While many dream of designing an app that will sell for millions, one man had this dream fulfilled when his app was purchased to the tune of $100 million before it was even widely available to the public, just one month after its inception.
Gentry Underwood sold his app, Mailbox, to Dropbox for $100 million when the app was only available via mailing list at the time.
Underwood’s app allows users to clear their email inboxes much quicker and more efficiently on their smartphones than with traditional methods.
By maximizing the ability of email on smartphones, he was able to grab the attention of major companies, including Dropbox.
“It’s very natural when a new platform comes along to expect behavior to work as it did in the old platform, which means, for a smartphone, take a desktop email client and jam it down into the mobile device, because that’s all you know,” he said to Wired.”You don’t know how people’s behavior is going to be different; you’ve never seen it before.”
With people opting to use their cell phones to access their email at a much higher rate than with desktops and laptops as business takes people on the go, Mailbox has become an innovation many have come to appreciate.
Mailbox isn’t an email client itself, but rather a more organized inbox. The service hasn’t been built independently on a large scale because this sort of inbox requires a massive investment, such as the one provided by Dropbox.

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