Martin Stoyanov

He is from Novi Pazar, a town near Shumen in northeastern Bulgaria, and studied at the Vocational School of Construction, Architecture and Geodesy in Shumen. Bulgarian National Radio’s English-language article writes that he got his first computer at the age of six and began programming at 11 without taking computer science or English courses.⁠[1]

He recalled that he started coding as a web developer at 11 and first built hobby projects, among them a music website and a search platform covering social networking, movie reviews, tourism, recipes and online games; the work he was proudest of was a system for organizing video-game sports matches, which Bulgaria’s Electronic Sports League used for the final five matches of all sorts of games. After about three years of building websites he moved to mobile apps, which sounded exciting to him and which not many people were making, and released two apps, a newsreader and a task manager, each of which reached about 100,000 users. Bulgarian National Radio’s article also writes that he had developed two mobile apps about a year and a half before it was published.⁠[2][1]

He said that what helped him most was self-initiative and the wish to learn on his own: nobody really taught him anything besides the internet; the biggest support he got was access to all the resources he needed to learn on his own, and all he needed was a computer, some English lessons and textbooks, which he said he owed to his parents. Speaking about his life in Bulgarian National Radio’s article, he admitted: “My life is my family and my company.”⁠[2][1]

The Founder to Founder newsletter writes that he started Emailio in 2013 after dropping out of high school and that his co-founder Teo joined a few months after they began working together; in his interview with Trending Topics he also said that he started Emailio in 2013 and had been running it ever since.⁠[3][2]

Bulgarian National Radio’s English-language article writes that he co-founded the start-up Magine with Teodosiy Teodosiev, a 30-year-old entrepreneur from Varna who had organized a program for gifted children in Varna a few years earlier and for whom Magine was a fourth business. He recalled that the two had worked together on several projects and then took part in Startup Weekend in Varna, where teams have 54 hours to build a business, each idea is pitched in one minute and the audience votes. They won, and three days later they received an investment from the Bulgarian venture fund Eleven under the European JEREMIE initiative, after which they entered Eleven’s three-month program. The article calls him the youngest founder of a start-up backed by a prestigious venture capital fund.⁠[1]

In the article he described an iPhone app that organizes and refines email while the user travels to work or school: users download it from the Apple store, enter a username and password and begin organizing their mail; they can preview a message, tell the app that the task needs to be done today and file the message in a dedicated folder, with everything synchronized with the computer at home.⁠[1]

Bulgarian National Radio’s English-language article writes that the two then applied to an American investment fund, were invited to an interview in Silicon Valley on November 5 and were approved for investment the same day; the fund was Y Combinator and the investment was $100,000. They were to travel to Silicon Valley on December 26 for the program, which ran from January to March and ended with a Demo Day before 500 of the best investors, and he and Teodosiy Teodosiev expected to stay there and build their business to a much higher level. The article gives his age as only 17 and says his dream was to build a company that could leave a mark on the world and make people’s lives better and easier.⁠[1]

Y Combinator’s company page lists Emailio in the Winter 2014 batch, with Martin Stoyanov and Teo Teodosiev as its founders. Founder to Founder writes that he got in at 16 and was the youngest founder to have been admitted at the time; in a question of its interview, Trending Topics calls him the youngest founder to graduate from Y Combinator.⁠[4][3][2]

He said that Y Combinator was the reason Emailio still existed: it gave the team confidence and credibility and allowed it to move from Bulgaria to Silicon Valley, where its potential target users were. The biggest lesson, he said, was to focus on just one user and make something that a few people love: all Paul Graham wanted from them was an email app for one person, focused on the most demanding users like the investor Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry, who gets hundreds of emails a day and knew all the available alternatives. Founder to Founder also writes that the team began by building an email app for a single user, Sam Altman; in Emailio’s 2020 launch post on Product HuntProduct HuntProduct Hunt is a product-discovery and launch community founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013 and operated by Product Hunt, Inc. Makers present new products, while users vote, comment and review them and discover tools through categories, forums and AI search. AngelList announced its acquisition in 2016; as of November 2026, its official website lists Rajiv Ayyangar as CEO.Open the full entry he wrote that the team had built email apps for a single user, Sam Altman, from 2014.⁠[2][3][5]

