Crafting a better work experience

When talking about Missive, I often dropped this bomb:

— We never did any marketing.

Well, looking back, it’s a lie. Or let’s just say that it’s an understatement.

Or maybe I was being lazy and not recollecting the many small things we did.

Now that the Missive team is growing fast (read more), I realized, you must tell your team the complete story to equip them with success.

I’m writing this for our future Head of marketing. It’s a list of all of the things we did marketing-wise for the last ten-ish years. As you can see, not so much.

To me it's a testament that, yes, if you build something that people like, they will find you.

Now, imagine with a marketing team...

Note: We got our first customer on Jul. 20, 2016 and we are now at ~$500k USD MRR eight years later.

Everything we did marketing-wise

1. First homepage, at this point Missive was free to use beta. 2015

2. We have a Blog we updated sporadically. 2015 - 2024

3. Multiple ProductHunt launches. 2015-2023

4. A Brief History of Email Apps. - A failed attempt at creating valuable content. Was fun to do, but was a miserable failure. 2015

5. Twitter - Hello Word 2015

6. Email cold outreach to a few people we admired to get feedback and validate the product. No more than 50 emails total were sent. 2015

7. Second homepage and the release of our paid plans. 2016

8. Twitter - I monitored conversations about competitors, email clients, etc. and mentioned Missive in replies. 2016-2023

9. Nailed basic SEO vitals. 2016-2024

10. Open sourced EmojiMart component, now used by big startups (e.g. Figma!). It's a big driver of traffic and backlinks. 2016-2024

11. Attending the Inbox Awesome conference in NYC, the conference was for email marketers, not our target audience. Here is a picture of me on a panel about how to make people open and read your email newsletters. I had 0 clue what I was doing. I attended two years in a row because we like the title "Inbox Awesome" 🤣. 2016-2017

12. Getting both our desktop and mobile javascript apps featured on the App Store and writing about it. This established us as a legitimate player in the email client space. 2017

13. Published VS competitor landing pages, to this day, these are our most valuable content. 2016-2024

14. Developed integrations with popular SaaS (Asana, Salesforce, Aircall, etc.). This created nice co-marketing opportunities like being featured in their app/integration store. 2019-2023

15. Third homepage (current one). 2020

16. We deprecated a really popular feature, read tracking, we explained our reasoning in a blog post. This was an important decision, it helped defined our company culture and product direction. It mostly created churn for solo-user customers.

17. We hired consultants to do SEO + write content. We did with two firms, both times the firm owners were paid Missive users. In both instances we paid $10k/month and the experiment went on for around six months. Six months is not a lot in the SEO world, but each time, both we and the consultant learned that writing good content on an app like Missive is really hard and can't be done by pay-to-hire-content-writers. 2022 & 2024

18. We ditched Google analytics, for privacy reasons, read more. I'm still not so sure about this one, it does feel like we did some privacy-posturing. Now, this might be a potential friction for our future marketing team. We have no plan to re-visit this at the moment.

19. We created a homemade affiliate program. 2022 - 2024

20. MRR milestone blog posts + Hacker news traffic 2021-2024

21. We created many case studies to showcase how Missive is used by people in different industries. Those were pushed on LinkedIn and X.2020-2023

22. We sent a total of forty newsletters, all were a summary of our progress pushing out the content of our changelog. 2016-2024

23. We offer weekly webinars potential customers can attend to learn more about the product and each webinar offers a dedicated Q&A at the end. Those webinars have been a great success, specially for people coming from other competitors looking for a validation that the switch to Missive is a good decision. 2020 - 2024

24. We attended our first trade show in an industry where we find some of our bigger customers, logistic companies. I wrote an article about our experience. 2024

25. We got serious with G2 and other review sites and started earning multiple customer reviews and earning multiple badges. 2024

26. All co-founders did couple of podcasts & interviews over the years. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, ...) 2016 - 2024

27. I developed our product metric pipeline with Segment and Mixpanel. This will be useful for the future marketing team. 2024

This list is really a testament of how small our team was and how focused on the product we were. We were lucky enough those small initiatives created enough traction to where we are today. Having said that, reading it again, it shows unequivocally how amateurish our marketing efforts were.

It's time to bring expertise and structure, our marketing efforts should be as good as the quality of our product. And thus, we are looking for a Head of Marketing. If you are interested, please reach out (email).

The time and energy invested in our product metrics pipeline allowed us to answer questions like which industries are extracting the most value out of Missive.

Starting with metrics

After crunching our numbers (organization size, core functionalities usage, ease of onboarding), the answer was:

1. Logistics/Transportation (mostly brokers & carriers)
2. Travel/Property management (luxury travel agencies, tour operators)
3. Finance/Legal (accountants, law firms)
4. Retail (various sectors)
5. Manufacturing (various sectors)

With this insight, our next question was: where can we meet as many people from these industries in person? Our first instinct was to attend industry-specific trade shows.

With that in mind, three weeks ago, we identified FreightWaves Future of Supply Chain in Atlanta as the biggest short-term opportunity. We contacted the organizers and negotiated an interesting package:

1. A 7-minute demo on the live stage
2. A 6x6 booth
3. A 10-minute interview on "What the Truck?!?" radio show

Organization

Once confirmed, we had two weeks to organize the whole trip. Two team members would go: Janie (COO) and myself (CEO). The first thing I did was to make noise about our attendance. I posted on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and the Hampton founders community. My angle was to be transparent about us having zero experience and going there to learn as much as possible.

