How Clearout Built a Bootstrapped Email Verification SaaS to 20,000 Customers

Who built it, and what they built

Gnanaprakash Rathinam is the founder of Clearout, an email finder and email verification tool based in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. He is a software engineer with over 20 years of experience building software and apps, much of it in early-stage startups where he worked from zero while keeping user needs in mind.

The business panel lists the company as started in March 2019, with 12 employees and one cofounder.

Where the idea came from

Rathinam wanted to build a SaaS product that would ease marketing and sales processes for businesses of all sizes. He found that existing tools were not cost-effective or friendly for non-technical users.

At first, the plan was to combine every digital marketing channel into a single tool that would support smarter decisions. The team abandoned it once they saw it might not be useful or affordable for every kind of marketer and seller. Smaller businesses, for instance, would rather use email marketing than spend blindly on Facebook or Google Ads.

More study pushed the team toward email marketing, which the founder points out has existed since the early 1990s and can deliver an ROI of up to 4400%, higher than any other marketing channel. He viewed email data quality as the issue to tackle, because list quality drives the strongest campaigns.