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This is a draft. The company submits the real form. Comment anywhere with Hypothesis: tell me what to sharpen, cut, or say differently. Each heading below is the exact question from the live form, and under it is the drafted answer.
Eligibility is confirmed: Review My Emails is run by a UK company registered at Companies House and incorporated in 2023, based in the North West of England, so it clears the "incorporated on or after 1 January 2021" rule.
Q1. What is the name of your business?
Review My Emails
Q2. Website URL
https://reviewmyemails.com
Q3. Contact email
ahoy@reviewmyemails.com
Q4. Social media
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/yannatorry (other channels added on submission if in use)
Q5. Year registered with Companies House
2023
Q7. Region
North West England
Q8. Sector
Tech (software provider). Comment if you would rather be judged as Marketing (agency).
Q9. What was your lightbulb moment, when did you know you had to start your business?
It crept up on me over years rather than arriving in a flash. I had learned deliverability the hard way, starting out at Cakemail and then through client work and the Email Geeks community, the place where the people who keep the world's email flowing actually talk to each other. Again and again I met founders and marketers whose businesses ran on email and could not understand why their messages were vanishing. They were not careless, they had simply never been shown the real rules. What reached them instead was marketing: sending platforms promising unlimited lists and unlimited sends, warm-up and outreach tools selling shortcuts, and the easy assumption that email must be simple because everyone uses it. The people who did know the rules mostly kept them inside the community, some for sound security reasons and some because it has always been a closed club. The moment it clicked was realising that the people who needed the answers most were the ones least able to find them, let alone pay for them. This was not my first company, I had built and sold a business before, so I knew what starting from nothing takes. I also knew what had always worked for me: show real value and real results, and everyone becomes a client. People told me I was too nice for business, but being nice and valuable at the same time works remarkably well, and I love teaching. So I built a company that fixes the problem for the people who can pay us and hands the knowledge itself, free, to everyone who cannot.
Q10. What problem were you trying to solve?
The problem has two halves that feed each other. Email is where most businesses make their money, and it is the hardest channel to get right, because whether a message lands in the inbox or in spam depends on things the sender never sees. On top of that, most senders only ever learn about email from their own sending platform's sales pitch, while the real know-how is wrapped in jargon and sold at consultant rates. So the businesses with the least to spend get the least help, and keep paying for a problem nobody has explained to them. People have called email dead for years, and it refuses to die. Tell a business it cannot send a single email over Black Friday and watch the panic. Yet that energy almost never turns into budget, attention or learning. Worse, most senders think they are fine when they are not. Here are three things nobody tells them. One: about one in five addresses on your list goes bad every year, and many of them never bounce. They just sit there, and you keep paying to email people who are gone. Two: Gmail never tells your email tool who complained, Apple tells nobody anything, and since June 2026 Microsoft hides who complained too. If most of your list uses those three, the "almost nobody complained" on your dashboard may simply mean nobody told you. Three: email authentication, the identity check the big mailbox providers now demand from bulk senders, has existed for more than twenty years, yet more than half of the world's top email domains are still missing a key piece of it. And the ones who have it often expect it to get them into the inbox. It will not. It proves who you are, not that anyone wants your email. Email is not broken. People were taught it backwards. We set out to close both halves at once: do the fix properly for the customers who hire us, and make the knowledge behind it free and readable for everyone else, so that reaching your own customers stops being an expensive secret.
Q11. What was your biggest challenge when starting the business? How did you overcome it?
Earning trust with no money to buy it. Deliverability is a hard field to begin with. We usually arrive after the damage is done, even though we are built to prevent it, and often after people have been burned by advice that was simply false. A new name means nothing in that world, and we were fully self-funded with no marketing budget to shout over the noise. Our answer was to give value away before asking for anything back. We spent five years writing the Email Almanac, a free library of plain-English answers to the questions people usually pay to have answered, opened a free Email SOS Hotline for anyone stuck with a deliverability emergency, and released free tools for checking an email setup. People met us through the free help and saw what we actually do: real value, more money for them, no snake oil, just patience, understanding and results without disrupting their business. Then they came to us when they needed the paid work done. It helps to work in a field where you can genuinely help everyone you talk to, and nobody leaves worse off than they arrived. The second challenge was turning what began as a hands-on, done-for-you service into a self-serve product a stranger can trust without a sales call, and that app is live: anyone can sign up and have their first 1,000 addresses cleaned free. Being bootstrapped forced both disciplines on us, and both turned out to be the strategy rather than a constraint.