Instantly, people started to reach out privately to give tips on how we should approach this to get as much ROI as possible. I want to personally thank two people. Vic Cherubini, who proactively reached out, organized his thoughts around trade shows before our call, and shared valuable insights:

I also want to thank Maxime Villemure, an ex-pro poker player turned logistics entrepreneur, who reached out on X and proposed a call to teach me everything about 3PL/Logistics and his industry.

With these personal coaching sessions and Janie’s firsthand experience with trade shows, we understood the need to reach out to as many people as possible before the show.

1. Contacted our existing customers in the industry
2. Make noise on LinkedIn/X
3. Cold outreach to attendees

The first two were easy. The last was harder as we did not have a list of attendees. However, the Future of Supply Chain website had logos of all the businesses attending. We took screenshots, then used ChatGPT-4o to identify the domain names related to all logos. We then passed that domain list to Hunter.io and got a list of possible email addresses to reach out to.

Janie then proceeded to message people on LinkedIn or cold-reach them via email about our presence at the event.

Execution

All in all, we successfully scheduled two demos through these messages. Not bad, but not great. The good news is the conference wasn’t huge, so all attendees saw our booth, making pre-booking meetings less important.

Vic provided excellent tips for our booth, but we ended up having no time to implement most of them. We kept things simple. Arnaud quickly created a video that we looped on the TV:

<figure>  <div class="video-container">   <iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed//5Z6S7w2_rk0?quality=high&modestbranding=1&showinfo=0&rel=0&theme=light&autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>  </div></figure>

I used my laptop to demo the product directly to attendees. All in all, we did 33 demos at the booth. I did a good job with the demo on the main stage, both highlighting the pain of brokers dealing with a massive volume of emails and the solutions Missive has to offer (team inboxes, AI, rules & automation, custom integrations and analytics).

Many people also discovered the product while listening to the radio interview I did live on the What the truck?!? Radio show.

We mostly encountered three types of leads:

1. Potential customers (brokers)
2. Potential industry-specific integrations (TMS)
3. Content/marketing partnerships (industry influencers, founders)
4. Big shots (investors, VPs of large logistics businesses)

We scanned their badges and took screenshots of the person to remember post-event who and what. Janie also took notes in the lead retrieval app. Janie spent our airport transit day following-up with everyone we talked to or showed interest.

From our conversations, I assume we can hope to convert at least 5 organizations, all having need for 50 seats each, to Missive.

Conclusion

We have yet to assess the ROI of this trip to Atlanta, but just as an experience it was an absolute eye-opener and I came away wanting to invest way more resources into attending industry specific trade shows.

One quote from Paul Graham I absolutely abide by is “action produces information”, and we absolutely did with this first trade show.

At Missive, we're not fans of meetings. However, we’ve just started doing all-hands, few times a year, to keep in sync.

The idea is, prior to each, I send a written memo about our vision, challenges, strategies, and roadmap – a snapshot of our current status.

After writing the first one, I decided why not share it with our customers. Here it is, our second memo.

👋 Hello team,

It has been 51 days since our first all-hands; that timespan is 14% of the year. Time flies by incredibly fast, looking back it’s a constant reminder of how time-constrained we are. For this second memo I plan to share updates on various subjects, list the things we’ve achieved, then go over things we have planned for the next few weeks.

On Missive + Tasks

Arnaud and Etienne have been working on scoping the upcoming task improvements.

Our goal is to integrate conversations and tasks in a natural way to improve visibility and accountability. As you can imagine, this requires a few core changes to ensure simplicity and ease of use. Let's dive in!

Currently, in Missive, you can assign and close a conversation. This is useful for customer support, where you don’t need to be descriptive about what needs to be done. The act of assigning a customer question is good enough, your colleague will reply to the customer and then close the conversation.

When you need to be more descriptive about the work that needs to be accomplished, Missive offers the ability to create tasks within conversations, each of which can be assigned to a colleague. For instance, you might create a task for your assistant to export a specific PDF report and attach it to one of your drafts.

Having two different mechanisms (assigned conversations and tasks) to keep track of what needs to be done creates complexity. Ultimately, whether it's an assigned conversation or an assigned task, the key is to have tools to plan your day and know what you and your colleagues need to focus on.

This upcoming update will thus not only focus on bringing a My tasks view but also bridge the gap between assigned conversations and tasks. So both can be managed using the same tools (My tasks, Calendars, Due date, etc.)

On the technical side of things, Rafael started brainstorming and scoping the architecture and database changes required for these new functionalities. It has been decided that Denys will be responsible for building the first prototypes of those changes on the backend, and Etienne will lead the front-end.

On SOC 2

Our SOC 2 Type 1 audit started last Tuesday, May 14th. We should receive our SOC 2 Type 1 certification pretty soon.

Going through the different SOC 2 controls was a really interesting and beneficial experience in terms of battle-proofing our different security and privacy processes.

Getting this certification will streamline the onboarding process for larger customers. Instead of filling out custom security questionnaires for each customer, our certification letter will likely serve as a replacement.

The SOC 2 certification will also enhance the credibility of Missive for customers of all sizes, not just the larger ones.

On Product Metrics

It took us more than eight years to include product metrics in Missive, but we finally did it. For most of our history, we were completely blind to how people were using Missive or how our initiatives were impacting users, apart from our direct conversations with customers.

