How Carlo is growing Plunk - The open-source email platform

Meet Carlo D’Agnolo.

Carlo is 27 years old and from Belgium. He dropped out of college, started at shitty (in his own words) jobs and worked his way up.

Currently he is running marketing and growth at his friends VC-backed cyber security startup c/side full time.

But this story is gonna focus on Plunk. An open-source email platform.

The story told by Carlo D’Agnolo

About a year ago (2023) I joined a guy named Dries Augustyns in growing his side-project Plunk, which is a SaaS email tool. It is completely bootstrapped and profitable.

Dries started it late 2022, with a Product Hunt launch in March 2023. I joined the project a few months later after an introduction by the guy I now work full time for.

So - What is Plunk?

Plunk is probably the easiest email tool any SaaS founder can use. Dead simple API, you can send campaigns as well as automations and transactional emails.

What makes it unique is that we charge for sending per email. No subscriptions. This makes it easier for any small-scale operation to get started once they go above the free 3.000 monthly emails.

You pay $0,005 per email sent which makes it super cheap for small senders.

Going viral

We just announced that you can now self-host Plunk completely for free. Dries’ post on X (below) went kinda viral which has been great for visibility

This post was single handedly probably the biggest reach we’ve had. It’s funny, people like free stuff 🙂 It was driven by Dries’ profound feeling of giving other people accessible tools to build great products. A definite trend that continues to grow, it’s lovely to see.

Will be interesting to follow what this will do to our paid users. Will the number go down because it’s now free with some more effort or go up because of extra reach? Let’s do a follow up in a few months.

What has been impressive is the response from the open-source community. The project has received 1.7k stars on GitHub and users have been pouring into our Discord.

Impressions and clicks on Google alone went 20x the days after that tweet. So don’t discount the sheer power of social virality.

Other marketing initiatives

We tried a bunch of growth hacking things that didn’t work.

For one, we put Plunk branding in the footer of the emails being sent from our service to do two things: expand the reach (since all receivers would see our product) and be an incentive to upgrade to paid to remove it. This had far less impact than we’d thought it would.

Below is the message/link we put in the footer of emails for free accounts.

We also created an email terms glossary to hijack SEO. This barely gets clicks, but was pretty low effort to build.

The things that really worked for us are rather basic: Word of mouth and SEO.

Word of mouth was done by Dries. He’s awesome at getting back to people asking for help or tips on Discord. Since that’s all public, it drives a bit of a community feel which is nice. Positive experiences like that help people spread the word. It’s a slow burn but it continues to drive people to Plunk.

Usually I don’t like the ‘word of mouth’ answer, but here it’s built into the culture and vibe of the product. We did this approach because we like it, but we also expected the results it would have.

I came in with some SEO knowledge and immediately went to work. Just writing a couple of really well researched articles on good topics, and in a nice style that fit our product and user base. This alone probably doubled our user base in a couple of months.

I wrote a bunch of articles on popular “internet entrepreneurs” which did well, though it’s not a 100% match with our user base.

Our technical articles have a higher conversion rate, but less traffic. See a few examples of both types of articles below.

• How Pieter Levels Became a Millionaire

• Andrew Tate’s Genius Marketing Strategy (analyzed)

• Sending emails with Supabase and Plunk

• Send emails from Stripe Webhooks

The 'free tools approach' also works but is hit or miss in our experience. This one was worth it for us and gets daily clicks:

• Markdown to responsive email HTML

Making 10 more of these would likely be worth it.

The first 100 users

I believe we reached our first hundred users in a few months, but not all were paying.

Our footer has great real-time stats showing. We currently host +3.3k projects (but a user can have more than one) and we’ve sent out +2.8m emails.

Email is a very crowded space, and the big players do really well. It’s hard to break into. Plunk is profitable, yet will remain a side-project at this time.

Our marketing techniques so far have done reasonably well. But if you, the reader, are screaming at your screen right now with “why aren’t you doing this!” please do reach out to us.

Contact information:

• Carlo D’Agnolo on X

• Dries Augustyns on X