How Zapmail Reached $6M ARR in 18 Months with 4,500 Paying Customers (Interview with Founder & CEO Alan D'Souza)

Intro and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Alan D'Souza built reachbox.ai from zero revenue to 6,000,000 ARR in just eighteen months. He added $5,000,000 in revenue in the last six months alone. He's got 4,500 paying customers, growing 25% month over month. But here's the crazy part. 35% of their customers come from just 280 affiliates. They're paying out $50,000 per month in affiliate commissions for life, and their customers pay an average of $110 per month with only 7.5% churn. 27 employees generating $230,000 in revenue

00:30per employee. You're about to learn the exact playbook that generated 6,000,000 ARR in eighteen months. Hey, folks. My guest today is Alan D'Souza, and he has thrown his hat in the ring into the AI space. He's building reachbox.ai, which is an AI powered cold email outreach platform altering offering things like email warm ups, campaign automation, centralized inbox, etcetera. We're gonna jump into it today. Alan, you ready to take us to the top?

Alan D'Souza

00:56>> Of course. Perfect.

How Reachbox Differentiates in a Crowded Market

Nathan Latka

00:57Okay. This feels like a very crowded space. What you know, there's Lemlist. There's Instantly. There's clay.com touching this space. How is Reachbox different?

Alan D'Souza

01:06>> Yeah. So when we started Reachinbox, I think the intent was to kind of build a tool that can automate hyper personalized emailing at scale, and it was built out of a pain area for us itself. We were trying out all possible tools. We're trying to use everything that was needed, and we're still not able to achieve the level of hyper personalization or reach the inboxes, and hence the name Reach Inbox. What

01:35>> we wanted to do was we wanted to craft emails that were extremely relevant to the target audience and also kind of resonate with what they are looking to solve for their business instead of just sending out a blank email to everyone. And that's where we saw the opportunity of AI coming in. We said, okay. If there's if we can hyper personalized based on recent activity, based on the likes of the user, nothing better than that. Right?

01:59>> So, yeah, drafting a personalized offer for every target audience that's there.

Nathan Latka

02:04Yep. Well, help me understand because I don't want to lose the audience, right? They're gonna be watching this and going, oh, it's another email marketing tool, but you guys have some pretty incredible growth. Can you share your growth just so people stick around for the rest of show to learn from you?

Alan D'Souza

02:14>> Of course, of course. So we started towards

Growth Numbers: $6M ARR in 18 Months

Alan D'Souza

02:19>> December 23, and then we were kind of in beta till about June 24. In June 24 is when we started selling selling out MRR plans. In the last eleven months, we now clocked about 6,000,000 in ARR, and we're growing about 25% month on month.

Nathan Latka

02:39That's wild. So 6,000,000 in ARR as of today.

Alan D'Souza

02:42>> Correct? Yes.

Nathan Latka

02:43We're recording this 05/06/2025?

Alan D'Souza

02:45>> Yes. That's right.

Nathan Latka

02:46Okay. So just to be clear, we're we're talking well, 6,000,000 ARR. Right? So so that'd be 83,000 a month times six. You're you did about $500,000 in revenue last month.

Alan D'Souza

02:57>> Absolutely. Absolutely.

Customer Count and Revenue Drivers

Nathan Latka

02:58Are people paying the most for?

03:00We're on your feature page right now. What's the thing driving the most revenue?

Alan D'Souza

03:05>> I mean, it's the so once you have once you get on to the plans, you have various add ons that are there. So for example, you can buy a subscription for Reach Inbox. And once within Reach Inbox, you can also get your email info from within Reach Inbox. You can do lead enrichment from within Reach Inbox. You can use AI credits within Reach Inbox. So on an average, when a user comes in, he kind of uploads

03:28>> about 10,000, 15,000 leads. He then wants to enrich those leads. He wants to use his email infra. He wants to ensure that the volume is done properly. And he wants to use AI to kind of do a proper outreach to all of them. So it's combination of all of these factors that lead to user spending higher on our platform.

Nathan Latka

03:45Mhmm. And how many paying customers do you have today?

Alan D'Souza

03:48>> Today, we're roughly at about 4,500 paying customers.

Nathan Latka

03:52How did you get the first 100?

