Interview with Unroll.Me CEO and Founder Josh Rosenwald

Unroll.me is a service that will clean up your email inbox from hundreds of newsletters you’re currently subscribed to. We wrote about Unroll.me before, but today we are presenting an interview with Josh Rosenwald, CEO and founder. He went to school, worked a couple of jobs and launched a failed startup. After that, he did what a lot of great businessmen did before him: he dropped out of college to build his job, Unroll.me.

As a founder, what gave you the idea for Unroll.me?

I was working with an old friend of mine on creating a startup. We were sending each other a whole bunch of ideas back and forth, but things started getting lost in the email shuffle. Ideas would be sandwiched somewhere between the dozens of daily deals and social updates we would get. We realized we couldn’t move forward building something big until we fixed the most obvious problem starring us right in the face, email overload.

How did you gather your team?

At first I found a friend who I thought would be someone great to work with and we partnered up. Then he and I each brought another friend to the team to build and launch the product. Once things got into full swing, we started looking for outside developers. As we started growing and people realized we were building something meaningful, the search got a whole lot easier. We now receive a ton of interest from highly qualified candidates even when we don’t have any openings.

Unroll.me says it will simplify your inbox. How does it actually work?

We all get a ton of emails. Updates from social media, daily deals, and offers from brands. They can overwhelm us pretty quickly. Most sites you visit collect your email and keep marketing to you, making your inbox a mess. You have almost no control. Unroll.me allows you to unsubscribe from the emails you no longer want to receive in just one single click.

Then you can combine the newsletters you want to receive into a single daily email from Unroll.me. This way, you don’t receive dozens of offers a day in your inbox. You get one email, from Unroll.me with all of your emails inside. This saves users a ton of time and they can get back to having a pretty clean inbox in no time.

Any plans to upgrade the service?

Yup. We have some new features coming out soon. We don’t want to spoil any surprises yet, so check out Unroll.me, signup, and stay tuned. (author’s note: between conducting this interview and publishing it, it was revealed that Unroll.me added AOL and iCloud support, on top of its support for Gmail and Yahoo).

In the end, what advice would you give to someone who is starting a startup?

You better be passionate about what you are doing. Creating a startup is test of character and composure. There are a ton of ups and downs you’ll have to weather, so make sure you have a great team and support system. Most importantly though, just jump in. The only accurate barometer for an idea is to build your product and then sink or swim. Bring a life jacket just in case.

Hope you have enjoyed reading this interview, and don’t forget to check out Unroll.me. Because, who doesn’t want uncluttered and clean inbox?