As we scale the team and become less involved in every customer conversation, it is crucial to build a flexible metric dashboard. The workflow is built using Segment for data ingestion and Mixpanel for visualization.

My next step is to build a workflow for Luis and Janie to help them follow up with potential customers. The data in Mixpanel will allow them to reach out with relevant information based on product usage, such as:

• Have they created rules?
• Have they created labels?
• What are their use cases?
• Have they connected email accounts?
• Have they had any failed payments?

If you don’t have access to Mixpanel, just ask, and I will invite you.

On Price Increase

On April 15, we released a yearly subscription option, increased the price of all our plans, and removed some plan limitations. This price increase had several goals:

• Decrease the gap between the price of Missive and our competitors.
• Increase the incentive for organizations to subscribe to the new yearly subscription.
• Auto-filter solo users who were churning at a high rate due to a lack of value in the collaborative features central to the Missive experience.

Here are the results of the price increase on our MRR:

We can observe the immediate 10% price increase for all seats, followed by many organizations removing seats they had added to lock in the legacy pricing. We also see numerous organizations switching their subscriptions from monthly to yearly in the following days. This bump and slump in the MRR is expected as more organizations switch to the yearly plan and receive a 20% discount.

Interestingly, before the price increase, the Starter plan was the least popular option among our users. The six-month history limit and the small price difference between the Starter and Productive plans led most new users to choose the Productive plan.

Since April 15, the Starter plan has become the most popular. This is great because it leaves room for those organizations to eventually upgrade to the Productive plan for features like rules and integrations.

On Affiliates

Following the price increase, we also increased the rewards affiliates can get when referring customers to us. Interested to learn more about our affiliate program? I recently wrote a blog post about it here.

On Webinars and Customer Interviews

Luis has taken over the duty of doing webinars. He is still doing the bi-weekly team inbox webinar. He also created one specifically tailored for users on the Productive plan about the rules and integrations.

Luis is also conducting user interviews using the JTBD (jobs to be done) framework. The results of all interviews he made so far can be consulted on Notion.

These interviews, along with our product metrics, will help us better understand our customers and how they use Missive. The ultimate goal is to learn to speak their language, allowing us to better tailor our marketing and sales initiatives.

On Support

Philippe Langlois is doing a great job with support, the number of support messages has stayed relatively the same but the first reply time and handle time has been constantly decreasing over the last few weeks.

Philippe also started to systematically reply to all customers having had a successful interaction with him to get a potential review at Trustpilot, G2 and others. We can clearly see when he started doing this:

On Marketing

For the past few months, we collaborated with a marketing agency to produce content and structure our marketing efforts. However, both parties agreed that we had reached the full potential of this partnership and decided to end it. Moving forward, we will bring all marketing efforts in-house.

I have a strong bias towards action over strategizing, which made it challenging for me to maximize this partnership. Paul Graham’s quote, "If you're not sure what to do as an entrepreneur, do anything. Action produces information," resonates strongly with me.

As an organization, we can't rely on a perfectly fine-tuned recipe for marketing, development, product, etc., because the ingredients are never exactly the same. We need to figure things out ourselves, fail, adapt, and eventually win.

There are no shortcuts; we need to do the hard work ourselves.

On Development

We are now five months in our experiment of scaling up the team with senior developers having years of experience with Ruby/Rails. In those 5 months we have made a lot of progress into not making Missive so dependent on one man, Rafael.

• Implement CI on GitHub (specs and code formatter).
• Created and deployed monitoring system for developers access to production server.
• 1Password secrets to ease development and improve production security posture.
• Automatic deployment from GitHub to multiple Heroku apps to ultimately let devs other than Raf deploy to production.
• Better GitHub integration in Missive.
• Production DB backup monitoring.
• Updated to the latest Rails version.
• Updated to Ruby 3.3.
• Automated user data exports to reduce manual operations requirements.
• Greg, Denys and Louis-Michel all got familiar with part of the code base only Rafael was familiar with.

Louis-Michel and Denys have each started working on features that are extremely high on our Canny board, so we are quite excited about the next few months.

On The New Office

We just moved to our new office in Quebec city. For Etienne, Rafael and myself, it’s nothing new as it’s the same office where the first line of codes for Missive were coded in 2015 in what was the now defunct co-working space, Abri.co.

Keep all in mind that 36% of our staff is not located in Quebec, so we will stay predominantly a remote first culture. Conversations should happen online (text, video) most of the time.

Rails World + Offsite

We were extremely happy to have secured six tickets to attend the next Rails World in Toronto next September. We will take advantage of the conference to fly everyone to Quebec city a few days before the conference. It will be the first time the whole company will meet in person!

See more information about Rails Word in our Notion.

Customer Field Trip

End of May Janie and I will fly to New-York for 3 days to meet our best customers from the Big Apple. This will be a first for me as I’ve rarely met customers in real life apart from the few we have in Quebec city! I will probably also go to the bay area and LA soon to do the same. Why? From every business-oriented person I talked to, it is an absolute must to meet your best customers in person:

• You show them that you care. You make them fans for life.
• You gather real honest feedback you would never have got from just an email or phone call.
• You can work on their pain and expand their use of your product.
• They can help us expand our network and share insights on how to sell to their industry.

Trade shows and Conferences

On June 4th and 5th, Janie and I will be attending our first trade show, the Future of Supply Chain. This event focuses on transportation and logistics businesses, which are key customer segments for us. These businesses typically have a large number of user seats and are heavy users of our assignment, chat, and task features.