Q12. Key clients, investors, and partnerships
Investors: none, by choice. We are fully bootstrapped and have never taken outside money, so the business answers to its customers (and to my crazy ideas) rather than to a cap table. Track record: we have worked with hundreds of consulting clients, cleaned more than 8,000 email lists (a large share of them for free), and helped more than 1,000 people over the last 8+ years through the free hotline and free advice. Recognition: the founder and the business have been recognised with the Litmus Coach Award (2020) and the Marketing 2.0 Best Business Award (2022), were finalists in Lenovo Twinning (2026), and the founder was named in the MARsum Top 100 Marketing and Advertising Leaders (2020 to 2021). Partnerships: we know nobody grows alone, so anyone who brings us a customer earns 15% of every credit purchase that customer makes, for as long as they stay. We are known as one of the best in deliverability consulting, and now we want to be more than the list validator people trust. We want the word email to make people think of us, because they know we are there to guide them. Real value is what turns customers into people who cannot stop referring us. We are also active, known contributors in the Email Geeks community, which is where the deliverability field actually lives, and our reach is already international, with clients in the UK, the US, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, Greece, Brazil and Vietnam.
Q13. What achievement were you most proud of in the last financial year?
Taking the Email Almanac to 4,000+ published answers while the business stayed fully self-funded and paid its own way. That is the one I could not stop talking about, because it is the whole mission made real. The subject is one people are normally charged a lot to understand, and it is usually explained in ways designed to sell them someone's software rather than give them real advice. We gave it away in plain English instead, and it paid for itself. Building it did not slow the company down, it grew it, which is the proof I most wanted that generosity and a healthy business are not opposites. Now we are turning all of it into videos, so the same answers reach the people who would rather watch than read.
Q14. Summarise your business in one sentence.
Review My Emails tells businesses not just whether an email address is real but whether they should send to it, so their emails reach real people and keep making them money, and gives the expert knowledge behind it away free through the Email Almanac, a free Email SOS Hotline and free tools.
Q15. Who is your target audience?
Our paying customers are businesses whose revenue rides on email reaching real people: marketers, agencies running campaigns for their own clients, and small and mid-sized companies that cannot afford to have their messages land in spam. Our best fit is a company of roughly 50 to 500 people with a list in the tens or hundreds of thousands, big enough that one bad send costs real money. Around that sits a much larger audience that the free layer is built for, anyone anywhere who searches for a straight answer about email or deliverability, from a solo founder sending their first newsletter to an in-house marketing team troubleshooting a sudden drop. Many of today's customers started as someone we simply helped for free, which is the audience funnel working exactly as we designed it.
Q16. What makes you stand out from rivals?
Almost every list checker answers one question: does this address exist? We answer the one that actually matters, should you send to it, because an address can be perfectly real and still quietly damage your reputation. Every address gets a clear verdict, the reason in plain English and what to do next. Bulk checkers are cheaper, agencies cost many times more, and we are the one that tells you what to do. The second difference is generosity. Most of the deliverability industry treats its knowledge as the product and puts a price on it. We do the opposite: the Email Almanac, the free Email SOS Hotline and the free tools are open to anyone, no account and no fee, and we make our living from doing the work well, not from gatekeeping the answers. Three things let us hold that line. We are bootstrapped and independent, so there is no investor pushing us to move the free layer behind a paywall. The expertise is founder-led and earned in the field rather than bought in, so the advice is trusted. And the team is small, fully remote and genuinely international, which keeps us lean enough to give a great deal away and still be a real business. Rivals compete on ad spend and lock-in. We might not have a million to spend on Google Ads, but we have mastered building one-to-one connections at scale, through community, real value and proof we build in public. Too many email companies do not even have a real deliverability specialist, which is like sending a car mechanic to fix a spaceship. As mailbox providers lean ever more on machine-learning filters, email only gets harder, and in a field this full of jargon and broken promises, trust, plain speaking and generosity are very hard things to copy.
