to get a custom domain set up with 33mail" I think that would be huge.

That experience might look like:

  1. Hello, user! Please pick a domain! ____
  2. Tell me where to forward all your emails: ____
  3. Enter your credit card number: ____
  4. Click "save"

  Tada! Now anythingatall@thatdomaintheyjustregistered.com 
  forwards to their email address!
Then you register the domain for them. You're either a registrar or you work with a registrar. You control the DNS for them (or maybe it gets added to your 33mail dashboard so they can add A records or whatever).

I love your service. I want it to make 80k/mo. Y'all have provided me a lot of happiness. And I've been pleasantly surprised when I've gotten support email responses from y'all.

Please keep up the great work.


Commiting to a single project for 10 years is awesome, must have been hard the first few years with very little revenue to keep the motivation. How are people finding your site? Mostly Google? I find getting any visitors at all to be a hard problem if you do not already have an audience. You misspelled bandwidth on your pricing page: https://app.pagewatch.dev/40f64ffa08475710b3630c1f35f9e7ee38...


A market segment you might be neglecting is that of users needing protection from malicious trolls or stalkers. An email alias of the form you provide is no protection at all to them, because the troll can follow the instructions on your landing page to send any number of messages to the same user by choosing a new alias for each message. An easy solution is to allow the option of accepting messages only on pre-defined aliases. If you do that already, it would be good to mention it in the FAQ.


Wow, this is heart-warming for me! I've now spent 8 years developing my project [1], and still making only a tiny piece of revenue. I'm now at a state where I double my active users every 4 months, so hopefully my ramen-revenue is close.

The deal with my project is that it a huge undertaking, and only provides real value near completion.

Keep grinding! :), I wish I can replicate your success.

[1] https://rpgplayground.com


Nice simple forwarding service. I need something slightly more complex --- I want store and forward/routing/hub mailbox with API control.

I need API access to obtain sender and destination address of mailbox item and then decide how to dispense with it, either delete, retrieve or forward to a different destination. "Destination" may involve dozens of addresses. Reply address may be changed.

To minimize storage and costs, any item over 24 hours old can be deleted.


Hey we may have something like this. Can you please email me at maitrikvk [at] newtonhq [].com . Would love to have a chat.


Interesting, may I ask what you would use this functionality for?

Thank you for the suggestion.


I want to integrate email management and routing services as part of my client service package.

My clients have a lot of hourly employees that they need to communicate with but for privacy reasons, they don't necessarily want to use a corporate or private email address.

For example, a manager may want to use his private phone to send an email to a group of employees. Any replies would be routed to his secretary at the office --- with all addresses remaining semi-anonymous. My software will handle all this with the help of your service.

I currently have several hundred clients with a total of over 20,000 employees.

In other words, this all strictly opt in --- no marketing.


Although @sanity31415 has offered to get in touch with his 33mail product, there's also the option of standing up a REST API server in front of your mailboxes.

There is an open source product called IMAP API which is available under 2 licenses depending on your needs: AGPL & MIT. It recently had its own Show HN [2].

[1] https://github.com/andris9/imapapi

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372987


Very interesting, and probably not difficult for us to implement. Would you mind emailing me to discuss? I'm ian [at] 33mail [dot] com.


Will do.


Sounds like you want Mailgun.


I could probably do it with mailgun but there would be a lot of unnecessary data tranfer. In many cases, I don't really care about what is in the body of the email, I just want to re-address and re-direct. I can get the info I need to do this from just the address headers.


Congratulations! I admire your tenacity and commitment.

However,

> We have not spent much on paid user acquisition

Why not spend on paid acquisition? A bit of marketing and sales focus would have gotten you to $8k in 2 years, not 10.

I see so many great products on HN that take years to takeoff simply because the founders refuse to market it.

Good products deserve to be more widely known so more people can use them. A founder not investing in marketing is doing their own products a disservice.


As someone with similar project growth, I've played around with things like Adwords and generally failed or had a negative experience, wasting money with no results. Marketing seems... hard, and I don't really gave the funds to hire a professional. My main project is ad supported, rather than subscription, so that might make it harder.


> We have not spent much on paid user acquisition, we experimented with it a bit a few years ago without positive results.


That's the key - you can't just "experiment" with paid acquisition. You have to spend a little to gather enough data on what actually works for your audience.

It might take $1000 in failed ads before you "get" your audience, but you might quit after spending $100. But the $900 in supposedly "wasted" ad spend will help you understand enough that you can make 10x higher revenue.

If you approach software development as an iterative activity, you should approach marketing the same way too. Expecting great results at first try is akin to expecting completely bug free software at first go without any tests.


I think we spent around $2k - so while it's possible we gave up too soon, we did give it a decent chance to succeed.


Thank you!

> Why not spend on paid acquisition? A bit of marketing and sales focus would have gotten you to $8k in 2 years, not 10.

We did try it, IIRC we had a budget of around $2k - but nothing even came close to working.

It's very possible that our messaging or targeting was wrong, or perhaps we tried the wrong channels, but we did take a whack at it.