We will have a small booth, and I will be giving a 7-minute demonstration of Missive on the main stage.

We aim to connect with potential big customers and hopefully secure new business. This will be a valuable learning experience for us and help us define what we need going forward to improve go to market strategies.

Next, we plan to participate in more events within the logistics and transportation industries. Additionally, we will explore opportunities in the travel and hospitality industry, where we also have a strong customer base.

‍

At Missive, we were blessed with eight years of organic growth. As a small team of developers with limited resources, we never invested much in marketing.

One of the few initiatives we did, was quite “cliché” for developer entrepreneurs… we coded an affiliate system from scratch. Two years in, it’s time to assess if it was successful.

Why an affiliate program?

Our customers have always been extremely enthusiastic about Missive, so naturally, developing an affiliate program made sense. This would allow us to delegate our marketing to our customers while they could benefit from their efforts by reducing their monthly invoices. A developer’s dream!

Why build it from scratch?

Missive is a collaborative email client that deals with sensitive customer data, which we take very seriously. It was always out of the question to insert third-party scripts into our app for privacy and security reasons. That meant no easy product metrics, no easy marketing attribution, and most importantly in this case, not being able to create an affiliate program using an off-the-shelf solution.

Building it ourselves also meant we could have more control on the affiliate experience. For instance, every organization owner can automatically open its affiliate dashboard from Missive and see their balance and potential gain.

On rewards

We pay a monthly reward for each seat in a referred organization that upgrades to a paid plan, and do so for up to 5 months. If a seat cancels, let’s say, after two months, the total reward will be limited to only those two months. This way every referral is always profitable.

• Up to $25 per Starter user referred.
• Up to $50 per Productive user referred.
• Up to $75 per Business user referred.

Rewards are either credited directly to customer invoices or paid out in cash, once balances exceed $250. We use PayPal for payouts up to $5,000 and do bank wire transfers for larger sums.

To this date we have paid or credited more than $115,000 to our affiliates. The lion’s share of the payouts was given to just two affiliates, where the biggest one earned more than $60,000 in cash payouts. Our best affiliate was an existing Missive customer who runs a digital advertising business.

On affiliates doing paid advertising

We initially let affiliates do paid advertising with no limitation. Some did so on our brand keyword, “Missive”. I believe the bulk of the $115,000 we paid out was earned this way. We recently changed our mind on this, it is now against our program terms to advertise on search that include our brand “Missive” keyword. The advertising effort of affiliates should be focused on people not already familiar with Missive.

On customers referring other customers

Only around 15% of the total earnings were paid to 55 customers via credits applied to their invoices. Few customers referred others through the program, and thus few received credits on their invoices. Most of our customers, when doing word of mouth, don’t even bother using our affiliate program.

Final takeaways

First, if we want the affiliate program to be a significant part of our new business we need to better market it. The program itself is a product.

Second, we should increase the value of the rewards, especially given we now prevent our affiliates from doing advertising on customers already familiar with Missive.

Starting today, the rewards for referred users subscribing to our latest plans will be increased to:

• Up to $60 per Starter user referred. + 240% increase
• Up to $100 per Productive user referred. + 200% increase
• Up to $145 per Business user referred. + 193% increase

With these new rewards I believe our customer base will have more incentive to share their affiliate link. It will also become more profitable for professional affiliates or influencers.

If you want to try it yourself, just create a Missive account, then from the app open your settings and select the Rewards option!

At Missive, we're not fans of meetings. However, we’ve just started doing all-hands, few times a year, to keep in sync.

The idea is, prior to each, I send a written memo about our vision, challenges, strategies, and roadmap – a snapshot of our current status.

After writing the first one, I decided why not share it with our customers. Here it is, memo numero uno.

👋 Hello team,

Things have changed a lot in the last few months for us at Missive. It's important that we all share a common understanding of our journey, our goals, and the path ahead.

Instead of lengthy all-hands meetings where only I talk, I'll capture our vision, challenges, strategies, and roadmap in writing first so you can participate and ask questions.

I wrote each section of this memo to convey specific insights or updates, designed for clarity and brevity. While some sections are brief, each is important. Feel free to engage with each part as it resonates with your role and interests, but I encourage a thorough read to grasp the full picture of where we stand and where we're headed.

On origins

In 2013, Rafael, Etienne, and I started working together on a product called ConferenceBadge, a simple name badge designing tool for event organizers. The product quickly gained traction, allowing us to work full-time on it. However, early on, regardless of sales increasing, we decided that was not what we wanted to do with most of our time.

We wanted to work on a more ambitious project, Missive. The initial idea, devised by Etienne, was: Could we create a collaborative email draft editor? This idea quickly morphed into the first Missive prototype, a full-fledged collaborative email client merged with team chat.

From its inception, Missive was a bold move. By rejecting a safe path for something more ambitious — discarding a successful, revenue-generating, bootstrapped product like ConferenceBadge to work on an unproven idea — many called us crazy.

There, I see two guiding principles, which I think we all should keep and apply forward:

1. Level up: Build a foundation, a quick win, something achievable with your current means/skills. Then use this as a foundation to propel yourself to the next level.
2. Long-term thinking: Do not limit yourself or your ambitions to your current situation, think long-term where you want to be, and start acting now.

ConferenceBadge was our foundation, it gave us the means and de-risked our path to working on a product normally built by teams massively funded.

