How This AI Email Marketing Tool Reached $4K/Month In Just 4 Months

Onur Genes

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Published: September 12th, 2022

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Onur Genes

Founder, Nureply

$4K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Nureply

nureply.com

from Ankara, Turkey

started April 2022

$4,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

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Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits ... James Clear

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Hello, I am Onur Geneş and I am the founder of Nureply. Before entering the SaaS world I had a Software Development Agency called epistio. It is still functioning but I wanted to get away from service businesses to make a SaaS product.

This is not my first product as I have made many others. Even one of them was the #1 product of Product Hunt but it didn’t make any money from it.

Today I am helping SaaS and agency owners to make more money only using emails and nothing else. Nureply makes $4,000 per month in the 4th month, and I am just starting!

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I had this software agency for 3 years and made a lot of great projects. Companies we have worked with include Swiss Banks, Private companies, and many SaaS/App products.

But I always had that thought in my head: “What if I can’t find another client after this project?” This led me to find solutions. I have tried paid advertising, reaching out to people via LinkedIn, and many more but all of them had their problems.

I didn’t want to spend money on paid advertising and it becomes too much work to reach out to people on LinkedIn. Eventually, I heard about email marketing and wanted to explore it.

Never scare and back away because of competition. Your idea might be the same but your execution will never be the same as your competitors.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

When I first found out about email marketing and wanted to explore it further, I was writing these lines 6 hours a day and it became my day job. That was not a good sign because I still have to manage a team of developers, join meetings, and talk with current clients.

I started to see a pattern in the lines I am writing. Then the light bulb moment came: Why am I not making this an AI model?

I have a background in ML and AI topics and generally know how they work. I have started to do experimentation with GPT-3 based models on OpenAI.

Describe the process of launching the business.

I have created a very basic landing page and started to share and collect email addresses. I have found many people on Facebook, and Twitter, and of course sending emails to “Email Marketing Agencies” because if I have this problem, they also have it!

In 35 days 750 people were waiting for the emails. I knew maybe just 1 percent will become a customer but it is still a good number to start with. Sent an email to invite “select users” to beta. It was free and I wanted to see if there were any problems with the product. 30 people replied and signed up on the first day. That was more than enough.

After 20 days of beta testing and bug fixing, it was ready to share with the world. When I was finishing the beta process, I wanted to reach out to all beta testers and tell them the product will be paid for in a few days.

20 out of these 30 testers subscribed on the first day. Nureply was making money even before going public!

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Even before I had the AI idea, in the first month of my diving into email marketing, I sent 100 emails and was eagerly waiting for new job inquiries. You guessed it right, nobody even responded. But what was wrong? Quickly realized, that these emails seem like spam and have nothing in them about the recipient. I don't even answer these kinds of emails. What was the solution?

Making it more personal!

I started to check the website of the leads, LinkedIn profiles, blog posts, and articles and wrote a few sentences to steal their attention. It worked so well! I was getting a few replies but that was not enough because you have to talk with them and convince them. Even in that case, not everybody is your ideal customer. You need to send a lot of emails to get a client, especially with software services with a high ticket sales price. Then I integrated this idea of personalization into AI. Sent the emails with this AI and saw huge improvements. My reply rates had gone from %1 to %3!

Of course, there were problems with the first model. The AI model was not good enough. It was writing decent things but not like a human. It was hard to get all the information by hand and feed it to AI to get a response. At that point, I wanted to automate it with better writing, human-like AI.

If you are struggling with something, other people are struggling with the same problem. If you can solve it properly, you will get a lot of customers.

Started to create a custom AI model. Hired 5 virtual assistants and gave them the manually collected data. They were writing good icebreakers and when I added my data on top, it was like a real human! I have also automated the data collection process and when you combine these two, you have a solid system that works every time!

The first thing that came to my mind is “Why am I not making a product with this system?” Added UI elements, because there were none present at the beginning. Added payment systems, automation, and management of users. Within 35 days, it became a usable product.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Today, as a bootstrapped founder, I can call Nureply as Ramen profitable. It covers all the costs itself and mine as well.

Making $4k/month helps me to focus solely on Nureply.

The best part? I haven't done any paid advertising campaigns yet. All of the sales came from word of mouth or people came across online. SEO has started to work in the last few weeks and it gets better every day.

The average customer spend is around $300 and has more than 800 email subscribers. This makes it easy to launch new features and gain new subscribers.

As a solo founder, I am focusing on coding the whole system for 2 weeks and 1 week for marketing. It is not easy but it works.

Soon, planning to launch email sequence support, which will help to reduce the churn rate. The biggest benefit for the customer will be, that they will be able to not leave Nureply to do everything around cold outreach.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

In the beginning, I was only focusing on a very niche problem, writing icebreakers. This was good to get going but I am feeling late to start adding new features. It is hard to sell more with fewer features.

If I were me today, 5 months ago, I would start implementing more features from day one. It would help me to get more attention to the product but at the same time, it would be hard to make it a more polished product.

Also, I felt like I don’t know marketing at all. This is the biggest struggle for new products. You don’t know what works or what will work in the future. You are just trying to survive and it can be exhausting.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Upwork for hiring Virtual assistants to help me out writing seed icebreakers for training the AI
Buttondown for sending email campaigns. Very easy to set up and good enough to use
Stripe for getting payments.

Other than that, the rest is made by me.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Atomic Habits helped me to form better habits. It is a generic recommendation but keeping pushing every day is the key to success.

The IndieHackers community is good for learning from indie hackers.

Twitter is the biggest inspiration. Connecting with like-minded people is the best thing I have done for myself.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Never scare and back away because of competition. Your idea might be the same but your execution will never be the same as your competitors.

If you are struggling with something, other people are struggling with the same problem. Solve it for yourself, solve it well, and share it with them. If you can solve it properly, you will get a lot of customers.