Home / Founders / Dmitri Leonov
Leonov helped turn a small email filter into a long-running subscription business on one rule: users should never have to learn anything new to get a quieter inbox.
Dmitri Leonov is a co-founder of SaneBox, an email management service that learns which messages matter to each user and moves everything else out of the inbox. He came to it from search advertising, after starting his career in investment banking and spending seven years at Overture, the paid-search company Yahoo acquired.
Working in Search Advertising at Overture
At Overture and then Yahoo he worked on marketing and sales strategy and business development, and later built the partnership channel and international markets, as he told Mixergy. Search advertising taught him to think about intent, meaning what people want to do or buy next.
Shutting Down His First Startup in 2010
When he left the corporate world in 2010, his first idea was a social product about what people planned to do, in contrast with Twitter and Facebook, which asked what people were doing right now. It lasted about a year. He shut it down after concluding it was "a solution for a problem that didn't exist."
Joining Stuart Roseman at SaneBox
He was building an email tool with a friend when someone sent him a link to SaneBox, which did everything his tool was meant to do, only better, he told PCMag. He joined Stuart Roseman's team while the product was still in alpha and took on nearly everything outside engineering, from business development to marketing.
The team set out principles for the product: the customer should not have to do or learn anything, it had to work everywhere people check email, be as secure as possible, get better over time, and be worth paying for, Leonov told Ness Labs. Early users were CEOs, investors and entrepreneurs who found it on Twitter and told others, so word of mouth drove the first years of growth.
SaneBox sorts mail from behavior and never reads the text of an email. It watches which messages a user opens, which ones they answer and how long they have corresponded with a sender, and it learns from any message the user moves, Leonov told InsiderApps. "It's really difficult for the brain to determine the difference between a signal and a noise," he said.
Advising Transformative Technology Projects
Beyond SaneBox, Leonov advises and invests in projects he groups under transformative technology, according to his Transformative Tech profile. He has helped bring several wellness products to market, starting with Taopatch.
