Introducing RMail

More than a year ago, Randy Charles Morin launched a user-friendly service called Rmail that lets people receive RSS feeds via e-mail. Today, it has 20,000 users and 50,000 subscriptions, and sending out 30,000 e-mails a day. I did a Q&A with Randy, who’s based in Brampton, Ont., to talk about how RMail’s origins and where it’s going.

What is Rmail?
Rmail is a service that converts RSS to e-mails. When you subscribe to a new RSS feed, next time the feed is updated you’ll receive an email. Actually, Rmail does do a lot more than that, but the majority of users won’t see past the homepage. The homepage has two input boxes, for your email address and the RSS feed, and a Subscribe button.

What problem does it solve?
The biggest problem with RSS is that most users don’t even know what RSS is. Rmail allows those users to subscribe to your blog and get the benefit of RSS without having to understand what RSS is. Others have tried and failed to service this need.

What inspired the idea?
Long ago, I used Bloglet to offer RSS to email services to my readers. Bloglet stopped working reliably a couple years ago and I decided to write my own. My recent users keep telling me they converted from a competitor to Rmail because the competitors service stopped working. So, you can say, I was inspired by the failure of all the other RSS to email solutions.

How many users?
I have 20,000+ users and I’m sending more than 1 million emails per month. Three months ago, I had 5,000 users, but with the recent downfall of a competitor, I’ve been gaining users very quickly.

How is it being marketed?
Word of mouth. I never really considered Rmail a product when I wrote it. It was a solution to my own pain. But in the last three to six months, I’ve been gainging users at an increasing rate as RSS becomes mainstream and other RSS to email services fail to deliver. In fact, I didn’t even consider Rmail worthy of funding until I heard that FeedBlitz got funding for doing nothing less than what Rmail has been doing for a year.

What’s the business model?
The business model is pretty simple, I have a useful service with ads. In the first year, growing from zero to 20,000 users, Rmail generated about US$15,000 in advertising revenue. The website is a shared hosted server that costs me $15/month and the back-end runs on a second hand Windows XP computer in my basement. FeedBlitz claims to have 700,000 users. Let’s do the math. With an average of 10,000 users in the last year, I generated US$15,000. If the advertising revenues increase 70-fold as users increase 70-fold, then I’d be making? I then realized that I’m an idiot for not getting serious about this before.

What are your growth plans?
My current plans is to stumble into some seed financing so I can get some serious momentum behind Rmail. I’d like to get a hosted application server to run the back-end and maybe work on marketing (be nice to Michael Arrington).

Who are Rmail’s competitors.
Rmail’s primary competitors are FeedBlitz and my good friends at FeedBurner (I will crush them).