EmailOctopus

Jonathan Bull launched EmailOctopus in 2014 as a side project, connecting it to Amazon SES to offer dramatically cheaper bulk email sending than Mailchimp. The early pricing was simple: free up to a subscriber limit, then flat-rate tiers. Within six months it hit $10k MRR without any paid advertising. Growth came almost entirely from SEO and comparison articles targeting users searching for Mailchimp alternatives. Tom Evans joined as COO and the pair bootstrapped with total transparency — sharing revenue milestones publicly on their blog and on Indie Hackers. By 2021 they crossed $1.6M ARR and published a detailed breakdown of how they got there. EmailOctopus eventually reached $3M+ ARR with a team of 10 people. They never raised outside funding, avoided the feature bloat of competitors, and focused obsessively on deliverability and simplicity. Their blog post "The marketing tactics that took EmailOctopus to $3M ARR" became required reading in the bootstrapped SaaS community.