How I Built It: $6M/Year Email AI Platform (Bootstrapped)

Jake Mor is the founder of Superwall (superwall.com), a mobile app paywall platform that generates $3.6 million ARR with just 12 employees by powering over 100 million paywall views monthly for 3,000 customers. His company processes $25-50 million in customer revenue each month and has built over 4,000 custom paywalls while facilitating 4-5 million new user conversions monthly across their customer base. Jake reveals his exact hybrid PLG-to-enterprise strategy that starts customers at $200-300 monthly on self-serve plans then graduates them to $1,000-1,500 negotiated enterprise deals, plus his AI demand scoring system that delivers 20-30% revenue lifts overnight for apps generating $5-10 million MRR. In this episode, Jake breaks down how 2 lines of code became a $3.6 million business, his white-glove onboarding process that takes over customer paywalls for 4 weeks to prove value, and the failed experiment database that helps customers avoid costly mistakes while achieving conversion rates of 20-30%.

Alan de Souza built Reachbox.ai (Zapmail), an AI-powered cold email outreach platform offering email warmups, campaign automation, and lead enrichment. He scaled from zero revenue to $6 million ARR in just 18 months, serving 4,500 paying customers at $110 average revenue per user while growing 25% month-over-month with only 7.5% churn rate. His 27-person team generates $230,000 in revenue per employee, with 280 active affiliates driving 35% of all customers through a 20% lifetime commission program that pays out over $50,000 monthly. In this episode, Alan reveals how he added $5 million ARR in just 6 months using systematic customer feedback from 1,500+ conversations, why he still does 10 customer calls every day, and the exact affiliate strategy that turned his customers into a revenue-generating army earning lifetime commissions.

John Rush went from building 7 VC-backed startups as a CTO to creating a $3.5 million ARR empire of 20+ AI tools, with his biggest product SEO bot generating $120,000 monthly recurring revenue using just a 2-person team. He reveals his exact 30-30-30 growth formula (30% SEO, 30% cross-promotion, 30% social media) and how his listing bot makes over $50,000 per month selling one-time payments to 1,000 new customers monthly who want access to his database of 20,000+ directories. In this episode, John screen-shares his actual Stripe dashboard showing the revenue growth and breaks down how he achieves $720,000 in annual revenue per employee by building AI agents that run his entire operation on autopilot.

28-year-old French founder David Zitoun bootstrapped Submagic to $8 million ARR in just 3 years with only 13 employees, generating $615,000 revenue per employee without raising a single dollar of VC funding. He reveals how he hit $1 million ARR in exactly 90 days using the most generous affiliate program in SaaS - paying 30% lifetime commissions to 10,000+ affiliates who now drive $1.6 million of his annual revenue while processing 5-10,000 new signups daily. David breaks down his contrarian playbook including why 70% of his team has no college degrees, how he converts 2,500 new customers monthly despite 15% churn, and the exact growth tactics that crushed the US market from France.