How InboxDone.com CEO Yaro Starak grew InboxDone.com to $3M revenue and 15 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is yaro starok he is the creator of a company called inbox done.com your email done for you uh it's a management service that helps busy professionals and founders get down to inbox zero every day by managing and replying to all of their email yarrow you ready to take to the top let's do it all right how do you manage or reply to everyone's email with no context well you get into someone's inbox and you create the context you you learn about it obviously it's not me i'm not the one doing it we have a team but uh it's based on how someone came in and took over my inbox and basically check the scent folder learn about the company learn about the person then you practice you know you start writing drafts you check it and then eventually you can almost become that other person so what have you grown revenue tuesday and let's get the backstory yeah so uh we're about 15k a month at the moment um we just took on two more clients though so i'd have to double check uh what we're at for the last 30 days but um the short version of the story is it was something that i wanted to do forever because i i broke free from email uh way way back when i had an online essay editing company and then i got into blogging and podcasting and selling online courses and during that time i had someone do my email the entire time and for me it was the biggest productivity hack i've ever experienced you know breaking free from emails so it was natural that i thought this has got to be something other people want to do but to be honest i just had it on the back burner i was too busy growing a coaching business to focus on it so 2017 i decided to work with a co-founder uh her name is claire she was my inbox manager at the time for my coaching business and we said let's just test it let's find you know one or two basic you know beta test clients see if it worked for them see if we can make a profit does the system that works for minebox apply to someone doing completely different industries niches and so on and the test worked it um took about you know three to six months to really feel out a process that we could apply for other people um claire was the one doing it so how many customers have you scaled to today yeah we have about 16 i think at the moment like i said there's a couple more came on board in the last few weeks so uh so this is an expensive product then what do you mean these customers are paying a grand or two per month yeah yeah it's definitely not like your five dollar a month sort of virtual assistant from overseas insane sanebox in pricing it depends what's the value of breaking free from email you know but now we we are definitely going after a type of person who is kind of like me i had a business doing multiple six figures but we had a lot of customer support queries i had people asking me for podcast interviews my point is oh sorry this isn't sanebox is a technical tool that helps you to inbox your sort of like unroll me this is not a technical piece of software you have people you're hiring people essentially yeah no of course yeah it's not it's not a sas i know you have the stats no it's all human powered you know we do use some tools yes where obviously some plug-ins uh gmail for outlook and all that but no it is a human being it's an american educated you know english is the first language so very uh very hands-on very boutique you're not going to make money doing this is it profitable so far so good uh obviously we haven't scaled to hundreds and thousands of customers so that's a different question to answer at that point but at this point with myself my co-founder we've got about a team of eight at the moment our inbox managers um you know one inbox manager for our own company so yeah it's scaling well um but we're pouring all the profits back into growth at the moment so break even today i would say i mean my co-founder takes a salary but yes very keep today yep yep yep uh we have to pay yourselves yeah that you want to include that in costs um so so break even today and what so what does the margin look like right i mean it for what does it cost you to pay an inbox manager and then what do you mark that i mean essentially you have to mark that time up to make a profit on that customer right yeah i mean we've this has been a learning experience for sure you know we i can safely say it's 30 40 in proper margin it depends on the client you know some clients are they're going to go through peaks and troughs you know so they're going to have maybe a week where they're doing a product launch or something happens in their life that's huge and we almost break even and then the next week you know their email drops and we're back to a normal profit margin we have some clients who just you know they're happy to give us even 50 60 profit margin just to keep that off their plate never to go into their inbox again but it varies on the client it really does i guess my point is though if i'm paying you a thousand dollars a month you are paying someone to manage my inbox to the tune of 600 or 700 bucks a month the margin that is left for you and the business is 200 to 300 bucks per customer uh yeah i mean most of our clients are more around the fifteen hundred dollar mark so one thousand to fifteen hundred and then yeah we might keep anywhere from 800 to 900 depending on you know the client sometimes it's all the way down to 500 but like i said that that'll change throughout the month depending on what's going on and they might bump up a plan higher they might drop down and plan lower but like i said so far the margins are holding but i don't know what it's look like over time i mean how do you how do you scale this business though i mean those are pretty thin margins right if you're doing 15 000 a month in revenue and you have 15 customers that means the average one is paying you a thousand bucks a month you're paying 800 you know 700 bucks for the va so again there's only 200 300 bucks for all your other expenses to you for you to invest in growth and everything yeah i mean like i said it can be as much as you know six seven hundred on a fifteen thousand fifteen hundred a month client uh when we started we were priced at a thousand we bumped up to 1500 uh just again learning about pricing but some of our clients are unless and i'll be honest with you i mean i don't have an answer for that as we scale more all i know is at the moment we can pay you know co-founders salary it leaves some money for you know paying the team that's not inbox managers like you know the the hiring manager you know a few ancillary staff and then um you know a couple of thousand bucks to spend on marketing at the moment which i'm enjoying spending and testing different marketing campaigns but tell me about that what are you testing well for the early stages it was all like podcast marketing my own audience that sort of thing then obviously that kind of tapped out at the moment i've been playing with uh you know twitter ads we've been getting some traction with the vc kind of world so twitter is where a lot of vcs hang out so we've been you know playing with that what do you mean you do you manage or we're near 15 customers as a vc yeah we've got a couple of clients who come through like they're either founders who are now doing investing or they're actually vcs i feel it's like a bit of a sweet spot for our service you know they're not huge companies they're usually more boutique a couple of um founders and they have a lot of email a lot of inbound email a lot of communication flows so again it's a test it's way too early for me to say that's a sweet spot but vcs real estate agents kind of a certain size company seems to work well interesting okay now have you done this all bootstrapped or have you raised bootstrap bootstrap company okay and um any engineers on the team no no we don't really need them i mean we've got some tech help for the website but it's not a tech heavy business that's what i'm saying there's like is there a way that you can build and invest in developing code here to make the margin improve so you can actually afford to bring this service to way more people yeah well i've certainly thought about you know the the ai assisted email management and there's a few tools that have come out that i've had my eye on like that can simply just reduce the cost of delivering the service like tools there's one called tala which i had my eye on for a while it hasn't really surfaced to something we would apply but we looked into it uh it basically kind of creates an ai powered knowledge base for common emails like you know common responses to emails and the idea is your inbox manager is in there they've got tala looking at the emails it's building a knowledge base [Music] yeah t-a-l-l-a i think is a the right one you can find it there um but it just wasn't you know cost effective for us to apply something like that at this point in the future if it gets better you know with more scale possibly but yeah i don't have an answer has anyone started paying you and stopped oh yeah for...