On our long journey

For much of Missive's history, we were a small team of three, ruthlessly prioritizing listening to and delighting our customers.

Our process to decide what to work on next was simple: do customer support ourselves and set out to improve some of the bigger pains our customers were experiencing at that moment. This shows on our changelog, a long list of incremental improvements.

This process worked magically at first, we could fix issues at a speed unmatched by our competitors and ship innovative features at a blistering pace.

After 8 years and more than 3500 paid customers, it started to show its limitations. As we've grown, so has our to-do list. Not too long ago, I found myself knee-deep in customer support, with Rafael and Etienne tackling bug reports that seemed to multiply overnight.

The three of us, juggling everything, had become too big of a liability. We didn't have enough time to do anything meaningful.

Working on a project like Missive can be extremely satisfying when you have the space and time to experiment. Lately, we were more and more heads down, just trying to make things work.

After a couple of attempts at scaling the team unsuccessfully, we were exhausted.

Then, on a rainy November day at a microbrewery near the office, we each took turns, Rafael, Etienne, and I, discussing what we wanted and where we wanted to go. What transpired was that we were absolutely not exhausted from working on Missive, but mostly we were exhausted from doing it alone. On that day, we laid down a plan.

1. Hire someone to help us hire. (Janie)
2. Move from our gloomy shared office to a nice HQ. (in construction…)
3. Hire someone to help us with customer support. (Philippe, Luis)
4. Hire experienced developers. (Louis-Michel, Grzegorz, Denys)
5. Hire a talented designer. (Arnaud)

Fast forward 5 months later and I believe we are on track. The team has grown, each of you brings something unique to the table, be it from past collaborations, as a customer, or through your work experiences. Your fresh perspectives and skills are exactly what Missive needs to leap forward. With more hands on deck, we're not just looking to distribute the workload; we're aiming to multiply our capabilities.

I’m confident in saying we are extremely talented and we have what it takes to make a big impact.

I personally set a high bar for ourselves, aspiring to be mentioned in the same breath as Notion and Linear; products known not just for their utility but for their innovative edge and the quality of their user experience.

We were a tiny team, now that we are a bit bigger, we are still going to punch far above our weight.

On mission

We have the ambition of being a meeting-less culture, that’s even why some of you were interested to apply to a job at Missive. Now to be meeting-less, there's a requirement, we need alignment, we need to agree on where we are going. To that effect I wrote this mission statement:

We are toolmakers. Our tools improve communication by breaking silos and ease collaboration. They are built for teams having an outsized impact on the world, like us.

Toolmakers love their craft. They are obsessed with the end result. They build in service of others. They don’t get lost in convoluted processes. They are always focused on creating the best possible product, in the end it’s the only thing that matters.

Missive 3.0

With more time to think, one of our goals this year is to redefine what Missive is. Aiming to make it not just a shared inbox app but a platform that helps small and medium-sized businesses plan around all the work that revolves around their communications.

This is how we’ve been using Missive at Missive for years now. But it’s not just us, our hubris, it’s also what our most fanatic users have wanted for years:

Etienne and Arnaud will spearhead this project and work together on UI improvements and improvements around task management.

Let me give you an example, a freight transportation broker using Missive will exchange hundreds of emails a day with businesses wanting to deliver parcels.

From these emails, hundreds of tasks need to be completed by different people. Currently, such a customer might use the basic task functionality in Missive to achieve this, but it's not an ideal experience.

They are most likely to fall back on using a platform like ClickUp or Asana to manage those tasks, alongside Missive. The feedback we've consistently received is clear: such users would prefer a seamless experience within Missive, where task management is integrated directly into the communication flow. The current task's implementation is too simplistic and conversation-centric. Once tasks are created, they are lost in the sea of conversations and there is no accountability possible.

I believe there's a significant market opportunity here, as virtually every business that relies heavily on daily communication via email or any other text communication channels could benefit from such a built-in way to manage tasks around communication.

We need to make this vision a reality on the product side but also to clearly articulate this via our brand and our different marketing initiatives. This will set us apart from traditional help desks.

On AI

AI is on everyone’s radar; it’s the new hot thing. To me, it would be a mistake to market ourselves as an AI product or define all of our roadmap around it. Of course, short-term it would be great, free media and a lot of attention. But long term all products will have AI built-in. This won’t be a differentiator at all. There is no moat in AI.

Now, I’m not saying it's not important, it is, what I’m trying to articulate it’s that AI should not be the main part of our DNA. We will experiment with it, we will create buzz with it, it’s just not what will set us apart.

On collaboration

As I wrote before, we were a small team, for a long time. We know we’ve developed ways of working that are not compatible with collaborating with more people. With the help of Louis-Michel, Denys and Greg on the tech side of things, we already started changing some of our practices.

I expect you, the new team members, to teach us, the original three, how to work and collaborate in a bigger team. But I expect us to teach you how to be mighty efficient. This will create tensions, it’s good and expected.

As toolmakers, our goal is to create the best product, not implement the best processes. The processes are only good if they help us achieve the best product.

On growth

Growth is the consequence of a great product. There is no shortcut. Any growth initiative should be about putting fuel on an already strong fire.

Historically, growth has been around 2%-6% month over month. We always had a solid stream of new inbound users.

This nice consistent growth, hides a darker reality, for every new users and existing ones who grow with us (seat expansion) we have a lot of users who churn, and usually, after a short period of time.

