With businesses’ growing dependence on emails, the global email client software market is expected to grow to over $76 billion in 2032 from nearly $20 billion in 2023 at an annual growth rate of 16.2%, illustrating how the market is increasingly becoming competitive.
Mailbird, an email client solution provider, is well aware of how concentrated the market is as it competes with giants like Gmail and Outlook.
However, that didn't stop the company from growing its platform to have over 4 million users or its steadfast commitment to innovation and excellent customer experience.
We interviewed Mailbird Head of Growth Alexis Dollé and he revealed:
- The company’s journey to business growth
- The challenges it faced when scaling
- How it differentiated from competitors early on
- How it acquires clients in 2024
- Key growth strategies for business optimization
Who Is Alexis Dollé?
Alexis is an industrial engineer who sold his first business, an online gaming website, when he was only 17. He has been personally coached by Sean Ellis, who coined the term “Growth Hacking” and was responsible for the explosive growth of startups like Dropbox. Alexis joined Mailbird in 2015 and has since helped increase its revenue by 30 times with successful growth experiments based on data analysis.
Alexis explains how Mailbird founders Michael Olsen and Michael Bodekear were inspired to start the company after Google's acquisition of Sparrow, Mac's email client.
“It confirmed their intuition that there was a clear demand in the market for beautiful, intuitive email applications. That gave us the confidence to pursue our vision of creating a simple yet powerful email client for Windows users.
Even today, Gmail’s multi-account experience leaves a lot to be desired — and I believe this is where Mailbird stands out,” he shares.
The platform is such a hit with Windows fans that over 50% of its users are Gmail or Google Workspace users.
Mailbird’s Journey to Business Growth
When Alexis joined Mailbird just three years after its launch, he realized that the email client market for Windows was still ripe for disruption due to outdated apps, poor design, and clunky user experience (UX).
Based on this, the team started to imagine the practical steps of building Mailbird and what would be unique about the platform, focusing on a smooth UX design, creative integrations, and prompt customer support.
This eventually led the company to concentrate its efforts on targeting Mac users.
“There’s still room for innovation in our space, which is just one of the reasons we’re expanding Mailbird to Mac this October.
Bringing the Mailbird experience to Mac users has been our biggest goal lately, since we got so many requests. It’s incredibly exciting that 10,000 people signed up for our waitlist and are awaiting the launch,” he adds.
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Alexis highlights that Mailbird faced many challenges in scaling, and it still does, including:
- Hiring people in a fully remote setup: This was really difficult 12 years ago. While being a fully remote company gave Mailbird the ability to hire anywhere in the world, it had to do a lot of convincing to get people to come aboard.
- Managing a fully remote team: It’s not easy to keep a motivated and productive team while working from 15 different countries, in six or seven different time zones, with often more than a 12-hour difference.
- B2C scaling: When you build a product for the masses, you need to be aware of the key blockers preventing someone from adopting it. In Mailbird’s case, the email client market was filled with a variety of different actors with their own approaches.
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Competing with free email clients also posed pricing challenges that make it difficult to convince users to pay.
Low prices restricted growth investments, as paid ads hit limits and social media ads weren’t viable.
Over time, competition increased with better-funded rivals.
“More than 12 years after we launched, the market got a lot more crowded and there are stronger niches in our space. So we have more relevant competition, with big budgets and a well-defined positioning,” he adds.
Despite these obstacles, Mailbird continues to evolve with strategies in SEO and user retention to stay competitive and increase productivity.
What Helped Mailbird Differentiate Itself Against Competitors
I was curious to hear from Alexis about the most effective strategies Mailbird employed to differentiate itself in the market and attract clients early on.
“Finding the right angle of our product launch and having a female CEO in a tech company, we got significant media coverage that helped us get off the ground.
But this works only for a while, and you need to build a machine that drives its own growth to sustain scaling over time,” he explains.
He says that when he joined Mailbird after its 2.0 launch, it was clear that the company needed to have a more straightforward way to grow faster.
“You need resources to grow — and Mailbird was burning money as we invested a lot in people after our second round of seed funding. I had a few months ahead before we ran out of money, so I had to act quickly.
Step one was to maximize revenue from our existing users, as well as our new user flow. The more revenue we generated, the more we could invest in growth,” he notes.
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Alexis says they spent about a year running about 100 different tests on the website and in the app to boost conversions to paid service, retention, and customer lifetime value (LTV).
Within six months, the company doubled revenue and was able to keep moving forward with growth efforts and hire more people.
Looking at ways to generate extra visibility from existing users, he says that SEO was the biggest channel for the platform, driving up to 300,000 people to Mailbird’s website every month.
“At the time, SEO was already the biggest channel for us, and it remained the same as we kept developing it.
To this day, this gives us an edge that most of our competitors cannot copy,” he adds.
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Alexis explains that they also rely on AI which helps produce content.
“We’re also using AI the right way. AI can produce very poor content, but when you use it properly, it can become very efficient and helpful.
Every time we can increase our unit economics, charging more per customer and converting more users to paid customers, we can also increase our budgets on paid channels like search or test new channels of acquisition,” he concludes.
How Mailbird Acquires Clients in 2024
Mailbird’s success in securing major contracts like Samsung and Shutterstock is deeply tied to its mission of reducing inbox anxiety and enhancing productivity.
By being transparent, focusing on customer feedback, and building a great support team, the brand stood out in a competitive market.
Its commitment to delivering a less stressful and more enjoyable email experience helped it gain trust and visibility, which made all the difference when competing with bigger players.
“We’ve been listening to our users since the beginning of Mailbird, and their feedback is priceless to us,” Alexis says.
Customer feedback comes through regular surveys, in-app, or at different stages of the life cycle, including when users decide to leave.
“The primary way we listen to our users is through our Customer Happiness Team which answers tickets from customers with high expectations, listening to their feedback and identifying growth opportunities,” he adds.
Alexis highlights that these interactions give them precious insights into what customers need so they can double down on the right things.
“The more we understand how people interact with our product, the more we can improve it,” he concludes.
Key Growth Lessons for Optimizing and Scaling Your Business
Alexis shares lessons that other business owners and managers can use to optimize and scale their companies:
- Start by improving what you already have before exploring new growth opportunities.
- Don’t shy away from failure — take bold actions when testing and focus on significant changes that make a real impact.
- Let your team learn from their own mistakes to build trust and encourage growth.
- Encourage your team to take on difficult projects, even if they seem risky, to foster a culture of experimentation.
- If you're stuck, look at what others are doing and build on those ideas — it’s okay to improve rather than reinvent.
Business growth doesn’t come easily or quickly. You have to work hard for it.
Recognize what your brand lacks by looking at market trends and listening to your customers. Only through continuous and well-informed initiatives can you make your target audience choose you over the competition.
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