We were lucky to catch up with Michael Olsen recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Michael , thanks for joining us today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

It’s common to look at a company that’s managed to scale and imagine it happened overnight. But for us – as is the case for many businesses – success didn’t come overnight. It is hard work. Ongoing hard work.

We work in a very competitive market and are building a product that people hesitate to “just quickly try out”.

The key elements to our successful growth came from a mix of tactics we used.

Once we got the initial traction, the biggest impact came from the hundreds of experiments we did in the app and on the website. We ran hundreds of A/B Tests to improve CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization). The more radical the tests, the bigger the impact. We had to learn not to let the fear of failure get in the way of us testing a new growth strategy.

The more we test, the more we fail – but the more we learn that allows us to pursue better tactics later. A lot of the things we do don’t make a big impact, and we know that’s part of the process. Eventually, we find a test that yields results and makes a difference, which is very satisfying.

Once we got to the point where we maxed out the potential of our existing user flow, we needed to look for ways to increase our traffic. Since we were targeting the B2C – and to a small extent, the B2B – market, our unit economics didn’t allow us to spend too much on paid acquisition. That’s when SEO became the obvious choice for us. We were able to create some very technical SEO projects with our technical engineers and growth team. And that’s what we still focus on today.

We implemented and tried every possible and legal trick that the world of SEO has to offer. This has proven to be extremely successful for us to drive traffic to our website. Just like other companies, Google Core updates are occasionally hitting us hard. It forces us to rethink the way we are creating content and our SEO projects.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

After finishing my degree in Computer Science, I became an engineer and later, an entrepreneur. I co-founded a food order and delivery company called Room Service, where I was the sole engineer.

A short while later, I met up with Michael Bodekaer, my co-founder at Mailbird, at a startup event in Copenhagen. We started talking about going into business together. As we were both passionate about email technology, the topic of email clients came up.

Sparrow was a good solution for Mac. But most of the email clients with a simple and beautiful UI were only available for MacOS. There was no equal alternative for Windows. Most options were either overly complex or didn’t meet the needs of users that were looking for modern, simple, minimalistic options.

So we decided to build one. A clean, intuitive, yet powerful email client for the underserved Windows market. Now, we’re planning the launch of Mailbird for Mac as we want Mac users to have the same experience. It’s coming out in October, and anyone can get on our waitlist and try it out for free.

From the beginning, Mailbird was a project fueled by passion. Our team poured all their great knowledge and expertise into building this product – and we’ve been continuously enhancing it over the years.

“Quality over quantity” is a guiding principle for us, and that’s where Mailbird differentiates itself from the competition. Every feature we implement is there to enhance the user’s flow and email productivity.

We’re all overwhelmed by the number of emails and app notifications we get. Instead of having to switch back and forth between inboxes, Mailbird lets you unify your email accounts and access them all in one place. So it makes email management a breeze – our customers always tell us how much time and energy Mailbird saves them.

What’s more, you can connect so many of your favorite apps and manage them all in your Mailbird account. From social media channels, like Facebook and X, to your Google Calendar or Slack account, you can quickly check notifications while you’re also going through your inboxes.

I’m most proud of the overall Mailbird journey. We’ve built Mailbird from the ground up and created a streamlined email management flow that puts the user at the center. It’s been an incredible journey with our team steadily growing, and building a multi-million dollar company without seeking significant external investment. This accomplishment is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our team.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

Growing your clientele is a worthy goal, and any entrepreneur would be smart to focus on that. But at the same time, enhance the value of your product so you can expand the lifecycle of your existing customer base. Because if you can expand that, you’re creating bigger acquisition opportunities. You’ll be able to allocate more money to paid acquisition efforts that may not have been profitable before.

For us, the most effective growth tactics were long-tail SEO and offering a free version of our product.

Offering a free version may sound like a very obvious choice. While a free version came with a significant increase in the number of downloads, those did not directly generate extra revenue. However, those newly acquired downloads come with long-term positive effects. We tested removing the free version and saw an improvement in our financial performance, in the short run.

In the long run, we realized that removing the free version makes it very challenging to drive acquisition. That’s why we decided to make the free version available again. However, this is extremely contextual and linked to the type of product you have, your positioning, and the unit economics behind it.

As for SEO, our Growth team developed a strong expertise in building programmatic SEO projects. Within these projects, we can target keywords that are out of reach from a paid acquisition perspective because the volume per keyword is too low. That is why Google will not allow you to show your ads for those keywords. Instead, so called N-dimensional SEO allowed us to create targeted content. This also allowed us to implement A/B tests within these SEO projects, which is usually very hard to do.

If you have a page with 10,000 visits per month from Google, you cannot make title changes and compare performance very easily. When you have 100 similar pages driving 100 visits, you can implement changes on 50% of them and see immediately if those changes are effective or not.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

I’ve found that consistency is the most important aspect in building your reputation as a business. When your service or product is consistently good, your customers return again and again. From day one, Mailbird’s goal was to make email a smooth, enjoyable experience for our users. Regardless of the effort it takes, 12 years later, we still stick to that promise and continue to deliver on it.

Reliable, high-quality customer support is also paramount. If anyone hits a snag on the platform, they can reach out to our team night and day, and someone will be there to guide them. In addition to that, being transparent in our communication has helped us establish trust with our customer base.

On top of these core values, we’ve pursued a few effective inbound and outbound marketing tactics. For instance, in our first few years, we focused heavily on public relations. Right before Mailbird launched, Google acquired Sparrow, the iOS app. Since that was a current topic in the media at the time, we were able to earn great coverage – in TechCrunch, PCWorld, and other large publications – by branding Mailbird as “Sparrow for Windows.”

While we continued to build on our PR efforts, we also approached our content marketing thoughtfully. Our website and blog have gained increasing traffic thanks to the content we’ve been putting out through the years. Investing in SEO is critical for businesses, especially in the early stages.

Ultimately, I believe putting your customers first, in every action you take, is what enhances your reputation. This shows in our media coverage, in reviews, and in all the interactions we have with our audience. It’s our genuine desire to make them happy and improve their lives. It’s also what motivated us to develop Mailbird for Mac. We’re stoked for the launch and confident that they’ll enjoy managing their inboxes with more ease.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.getmailbird.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mailbirdemail/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/getmailbird
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mailbird/
• Twitter: https://x.com/mailbird

Image Credits

Pictures: courtesy of Mailbird