GetResponse

At just 18 years old, Simon Grubowski earned his first $200 working in Stockholm, Sweden, designing a website for Interland, a meat importer from New Zealand. That modest sum became the entire seed capital for GetResponse, launched in 1998. Simon had a clear pain point: he needed an easy way to build an email marketing list and send automated drip content to customers at preset intervals. Rather than paying expensive enterprise software providers, he decided to build a better solution and "bring big company technologies to small business."

With $200 in pocket and big ambitions, Simon's first office was his parents' attic. He bootstrapped the entire operation without raising external capital, a decision that would define GetResponse's financial independence for decades. The product focused on simplicity and great user experience—core values that attracted a loyal early customer base. As the product gained traction, Simon resisted the urge to chase every opportunity and instead focused on deepening the email marketing platform.

GetResponse grew steadily through word-of-mouth and conference sponsorships. By the time of this interview, conferences accounted for approximately 10-15% of enterprise sales, generating enough revenue to reinvest in growth. The company had built a team of 300 employees spread across Poland (headquarters), Boston, Halifax, Russia, and Kuala Lumpur. With nearly a million users and almost 100,000 paying customers at an average revenue per user (ARPU) of $50 per month, GetResponse had achieved approximately $5 million in monthly recurring revenue.

A major breakthrough came when Simon introduced additional product lines—marketing automation, landing pages, and webinars—alongside the core email marketing tool. Rather than overwhelming customers, 30% of free trial users adopted landing pages (exceeding the expected 20% threshold), and paying customers upgraded to higher-tier plans to access these features. Surprisingly, a simple but counterintuitive decision also drove significant growth: making it easy for customers to cancel their subscriptions without friction. This one feature reduced churn by 30%, dropping it from approximately 8% to 6% monthly logo churn. Simon's philosophy: "We're not really focused on churn; we're focused on building a product people love."

GetResponse grew approximately 20% year-over-year, expanding from roughly $4.1 million in monthly revenue in December 2016 to around $5 million in December 2017. The company maintains a customer acquisition cost (CAC) of $200-300 with a payback period of six months. With 300 employees and plans to hire toward 400, GetResponse remains bootstrapped and profitable, having never raised outside capital. Simon declined a hypothetical $240 million acquisition offer, stating he has "no intention to sell" because he loves what the company is doing. The platform now serves diverse customer segments from solopreneurs to small teams, with particularly strong adoption in Asian markets despite higher churn in those regions compared to the US and Europe.