Seven years ago, we bought an unmonetized side project for $5,000. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that ImprovMX has been acquired, having grown into a business serving over 200,000 users, and forwarding more than 30 million emails monthly.
The story of ImprovMX is one of organic growth and intuitive product development. When we first acquired it, the service was beautifully simple – just a basic landing page for setting up MX records and creating catch-all email redirections.
There was no management portal and no additional settings. Once configured, there was no possibility of changing anything. This simplicity was both our greatest strength and our biggest limitation.
As happy users of ImprovMX ourselves, we saw untapped potential. We made an offer to Alexander Tereshkin to buy the service and reimagine it from the ground up, introducing a management dashboard and expanding the feature set to include multiple domain management, custom email aliases, and SMTP sending capabilities. We launched a freemium model offering five domains and aliases for free, with a $9/month premium tier. The response was immediate and overwhelming – subscriptions started rolling in within hours of launch.
What’s interesting is that we never did extensive market research or customer surveys. We simply built what we wanted to use ourselves, and it resonated deeply with others. Our free plan became our most powerful acquisition channel, striking the perfect balance between accessibility and premium value.
Running an email service at scale brought its share of challenges. With millions of emails processed daily, we’ve weathered countless technical storms – from middle-of-the-night traffic spikes to emergency DNS migrations. Every holiday and family gathering came with our laptops in tow, ready to tackle any crisis that might arise.
Over time, we realized that while we are good at building and problem-solving, ImprovMX needs someone who can transform it into a more structured organization. That’s why we’re excited to announce its acquisition by Matthew Tse, whose background in Site Reliability Engineering makes him the perfect steward for ImprovMX’s next chapter. While we’ve received other acquisition offers over the years, Matthew’s vision and bootstrapped entrepreneurship philosophy aligned perfectly with ours.
Looking ahead, this transition allows us to fully commit our energy to Fernand, the customer support tool for SaaS founders we’re building. While there are many support tools available, few truly understand the unique challenges of bootstrapped SaaS businesses – and with Fernand, we’re building what we wished existed: a support solution that seamlessly integrates with your product and helps you scale customer service efficiently. The lessons we’ve learned building and scaling ImprovMX will be invaluable as we pour our energy into making Fernand the go-to support solution for ambitious SaaS founders.
Acknowledgments
This journey wouldn’t have been possible without:
- Matthew Tse for his trust and partnership
- Jon Hainstock at Quiet Light for brokering the deal
- Bold for acting as our legal counsel throughout the deal
- iBanFirst for helping us navigate currency exchange complexities
- Matt and Yosif, our stellar support engineers, who will transition with the business
- And our families, who supported us throughout the years and especially all along December’s intense due diligence process
Of course, to you, our users. We want to say thank you for trusting ImprovMX with your email forwarding needs. The service is in excellent hands with Matthew, and we’re really excited to see where he takes it next.
Antoine & Cyril