How They Acquired the First 100 Customers

Alan D'Souza

03:54>> The first 100 was all using Reach Inbox. We kind of were using our own tool to kind of do an outreach, reach out to people who were in the SaaS space, in digital businesses, and introducing and telling them, okay. Listen. This is the email. This email reached your inbox. So probably you can reach the inbox of your customers as well. Right? And and, you know, just

Nathan Latka

04:14that Alan, And people because people will hear that they go, be specific. I mean, what did you put in the subject line? So you were targeting b to b soft like, who were you targeting specifically, and what would you do put in the subject line?

Alan D'Souza

04:24>> Our first initial customers were only SaaS and we would understand the SaaS. For example, let's say there was a SaaS company which does

04:35>> website visitor optimization, right? For example, they create multiple copies of the same website. So we would tell them what exactly can Reach Inbox do for them? Like how can Reach Inbox help them acquire customers at scale? What should they do if they were using Reach Inbox? Are the top three things that they need to do to kind of get more customers? Right? So you tell them, okay, listen, if you go and send a case study to

04:59>> your customers with this thing, you would probably get much more replies. If you do this, you get much more replies. So top three things that they can do, and then a personalized link to a personalized video for them about what they can achieve. So adding more value than expecting them to come and sign up, right? So if you just go and send out an email saying, listen, why don't you come and sign up? Why don't you

05:19>> try a demo here? People are not going to do that. If you go and send that, okay. These are the top three things, but I've also created a video link with a personalized demo for your company. People will click on the video. If they like it, they'll respond back.

Nathan Latka

05:30Yep. Well, take take me in this because I wanna make sure, you know, we get there's a lot of people online that they don't have proof to back up what they talk about. You have proof. You posted your Stripe screenshot right to LinkedIn here showing 0 to $400,000 a month in revenue. This is April 1 pretty quickly. And then you gave some sort of insights insight into into how it worked. When you say you talked to

Learning from 1,500 Customer Conversations

Nathan Latka

05:511,500 users, explain to me how you did that. How did you methodically interview or talk to 1,500, capture their data, then build it into your product?

Alan D'Souza

05:57>> Yeah. Yeah. Yep. So one thing that was very clear for us was we we would we would handle support within our core team itself. And whenever people would come on the support channel, which is Intercom, we would kind of understand and listen to them and maybe get book calls with them. Right? We would I I mean, even till date, we do about eight to 10 calls a day and talk to all of our customers who are

06:20>> in the pro plans and understand what are the problems that they're how are they using our products? What are they using it for? How do they achieve whatever they're using it for? Right? So that's what we do.

Nathan Latka

06:31Okay. So got it. So these weren't necessarily 1,500 individual interviews. They were, like, intercom interactions, email, Loom videos, things like that?

Alan D'Souza

06:38>> Yes. That's right.

Nathan Latka

06:39Okay. And what were they saying? Like, I'm trying to position you against the rest of the because everyone like, there's lot of tools in the market. So did these people say something like, I tried Lemlist, but x didn't work, or I tried instantly, but y didn't work, or I tried whatever, and and it didn't work?

Alan D'Souza

06:54>> No. It's it's not exactly I tried this. I didn't and I it didn't work. So a lot of these users were newcomers to the space as well. Right? A lot of these users didn't really know what they need to do to kind of reach the inboxes of users. Right? So this is what this is what the challenges were. So cold outreach itself, though we think it's a very saturated space, it's still pretty new out there. A

07:17>> lot of businesses still don't use cold outreach because using Google Ads, using Facebook Ads is pretty simple for SMB. Pull out, it still feels like Rocket Science, they need to know what DNS records, how do you set up old email infrastructure, how do you find these leads, how do you enrich these leads, what do you do, how do you even verify these leads, all of this. So it becomes very tiring for people. They try to avoid

07:40>> going the cold outreach route. And I think that's what we kind of solve for them. And when we were solving, we would understand, okay, that this is where they find it difficult. How do we simplify that? So we went on simplifying the user experience for anyone who came to us.

Nathan Latka

07:54Mhmm. Mhmm. Okay. That makes sense. So the onboarding when you go into zapmail is it's a super clean experience. You've really optimized. You got your first million bucks here of revenue. You posted this back about seven months ago. And you said, really most the most the initial. I saw some people in the comments asking how you got them. It was really you sending out your own emails back into your tool. We've seen a couple tools like

08:14this have really high churn rates. What's your churn rate?

Churn Rate and Retention

Alan D'Souza

08:17>> Yeah. So, I mean, churn rate in our industry is also pretty high, but, we are at a single digit churn rate. We are in the we are around seven to 7.5% churn rate right now.

Nathan Latka

08:297.7% of logo churn per month or revenue churn per Yes.

