This guy built a $1 million business on top of the Gmail API

Every year we get new articles questioning whether “email is dead.” With the proliferation of social media and messaging apps, it seems only natural to ask what will replace a decades-old electronic messaging system that really hasn’t changed much in all the years we’ve used it.

But email has remained resilient, and it’s even experienced a renaissance of sorts lately. In the wake of Facebook’s algorithm changes that are designed to hurt content providers, more and more publishers are launching new email newsletter products. It’s impossible these days to fire up a podcast or watch a YouTube video without encountering an ad for Mailchimp.

And of all the email providers, Gmail is king. The Google-operated service has over 1 billion users and is one of the few major email platforms that is actually continuing to innovate. In 2014, it opened up its API to developers, allowing them to build new products that Gmail users can install.

It was around this time that Ajay Goel was on the lookout for an opportunity to launch a new business. It was while he was looking around for a tool that would send mass emails that he came up with the idea for Gmass, an add-on that allows users to schedule and send mass emails directly from their Gmail accounts.

I interviewed Goel about his long career of building email-based tools and why he doesn’t think email’s going away anytime soon.