In this graphic, subscriptions = paid organizations. Above purple is good, orange is bad.

To increase our growth rate we need to work on that orange part and better nurture our inbound users. The recipe is simple:

1. Better product (make it simple, reduce the confusion)
2. Better support
3. Better documentation
4. Better onboarding
5. Yearly plan
6. Impactful brand/marketing
7. Better product metrics

We need to be more deliberate and eloquent about what Missive is by simplifying the product and the message.

On our changelog

I got curious writing this memo and parsed the data from our changelog and generated a graph showing the number of release elements either tagged as New, Improved or Fixed per quarter over the years.

The trends of both New and Improved features are decreasing faster than the Fixed one. With more and more technical debt and customers to care for, a tiny team can’t forever beat the odds.

On our tool stack

We use Missive, more than anything else, even when it’s not the best fit. We stick to it, we live with its weaknesses… then we improve it. This experience is our fuel; it guides us into creating a better product from a first hand experience.

We avoid using too many tools. Having a simple stack has more advantages than using the perfect tool for every job. The cognitive cost of learning and maintaining many platforms is high. Let’s not fall into this trap.

On the upcoming price increase

On Feb 28th, we announced a price increase. One goal is to make monthly plans more expensive and attract more customers to the new yearly plans.

The announcement email was sent to all ~6k+ admins and owners of paying organizations. We received 124 replies, with 34% neutral, 40% positive, and 26% negative, but none were hyper-negative. So technically, only 0.25% of users replied negatively, which is not bad.

Most of the replies inquired about the possibility of getting their grandfathered seats rolled up into a yearly subscription with a 20% discount. Originally, it was decided that if you upgraded to a yearly subscription, you would move to the new pricing. We decided it would be fair game not to do so. This change allowed me to reply with the following message, to which most responded extremely positively.

I expect to see a lot of customers switching to the yearly subscription next April and May.

On competitors

Who are our competitors? Missive being a pretty general email/collaboration solution, there are a lot of them. From Front to Spark, Superhuman and even to Intercom and Slack.

Should we care? No, we should always refrain from being obsessed with one or listen to only people who switched over to Missive from one of them. We are not copy cats chasing a space with a discounted product.

A lot of our users come from Front, just search for Front on this page to see. Because of this there are strong demands for us to implement their exact feature set. We sometimes do but most of the time we don’t.

We need to find our way.

――――

The end. That's it, this is the starting point, what are we going to achieve together? See you all, tomorrow, at the 🙌 all-hands!

Philippe Lehoux

‍

A list of things tech startups usually go through that we did not.

Warning: This is not a list of things you should not do; it's simply a collection of things we did not.

• We did not do a business plan.
• We did not create a pitch deck.
• We did not spend money on Google Adwords.
• We did not move out of Heroku.
• We did not create a US bank account to save on Stripe fees.
• We did not grow our headcount past four.
• We did not raise venture capital.
• We did not go through an incubator.
• We did not code a native iOS app.
• We did not code a native Android app.
• We did not code a native Windows app.
• We did not code a native Mac app.
• We did not spend money on ads.
• We did not type-check our codebase.
• We did not switch to a new programming language after launch.
• We did not hire a PR firm.
• We were not featured in any noteworthy tech publications.
• We did not win any prize nor apply to win one.
• We did not attend networking events.
• We did not join the local chamber of commerce.
• We did not devote a % of our days to marketing.
• We did not pay for a competitor product to try features.
• We did not focus 100% of our work hours on only one business.
• We did not buy or use an email list to reach potential leads.
• We did not use a CRM.
• We did not track/monitor user behavior in the apps.
• We did not A/B test anything.
• We did not sell the company to a competitor.
• We did not split our codebase into microservices.
• We did not use AWS Lambda.
• We did not apply for the government salary subsidies.
• We did not translate our app or website.
• We did not have coaches.
• We did not ask questions at user signup (What is the size of your company?)
• We did not give discounts.
• We did not offer yearly plans.
• We did not order mugs/socks/T-shirts/hoodies with our logo.
• We did not pay for a LinkedIn premium plan.
• We did not host a page that asks for email addresses to download a PDF.
• We did not have mentors.
• We did not do an MBA.
• We did not present talks at our alma maters.
• We did not pivot.
• We did not setup automated email follow-ups.
• We did not waste money.
• We did not hire a human to do our hero video narration. (Suggested here)

Were we successful because or despite of all of these did-nots?

There are presumably many things there that would have made us more successful. And obviously many things we might do soon.

The takeaway? Don't stress over all the things you are not doing but focus on the few you are doing right.

Missive will soon reach $2M in ARR, roughly one year after the $1M mark.

In the article celebrating this significant milestone, I wrote that we could grow another 100% with the same team size.

We believe we can grow by another ~100% with only the four of us.

I was right. We grew to this point without sacrificing quality to our customers. It is baffling to most people, especially ones from the startup world, to see us thrive with such a low headcount.

Our users love the app and love the customer support experience we offer. They are shocked when we tell them we are just three. Also shocked when they see my basement Office in Zoom calls. 😆

Do I have the most unglamorous working setup?

