When Liviu Tanase moved to the United States from Romania in 2014, he had already founded four companies in his home country. In 2017, he started his fifth company—ZeroBounce, an email validation company—in Santa Barbara, California.
Since then, ZeroBounce has been on the Inc. 5000 list four times and has grown about 30–35% year-over-year. “There were some years that we grew much more in the beginning… because, you know, when you’re small, it’s easier to grow faster,” says Tanase.
ZeroBounce began with just two employees in 2017—Tanase, as the company’s founder and CEO, and a chief technology officer. Today, it has 80 employees, as well as clients all over the world, including big-name companies like Amazon, Disney, Airbnb and Netflix.
Invest in success
The secret to the company’s success, Tanase says, is investing in two things: marketing and cybersecurity.
He estimates that ZeroBounce has invested at least $3 million in marketing over time to figure out how to best reach the company’s target audience. The company’s overall approach could be summed up in three short sentences:
- Keep what’s working and remove what’s not.
- Fail fast.
- Don’t keep what’s not working for very long.
While Tanase is expansive with marketing, he is extra cautious with cybersecurity. He doesn’t trust other cloud platforms with client data, so ZeroBounce has built its own cloud platform.
Clients use ZeroBounce to detect if a customer is signing up for their services using a disposable or temporary email. They also use ZeroBounce to ensure that their email lists aren’t filled with old, invalid emails. For instance, Tanase says, if your email list is five years old, the percentage of invalid emails could be as high as 60% or 70% because people change jobs.
Test, fail, and keep what works
With so many companies using email to communicate with customers, Tanase believed there was a need for ZeroBounce. He just needed a way for potential clients to find it.
“Our idea was to be everywhere, if possible,” Tanase says. Then potential customers could see the company and test the software. “If they see our service, then we can convince them that we, you know, are one of the better companies out there,” he adds.
With this mentality in mind, ZeroBounce started marketing on all social media platforms, from Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram.
“We tested, and we invested a lot of money into them in the beginning just to see what works and what doesn’t,” Tanase says. Although it takes a significant amount of money to build something on each platform, Tanase believes it’s worth the investment.
“In a way, we lose money,” Tanase admits. “But then, after everything is done and we test it, we see what works—then actually, we keep those things, and they’re highly profitable.” But without that investment of time and money, ZeroBounce wouldn’t know which channels would be the most profitable.
“To put a number on this, I would say investment in terms of understanding what works and what doesn’t [equals] around $3 million over time—not in one year, like in three years, something like that,” he says.
He admits that this is a lot of money. “But, again, that actually pays out in the end because you only get what really works, what’s highly profitable, but it’s very hard to get there unless you have the data to see what works and what doesn’t and test things,” Tanase adds.
Sometimes a platform doesn’t work because it doesn’t reach the right audience, he continues. But the decision to stop marketing on a specific platform is driven by data, not emotion. “The whole idea is to have a scientific and data-driven way to get to the results,” he says.
It’s also important to fail fast. “So don’t let things take too long. If you see a keyword, for example, that is really bad in terms of conversion,” Tanase explains, ”don’t let it be there for months on end because it’s just wasted money.”
Marketing on more than one platform also has led to ZeroBounce’s success. Say your growth is 1% from each platform. According to Tanase, when you put all of them together, the sum is bigger than the individual things you do.
Own your infrastructure
When Tanase isn’t thinking about marketing, he’s obsessing over cybersecurity. He knows all too well that a data breach can tarnish a company’s reputation, lead to lower profits and cause headaches for clients. As a result, security is “insanely important,” he says.
Instead of using cloud services from a third-party provider, ZeroBounce has built its own. “All the infrastructure that we have, we own,” he says. “It’s not a cloud service, so that eliminates as many attack vectors as possible.” The company also has a policy of deleting customer data every 30 days.
While Tanase’s approach to cybersecurity is very insular, his approach to improving ZeroBounce is not. He says he is always seeking feedback from outside the company. It’s essential to be up-to-date on what’s going on in the market and implement as many new things as possible.
Tanase is also careful to treat every customer the same, regardless of whether they are a big household name or a small boutique client. Too often when companies grow, they start to treat their customers badly, he explains. “Even if it’s a small customer… we treat them the same.”
Although this is the fifth company Tanase has founded, he says he is not itching to start any new companies right now. “The team that we created here—I think it’s the difference between all the other companies that I created,” he says. “It’s a much more mature team and it’s, I don’t know, I’m just very lucky to have them—and very, very proud of them.”
However, if he ever did create another startup, he says it would be a cybersecurity company.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of SUCCESS© magazine.
Photo by insta_photos/Shutterstock.com