Alan D'Souza

08:34>> Logo churn per month.

Nathan Latka

08:35Logo churn per month. Okay. Interesting. And how are you getting new customers today? Is it still cold email or is it SEO or something else?

Alan D'Souza

08:44>> So new customers are still coming in from referrals. We have built a pretty strong affiliate cycle where people who come in, they kind of further refer users, and they get in their friends in as well.

Affiliate Program Deep Dive

Nathan Latka

08:57Wait. You tell me about that?

09:00I see it here. You're paying 20% commission. How many affiliates have signed up and how many have made have have driven at least one sale?

Alan D'Souza

09:06>> We have okay. So most users sign up, but, the affiliate spread is between about, say roughly about two fifty to two eighty users who have actually driven sales.

Nathan Latka

09:18So there's 280 affiliates who have driven at least one new customer.

Alan D'Souza

09:22>> Yes. Yes. Yes. A lot of them have driven more than one customer, but yes.

Nathan Latka

09:26How many total customers out of your 4,500 came from affiliates? Do you know or a range?

Alan D'Souza

09:31>> I would say about

09:34>> roughly, I think should be about 30%, 30 to 35% of our users should be coming from affiliates.

Nathan Latka

09:40Wow, that's big.

09:42Why? That's a big deal. Mean, interview a lot of folks with affiliate programs. What's the secret? Why are people spending so much time and I energy promoting your

Alan D'Souza

09:50>> think it's pretty simple, right? When you have a product which solves your need, with with which solves your problem, you you and and you see that, okay. I can invite my other friends, other people in the space, and get a month on month lifetime permission on this. People go out there and speak about it. And there's nothing better than than your users speaking about it.

Nathan Latka

10:09Uh-huh. And you like Taltz? You're running your affiliate program on Taltz that's working well for you?

Alan D'Souza

10:13>> Of course. Of course. That that's a great product.

Nathan Latka

10:16Are is it 20% commission in perpetuity or just for the first year?

Team Size and Revenue Per Employee

Alan D'Souza

10:20>> It's on of it's for the lifetime of the user.

Nathan Latka

10:23For the lifetime. Okay. So your expenses, like, last month, your top line revenue was something like $500,000 at the top of the you know, at the top you you paid out, what, something like fifth $40,000 to affiliates last month, something like that?

Alan D'Souza

10:34>> Should be roughly around those numbers. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have that on top of my mind, but yes.

Nathan Latka

10:40Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's the team size today? Have you managed to stay pretty small, or you guys have a bunch bunch of people?

Alan D'Souza

10:45>> Yeah. We're we're pretty lean so far. We're about twenty twenty six, 27 people now. But majority yes. Of Yes. Full time.

Nathan Latka

10:54Okay. Interesting. Yeah. That's still pretty healthy. Right? If I do 6,000,000 divided by 27, what is that? 230,000 of revenue per employee. Is there room to improve that? Do you need 27 people or are you hiring ahead of growth?

Alan D'Souza

11:05>> I think we're hiring because we also have a couple of more initiatives getting launched in the coming months. So we have some more products coming out, and that's where it is. It's we are investing in our future products.

Nathan Latka

11:17What can you give us a hint? What's coming up?

Alan D'Souza

11:21>> More in the GTM space. We're we're building around future automation in the GTM space and trying to do things around the GTM space.

SEO and Other Growth Channels

Nathan Latka

11:30Okay. Alright. So GTM space coming up. Affiliates are driving a lot of growth. Your own email outreach is driving a lot of growth. Any other growth? Do do any SEO or no?

Alan D'Souza

11:40>> SEO does definitely drive quite a bit of traffic for us, but it's, of course, a very difficult channel for us. Right? I mean Mhmm. It's it's not the best channel, I would say. But, of course, user referrals and, you know, what if not is driving the most traffic for us?

Nathan Latka

11:58What's your main site? Is it reachinbox.ai or the other website related to zapmail? You have a bunch of sort of sub domains, it seems like. Am I right or Yes.

Alan D'Souza

12:06>> Yes. Reachinbox.ai. So what we did was we we split between our main selling platform and our cold email infrastructure platform so that users who wanted to use other platforms could also use cold email infrastructure from us and, you know, send it to other platforms as well.

Nathan Latka

12:24Mhmm. Mhmm. Which is what zap okay. But zapmail and reach inbox, they're owned by the same parent company.

Alan D'Souza

12:30>> Absolutely. Absolutely.

