Jonathan Bull Built an Affordable Email Tool into a Team Business

Jonathan Bull is a co-founder of EmailOctopus, an email newsletter and marketing service. He started the business with his brother Gareth Bull to offer an alternative to expensive email tools. It grew as a team business with separate responsibilities for development, marketing, and customer support.

An Indie Bites interview published on November 8, 2023, introduced it as a company with more than $3 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a figure also disclosed on the official blog in July that year. ARR annualizes recurring revenue; it is not actual revenue recorded for that year or net profit. This was the company's revenue metric disclosed by the company and its representatives in 2023, and must be distinguished from Jonathan's personal income or the company's current revenue.

Two Brothers Start a Business Outside Their Day Jobs

Jonathan began building websites around the age of ten and ran his first online business at about fourteen. After studying software engineering at university, he worked as a developer at the Royal Opera House in London and at a cryptocurrency news startup. EmailOctopus, which he started in 2014, was initially a side business he developed in the evenings and on weekends while employed.

The product began with the email costs of another service he ran. Once about 2,000 users had opted in to receive updates, Mailchimp's fees became a burden, so Jonathan wrote a script to send email through SES, Amazon's email delivery infrastructure. EmailOctopus turned that personal solution into a service other people could use.

While Jonathan built the website and backend, Gareth, who had experience running a digital marketing business, gathered prospective customers before launch. He found people on Twitter complaining about existing services' prices and ran ads targeting people searching for cheaper alternatives. By dividing development and customer acquisition, they did not need to wait until the product was finished to begin promoting it.

The initial product was a free tool that let customers connect their own Amazon accounts to send email and handle bounces, unsubscribes, and related tasks. When they introduced paid plans and limits on free use in July 2015, more than 99% of existing users left. The remaining users generated only about $200–$300 a month in initial revenue, but for Jonathan it was the first evidence that people would actually pay. Having many free signups and having a viable paid business were separate questions.

When monthly recurring revenue reached around $3,000, Tom Evans joined on a contract basis to handle operations. The problem he discovered was not just a lack of new features: around 100 customer emails had gone unanswered. Tom established a customer support system and connected inquiries and feedback to product improvements, making up for Jonathan's limited time as he balanced employment and development.

Refining Both Price and Simplicity

Rather than charging a premium to serve a specific profession, EmailOctopus chose to provide affordable email delivery that businesses across industries needed. In a 2023 interview, the management team explained that simplicity also reflected their small team's inability to match all of their competitors' complex features. Rather than a fully developed strategy from the outset, it was a choice to turn a manageable product scope into a price advantage.

The product later developed to include an email editor, signup forms, customer segmentation, automated sending, and performance reports. Even so, it did not change direction to become an all-in-one tool for every marketing task. The official homepage checked on October 1, 2026, also emphasized its focus on email marketing rather than adding separate channels such as text messaging.

The revenue model brings people in through a free plan and moves them to paid subscriptions based on their recipient count and required features. As checked on October 1, 2026, the free plan for the standard service includes up to 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month, while paid plans include features such as removing branding and keeping reports longer. Here, subscribers are the email recipients each customer manages, not the number of customers paying EmailOctopus.

Maintaining affordability did not mean keeping the original prices forever, however. In a 2020 retrospective, the management team said they initially believed they needed to be ten times cheaper than competitors, but later shifted toward finding a price fair to both the company and its customers. They adjusted prices alongside product improvements while, up to that point, allowing existing customers to keep the prices they had signed up at.

A larger obstacle to growth lay in getting started, rather than in pricing. Initially, 90% of people who signed up never sent a single email, and most never reached the step of connecting Amazon SES. In a survey of these inactive signups, 86% of respondents said they would like to use the service if the Amazon connection requirement were removed.

In September 2019, they therefore launched a standard email service that did not require customers to connect their own Amazon accounts, separating out the existing connected product. According to the company, the time needed to send a first test email fell from generally more than a day to around two minutes. The change expanded the audience beyond developers who understood an inexpensive tool to include people without a development background who could start using the service immediately.

Customer Acquisition Methods That Worked and Those That Fell Short

Early customer acquisition used existing communities such as Reddit and Quora, along with free resources. One notable example was a set of HTML email templates released for use with other email services as well. According to a 2023 company announcement, more than 50,000 people had provided their email addresses to download them, and that list became a channel for introducing the main product. This was the number of prospective customers gathered through free resources, not paying customers.

As the business grew, it also used advertising, but did not simply pour money into highly competitive search terms. In materials published in 2023, Google advertising spending was around $15,000 a month, focused on protecting searches for its own brand and specific searches for alternatives. The company also stated that it aimed to keep the revenue earned from a customer over the long term at least three times the cost of acquiring that customer.

The affiliate referral program, by contrast, was less effective than expected. As of 2023, it had more than 1,000 registered affiliates, but two people generated 90% of its revenue, and affiliate revenue accounted for around 3% of the company's total. Considering the burden of monitoring fraudulent accounts and policy violations as well, the management team concluded that they would not start it again in the same way.

The Operational Burden Behind an Affordable Service

A service that was inexpensive and easy to join also attracted spammers. According to a 2017 company retrospective, they had to pause new feature development and build systems to filter suspicious signups and sending activity. They gave up some growth and revenue in the process, choosing to protect their brand's reputation and relationship with Amazon.

A simple user interface did not mean simple internal operations. As sending volumes grew, they replaced most of the early code and needed infrastructure to handle large volumes of records such as email opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes. The technical challenge in this case was less about the send button and more about reliably maintaining delivery and collecting results for many customers.

Building a Company with a Team and a Financial Cushion

Jonathan recalled having to learn to let go of his tendency to control work himself and delegate to specialists as the business grew. Hiring leads for marketing and customer support, in particular, gave him and Tom time to focus on work they had put off. The official introduction checked on October 1, 2026, lists Jonathan as co-founder and CEO, Gareth as co-founder and adviser, and Tom as COO, and also introduces separate staff responsible for development, design, and customer support.

The policy of growing without outside investment also included a commitment to financial security. In 2020, the company disclosed that it held enough cash to pay the entire team's salaries for at least a year even if revenue disappeared completely. Rather than spending all available money on expansion, it kept a cushion that would allow the founders and employees to weather difficulties.

They did not rule out outside investment or a sale unconditionally. In a 2023 interview, the two said they had met investors and potential acquirers but had chosen at that time to keep growing the business themselves. Maintaining independence was a decision they revisited after the business had grown.

Reading this case simply as a story of succeeding by charging less than competitors leaves out important parts. The actual process included validating paying demand, removing a complicated setup process, organizing customer support, controlling spam, and delegating work. EmailOctopus shows that opportunities exist without inventing an entirely new market, and that turning those opportunities into lasting revenue requires building operations as well as a product.