ImprovMX
Forward your domain's emails to your personal inbox.
We've finally made it to the milestone of 1000 paying customers. It's growing quickly since our last post on paying customer growth which was at 800 in the end of October. We added 200 new customers in the month of November!
We'll now focus on making everything more robust, create more onboarding guides, and lower our customer support response times.
The transparency/security updates have definitely paid off, and we've almost doubled our number of customers since then.
We've also accelerated our growth path after changing a few of the free tier limits to be more strict. We expect to hit 1,000 paying customers in the next few weeks!
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I just signed up -- and having fun getting to know the product.
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Thank you! Don't hesitate to ping if you have any questions :)
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That's truly impressive. I've found your product a while ago, but can't remember how. Do you mind sharing your strongest acquisition channel?
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You're going to be disappointed on my answer: Our strongest acquisition channel is organic. We are well referenced on Google and people searching for email forwarding easily find us :)
Direct access account for ~53%
Google search for ~34%
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We've pushed a few updates that helped in the last few months to reach that magical number of 500 paying customers. We have also hired a customer support rep that assists getting our customer service to an even better place.
We are now doubling down on privacy/transparency oriented features to address our users concerns and reach 1,000 customers.
It took us less than 11 months to reach 150th customers, with a growth that is promising.
Our current target is to reach 200 customers by the end of the year, which will be awesome!
We are working hard every day to increase the quality of the service and we are happy with how things are going.
Stay tuned for our next update, hopefully before 2020 ;)
We recently crossed the 100th customer mark on Stripe. This is a neat milestone!
We started the premium pricing system in January of this year so it took us 9 months to reach 100 customers.
Our plan is to have 200 customers by the one year mark, finger crossed ! 🤞
We reached 50 paying customers on May 18, in just 4 months!
This is important for us because it shows that we are on the right track and we plan to double down on growing the business :)
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Congrats on your journey my friend! I wish you quick feedback, rapid iteration and longer LTV w/ your customers.
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Oh sweet :) Thanks!
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Congrats and good luck!
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Thank you :)
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Congrats!
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Thank you!! :)
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Winning!
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Not yet, but on our way there!
Thank you :)
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Congrats, how are you marketing this. We’re on 5 customers after 1 month
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We are not making much ; We did an email to let our users know when we implemented the premium feature, and we have a "wanna go premium" on the dashboard. We could do better for sure.
The one things that help us is clearly the user base, we have more than 29k users right now, and gain around 70 new users per day on average.
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago
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On it! Thanks :)
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What a ride! We quickly raised to be #3, had difficulty going #2, stayed there for a while but were quickly overtaken by two other products, to finally finish at #4! What a ride! :)
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Very cool :)
If you have the time a post/blog about the visitors etc would be great.
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I just wrote an article, but unfortunately, our GA stats are crap! I suspect that Adblockers made the result invalid. Anyway, here's the link :)
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/8ba6fdb6d2-
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Thanks will have a look.
"I have an old account at PH and our product was featured almost right away." I might need your help soon :)
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As I said, I'm not sure it did the trick! Some other experienced ProductHunter might work better for you and are open to requests to submit projects:
https://www.producthunt.com/@chrismessina
https://www.producthunt.com/@kevinGood luck!
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March was a biggest month so far with an increase of 500% in term of revenues!
We made our first payment a week after pushing the premium features.
26 Comments
Wow congratulations on the latest milestone @aminoux
If you dont mind me asking, what marketing channels worked best for you so far? I ask this because the email forwarding solution can sometime be a real problem to some companies and sometimes a convenience for others.
A founder or a company which has multiple aliases such as admin@ , sales@,customersupport@ will find this very useful. And other times a founder who is just starting her/his business might predominantly uses their personal email might find it convenient to have their domain emails forwarded.
Products like these are tough to market and to get a 1000 paid users is an amazing milestone to achieve. Very curious to hear about your marketing success.
Hey! Thanks for the nice message.
To be fair, it's all about word of mouth. We're not doing any paid marketing at this point, although we're considering hiring someone for content creation in the near future. As you pointed out, our niche is very very technical and it's sometimes hard to convey what we are doing using simple words.
We just tried something recently by sponsoring CSSBattle.dev ; https://cssbattle.dev/battle/12 — We haven't seen a big increase in traffic or conversions so far, but it's a nice project which I had a lot of fun playing, and I thought supporting the dev community (a major part of our target audience) definitely made sense for our brand in the mid/long term.
Product Hunt still bring quite a few users as well as... Youtube! Some people shot videos showing how you can set-up free email forwarding for your domain. Some videos are super well edited, and we didn't have to spend $1 on it. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak8Y4mnuvvc — I guess this comes from the fact that we're offering something freemium and that the product works well, and looks good. Seems dumb, but a good product is always a good marketing strategy...
Hope this is valuable!
Thanks for taking the time in writing back. Really appreciate it.
Got a question, does this mean I don't need an email service provider? So I have the domain Wecaresocial.co and created an email account in Google suite business, does ImprovMX eliminate the need for me to have Google suite business?