AI and the Future of Go-to-Market Tools

Nathan Latka

12:32I see. Interesting. Alright. Last question as we wrap as we wrap up here. Where do you see sort of, you know, AI and LMs and agents sort of taking the go to market space? Do tools like you get replaced, you think? Do you replace yourself? What happens?

Alan D'Souza

12:46>> Yeah. It's it's a very interesting question, and this is something that, you know, we've also been thinking of since we got started. I think, yeah, I I I feel that, of course, eventually, is about taking away manual intervention as much as possible, But I feel human moderation, human assisted outreach is what it's gonna be like. Know, it's it's gonna be that AI is gonna set up most of your campaigns, everything, you know, find you the right

13:11>> leads. It's gonna enrich all of that, do everything for you, but it's still gonna be human assisted. There would be human moderation needed, then it, you know, works very seamlessly where AI would do most of the things that humans are just there to, you know, moderate things around it.

Revenue Milestones: Zero to $6M in One Year

Nathan Latka

13:25Mhmm. That makes a lot of sense. We'll see sort of what happens. Before we wrap up, just wanna make sure we get the growth rate right. 6,000,000 of ARR today, where were you exactly one year ago?

Alan D'Souza

13:34>> Just starting. I think just before getting started. Yes. But zero.

Nathan Latka

13:37Like like so zero revenue one year ago?

Alan D'Souza

13:39>> Zero.

Nathan Latka

13:40And about you hit a million revenue about, what, five months ago?

Alan D'Souza

13:45>> We had we had zero MRR a a year ago. We had a we had we ran a lifetime deal a little earlier, so we had we had support coming in from our lifetime users on the beta version of our product. So that's where it was. Yes.

Nathan Latka

13:58Okay. Six months ago, though, is when you broke 1,000,000 of revenue. Right? Somewhere around there?

Alan D'Souza

14:03>> Yes. That's right. About and

Nathan Latka

14:05you said you added 5 you've added 5,000,000 of revenue in the past six months. Is that accurate?

Alan D'Souza

14:09>> That's right. That's right.

AppSumo Lifetime Deal Retrospective

Nathan Latka

14:11It's a great growth rate. Would you do the lifetime deal again? A lot of people say, you know, you do those deals, and it ends up with a lot of bad customers with a lot of support that don't wanna pay a lot of money.

Alan D'Souza

14:19>> I think I think that's not the right right feedback because we we did get a lot of support coming in from our lifetime users. We had a pretty good set of lifetime users who came in, gave us the right feedback, supported us early on, and also some of our earliest affiliates as well. So I think if you're able to drive the right value through a lifetime deal and then eventually have sufficient upsells, it kind of works

14:45>> for everyone.

Nathan Latka

14:47How much how many sales did how many people purchased the lifetime deal on Opsomo?

Alan D'Souza

14:52>> Think about roughly a little over 800, 800 plus people bought it on Opsomo.

15:01>> Average value of about $200.

Nathan Latka

15:05200?

Alan D'Souza

15:06>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

15:07Okay. So that was a good chunk. That's, like, a $160. Obviously, app how what does AppSumo keep? Like, 60%?

Alan D'Souza

15:14>> Yeah. Something around that. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

15:16Okay. But still, it's a nice, like, $60-70 grand into your bank account you can reinvest.

Alan D'Souza

15:19>> Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's and and it was in the very early days, but more than the money, it's it's about the feedback that you're getting. It's about users who are coming in and who are being patient enough to see why they're growing. Right? So that was the was the best part for us.

Nathan Latka

15:32Yep. Well, Alan, if people wanna test out your tool, where's the best place to find you online?

Alan D'Souza

15:36>> I'm on LinkedIn, on Twitter, both of these places, but, yeah, more active on LinkedIn.

Nathan Latka

15:43Guys, there you have it. Zapmail had no revenue one year ago, and six months ago, they broke 1,000,000 of revenue. They've added 5,000,000 in new revenue over the past six months. One of the fastest growing companies in the go to market sort of AI space. They've got over 4,500 paying customers that pay an average a $110 per month. Their churn is a problem, but a lot of folks have churn in this space. They're turning about 7%

16:03of logos per month, and their number one growth or one of the big growth channels is affiliates. Over 280 affiliates have driven them at least one customer, and 35% of their total 6,000,000 of ARR today have come from affiliates. Their team size is 27 people. They're looking to scale. Watch out for some new product launches here in the GTM space coming up. Alan, thanks for taking us to the top.

Alan D'Souza

16:21>> Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here. Bye.