How I Built It: $6M/Year Email AI Platform (Bootstrapped)
SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Nathan Latka
4.6 • 683 Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2025
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Alan D'Souza built Reachbox.AI from zero revenue to 6 million ARR in just 18 months. |
| 0:06.0 | He added $5 million in revenue in the last six months alone. |
| 0:09.4 | He's got 4,500 paying customers, growing 25% month over month. |
| 0:14.5 | But here's the crazy part. |
| 0:15.8 | 35% of their customers come from just 280 affiliates. |
| 0:19.4 | They're paying out $50,000 per month in affiliate commissions |
| 0:22.1 | for life. And their customers pay an average of $110 per month with only 7.5% churn. 27 employees |
| 0:28.3 | generating $230,000 in revenue per employee. You're about to learn the exact playbook that generated |
| 0:33.8 | 6 million ARR in 18 months. |
| 0:36.1 | Hey folks, my guest today is Alan D'Souza and he has thrown his hat in the ring into the AI space. |
| 0:42.9 | He's building reachbox.a.I, which is an AI powered cold email outreach platform, |
| 0:48.0 | offering things like email warmups, campaign automation, centralized inbox, etc. |
| 0:53.8 | We're going to jump into it today allan you |
| 0:54.9 | ready to take us to the top of course perfect okay this feels like a very crowded space what |
| 1:00.4 | you know there's lemeless there's uh instantly there's clay dot com touching this space how is reach |
| 1:05.4 | box different yeah so uh when we started reach inbox i think uh the intent intent was to kind of build a tool that can, you know, automate hyperpersonalized emailing at scale. |
| 1:18.0 | And it was built out of a pain area for us itself. |
| 1:21.0 | We were trying out all possible tools. |
| 1:23.1 | We were trying to use everything that was needed. |
| 1:25.6 | And we're still not able to achieve the level of hyper |
| 1:29.0 | personalization or reach the inboxes. And hence the name reach inbox, right? You know, we, |
| 1:35.1 | what we wanted to do was, we wanted to craft emails that were extremely relevant to the |
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