On June 5, 2014, he was selected as one of that year’s 20 Thiel Fellows, each of whom received $100,000 over two years to launch their business ideas and had to drop out of college. The list of fellows gives him as 17 and from Novi Pazar, Bulgaria, and says that he was writing software to make it more efficient to read and manage email on the go.⁠[6]

He recalled that the team first tried to make email very fast; in the summer of 2014 they met the behavioral economist Dan ArielyDan ArielyDan Ariely is a behavioral economist and psychologist, a professor at Duke University who studies how people systematically depart from rational decision-making and how they behave dishonestly, and the author of several bestsellers including Predictably Irrational. A 2012 paper he co-authored was retracted in 2021 after Data Colada concluded that its data had been fabricated, and other studies of his have since been questioned over the authenticity of their data.Open the full entry, who helped them see that email itself was the problem, since constant notifications interrupt work, and gave them the vision that phones can become the perfect habit-changing device. He said the team realized that in terms of development Gmail had all the necessary functions while other email clients had not innovated for five to ten years, and that for him personally and for many people entering the workforce email was a constant source of stress. He said: “we wanted to put our little brick in that digital wellbeing movement.”⁠[2]

Founder to Founder writes that Dan Ariely is a founding member of Emailio; in the article he said the team had built an email app just for Dan Ariely, who was so happy with it that he wanted to join the team. In the Product Hunt launch post he wrote that the team had researched email problems with Dan Ariely’s behavioral research lab at Duke University.⁠[3][5]

In August 2020 Emailio launched on Product Hunt with the tagline “A new take on email with a focus on wellness,” listing Martin Stoyanov, Jerry Huang and Ivan Nikolow among its makers. In the first comment on the launch post he introduced Emailio as an email client for building healthy habits and said the team had worked on email for seven years; the product’s wellness system gives insights and nudges such as challenges and streaks, power users can organize email with tasks, notes, events and files and set custom swipes and rules, and all data stays on the device.⁠[5][7]

His Product Hunt profile reads “Co-founder @ Emailio” and lists two products he made: Filtr (December 2016, tagline “Get your email sorted”) and Emailio (August 2020).⁠[7]

In the Founder to Founder newsletter of September 20, 2020, Frederick Daso introduced him as the co-founder and CEO of Emailio. The article writes that Emailio tracks four wellness goals and uses gamification and behavioral science to help users spend less time on email, receive fewer emails and suffer fewer interruptions; the team has a mixed background, with members who have worked at AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry, who have built electric cars from scratch and who are Thiel Fellows. Starting from a figure of 5.5 billion email accounts worldwide, the article says Emailio aims to win 0.5% of them, about 27.5 million users, at $80 a year, for a target annual recurring revenue of more than $2 billion.⁠[3]

The article writes that early on the team struggled to stand apart from other email clients and took more than five years to find its niche; he believes the team succeeded in creating email experiences that a few people love. His advice to early-stage founders: start a company only if you love the work and want to do it for ten years or more, not because it seems cool, since you may have to sacrifice wages, family time and other opportunities for a long time; and once you are a founder, look after your mental and physical health and never put the startup ahead of your relationships.⁠[3]

Trending Topics published its interview with him on October 26, 2020, when he was 23. He described Emailio as an email client for iPhone, iPad and Mac that uses behavioral science and gamification to build healthy email habits, with wellness courses, challenges and goal tracking, and that tracks four goals: reaching inbox zero, spending less time on email each day, picking up email less often and decluttering the inbox; he had just finished a swipe feature that lets users create custom swipes for many kinds of actions.⁠[2]

He said Emailio used a subscription model at $8 a month in order to build a sustainable product that respects privacy and keeps improving; he considered paying users’ feedback to be of higher quality, and said the app gives users at least several hours back every week. The team was kept lean, with four co-founders, one designer and one developer and no plans to hire; its clients were mainly in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, with international expansion planned after release, and it had not yet started fundraising, concentrating on the team and the product first.⁠[2]

He recalled that the early days were lonelier than he had expected; having started so young, he knew only how to build apps and lacked skills in managing people, communicating clearly and raising money, and he made many mistakes while learning. He said his measure of success was having customers who would “come to my door” to talk him out of shutting everything down.⁠[2]

Y Combinator: Official website: https://www.ycombinator.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]