- Basement ✅
- No window ✅
- Wooden crate + books standing desk ✅
- Kid toys all around ✅
- Apple Studio Display ❌

Who beats that? 🤣#remotework #bootstrap #desksetup pic.twitter.com/M5osCQ5diO

— Phil Lehoux (@plehoux) March 30, 2022

It's not just that we did not raise any money, but we willingly kept the team small. Some critical aspects of our business are just more manageable because of our size, like:

Product Development ❤️ Customer Support

The three of us do all of the support. There is a direct line between the problems and the solutions. Our customers, when they complain, when they voice frustration about the product, we hear them and act swiftly.

We act swiftly to please them, of course, but also to keep our sanity; responding to the same complaints again and again is soul-crushing.

Technology Stack ❤️ Consistency

In seven years, our tech stack has stayed pretty much the same. We don't reinvent the wheel; we don't migrate to new frameworks or languages to please a new generation of developers. We don't have to since we are not recruiting X new developers every month.

Yes, but...

Yes, our revenues have grown at a healthy ~5% month-over-month rate. But this growth came in significant part from the expansion of our existing customers. We have been able to stay small because the rate at which we onboard new customers has remained approximately the same for the last 2-3 years.

In the last year’s post about our $1M ARR milestone, I wrote:

We never spent a dime on marketing; the cost of customer acquisition in our space is crazy high. We can't compete with subsidized VC-backed companies.

This is not true anymore; the business generates a lot of cash flow, and many customer acquisition channels are starting to make more and more sense.

Customer Onboarding ❤️‍🩹 A Tiny Team

So this brings me to the one thing we can not scale indefinitely: good customer onboarding. Each business is unique; each has its requirements, workflows, etc. When people first set up in Missive, that is when there are the most questions, this is when we can tell them where the value is. The more new users we onboard simultaneously, the bigger the team will need to be if we want to keep offering a stellar experience.

Can I predict what our headcount will be in a year? No, but I'm confident it won't be just the three of us.

Five years ago, we launched Missive, an innovative but somewhat hard-to-define email client to the world. Fast-forward to last week when we reached US$1M in annual recurring revenue (ARR)!

I believe our journey to get there is fascinating for a couple of reasons:

• We’re self-funded.
• We’re a small team of three co-founders and one employee.
• We built a cloud-based collaborative email client (a.k.a. it’s not easy).
• We never spent a dime on marketing.
• We’re incredibly resilient.

On being self-funded

Missive is bootstrapped, meaning we never took a dime from investors. We funded it with the cash flow of our other business.

One doesn’t start a new email client without some solid finance and runway. The graveyards are full of email-related startups. We knew that.

The long story is I met my co-founders at the coworking space I had opened in Quebec City to meet other like-minded people. They were starting a web development studio and I was learning to code by doing fun/creative little projects and experimenting on different business ideas.

I got one of those ideas after organizing a game jam festival. As an organizer I was designing and printing name badges for all the attendees, judges, sponsors, etc. The process was really painful. I envisioned a Vistaprint-like service for name badges. I started building it alone, then quickly asked my now co-founders to work with me on the project. ConferenceBadge.com launched in 2013 and promptly got to profitability.

A year and a half in, it generated enough revenue for us to go full-time on the product. Having said that, we were not excited by the idea of working exclusively on an online name badge service. We brainstormed on problems we encountered while building Conference Badge and Etienne got the idea of building a collaborative email draft editor to ease support. This idea quickly morphed into a full-fledged collaborative email client; Missive was born.

It took one year to build the prototype, one more year to start charging for it, one more year to have a few real customers, one more year to get to profitability, and finally one more year to get to $1M ARR.

We could never have afforded to work on Missive for so long without CB paying the bills. Life is like a role-playing game; you build up.

 PODCAST 🎙 Listen to my interview with Courtland Allen of IndieHackers (2017) where we discuss the early days of Conference Badge and Missive.

On being a small team

In the past five years, the team never grew past four full-time members.

Here are the roles we play:

Etienne and I are fluent in 90% of the codebase and mainly focus on feature development.

Rafael, on the other hand, is the master of all code. He reviews every line that gets committed to the different projects. He makes sure the servers are healthy and that the databases survive the billions of queries they run per day.

Etienne uses his infinite web technology knowledge to offer a fast and secure HTML/JS experience on all platforms (Electron, Cordova, Web).

Luis designed the public website, maintains its content, writes blog posts and does demo sessions with customers.

I personally manage salaries, expenses, office, accounting, and long-term financial planning. These tasks usually take a small percentage of my time.

On most days, customer support represents ~33% of our working hours. This has not changed despite our growth. We spend a lot of time making the app easier to use and improve the documentation to decrease requests per customer.

We are quite proud of the level of support we offer; our customers are often amazed at the speed at which we can help and solve their problems, especially customers coming from competitor products.

We believe we can grow by another ~100% with only the four of us. Being small allows us to be flexible on product decisions. We are first and foremost product builders, not managers, and we want to stay that way for as long as possible.

On building a cloud-based collaborative email application

One reason it took so long for us to get to profitability, at least in our experience, compared to our other product, is the complexity of the space we chose to play in.

Building a collaborative email client is challenging and rewarding, but the list of things you need to tackle before you have a minimally usable product is infinite.

You need to balance the time invested in getting on par with existing products and innovative work. It is no surprise most of our competitors have raised tens to hundreds of millions of dollars; the space is hard.

Up to this point, most of our architectural decisions have weathered the test of time and growth.

