ImprovMx is a simple email forwarding service doing $24K MRR.

• Bootstrapped
• Built as a side project
• Grown to a small team of 5

And the founder still has a full time job on the side 🤯

I mean, the startup is his side project, he makes a ton more from his job ofc.

This is their revenue chart -

ImprovMx let’s you forward emails from one (or many) email address to another email address.

This is there feature set -

Antoine Minoux and his co-founder Cyril Nicodeme acquired ImprovMx back in 2017.

It had a few thousand users at the time, and even some organic traffic. But it made no money.

But it was a much simpler product and a bare bones website. Antoine and Cyril redesigned the product from scratch to include more complex features.

Although the product didn’t make money at the time, but because it was SO useful, it had great traffic and userbase.

And that helped them get their first 100 users in just a few weeks after the new launch.

As Antoine told me on Twitter, “it’s so much easier to monetize something when you already have a stream of traffic on your product”

The coolest part about this business is that the founders aren’t full time on it.

And they don’t ever want to be as well. They’re pretty happy with their full time jobs, and run this on the side like a cash flowing asset.

As Antoine told me on Twitter - they’re really not aiming to be a unicorn, they want to build a lifestyle business.

Read Antoine’s detailed response to my questions on Twitter.

He talks about -

• The Acquisition in the early days
• Improving the product
• What he thinks about competition
• And more…

Read it here.

And do read this thread from Antoine where he shares how he juggled a SaaS startup on the side of his full time job at Yelp.

• ​Antoine’s thread​

(hint: 4 day work weeks!)

Top lessons from ImprovMx -

• There’s no overnight success, they’ve been at it for 6 years. But yes, there are small early wins which you must strive for.
• There’s nothing wrong with acquiring instead of building.
• Just make sure the product has demand, and organic traffic.
• I’ve seen people acquire products from Twitter, where the founders audience was driving all the traffic, and after the acquisition the traffic died because they stopped tweeting about it. Please DON’T acquire such an asset.

And yes, final lesson - you don’t have to quit your job to build an indie startup 🤷‍♂️

(Too late for me, I already quit 2 years ago 😅)

Here's a web version of this post to bookmark and share.

From the vault -

3 random post from the Superframeworks archives -

• ​0 to 8 figure exit in 18 months​
• ​$33K MRR with a simple Slack bot​
• ​$100M Framework to identify your market​

🔗 Super Links

Useful links you don’t want to miss -

• ​You're being lied to about productized services - Hunter Hammonds
• ​Google still sends almost 2/3 of all referring traffic on the web - Gael Breton
• ​The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction - Peter Vukovic
• ​Done is better than perfect - me
• ​14 email ideas your readers want from you - Jeff Felten

Last week’s top link -

• ​5 ChatGPT Prompts to Write Better SEO Content - Sarvesh Shrivastava

🤗 How can I help?

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you -

• ​Join the tiny community for your big dreams - We support, inform, educate and inspire each other every day. We are a tight knit group of indie hackers and solopreneurs working on our projects. We would love to have you. Entrepreneurship is hard, don’t do it alone. Come join us!

Thanks,

Ayush 🙏