The Idea
In 2020, Raul Kaevand was running a lead generation agency pulling $30,000 to $50,000 a month and quietly hating every tool he paid for. Cold email platforms charged per inbox. So scaling outreach meant scaling cost, and the maths punished the exact behaviour his clients were paying him for.
He had already taken a swing at startups. A travel app, built with a co-founder he met on Reddit, died with the pandemic.
So this time he built something smaller and dumber: an internal tool that let his agency plug in unlimited email accounts under one subscription and warm them up automatically. No per-inbox tax. His own agency clients became the first twenty users.
Then usage spiked, the results got hard to argue with, and Kaevand did the thing most agency owners never do. He shut down the profitable agency and went all in on the software.
This was the beginning of Instantly.
The Execution
- 2020: Kaevand's first startup, a travel app built with a co-founder he'd met on r/cofounder, collapsed in the pandemic. The lead gen agency, doing $30K to $50K a month, kept the lights on while he worked out what to build next.
- 2021: Instantly launched with Nils Schneider, Reio Suun and Sumit Kumar alongside Kaevand, betting the whole product on unlimited email accounts under one flat subscription. Fully remote, spread across Europe and Dubai. No office, no investors.
- 2021: The AppSumo launch brought in $50K+ and roughly 3,000 users, sold as lifetime deals at $59, $99 and $169 against list prices up to $2,028. The real prize wasn't the cash. Instantly's warmup feature needed a network of real inboxes sending real mail, and 3,000 buyers plugging in their accounts solved that chicken-and-egg problem overnight.
- 2021: Joining the Facebook group was baked into onboarding, and Kaevand named it Cold Email Masterclassrather than anything with "Instantly" in it, purely for Facebook search. It now has over 60,000 members.
- October 2022: Instantly hit $2.4M ARR in 9 months, going from 22 customers to 2,900 with a team of 15 and zero outside money. Best performing subject line, per Kaevand: "Quick question, [Name]".
- 2023: They started paying affiliates a 40% lifetime recurring commission, with individuals earning $10K to $20K a month for recommending it. That payout dragged gross margins from the usual SaaS 80-90% down to an estimated 50-60%. They took the trade.
- August 2023: Revenue passed $13M ARR, clearing the $1M MRR goal Kaevand had set publicly eight months earlier.
- 2024: $20M ARR, and the positioning moved from "more replies" to "Find, Contact & Close" as Instantly stopped being a sending tool and became a full prospecting platform with its own lead database.
- Today: Instantly sits at roughly $38.2M ARR on 24,500 paying customers and $130 ARPU, with headcount up from 15 in 2023 to around 200, and still $0 raised.
The lesson?
Instantly didn't win the busiest category in SaaS by having the best product. They won by turning their cheapest customers into infrastructure and their loudest fans into a commission-only sales force. Giving away 40% of revenue for life looks insane on a spreadsheet, right up until you're at $38M with no investors to answer to. Most founders guard a margin they haven't earned yet. Margin is what you protect once you've won. Distribution is how you win.