Leave Me Alone

What they Do Best

Service facilitating hassle-free unsubscribing from unwanted emails.

Main Industry

Productivity

Platform

Independent/Standalone

Type of Product

Desktop/Web App

Target

B2B + B2C

Price Range

$1 - $49

Business Model

Subscription

Free Plan

Pricing Details

They offer two subscriptions at $8 and $14 per month. Additionally, the app can be used during 7 days for a $6 payment

Revenue Estimates

$120,000

Monthly Website Traffic

55,676

Revenue Per Traffic

$0.18

Idea to Money

Since they were developing the product openly, many beta testers joined way before the product was ready and later became paid users

Founders

Employees

Year Started

2018

Dedication

As owners of a web development agency, they've built and run several projects like this one on the side

Market Insights / Trends

email organizer

Industry Incumbent

Spark ($2M/year)

How They Came Up With The Idea

These founders also run a web development agency. Leave Me Alone was born because they took their own advice and stuck to solving their own problems. Both were spending a lot of time sorting through emails, so they went searching for a service that would help them find and unsubscribe from the unwanted ones. Found a few which would help for free, but a closer look revealed that they didn’t charge because they were selling all of their user's data for marketing. Faced with the dilemma of a messy inbox or all of their email data being exploited, they decided to build their own solution.

How They Built The First Version

The first prototype of Leave Me Alone was built in 7 days. Motivated by their small success being open with a previous project, and mindful of their failures, they took a different approach to build this startup - they wanted to share everything, get early validation, and iterate. So they picked a name, put together a quick landing page, and started sharing it around on social media. Writing the code is the part of building a product that they're are most familiar with. They built a basic prototype that focused on the core functionality - showing users their subscription emails and letting them unsubscribe easily. The first version only supported Gmail and only showed emails received within the past week.

Growth Channels

The best thing that has worked for them is building in the open and being transparent about everything they do. They've been able to build a community of people invested in them and their journey to build this product who want to see them succeed. This has helped them to stay on track, remain accountable, and provided an invaluable support network when things have been tough. They attribute a large proportion of their success to the communities they're a part of who help to share updates, promote launches, and give them the motivation to keep going. The biggest ones are Makerlog and Women Make, but they also are very active and receive lots of support on Twitter, and Indie Hackers. All of their traffic is organic; from social media, blog, and word of mouth. They blog about a variety of topics including changes to the product, privacy, remote work, and coding. These are shared on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn using Buffer to post twice a week. Twitter is their biggest driver of traffic, and it is also where they are most active. Recently they started reaching out to other blogs to write guest posts for each other to bring readers different knowledge and expertise. Regarding SEO they publish blog articles that target keywords such as “how to unsubscribe” or “how to block emails”. These have done well because they are long-form content that provides step-by-step instructions for unsubscribing that are actionable and useful to the reader. The other big SEO improvement was identifying the best-performing long-tail pages and making them more helpful for readers. Pages such as “how to unsubscribe from X emails” where X is a common mailing list such as Quora, eBay, Amazon, etc.

Main Growth Channel

Content Marketing

Twitter

Tech Stack

Tools

- Metomic: cookie consent - Simple Analytics: analytics - Sentry: error handling - Mailgun: email tools - Airtable

Full Case Study

How This Traveling Couple Built An App That Helps You Unsubscribe From Unwanted Emails - Updates We Made That Took Us From $500/Month To $10K/Month In 3 Years