Marketing Crafted

How a Simple Unsubscribe Tool Used Smart Marketing to Hit $10K/Month

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Leave Me Alone logo

Danielle Johnson & James Ivings

Founder, Leave Me Alone

Follow on X

$10K+

Revenue/mo

Business Type

SaaS

Monetization

Subscription

Founded

2019

Introduction

Leave Me Alone is a tiny tool with a big job: kill your subscription spam without selling your data. It now makes around $10k/month while the founders live on a sailboat.

This is how they did it — and what you can steal.


Spam, a Bus, and a Bad Trade‑Off

Danielle Johnson and James Ivings were full‑time digital nomads from the UK, freelancing as web developers under their agency Squarecat. Six months into a backpacking trip they decided they never wanted to go back to the UK "rat race", so they looked for ways to earn online while traveling.

Danielle Johnson & James Ivings, founders of leavemealone.com

Their inboxes sucked. Tons of newsletters. Tons of marketing emails. Manually unsubscribing was a time sink. They tried existing unsubscribe tools and found the catch: "free" meant those tools were selling user data for marketing.

Messy inbox or give your data away. They didn't like either option. So they decided to build their own service: a privacy‑first unsubscribe tool that would never monetize through data.

The story starts on a long bus ride from Argentina to Bolivia. They opened their laptops on that 18‑hour ride and started designing what became Leave Me Alone.

Great SaaS ideas often come from a "bad trade‑off" you refuse to accept. Here it was "clean inbox vs privacy."


From Idea to Prototype in 7 Days

leavemealone.com landing page

Instead of disappearing for months to code, they did the opposite. They picked a name, threw up a simple landing page, and shared it on Twitter and in maker communities before writing a line of code.

Within a few hours they had 50 potential beta users and a pile of feature ideas. People weren't just interested in the product; they were interested in the story — two nomads building a tool on the road.

They then spent 7 days shipping a bare‑bones prototype:

  • Only supported Gmail.
  • Only showed subscription emails from the last week.
  • Core job: show subscriptions + one‑click unsubscribe.

No extra features. No fancy design. Just the painkiller.

Lessons:

  • Launch a landing page and collect emails before coding.
  • Ship a one‑feature prototype fast and validate demand.
  • Treat your build story as part of the product.

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