Q17. Where do you see your business in five years' time?
Our five-year goal is simple: when a business has a question about email, Review My Emails is the first name it thinks of, before its sending platform. Three things get us there, all growing together. The self-serve app becomes the first place a business turns the moment its email stops reaching people, cleaning and diagnosis that used to need a consultant, now a few clicks anyone can afford. The Email Almanac becomes the reference the whole field points to, the Wikipedia of everything email. And Shipshape, our education platform coming soon, teaches the next generation of senders how to get it right from the start, so we are preventing the problem, not only fixing it. Around that we will release free tools businesses can install themselves to stay in control of their own data and their customers' data, such as DMARC monitoring and deliverability dashboards, which we build, update and look after. People will build on top of our free tech stack, and that carries us from the engineers who install it up to the marketing and sales teams who rely on it. We want to be meaningfully bigger and still bootstrapped-minded, serving more markets in more languages, with the free layer staying permanently free. Our definition of growth is simple: more people reaching the inbox, not more of the knowledge moved behind a paywall.
Q18. Has your business used or integrated Generative AI into your core product or daily operations?
Yes, for marketing and operations, never for our expertise. The deliverability knowledge is ours. The Email Almanac is written by hand, our posts are written by hand, and we know what people need to hear and how to explain complex things simply. We would not hand that to AI anyway, because on email it too often repeats the same myths we spend our days correcting. Where AI earns its place is everything around the expertise: design, scheduling and posting on social media, organising the work, analysing results, and getting search basics like meta descriptions right. A bootstrapped team can only buy so much reach, so AI lets me pair my own deep expertise with the skills a small company would otherwise have to hire in. Our core product, the verdicts on an email list and the checks on an email setup, runs on our own data and rules, not on generative AI, so customers get consistent, explainable results.
Q19. One piece of advice to the UK Chancellor to better support early-stage businesses
Build one website where founders can actually find and reach every form of government support, from grants and funding to investment schemes and services, in plain language. Today that information is scattered and hard to trust, so the businesses that would gain the most give up looking. Small businesses that succeed put money and help straight back into their own communities, so making support easy to reach pays for itself. And widen the routes into skilled work, so more people can learn valuable skills on the job and not only through university.
The founder is Yanna-Torry Aspraki. The remaining personal fields on the form (co-founder names, age, ethnicity, gender, ownership, employee counts) are completed by YT privately on submission and are not shown on this public page.
Q28. How have you funded your business?
Bootstrapped (self-funded)
Q31. Social Impact, DEI and Sustainability
We would like to be considered for the Social Impact and DEI awards.
Social impact: our whole free layer exists to level a playing field that money usually tilts. The Email Almanac, the free Email SOS Hotline and the free tools are open to anyone, on a subject most people are otherwise charged a lot to understand, and we keep them free on purpose even though they cost us to run. The Email Almanac alone holds more than 4,000 free answers, alongside free checkers for DMARC, SPF, blocklists and email headers. The clearest measure is who it reaches: we have helped more than 1,000 people over the last 8+ years, many of them entirely for free, including small operators who could never have afforded expert help. Shipshape, our free email education platform, is coming soon to widen that reach again.
Diversity, equity and inclusion: we are woman-founded, fully remote and unusually international, and that is by design, not by accident. The team is six people, all self-employed and investing their own time in the business rather than sitting on a payroll. It spans six nationalities and several languages, and includes women and immigrants in leading roles, not only supporting ones. We hire on talent wherever it lives, which means opportunity goes to people who are often overlooked by companies that only recruit within one city. Inclusion for us is two-sided: an inclusive team on the inside, and, on the outside, knowledge given free to the people the industry usually prices out.
Q32. Where did you hear about the Startups 100?
Other: we track relevant UK startup awards and found the Startups 100 through our own research.