For co-founders Mike Nelson, Matt Helbig, Matthew Cook and Matthew Smith, Really Good Emails was a side project.
“We only worked on it at nights, weekends and the occasional lunch break,” Nelson said.
Even so, over the span of a decade, Really Good Emails (also known as RGE) grew from a WordPress blog to a must-have resource for email marketers.
By 2024, RGE had attracted nearly 100 million pageviews annually, 220,000 newsletter subscribers — and an interested buyer.
Identifying the need for Really Good Emails
Back in 2014, Nelson, with a professional background in email marketing, consistently met marketers seeking email inspiration. That sparked the idea for Really Good Emails, which launched in 2016.
The goal was to provide marketers a platform to explore emails, collect ideas and dig into how each email is made.
“Think of us as the Pinterest of emails — but with fewer mason jars and more ROI,” Helbig described.
Creating an easy-to-navigate web experience was critical to the site’s growth.
“We started as a blog on WordPress, but soon realized that we needed to have specific features so our readers could find examples better,” Nelson said. “This focused us on adding taxonomy and content that was SEO optimized, allowing us to be found at the top of search results because of the unique content and on-site engagement.”
Marketers could explore emails by categories, including behavioral (think: abandoned cart, recommendations, review/testimonial), industry (think: airlines, B2B, news, podcasts) and more. Users conducted more than 1 million searches on the site per month, according to Nelson.
Bootstrapped with $50,000 from its founders, RGE had three revenue streams: advertising, subscriptions and events, with advertising being the largest and most reliable.
Because RGE attracted marketers, marketing technologies were eager to purchase quarterly advertising packages to get in front of website users and newsletter subscribers.
“The more advertising we did, the more we had to put back into the product, which would turn into more users and higher engagement, which then led to higher advertising packages and so forth,” Nelson said.
RGE also introduced a premium subscription in 2018 for $9 a month. Pro users could create unlimited collections, leave feedback on emails, upload emails from their inbox to their profile and more. This revenue helped offset some of RGE’s costs.
By 2024, nearly 400,000 RGE profiles (free and premium) had been created.
On the events front, RGE launched a conference for email marketers called Unspam in 2019. It drew over 1,000 attendees through the years, with attendance capped to around 200 per conference to keep the multi-day event intimate and friendly.
At its sale in April 2024, RGE’s annual revenue was $250,000. Yet with 220,000 email subscribers and 100 million annual pageviews, much of its value was in its massive audience, priming it for a strategic deal.
How part-time founders built Really Good Emails
The biggest challenge the four co-founders faced when growing RGE was working only part time.
The reason they never went full time was simple: “Our day jobs were paying us much more than what we would’ve made after we split the profit,” Nelson said.
Plus, their day jobs were pretty cool. Nelson ran a growth team at Lonely Planet, Helbig worked on campaigns for auto brands, Cook was a consultant for brands like Nike and Toast, and Smith ran a successful design agency.
“We got really good at divvying up responsibilities, hiring contractors and keeping to schedules,” Nelson said. “As we grew even more and our lives became even more hectic, we hired an executive assistant from Squared Away that kept track of our projects, paid contractors, booked meetings for us, reminded us of deadlines and took care of our partnerships.”
This delegation allowed the co-founders to focus on initiatives that moved the needle, like adding new features and increasing community engagement.
When RGE continued to grow organically, the co-founders knew they’d have to decide who’d go full time at some point. In fact, those conversations had already started when the idea of selling turned serious.
Getting acquired by a public company — based in Italy
The RGE team met with Beefree’s CEO Massimo Arrigoni for the first time in February 2023. Many of the emails featured on RGE were built with Beefree, a drag-and-drop HTML email builder.
During a meeting about a potential business partnership, the idea of Beefree acquiring RGE came up.
“I could see a lot of potential,” Nelson said. “We were successful in building a community of users who used hundreds of different email platforms to build their emails, and it turned out that Beefree had been the software that most of those platforms used to create emails, too.”
Another reason the co-founders liked the idea? “We knew that if we sold to someone, they would need to solve the ‘creation’ side of the workflow, as we brought the ‘inspiration’ side that happened first,” Nelson said. “Beefree met those criteria, and we knew it would be a fun team to join after we sold.”
Within a month of that first meeting, the two parties had negotiated most of the terms of the deal. Another interested buyer had approached RGE as well, so Beefree moved quickly.
Then, the deal came to a halt.
Beefree is a business unit of Growens, a software company based in Italy. At the time, Growens was going through M&A activities with another business unit, so Beefree and RGE had to wait for that deal to close, which took longer than expected.
Additionally, RGE had to hire M&A lawyers who understood Italian law.
“This added to the complexity of finding common ground between the two different legal frameworks,” Nelson said.
The most challenging part was “the time commitment to put in additional meetings, discovery calls, legal reviews, extra documentation and more — all while having a full-time job and planning a large Unspam conference,” Nelson said.
In April 2024, more than a year after the initial conversation, RGE was acquired by Beefree for $6.6 million, which included an initial $600,000 payment, plus an earnout of up to $6 million based on meeting certain performance targets from 2024 to 2026, according to the press release.
The purchase included RGE’s assets, including the website, software, customer contracts and brands. It also required that two of the company’s co-founders join the buyer full time.
Life after acquisition: a one-year check-in with Really Good Emails
After the acquisition, Nelson joined Beefree as its chief growth officer. Co-founder Matt Helbig joined as the marketing lead.
The other two founders, Smith and Cook, took a different route to work on their own businesses. Smith runs Wimp Decaf Coffee Company and Cook’s focused on a new type of coworking membership called Atlas Local.
One year after getting acquired, Nelson shared his learnings on the RGE blog. His big fear, he wrote, was losing his company’s culture through the sale.
“We were worried about soul-loss,” he wrote. “We figured merging with a public company… meant we’d have to trade our quirky vibes for sanitized LinkedIn-approved polish. You know, like suddenly replacing our punchlines with Q3 goals and quarterly synergy reports.”
The good news is, that didn’t happen. Nelson shared that Beefree had leaned into RGE’s quirky culture, and the brand didn’t get diluted.
Plus, with additional budget and support, RGE experienced growth. The site’s traffic increased 47% year-over-year since the merger. Each month, the newsletter gets 1,500 to 2,000 new subscribers. They’re also working on some new features.
Nelson shared the downsides, too. Decision-making is slower. There are processes, meetings and more meetings. His new full-time role with the company is also more consuming.
Even so, they’d do the acquisition all over again — just without the year-long delay.
Nelson’s advice for founders thinking about selling is this: “Find a company that loves your thing for the same reasons you do. Not because it looks good on a slide deck. But because it’s weird, and special, and they want to make it even better. And then hang on. The next chapter is going to be a ride in ways you can’t even predict.”
