SaaS Talks by Spotsaas with Aquibur Rahman, CEO, Mailmodo

Email hasn’t changed much since long before the rest of the internet took off. While messaging apps, social platforms, and every other digital channel kept evolving around it, the inbox largely stayed frozen in place, still built around the same static, text-heavy format it started with decades ago.

That changed in 2019, when Google introduced AMP for emails, bringing real interactivity to the inbox for the first time. Few people grasped how significant that shift was. Aquibur Rahman was one of them, and it’s what pushed him to build Mailmodo, a no-code email marketing tool that lets marketers create and manage AMP emails as easily as regular HTML ones.

Founded in 2020 and backed by Y Combinator, Sequoia, and AngelList with total funding of $2 million, Mailmodo is a single platform to create, send, and automate emails.

We sat down with Aquib to talk through his vision for Mailmodo, the gaps he saw in the martech ecosystem, and how the product has supported marketers since 2020. Here’s what he had to say, in his own words.

As CEO/Founder, how has your journey been at Mailmodo?

We started Mailmodo in February 2020 with a brilliant idea and vision to disrupt email marketing as it was and bring Email 2.0. But we had no idea we’d end up facing a pandemic and a lockdown just as we began. The market conditions became uncertain and gloomy. No one knew what would happen then. But we decided to go ahead and kept on building Mailmodo. That led to a lot of great things. Since we were building our startup during the tough times, it taught us a lot of frugality, and we used all resources available to us in the best possible way.

Soon after we launched our product in Jan 2021, we got funding from Y Combinator and Sequoia Surge. We built a larger team and helped our customers get great results from their email marketing campaigns. Last year, we increased our revenue by 10X and team size by 4X.

We’re looking forward to achieving new milestones and ushering in a new era of emails.

Since 2020, how have Mailmodos’ product offerings evolved?

Mailmodo was conceived with the idea of making AMP emails accessible to all marketers in 2020. However, we later learned from our customers and other marketers that the martech ecosystem is full of outdated platforms.

Marketers need a simple and powerful platform that brings their email creation, automation, and management needs to a single place. This is why Mailmodo is now a complete email automation solution aiming to boost conversion and reduce the time marketers spend on automation by half.

Interactive emails remain our USP, but we’re now addressing email marketers’ every pain point and helping them streamline their entire process.

What gaps did you see in the demand of users which led you to optimize the offerings of Mailmodo further?

The roadmap of our product development depends primarily on customer sentiments. After working with our clients, we realized marketers primarily use emails to redirect users to another landing page. This landing page contains the final CTA, like booking a meeting, registering for an event, or submitting feedback.

We decided to remove this step by empowering marketers to create a similar landing page inside an email and enable end-users to take action without leaving their inboxes. Some of our most popular widgets are spin the wheel widget for offers, email gamification widgets, and widgets for scheduling appointments.

How does Mailmodo offer customisation to users- based on industries, geographies & verticals?

Our resource library is rich in templates and references for all types of industries, use-case, and holidays. For example, we’ve curated 50+ ready-to-use email flows for different industries with user journeys mapped for every possible use case and first-hand insights from 100+ automation and email experts. Similarly, our email template library has pre-built templates for all the uses-cases.

Which 3 software do you use at your workplace & why?
Our go-to software is Slack, Linear, and Mailmodo at work.

While Slack has been great for communicating with the remote team and linear helps streamline and prioritize tasks, Mailmodo has been the backbone of our email marketing practice, and we are one of its most ardent users.

What was your go-to-market strategy back in 2020?

During our initial days, we concentrated on building awareness about our product through organic content by producing quality blogs and how-to guides and hosting Growth Chats with industry leaders. Then, platforms like Product Hunt helped us gain traction and reach more users.

7- Any recommendations to SaaS founders growing & evolving in the SaaS industry?

Instead of chasing the trends, keep in touch with your customers and focus on ensuring that your product solves a real problem for your target market. Ask for feedback and suggestions, track their behaviour across channels, and mould your strategy accordingly. When you achieve a product-market fit, ensure your message is clear across all channels and your target customers know the value addition your product can provide.

Product Demonstrations, Malmodo:

Conclusion:

Building around what customers actually need is what kept Mailmodo moving forward, even when the timing of the launch could hardly have been worse. The team built through a pandemic and came out the other side with a stronger email marketing product, shaped by real requirements from the people actually using it rather than assumptions made in a boardroom.

Mailmodo plans to keep refining its offering, aiming for an email marketing solution that pairs interactive technology with genuine marketing know-how, rather than treating the two as separate problems.

Key Takeaway 1: Skip the trend-chasing. Build a product that solves a real problem instead.

Key Takeaway 2: Keep your messaging consistent across every marketing channel.

Key Takeaway 3: Keep evolving the product, and let customer feedback drive it.

Aquibur Rahman

CEO- MailModo

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