I’ve always wanted to have something like that, with a browser plugin to easily generate one of the fly when I’m signing up for a service


Thank you, we have a Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/33mail-defend-your...


You should definitely add that as a row in your pricing table! Even if it is checked for all columns.


Thank you for this service. Although I have not used it, I have used something similar in the past. They really help with reducing spam.


Thank you for the kind words! If you try it let me know what you think, we're always looking for constructive feedback.


Is your security layer robust enough? I suppose it'd be bad from a breach to be able to track alias emails with real emails


We haven't had a breach in 10 years, and follow best practices with security (prevent injection attacks, etc). Nobody is invulnerable of course.


Very cool! Where did the prefix 33 come from?

I like the "86ing" my spam. I wonder if you guys can get 86mail.com Just a fun thought.


Re: 33, no really story behind it I'm afraid, we came up with a bunch of candidate names and it was the one we liked.

Good idea re: 86mail :)


Thank you so much for sharing. I've noticed you have four membership levels. I think it might be very interesting for many of us to know what percentage the various types of subscriptions contribute to the total of 8k / mrr. I'm very curious about pricing and pricing strategies. I wish you the best of luck in 2021


Just chiming in as a happy user of 33mail - congratulations and I'm happy to know that it is sustainable and growing.

One suggestion would be to better advertise new features to existing users - I was going to suggest adding 2FA authentication, and went for a quick check on my account, and it was already available :-)


Thank you for using 33mail - and for the suggestion.

We try to walk the line between keeping users informed of new features without defeating the purpose of 33mail by sending emails they don't want.

About how often would you be happy to receive emails about new 33mail features? A few times per year - perhaps?


Congratulations! You have lasted longer than most silicon valley startups and have made more money than even some of the big names.

PS. Doing same thing over a long period of time is pretty good way to succeed. I maintained an app for last 7 years and fetched $750 or so every month with around $100 costs. All organic growth.


What kind of app did you make?


I now saw the video, Great explaination! I registtergred and will you it for sure! seems like a great product!


Thank you!


Hello! I always appreciate creative ways to mitigate spam. One question though, how would you see this as different from spamgourmet.com?

Similar idea as far as I can see, with addresses that may or may not transparently drop signed-up emails after a while.


Superinteresting! How much does it cost for 10 years to mantain a service like that? I think about server, domain etc... without computing time costs. I have a side project related to books and I would like to forecast eventually 10Y of server/domain/ect costs


I'd assume something like a basic dedicated server, starting at $50/mo (you can find deals like this from webhostingtalk forums). So maybe he's paying around $600-$1000/year on average. Probably started off cheaper and then gradually ramped it up as went.

A simple site could start off with a $5/mo VPS and then eventually you could migrate to a dedicated server.


Thank you :)

Our monthly server costs are a little under $1k/mo.


The beauty of your project is that ot is 100% yours. No VC money, no board meetings and no QoQ reviews. Congrats!

This makes me wonder how many nice little useful services are there that we dont see. Like the Saffron app from someone else here.


"For example, if the website is tribble.com, you might give themtribble@joesmith.33mail.com."

This is in your home page, under "It's as simple as one, two, three!".

Should there be a space between them, and tribble@joesmith.33mail.com?


Thanks, will be fixed soon.


Similarly, “...Sign up and pick a username, for example, "joesmith". Now, any email address ending with ...@joesmith.33mail.comwill…” After the email there should be a space, before "will.”


Interesting, my email service has this built in. I definitely use it all the time.


Focus on finding niche keywords/areas when advertising. The best ROI is going to come from there.

Like you said, the average person isn’t going to care enough to understand how a service like this might benefit them.


Congratulations for a 10 year anniversary. Curious, what is the market for your enterprise pricing plan? Do you really get companies for your customers or is just individuals with insanely high limit needs?


Good for you guys, I'm glad you stuck it out.

Real quick heads up, though, small typo on the homepage: "...@joesmith.33mail.comwill be" ('com' and 'will' are smushed together)


Congrats, neat idea. I think Yahoo has a similar feature. Do you forward emails to the "real" email or you have your own Email server service?


... THIS IS FAN TAS TIC !!! ...

100% signing up and will refer EVERYONE to you, 10 points to Gryffindor, I hope you keep this running FOR EVA !! ...


I do not have much to add except my congratulations. Committed execution on a good idea, and the results to show for it. Consider me inspired!


Thank you :)


If you don't mind sharing, I'm curious about that MMR what percentage is from free accounts with ads vs premium accounts?


It's always nice to see a project succeed! How much time does it take you per week to manage this service?


Thank you :) Probably between my brother and myself less than 5 hours per week on average, mostly responding to support requests.


Is your main acquisition channel organic search (SEO)? Are there other good acquisition channels that you have found?


Yes, SEO - and also organic mentions in relevant forums. We haven't had much success with paid acquisition.


Congratulations for committing to your project and letting it grown organically!

How long did it take before the first signup?


Thank you :)

Just looking in our user DB, we had 6 signups on day 1, 35 on day 2, and 120 in the first week.


