marketing features and tools are provided at a fraction of the price. We make money by providing
email marketing platform for our customers. Our customers pay us a monthly or one-time
Send Credits fee to use Sendloop, send email newsletters, and track results.
loop submission home page
loop submission home page
How did you come up with this idea?
Our other startup Octeth is into local email marketing and is one of the leading (and popular)
local email marketing software since 1999. We have a good experience in email
marketing industry and have founded many startups in this market since 1999 including
Octeth, Sendloop, PreviewMyEmail (acquired by SMTP, Inc.), Sendersuite, DeliveryIPMonitor
and so on. In 2007, we decided to build and run an on-demand email marketing solution
for clients who do not prefer to purchase an on-premise solution, install and run it on
their own servers.
How long did you work on it before launching it? When did you see your first dollar?
Sendloop was built from scratch instead of porting our on-premise email marketing
solution as an on-demand solution. It took about 6 months to get it ready for users. It started making money from day 2. We worked on ad marketing materials on day 1 and
sent the oman phone number library first ad email on day 2. The SaaS market wasn’t that saturated and
dominated in 2008, so it was relatively easy to launch a software and find your first
10 customers.
MRR:
I can’t share detailed financials on Sendloop (yet) but it’s somewhere between $100k –
$200 MRR. Whatever
What was Sendloop’s MRR after the first 6 months?
The MRR was around $12,000 at the end of the 6th month, but at that time we were selling pay-as-you-go email delivery credits and our revenue was higher, around $22,000.
Number of customers and free trials:
We will soon be approaching 40,000 users. More than 350 million emails are sent through the
Sendloop Email Delivery Platform every month. This metric exceeds 600 million during peak times
like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Our customers are spread across 163 countries.
Who are your customers? What is your target market?
We target small businesses and e-commerce companies, but we have clients from almost all
segments including freelancers, sole proprietorships, neighborhood stores, corporations, universities,
etc.
It was easy back in 2008 and we were lucky. We had around 10,000 customers and around
25,000 subscribers to the mailing list of our other company, Octeth at that time. We simply sent out an
announcement email and introduced them to Sendloop. Thousands of potential customers visited
Sendloop's homepage on day 2 and we started converting them into customers. We still have
many customers using Sendloop regularly from that day 2.
What are the top 2-3 distribution channels that work best for you? Which channel is not
working for you?
Word of mouth (referral marketing) works very well for us. That is why we invest a lot in this
channel. Cold outreach is another channel that works very well for us. We tried several times
but were not able to use affiliate marketing as we always dreamed of.
Tell us 2-3 growth challenges you encountered recently and how you solved them.
It’s pretty easy to grow a SaaS from nothing to something in the early days. But to make it a “must
have” solution on the customer side is quite a challenge. If you are a small team (like us),
you should focus on one important problem and solve it really well. You should not forget that every new
feature means a new product, which means a new challenge. This was the biggest challenge we had
and of course the next feature fallacy.
Some tasks aren’t worth doing in-house. What do you outsource?
Copywriting and lead generation are two important tasks that we outsource to a group of remote
team members.
What are 3 tools you and your team can't live without?
1. Intercom and Helpscout for support
2. Woopra for user analytics, funnels, and retention
3. AdWords
What was the most important thing that helped you reduce churn?
We noticed that when we built a personal relationship with our customers, the churn rate started to decrease. This was because our customers became business partners when we established personal communication with them. This made them stay with us longer and they started to invest in our relationship like we do.
Tell us what was the biggest mistake you made when building and promoting your SaaS and what
you have learned from it.
The biggest mistake we made in the past was the “next feature fallacy” meaning we were
assuming (and hoping) that adding a new feature would increase sales. This new feature
was either an idea from one of our team members or a request from one of our customers. Now we
always remind each other that adding a new feature never increases sales (in the long run)
and instead causes more problems than benefits. Since then we have focused on making what we are doing
work even better and it works really well.
If you were to start Sendloop today, what would you do differently?
Good question. We wouldn't add so many "pro" features and would focus on the core
functionality that solves our customers' biggest problem for email marketing. This would
save our time in the future and we wouldn't remove a lot of features to make Sendloop
simple again like it was in the beginning.
Have you ever been offered to be acquired or invested in?
Yes, we have received several acquisition offers since 2009. Many investors have also approached us about investment opportunities, but Sendloop is quite profitable and financially healthy, therefore we do not need any funding at the moment to sustain our growth strategy.
