• Jordan Gaston and David Emelianov cofounded an inbox cleaner app while keeping their full-time jobs.
• They sold the company at the end of 2025 for over $4 million.
• AI helped the cofounders save time and money on app development and selling the business.

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with David Emelianov, a 32-year-old software engineer and entrepreneur, based in the Bay Area, and Jordan Gaston, a 31-year-old software engineer and entrepreneur based in Austin. Their words have been edited for length and clarity.

David Emelianov: Jordan and I met years ago in elementary school. We weren't super close friends, but then we reconnected in 2017. We were both in Seattle, I was working at Microsoft at the time, and he was at Amazon.

Jordan Gaston: A mutual friend of ours put David and me back in touch. I worked at Amazon until COVID. Then I decided to move to a smaller startup, where I worked for four and a half years.

About a year ago, I made the jump to my current employer, which is a large FinTech company. Between working at Amazon and the smaller startup, I had about two months off, and that's when the idea for our app came about.

Emelianov: After COVID started and everyone at Microsoft went remote, I decided to leave my job. I moved to Miami and worked full-time on a previous startup I had with some college friends. Then I moved back to Seattle and got my next full-time role at a tech company. After that, I moved to the Bay Area and have been here for two and a half years, where I work full-time at a large gaming company.

Jordan and I had been working together on an inbox cleaner app since 2020, and when we started looking into selling the app last year, we were at $232,000 in monthly recurring revenue. At the end of last year, we sold the app, and did it all while keeping our full-time jobs.

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We were both moving when we decided to work on the app together

Gaston: It was 2020, and my mom had been complaining about cleaning out her email inbox. That's when I realized I could probably build something that would help solve this problem.

David and I had been roommates at the time and were both about to move away. I showed him a demo and explained what I was working on. He quickly started working on top of what I built, and then we decided to work together on this project.

Emelianov: It didn't even feel like a company when we first were working on it. It was just like "Oh, why don't we build this little Chrome extension thing that adds an unsubscribe button to your emails? I would want that in my inbox."

Gaston: It took us about three to four months to build the first version we felt happy with.

After we built that, we posted it on a side project subreddit to see what people thought, and the post got a lot of traction. That planted the seed for turning this into a real business.

We took a break from working on the app, and then came back

Emelianov: We kept posting on Reddit and would get some attention, but it wasn't a sustained growth funnel, so we stepped away from the business from May to September 2021. On a visit to see Jordan that fall, we started talking about the app and realized we wanted to try this again.

Gaston: Once we picked it back up, we set up subscriptions to see if anyone would pay for this service, and then started running web ads.

Emelianov: We realized that because we were a Chrome extension, we could only run ads to people on their computer, not mobile. So, we built a mobile app for iOS and Android. When we launched that mobile app in 2023, it enabled us to run Facebook and Instagram ads.

That was the last big thing we did, and then it became less about building new product features and more about finding out how to grow and build a good business for us.

The company was doing well, but we didn't quit our day jobs

Gaston: I usually spent four to eight hours a day on the weekend working on the app, and then if I had time at night during the week. It added up to about 20 hours a week.

When we started building the app, I was still pretty early in my career and had so much to learn. I was getting a lot out of my day job in terms of personal growth, so I was really excited about it and didn't want to quit.

Emelianov: I don't think it's always the right trade-off to quit an awesome tech job with stability and a retirement plan for something like this. The opportunities we saw for the business were more focused on our marketing and distribution strategy. Those aren't things we needed to spend 40 hours a week on.

We were strategic about setting up some stuff on the weekend, and then over the workweek, we let the ads run. The next weekend, we could look at the results, learn from them, tweak them, and repeat.

We also needed to fund the ads. We didn't want to go out and raise money at the beginning because the business outcome we need is fundamentally different if we had investors. Keeping cushy tech jobs, especially ones we liked, allowed us to have the best of both worlds.

AI helped us with time management

Emelianov: The reason we were able to build this business on the side without being able to spend a lot of time on it was that we'd only work on features or improvements if we thought that they would realistically change the amount of money that we could make in the short term.

We were probably a little too quick to trust AI to write our code, but it worked out.

When we were building the mobile app, we did it quickly because we took the files from our web app, copied them into ChatGPT, and were like, "Hey, this web app is written in ReactJS. Can you rewrite it in React Native, please?" We never hired a UI designer either. That was just us and AI.

Gaston: We were also able to automate our customer support system. I think it took us about two months to build the automated system.

We trained the AI on all of our help center information, and we would only step in on these customer service requests if the AI transferred the case to David and me. We were constantly correcting inaccuracies with that system early on, though it improved over time.

We decided to sell our business, and AI helped us navigate it

Gaston: We both have children now, and wanted to capture some of the value that we've generated. We talked to some brokers to see if there was a market for what we've built and how much we would get for it.

When we were selling the business, we used AI to do some simulations so we could understand what a fair market value for the business was.

We also saved a ton of time and money on lawyers because of AI. We would come in with specific questions and informed opinions rather than starting from scratch with a lawyer, where he's explaining how something works, and then we're asking follow-up questions.

Emelianov: Jordan and I have always been pretty confident in our ability to figure things out, and AI makes it easier for us to do that now.

Now that we've sold Trimbox, we're thinking about what comes next. When we have more time, we want to take what we learned and build more apps, only faster and with AI doing more of the heavy lifting.

Do you have a similar story to share? If so, please reach out to the reporter at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.