Wow, I read the ‘how it works’ on your website. Kind of a genius little service. Congrats guys!


May I ask, why did you guys wait until now to start marketing? Just curious about your decision.


We did experiment with paid user acquisition a few years ago but the results weren't good.


My guess is you will struggle find a paid CAC that is < LTV. Your prices are too low given ad prices. Maybe focus on content marketing, since I’m guessing SEO and maybe some blogs are what’s boosting you now.


If you added an option to pay with bitcoin, I would pay the Premium tier :)


Good news, if you go through the checkout process you'll see that we support bitcoin payments via mycelium.com :)


A simple suggestion: Have a mobile optimised version of the website.


Thank you for the suggestion, yes - that is on the todo list.


I need this but for mobile. Is there something already?


$8k/mo revenue is great, but what's the profit?


Just server costs since my brother and I work on it as a side project, those costs are less than $1k/mo.


I'll just comment it simply - congratulations!


How did you get your first 100 customers ?


I think we posted to Reddit about it and the post got a moderate amount of attention, perhaps a few other relevant forums. Aside from that it has been word-of-mouth.


Great service, I've signed up


Try a Gmail email marketing campaign


You're seriously suggesting he start spamming people about his email service?


Truly inspiring man !


Great job and good luck!


It’s not responsive and everything is too small to read on mobile.


Yes, optimizing the site for mobile is high on our todo list.


god damn people on this website are bitter lol


Congrats!


Why don't you apply for YCombinator?


I think for that we'd need a clearer idea of how we'd deploy the capital we had raised to significantly accelerate growth beyond what we're currently getting organically.


Giving away shares of a boot-strapped, profitable business?


Yes, on the economic side I will say, It's better a big piece of a small cake or a small piece of a big cake?

On the entrepreneurship side I will say that you will get an incredible know how to scale with your project and have a bigger impact :)

On the learning side No doubt for me that be inside one of the most prestigious alumni community it is worth the 10% of the company.


Congrats :)


May be a little bit modern design?


Do you say the same to HN?


I'm not a user nor do I need it, but the pricing seems really silly. Your users who find value from it surely need it more than $1 or $5 a month. If it's only $1/mo in value to me, I wouldn't even bother to sign up. Better find out what people use this for and have a better sense of how much they'd pay.


Weird phrasing, restating: For individuals that want it, it's likely much greater than $1/mo in value and they'd likely pay more for that tier.

The question is how far past $12/yr are they willing to pay for email, considering free email addresses are ubiquitous?


We arrived at the current prices through some A/B testing a few years back, but it may be time to re-run those experiments.


honestly, $1/m is perfect for me. and it's the only reason I signed up. I already have a custom domain that I can spin up custom aliases with some extra friction, $1/m is exactly what it's worth for me to not deal with that little extra friction.


Hire someone who has done this exact thing at another startup. You don't know how to do it, and even if you learn a few things here and there, you're clearly not an expert in marketing (just based off your post.) Not trying to offend you, but I'm being straight - hire someone. Someone good, who has done exactly this before, preferably several times, at several different companies, with several different strategies. Someone that can see what's happening with the numbers and feedback and tweak smartly. Pay them well or give them equity. Then retire.

This idea is excellent, useful, and very timely. You have a huge potential customer base out there.

I don't like your pricing structure, but that's just my opinion. Don't want to go too in depth on this.

Good luck.


Presuming that there’s a market for this service, which will support your recommendation, is reckless, and ill-informed.

Please, don’t listen to this person.

You’ll lose all of the ground you have gained, in the hopes of attaining something that does not exist.


> Presuming that there’s a market for this service, which will support your recommendation, is reckless, and ill-informed.

They're making 8k a month with a product that their own customers are saying is criminally underpriced. How can you possibly entertain the idea that there's no market for this service?


There is a market.

What I said is that there isn't a market which will support the recommendation.


Thank you for the suggestion and kind words.

Do you have any thoughts on how to find someone like that? I've had mixed experiences with marketing people.


A good shortcut is hiring from high fame startups. Not foolproof, but marketing people at uber outclass the average marketing person that might answer an ad.

Another shortcut is ask other business owners who are similar to you. Hopefully you have a small network or community. If you don't, it's worth finding 2-3 people who run businesses similar to yours to regularly connect with.

You might not even need to find a marketing "person" - there are agencies that do full service. You can talk to a few, listen to the pitch, and ask them for references. Few people do this, but you can and should, and its a great way to meet other business owners like you.


I will add my best unsolicited advice to this.

If you do not understand what a marketing or advertising professional is telling you and you ask them to explain it further and it still does not make sense—lots of jargon, buzz words, and “secret sauce”—do not hire that person.

There is nothing in marketing that is so conceptually difficult to understand that it cannot be explained at a high-level to a lay person. If they do not explain it well they either A. Do not understand it well themselves, or B. Do not want you to understand it.

Also be wary of big promises up front. No one can actually promise XX% increase or XXX more leads without having advertised your specific product before. They might be able to provide a general estimate based on past experiences, but that is it.

Best of luck.


Thank you for the advice, I'll do some research :)




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