Wordzen Inc.
Location: Mequon
Founder: Ajay Goel
Founded: 2015
Service: Email drafting and marketing tools
Websites: wordzen.com, gmass.co
Employees: One
Goal: Reach 15,000 paying customers by end of 2019
Experience: Goel previously founded email marketing firm JangoMail, which had grown to $6 million in sales when he sold it to a private equity group in 2013.
The No. 1 Sales & CRM tool on Google’s G Suite Marketplace isn’t a Silicon Valley tech platform like Salesforce or HubSpot. It’s an email marketing tool called GMass created by Mequon company Wordzen Inc.
With more than 100,000 users and an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars, the email marketing platform built by developer Ajay Goel has taken off.
Credit Lila Aryan
GMass is a program that allows users to mail merge and send mass emails using Gmail, and Goel said even Google’s own employees use it.
“We have customers at almost every major tech company,” he said. “I didn’t call them; they found me.”
Unlike some of its competitors, GMass can be used from within the Gmail interface, which is familiar to many people already, without logging in to and learning another platform.
“We compete with a lot of well-funded companies from Silicon Valley and around the world,” he said. “My company is not funded at all. I bootstrapped it from the beginning.”
That was made possible by Goel’s previous entrepreneurial success. He built Dayton, Ohio-based email marketing platform JangoMail, which he grew to 12 employees and $6 million in annual sales before selling it to a private equity group in 2013 for an undisclosed price.
Goel launched a new company, Wordzen Inc., in 2015, and it now has two products: GMass and Wordzen, an email composition tool. He’s the sole full-time employee, and works with a number of remote freelancers.
Wordzen was the company’s first product. It provides human editors to review an email for sentence structure, organizational style, tone, voice and grammar. Editors are also available to write an email for a user who has spoken the message into his or her phone.
But GMass has gained more traction, mainly because almost every company or organization is doing some type of email marketing, he said.
“It’s everything from a teacher using it to keep in touch with parents of their students, to salespeople at software companies using it for cold prospecting and setting up demos of their software,” Goel said.
GMass has reached about $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue, and Goel is aiming to reach 15,000 paying customers and hire another employee by the end of the year.
