This told essay is based on conversations with David Emelianov, a 32-year-old software engineer and entrepreneur based in the Bay Area, and Jordan Gaston, a 31-year-old software engineer and entrepreneur based in Austin. Their words have been edited for length and clarity.
David Emelyanov: Jordan and I met many years ago when we were in elementary school. We weren’t really close friends, but we met again in 2017. We were both in Seattle, I was working at Microsoft and he was working at Amazon.
Jordan Gaston: A mutual friend of ours got David and I back in touch. I worked at Amazon until the coronavirus outbreak. I then decided to move on to a small start-up company, where I worked for four and a half years.
About a year ago, I moved to my current employer, a large FinTech company. I had about two months off between my job at Amazon and my small startup, and that’s when the idea for our app was born.
Emelyanov: After COVID-19 started and everyone at Microsoft went remote, I decided to quit my job. I moved to Miami and worked full time at a startup I had founded with some friends from college. Then I moved back to Seattle and took my next full-time job at a technology company. I then moved to the Bay Area, where I have been working full-time for a major gaming company for two and a half years.
Jordan and I have been working together on the Inbox Cleaner app since 2020. When I started looking into selling my app last year, my monthly recurring revenue was $232,000. We sold the app late last year and did it all while still working a full-time job.
We were both moving when we decided to develop an app together
Gaston: Back in 2020, my mom was frustrated with organizing her email inbox. That’s when I realized that maybe I could build something that would help solve this problem.
David and I were roommates at the time, and we were both looking to move. I showed him the demo and explained what I was working on. He immediately started working on what I had built and then we decided to collaborate on this project.
Emelyanov: When we were first working on it, it didn’t even feel like a company. I was like, “Oh, why not develop a little Chrome extension that adds an unsubscribe button to emails? I’d like to have that in my inbox.”
Gaston: It took about 3-4 months to build the first version that I was happy with.
After I built this, I posted it on my side project subreddit to see what people thought, and the post got a lot of attention. This planted the seeds to turn this into a real business.
I’m back after taking a break from working on the app.
Emelyanov: We continued to post on Reddit and although we were able to get some attention, it wasn’t a sustainable growth goal, so we stepped away from the business from May to September 2021. When I went to see Jordan that fall, we started talking about this app and realized I wanted to try it again.
Gaston: Once I got it back, I set up a subscription to see if anyone would pay for this service and started running web ads.
Emelyanov: We realized that because we are a Chrome extension, we can only advertise to users on computers and not on mobile. So we built a mobile app for iOS and Android. When it released its mobile app in 2023, it was able to run Facebook and Instagram ads.
That was the last big job we did, but after that it became less about building new product features and more about finding ways to grow and build a good business.
Although the company was doing well, we did not quit our day jobs.
Gaston: I typically spent 4-8 hours a day working on the app on the weekends, and during the week if I had time in the evenings. That adds up to about 20 hours a week.
When I started building apps, I was still in the early stages of my career and had a lot to learn. I was so excited and didn’t want to quit because I got so much out of my day job in terms of personal growth.
Emelyanov: I don’t think quitting a great tech job with stability and a retirement plan for something like this is always the right trade-off. Where we saw the business opportunity was more focused on marketing and distribution strategies. These are not things you need to spend 40 hours a week on.
We strategically prepared some things on the weekend and then ran ads during the week. The following weekend, I was able to see the results, learn from them, tweak them, and iterate.
We also needed money for advertising. We didn’t initially intend to raise money because the business outcomes we require are fundamentally different when we have investors. I was able to get the best of both worlds by staying in a smart tech job, one that I especially loved.
AI helps me manage my time
Emelyanov: The reason we were able to build this business on the side without spending a lot of time is because we only work on features and improvements that we think will realistically change the amount of money we can make in the short term.
I may have been a little early in trusting AI to write the code for me, but it worked.
When I was building a mobile app, I was able to grab files from my web app, copy them into ChatGPT, and say, “This web app is written in ReactJS. Can you rewrite it in React Native?” so I could build it quickly. I’ve never hired a UI designer either. It was just us and the AI.
Gaston: We were also able to automate our customer support system. I think it took about two months to build the automated system.
We train our AI based on all the information in our help center and only intervene with these customer service requests when the AI routes the case to David and me. We were always fixing inaccuracies in that system early on, and it got better over time.
Continue reading the Tiny Teams series
We decided to sell our business and AI helped us solve it
Gaston: Since we both have children now, we wanted to capture some of the value we created. We talked to some brokers to see if there was a market for what we built and how much it could sell for.
We did some simulations using AI to understand what the fair market value of the business was when we were selling it.
AI also saves a lot of time and money on lawyers. Rather than consulting with an attorney from scratch, we bring in specific questions and informed opinions, the attorney explains how it works, and then asks follow-up questions.
Emelyanov: Jordan and I have always been pretty confident in our ability to figure things out, and now AI makes it easier.
Now that I’ve sold Trimbox, I’m trying to figure out what to do next. When I have more time, I want to use what I’ve learned to build more apps, faster, with AI doing more of the heavy lifting.
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