The Story Behind Maileroo

It all started at RMIT University where we both were studying Information Technology, thankfully to which in the nature of these degrees there are a lot of team-based practical assignments. So from day one, we were assigned together for our first ever programming project which was to build a gym-based app that would track a user's nutrition and spit out a summary of macros. This was the first ever app we had built together and unknown to us then would drive us to continue working together to this day.

Areeb started his journey in programming back in 2014 where he was building an assortment of websites, apps and cool tools like any new developer would. He would go on to build his own mini social media site, games, captcha tools and so much more helping him to become the full stack developer he is today. Driven by his passion for tech and video games, creating things has always been on Areeb's mind and to this day his itch for building has not slowed down.

Patrick on the other hand, started his journey back in 2016 with the good old Visual Studio, combining his graphics design skills with his programming knowledge to build out apps and websites for fun during his free time. This free time eventually turned into passion projects, and then over the years before university it was building a portfolio of websites for clients. Patrick's passion for design alongside his growing skill of programming helped him drive a career as a front-end developer.

We were in our second year of university at this point and in most cases, you shift subjects and do different things but our subjects across the years remained the same and so we continued to work together on the many projects we had. Even outside of university, we would develop a friendship that ended up becoming one where we would just constantly push each other to become better versions of ourselves in all aspects of work, skills and life in general.

For Patrick, this was the year where he would propel his development skills and push through with his first proper business, providing services to small businesses that needed websites. Building out small tools within CMS environments or custom websites using different languages and frameworks. Just like with anything, the more you do it, the better you get at it and so the itch to build more difficult things came quickly. In the latter part of the year, the business grew into other streams of development whereby more technical apps weren't just being developed but also the UI was being designed alongside this.

Areeb really excelled at this point achieving an incredible high distinction throughout the whole year across all 8 subjects for the year. He was awarded for his incredibly high grades by RMIT University in recognition of his hard work and dedication to his studies.

This is where it felt like putting a puzzle together and things started to click with the picture forming. It was quite clear at this point that Patrick was not fond of backend development where Areeb loved it and I think you could see where this is going right... As the years progressed up until this point, so many projects had been built together and so we decided to trial our efforts at building tools for businesses outside of university.

A truly defining moment for us both as it really reaffirmed our belief that we could build something together without the pressures of university grades being the only motivator. During this year we built many free tools and apps together using so many different platforms and technologies, and many of which used our competitors that we all know of being Mailgun and SendGrid to power their email delivery.

During our freelancing days, the constant deployment of infrastructure and connecting of email systems was what made us understand the real gap in the market for a developer-friendly solution that enabled you to go from sign-up to connecting it and sending emails in minutes. In the early days, this was no more than a thought at the time but by the end of this year we had a very small prototype that we started to deploy and replace within our client projects.

This started out as a simple dashboard with a section displaying connected domains and a basic API endpoint for sending emails. The original prototype was built using PHP with that direct ambition to create a simple system that did everything we needed from the moment we connected a domain to implementing it into clients' platforms.

A year out since our prototype, we actually took to the market and released a very early and private release of Maileroo to our small network of developers and software agencies to use for their projects. This was an amazing moment for us as it really helped us to validate the idea and pursue something that we also had a lot of passion for.

The early adopters were extremely critical of the initial release and as developers we think the amazing thing about getting better at what you do is not to think you know everything but to always be open and receptive to feedback and criticism. This way of thinking is how we drive ourselves even to this day, and during this time we wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

It was a crazy time during the start as Maileroo had launched, the name was nothing to anyone, we were just two developers with a passion to build an email delivery system that could help people and businesses send critical communications. During these days we probably went through 1,000+ different iterations of development, design, layouts and configurations to get it to a level where there was some level of respect from developers.