I start most mornings with the same ritual: swipe, swipe, delete. “Flash Sale”, “Last-Chance Coupon”, “Only 24 Hours”. My thumb works faster than my brain—those messages die before I read the second word. Meanwhile, across the river in Manhattan, a solo founder named Chaz Yoon opens the exact same inbox and hears a different soundtrack: ka-ching… ka-ching.
His site, Milled.com, does one thing almost absurdly simple: capture marketing emails, keep them forever, and let the rest of us search them like Google. Brands send the content for free, shoppers and marketers arrive by the hundreds of thousands, and a paywall quietly turns curiosity into cash. Latest estimates put the haul at $1 million-plus in annual revenue, produced by exactly one employee, no venture money, no office lease, just a stubborn idea and ten years of patience.
1. What is Milled and where does the money come from?
Picture a museum of spam. Milled archives every campaign from more than one hundred thousand retail brands—forty-two million emails and counting—and renders each message as a permanent, SEO-friendly web page. Casual shoppers browse old coupons; growth teams reverse-engineer competitor strategy; agencies buy access so interns can mine subject-line ideas without subscribing to a single list.
Three cash taps keep the lights brighter than Times Square:
- Subscriptions: marketers pay $99 a month (or $299 for a five-seat team) to unlock unlimited history, advanced Boolean search and keyword alerts. Predictable, high-margin SaaS.
- Affiliate links: every archived email still points at a product page. A backend script reroutes the URL through Skimlinks; if someone buys, Milled collects a commission—eternal passive income because promotions never vanish from the database.
- Display ads: roughly 700 000 monthly visitors generate CPM dollars that cover server bills even if not a single subscription closes that day.
It’s a neat triangle: consumer traffic feeds ad and affiliate cash, which subsidises the storage that powers the professional tier, which lures even more brands to send their emails, which gives Google more pages to index, which sends more free traffic. A self-watering plant.
2. Where did the idea come from?
Scroll back to 2012. Yoon managed email campaigns for an e-commerce shop and hated two facts of life:
- a creative team could spend three days on a gorgeous newsletter that vanished from customer inboxes before breakfast;
- competitive research meant subscribing to fifty rival lists and drowning in the noise.
He asked a deceptively simple question: What if an inbox had public memory?—and wrote code instead of a business plan. That single impulse—turning disposable content into evergreen reference—became the DNA of Milled: collect what everyone discards, let time compound the value.
3. How did they achieve it? Three Quiet Phases to 40 Million + Emails
Milled did not blow up overnight; it fermented.
- Phase 1 – Manual Seed: Yoon manually subscribed to “hundreds, then thousands” of brands, piping all mail into a single catch-all inbox. Boring, but critical to fixing the classic “cold-start” problem of zero content.
- Phase 2 – Scripted Shortcuts: After RSI kicked in, he wrote internal tools—little Python jobs to queue new brands, auto-label messages, strip tracking pixels, resolve redirects. Still essentially a one-man sweatshop, but with power tools.
- Phase 3 – Self-Filling Funnel: Four years later he flipped the script: brands could add a unique @milled.com address to their own lists, and Milled would ingest campaigns automatically. Suddenly the customers created the product.
That patience matters. Everyone loves SaaS, nobody loves four years of grunt work before dollar #1. But the upside is a programmatic SEO moat: each email becomes its own long-tail landing page (“Nike Black Friday 2017 free shipping email”) that Google can love forever. More emails → more keywords → more organic traffic → more emails. Flywheel secured.
4. Can an ordinary builder copy this engine? Yes—if you copy the constraints first.
Milled’s public interface is almost boring, which is the point. The leverage hides in four quiet rules.
First, harvest free, high-volume exhaust. Emails are perfect, but the pattern repeats: expired job ads, deleted tweets, abandoned Craigslist listings, patent summaries, AI-generated art prompts. Anything produced daily, left on the curb, and legal to archive is fair game.
Second, deliver value before you hit big data. Ten thousand items can be enough if you answer a painful question today—how much did fintech startups pay junior engineers last winter; which venture firms announced AI rounds this month; what subject lines convert in the home-gym niche. Don’t wait for ten million rows.
Third, automate ingestion before enthusiasm dies. Cron jobs, web-hooks, Zapier, Airbyte—whatever steals the drudge work from your hands. Manual curation scales like human sleep, i.e., poorly.
Fourth, diversify revenue streams early. Blend subscription (recurring), affiliate or API metering (transactional), and ads or data licensing (passive). When one faucet slows, the others keep your runway long enough to iterate.
A concrete illustration: clone the model for job descriptions. LinkedIn wipes listings once a role closes, yet recruiters crave historical salary bands and tech-stack clues. Nightly scrape postings, snapshot the HTML, tag fields, let Google index “Senior Data Engineer at Stripe, 2023”, charge $79/month for archive search, push Coursera affiliate links for required skills, sell banner space to ATS vendors. You just Milled the hiring market.
Modern tooling lowers the barrier: Supabase for storage, Next.js for static render, Cloudflare Workers as proxy redirector, and GPT-4 Vision to auto-tag content. All cheaper than a WeWork hot desk.
5. The bigger lesson: content vs. asset
I keep this sentence on a sticky note above my monitor:
Content is single-use; asset compounds. Content disappears; asset grows. Content needs constant push; asset pulls traffic on autopilot.
Brands treat promo emails like disposable fireworks—bright one night, gone by dawn. Yoon treated them like compost that sprouts money trees. The code matters, but the mindset matters more: scan the everyday noise around you, pick one stream nobody respects, and give it the dignity of structure. Time will do the heavy lifting.
6. A quick farewell
Chinese elders love to say 不怕慢，只怕站—better to crawl than to stand still. Milled crawled for a decade and ended up lapping faster, louder competitors who sprinted, burned cash, and vanished. So next time your inbox groans, pause before you hit delete. The distance between junk and a future revenue engine might be one cron job and a weekend of stubbornness.