From side-project to millions of emails
Some people on Twitter can be quite active. And even if that’s not the case, Twitter tends to be a very fast-paced social media channel, making it hard not to miss out on important tweets.
One of those active people I follow religiously on social media is Benedict Evans. Last year January, I noticed I was missing out on his tweets. I kept on thinking how awesome it would be to have all the stuff that he’s sharing in one place so I can read them whenever I want. That was when I found out about his newsletter (if you’re interested in tech and mobile, you should subscribe to it). After receiving the first issue, Revue started to come together in my head. What a powerful way to distribute curated content and keep followers in the loop. Not to even mention the possibilities for engagement.
Back then I saw the value of the newsletter and I still do. It’s such an intimate way to communicate with people, and so effective at the same time. Hence, I envisioned Revue as more of a network, a place for people to share meaningful content and let their voices be heard rather than just another newsletter service. To this day nothing has changed.
Of course I knew there were plenty of email services out there that are able to do the same in some way, but all of them were missing something. Many don’t focus on the curation of quality content or on the engagement with followers. Besides that, the majority of them are either too expensive or complicated for this purpose. I realized there was a need for a platform that is simple, looks awesome and connects passionate people wanting to share their interests. The idea of giving people the opportunity to express themselves and reach their audiences excited me. That pushed me to start working on Revue.
From then on, the ball started rolling. I created an MVP in roughly 4 weeks and launched on ProductHunt, as a side project (thanks to Bram Kanstein). I never anticipated it to do so well and to get so much positive feedback, because within 2 weeks Revue had over 2,000 registered users! It even became the 25th most upvoted product on ProductHunt. Talking about motivation :)
A few months later, in May 2015, I ran into Nalden. Before co-founding WeTransfer, he had been blogging for a long time and when he found out about Revue he was immediately sold. He saw Revue as a great way to start “blogging” again by simply sharing content that reached his followers easily without wasting too much time. After several coffees he decided to invest in Revue together with his partner in crime Damian Bradfield. They were the first that believed in me and Revue. Until this day I’m still very grateful to them.
In October that year I managed to grow the user base to around 4000 users and asked one of my buddies Mo, with whom I’ve worked before, to join me and work together on Revue. I really needed somebody that could take responsibility for the tech, since I was falling short on that part :) He is a kick-ass tech guy so I was pretty excited when he decided to join Revue as co-founder / CTO.
Since then a lot happened:
- We managed to keep growing the platform and we’re now at 15,000 registered users, collectively sending roughly 2mio emails per month.
- We attracted some amazing angel investors to join our adventure to create the best curation platform out there.
- We grew the team to five people. Mark joined us earlier this year to help us with his exceptional analytical skills, Veselina started working at Revue in June to take up on our social media efforts, content creation and community management (and she’s kicking ass at it) and Nikky joined us since she’s a great listener and likes to have casual but important chats with people to better understand our customers.
And that is how Revue became what it is today. The reason I’m writing this is because I wanted to not only give you a sneak peek at how everything happened and where we stand but to also share our direction for the future.
A lot of people ask us where is Revue heading? What’s next for us? As mentioned above, to this day the initial vision hasn’t changed, we still want to be that platform for people to express their thoughts by sharing meaningful content. We don’t want to be another email marketing service. We understand that this may not always be evident, but this takes time. Slowly but surely we will continue to work hard towards this goal.
I hope this helped you to get to know us better. The other way around, we’d love to get to know you better, so if you ever feel like saying hi, just drop us a line. We’re always down to chat :)
