Making $5M Per Year with a Free Marketing Platform with Aurelian Amacker: An EOFire Classic from 2022

When a Product Is Born from Frustration

There are entrepreneurs who design solutions from spreadsheets and focus groups, and there are those who build because the existing tools made them grind their teeth. Aurelien Amaker belongs to the latter tribe. His journey began not as a grand plan to found software, but as a restless dissatisfaction with the tooling available to course creators in the early 2010s. What started as a modest online-course business teaching English in the French market morphed into a full-stack ambition: build a platform that simply does what practitioners need, without the clutter, cost, or confusion.

The trouble with too many options

Aurelien's early encounters with landing-page builders, integrations that didn't support PayPal, and platforms that charged hundreds yet under-delivered taught him a lesson many founders learn only the hard way: more features often mean more friction. After a failed attempt that cost him time and money, he regrouped, found the right developers, and launched a new product in 2018 that eventually became Systeme.io. The premise was crisp: offer a pragmatic, tightly focused toolset that removes the busywork of stitching services together.

Simplicity as a competitive advantage

Rather than chasing a checklist of every conceivable widget and toggle, the product vision prioritized clarity. Each feature survived a question: does this materially affect a creator's top line? If not, it stayed off the roadmap. That intentional restraint—less shiny novelty, more practical utility—allowed Systeme.io to be both easier to use and powerful enough to run its founder's own business: pulling 60,000 new opt-ins per month and generating hundreds of thousands in revenue.

Why an "all-in-one" can beat best-of-breed

The rhythm of entrepreneurship rewards speed and focus. Aurelien argues that while theory might celebrate “the best tool for each task,” reality punishes fragmentation—especially for founders with limited time and capital. Integrations break, updates conflict, and the user experience fractures across dashboards and support channels. A single platform that covers funnels, email, memberships, and payments can accelerate momentum simply by being consistent and predictable.

• Speed: Launch faster without wiring together multiple vendors.
• Clarity: One interface, fewer settings to parse.
• Support: A single support team means faster, coherent answers.

Offer over ornamentation

There’s an old marketing adage Aurelien repeats: offer trumps marketing, and marketing trumps design. In practice that translates into an obsession with the pricing model and what users receive immediately. Systeme.io’s much-discussed free plan—initially set at a lower threshold and then expanded to 2,000 contacts after internal debate—became a magnetic entry point. The startup tier, priced at $27 per month, intentionally bundles generous contact limits and unlimited emails to remove early-stage constraints for creators.

Customer stories that validate the thesis

Numbers and testimonials illustrate the approach. Systeme.io grew to tens of thousands of paying customers and hundreds of thousands of free users by leaning on accessibility and service. Aurelien recounts a pair of young French entrepreneurs who scaled to a million in annual revenue, then pivoted into crypto, raising five million for a token launch while maintaining steady course-income. He also points to affiliates and creators across different geographies who have built audiences and businesses using the same foundation.

Support as brand promise

Beyond product features, the company doubled down on customer care: responses within one to two hours, seven days a week. Fast, human support becomes not just a retention tool but a differentiator in markets where enterprises often shrug when customers stumble. For many small creators, that responsiveness is the difference between midnight panic and a solved campaign.

The contrarian view on masterminds and mentorship

Perhaps the most arrestsing moment in Aurelien’s story is his candid challenge to conventional wisdom around masterminds. Far from dismissing mentorship outright, he describes how being in a high-profile mastermind coincided with stagnation in his own metrics—prompting him to leave and find a path better aligned to his instincts. It’s a reminder that communities and cohorts can be accelerants for some and distractions for others; the value of communal learning depends on fit, not fame.

Scaling without losing focus

Growth, for Aurelien, is the byproduct of relentless refinement of an offer and the discipline to refuse feature creep. As competitive as the all-in-one space has become, the playbook centers on delivering a coherent product experience, transparent pricing, and over-delivering to early users. That calculus—simplicity, generous onboarding, and rapid support—helps explain the momentum Systeme.io has maintained.

A reflective close

There’s a subtle cultural lesson in this founder’s arc: the entrepreneurial impulse to fix what frustrates you can yield a product whose distinction is not how novel it is, but how useful. The clean, practical solution often outlives the flashiest innovation. In a market crowded with choices, the quiet promise of clarity—paired with an offer that actually lets creators work without wrestling software—might be the rarest, most valuable advantage of all.