Yep, absolutely. It obviously depends on your usage and how big your company is, but if you don't mind having a free Google account and receive/send from an alias, then you can definitely use our tool for free instead of paying for GSuite.
One downside would be for example that Aliases can't be used in Google Calendar, so if you send a lot of invites to your customers they would see your personal email address. To fix this, you would either need GSuite OR to create a new Gmail account with your email address instead of @gmail (it's possible!).
Wow this is a game changer. I am going to suggest ImprovMX to my new clients who start their business. Saves them some money and the hassle of figuring out a new email service provider. Most people are used to Gmail and when their business email service provider is not Gmail they get a little agitated.
Great idea guys! How did you come up with it? How did you get your first clients? I would appreciate your answers as they might help me find my own idea. Thanks.
We didn't really came up with ImprovMX but it was an existing service that wasn't much maintained. We reached out to the owner, and were able to acquire it.
We then capitalized on the user base to grow the product, add a ton of features and improved the interface and experience, which helped us grow the service to what it is now.
You can have some more details here: https://improvmx.com/about-us/
Hope this helps :)
Congrats!
Hi there Antoine, congrats on the huge milestone!
Would you be interested in answering a few questions via email for my site Growthunt ?
Would love to share your story with other aspiring founders and promote your business on my site and newsletter subscribers.
Hey Yun,
Sure — Feel free to reach out at antoine@improvmx.com. I'd be happy to!
Congratulations on the milestone, Antoine! I've been following ImprovMX since a little later after your announcement and I like seeing members of this community succeed.
Recently, I bought a domain for my nice little personal page. Was only thinking of getting a custom email - mailgun, SES, google domain and then I stumbled upon this update. Just might have to give your free plan a try! ☺
Amazing, let me know how it goes! The free plan should be enough for your use case :)
Update time: Setting it up was smooth as butter. Plus, I also had a recruiter reach out to me earlier this week through it.
I know it's isn't a big deal by any measure but goddamn it felt good. Wish you luck :)
Wow, that is warming my heart! Thanks for the nice comment!
You're very welcome!
Congratulations @aminoux. I really appreciate your product (I'm a user on free tier) and your approach to marketing.
Btw I found out about your product when googling around GSuite catch-all emails, which I used to have to set up - it was a nightmare. I found a guide somewhere that suggested trying your product, and I'm glad I did!
Amazing! Do you remember which guide that was?
In general, I'd say we need to invest much more into content marketing and explain all the subtleties of our product. This seems to be a huge driver for conversion because of the super technical nature of the service.
Yup, just found it by doing some quick googling. https://smash.vc/gsuite-catch-all-guide/. Third result on Google for 'gsuite catch all domain'. Consider Ad Words for that, or a content marketing piece?
I've set up GSuite catch-all email around 5 times, but each time forget how I did it (because it's a nightmare as mentioned), so always have to find a guide again. The little shout-out to ImprovMX at the bottom of that article is about as freakin' great as it could get for you guys, I think. It was incredibly convincing, and I was sold after a quick visit to your site.
I'm in a similar-ish space of messing with DNS stuff with Cloakist, hence why I particularly love what you're doing.
Awesome! big congrats Antoine.
Great to hear how you got to 1k paying customers @aminoux good luck getting to 2k!
Congratulations @aminoux 🎉
Your solution looks great, I have this exact problem and have been using Yandex to solve it so far. I have to congratulate you on your landing page. I created an account without realising it because the homepage is so actionable I just tried it out with one of my domains. Very well done.
It's still not perfect but I'm really happy with how the onboarding flow is turning out.
I've put a lot of thoughts into it and we're really trying to match the intent of the user with a flow that's solving their problem in the easiest way possible. It's not easy because we're talking DNS configuration with a bunch of acronyms people are uneasy with (DKIM, DMARC, SPF, ARC.. wtf?!) so trying to simplify all of this is core to the experience.
Glad you signed up! Let me know if you have any thoughts.
Amazing growth, congratulations! What caused the big growth in November?
We created a lighter plan with smaller limits on aliases and domains and without the possibility to send using our SMTP servers. We priced it at $30 per year (only billed annually) and sent an email to all our free users using Black Friday as a pretext. Our real motivation was to check whether a lighter plan at around $3/m would make sense.
We prepared this on the Thursday night just before Black Friday and launched it as a mostly hardcoded solution. We put a countdown in there that would expire and hide the offer at Midnight in their timezone. We also restricted it from current paying users and new users, so that we could only tap in the cohort of already registered free users that never converted. Maybe it's not super ethical, but for the purpose of a test, we thought it was fine. Some people did reach out by email asking to downgrade from their premium plan to a light plan, and we of course turned the promo on for them.
At the end, this lighter plan gave us +190 paying customers in one day, but the MRR hasn't seen a crazy dramatic increase (+500$/m). Not sure if you can apply this, but hope that helps!
This is very helpful to know, thank you. I would have guessed it was a new marketing channel or something, so it's a good reminder to not forget about free users who never converted.