Meet Jean, co-founder of Mailmeteor with 5 millions users

A few months ago I discovered https://www.indiehackers.com/ . I wasn’t active on it but I noticed a message about a meetup in Paris, where I live. I didn’t know many entrepreneurs before and I think it’s great to be part of a group of similar interests if you want to progress.

So I thought “Amazing! Let’s join the meetup and meet cool people”.

That’s when I met Jean: he was the one who organized the meetup.

Hi Jean! You build Mailmeteor, the n°1 platform to mass DM for Gmail, that’s impressive!  How did you get the idea ?

In 2017, I worked for Station F, the world's largest startup campus (initiated by Xavier Niel), which brings together a large number of startups to help them grow. I had an advisory role with startups even though I didn't have one myself. Corentin and I wanted to create our own project.

I was working with a very large number of partners (500+), and the only way for me to keep in touch with all of them was to communicate via emails. Regarding our needs, Corentin and I decided to create a tool to send personalized mass emails from Gmail to share news, invite partners to interact with startups, etc.


How long did it take to become ramen profitable?

This project didn’t cost much, just server costs, and contrary to the advice we give to startups to raise funds, we wanted to be profitable from the start. We found our first client a few weeks after the launch.

Can you share some stats / numbers about mailmeteor?

Mailmeteor was created 4 years ago. Now we are a team of 10+ persons and we have 5 millions users, 10 000+ clients and millions of emails are sent through MailMeteor.

Was it your first indie hacker project?

Yes, and then we launched several others. The last one is Poked to revolutionize LinkedIn emails.

How are you organized with your co-founder ?

We don’t live in the same city, we e-meet every 2 days and we have what we call “Marketing Tuesday”. During these days we organize long calls to talk about marketing because one of the main issues when you are a founder is to focus too much on the product.

What is your marketing strategy?

For a long time our marketing strategy was essentially relying on the Google marketplace. Google is our 1st business partner but more recently we focused strongly on SEO. We have an entire team who work on content creation.

What are the main issues you encountered?

We are in the Google ecosystem, which brings advantages but also inconvenients. Advantage is that Google led us to get clients and users all over the world.
But the inconvenient is that we are Google dependant, if Google changes a policy, we have to adapt ourselves.

We met at indie hacker’s meetup you organize in Paris. How can indie hackers join your meetup?

The meetup was launched 7 months ago. It grows constantly. To join us it’s simple, you just need to engage with one of our tweets. .

Final words, what are your tips for people who want to create a SaaS too?

Launching a SaaS on the side while keeping your main job and testing things in your free time: it allows you to not have too much financial pressure.

Also, I have always created projects on already validated ideas, like startups that aim to revolutionize markets. Launching on an already validated market is an excellent way to achieve profitability quickly. Once you can do that, everything falls into place. The first user gives us confidence, the first client is an incredible moment, and then everything follows logically.

Jean’s links:
@cuireuncroco
Mailmeteor
Poked