$10K/Month Email App While Sailing The World

Danielle Johnson and her partner James Ivings are digital nomads who have been traveling the world full-time for 6 years, and living on a sailboat for the last 18 months ⛵️

(Some nice photos on Danielle’s Instagram)

Despite their nomadic lifestyle, they’ve managed to start and grow a successful business called Leave Me Alone.

In Danielle’s own words 👇

Leave Me Alone is super easy to use. Simply connect your email addresses, and we’ll show you all the mailing lists you’re on, and you can unsubscribe from the ones you don’t want with a single click!

When you’re done unsubscribing you can add the newsletters you love to a daily (or weekly) digest email using Rollups.

To keep your inbox clean you can control who is allowed to email you or block everything else with Inbox Shield.

The idea came about because Danielle and James were spending a lot of time sorting through their own emails while on the road. They went looking for a service to help them find and unsubscribe from unwanted emails….

Faced with the dilemma of a messy inbox or all of our data being exploited, we decided to build our own solution.

They built the first prototype of Leave Me Alone in just 7 days 🚀

The response from early users was incredibly positive, with 50 potential beta testers signing up after just a few hours of sharing the landing page on their social accounts.

Leave Me Alone officially launched in January 2019.

In the first month, we scanned a mind-boggling half a million emails!

The launch was a huge success: Leave Me Alone finished #1 product of the day and week on Product Hunt and brought in over $1000+ in revenue 💰

Danielle writes…

Our single best decision was to share our journey of ups and downs, and give people an insight into our lives as we build Leave Me Alone from various locations around the world – our audience has proved invaluable when we needed feedback, advice, encouragement, and even beta testers!

Four years later, the app now earns around $10,000 per month from subscriptions and one-off payments (via their website) 😎

Danielle adds…

We also completed our goal of earning enough money from Leave Me Alone to buy the sailboat of our dreams and sail around the world! 

We’ve been living aboard our 36ft boat Nayru since May 2022 and we’re still working on Leave Me Alone – I guess you could say that we’ve transitioned from nomads to sailmads!

Danielle’s advice if you’re building products…

It takes time to find an idea that sticks. Don’t hold onto a bad idea or product just because it’s the easy option. It’s difficult to admit that something you built or are building isn’t working, isn’t getting users, and isn’t growing. 

If you can recognise when this is happening and be objective about it, then you will waste less time bouncing back and working on your next idea.

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