One of the craziest decisions we took early on was building and deploying a single JavaScript/HTML codebase on all platforms. We knew it was impossible to bootstrap an email client on all major platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and web) with multiple codebases at our team size. A mobile email client in JavaScript was the only way we could compete. Not only did we succeed at creating a blazing fast experience on phones, to our astonishment, Apple featured us multiple times on the App Store.

To this day, I believe this decision is the main reason we can compete with massively funded startups. We refused three acquisition offers from unicorn startups; they were all interested in our skills and experience shipping one codebase on all platforms

 PODCAST 🎙 Listen to Etienne’s interview with Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski from Syntax (2019) where they discuss the pros and cons of building desktop and mobile apps with a single codebase.

On finding customers

Our initial users were mostly early tech-adopters looking for a new innovative cross-platform email client. We found those by posting on different tech discovery communities like ProductHunt. Those early and mostly solo users wanted a different set of features than what would ultimately become our real paid customers: small and midsize businesses.

This tricked us for a while in a race to build more and more features not so consistent with our vision. For instance, we started offering read tracking as it was one of the most requested features of early adopters. Many users upgraded to a paid plan for this alone; they weren’t interested in any of the collaborative features of the app. Those soloish users were churning at a far greater rate than real teams and they were requiring far more customer support/server resources per dollar earned. At some point, this reality sank in and we decided to focus entirely on teams. We ditched read tracking as it was a magnet for such misaligned customers. Our churn rate plummeted. The hard-learned lesson: have the courage to say no.

We never spent a dime on marketing; the cost of customer acquisition in our space is crazy high. We can’t compete with subsidized VC-backed companies.

We charge less than our competitors. They have higher prices, usually negotiable for a one-year agreement. After their deal expires, the price increases significantly; this is when their customers look for an alternative and find us. We let VC-backed startups build the market with big advertising spending, and we wait patiently with a better and more affordable product.

On being resilient

We are conservative in most of our decisions. To keep innovating as a small team for the long term, we are frugal with our time and money.

We’ve always made decisions to ensure we’d still be able to allocate 66% of our time to work on the product.

Our workdays are not much different from what they were five years ago.

We don’t set goals or long-term road maps. Daily, we look at what seems to be a good use of our time, and we do it, period. Long-term planning is tiresome and always looks pretty useless for a team like us.

What’s the takeaway from our last five years at Missive? Resilience, our capacity to rebound from whatever hardship we face, to look at our work with fresh eyes, and stay motivated.

Our story is not one of risk taking, it’s one of consistent work. It’s my belief that the compounding effect of our work will rival the one from VC-backed startups shooting in all directions. Be resilient.

Update: Now blocking read receipts from other servicesMissive now auto blocks read trackers and 1x1 images to prevent senders from spying on what you do with their email.

This week we sunsetted read receipts from Missive. This will cost us a lot, so here is why we did it.

Read tracking is magical. You know instantly when your recipients open your sent emails. This brings incredible power and can be beneficial in many legitimate business scenarios. It’s really popular.

Behind the scenes however, there is an uglier untold story. For us, the technologists who built and offered support around it, it kept getting more controversial over time. In the most extreme cases, we saw first hand how it was misused and weaponized to abuse people. And on the more innocuous and potentially useful scenarios, how unreliable it could be, which could in the end give a false sense of control to our users. A technology that works 70% of the time is a bad one.

The origin

Missive is a team communication app. From day one, we believed that in order to succeed we had to offer an unparalleled email experience. Email is the most important channel in most business communication stacks.

For instance, sales people live and die in their email clients. One really useful feature for them is read tracking. You send an email to a prospect, that person quickly follows up saying they are not interested, but 3 months later, they reopen that same email, you get a live read notification, you instantly take your phone and follow up. You win.

After we launched Missive in 2015, requests for a read tracking feature quickly started to pile up.

We built it.

Reliability

When you advertise read tracking ability, the majority of users don't think about the intrinsic aspect of it, how it works and how unreliable it can be. They expect it to work all the time.

Behind the scenes, read tracking works by checking if an image in the sent email has been requested on a server. Each recipient receives a different version of the email with a unique transparent image. Each time one of those images is requested, the server matches it to a recipient and notifies the sender.

But… false positives and false negatives are very common:

• The recipient may read an email without triggering a read receipt if the images were blocked/not downloaded. Many email clients have built counter-measures to block them by default, rendering them less and less accurate.
• The recipient may not read the email and still trigger a read receipt if the email server downloaded and cached the image in advance. A lot of web-based email clients will do this.

When a user expects read tracking to be a source of truth, those false positives/negatives can cause weird situations.

There is no way to make this more reliable. All apps offering read tracking ability without explicitly mentioning to their users that it sucks, are doing false advertisement.

Now, a lot of educated users know the pitfalls of the technology, and use it with a grain of salt. From our support experience however, those are the minority.

The abuses

With a minimal amount of creativity, it’s easy to come up with scenarios where people can misuse read tracking.

Let’s say you received a love letter (email) from a colleague, you are quite moved and touched by it, but feel it’s inappropriate and decide to not reply. But the words haunt you and you go back and read them again and again.

Now, if the love letter author inserted a pixel tracker, they can know every single time you did go back to that email, and read it again and again. Not cool.

This scenario is fantasy, I just came up with it. But for us, no need to be to creative, people would write us messages like:

Argh… no! Please, don’t do that with our product, please.

The legal landscape

We are no legal experts, but for us, it seems clear offering read tracking ability made us ride on the grey side of privacy laws like GDPR.

[... referring to email tracking … ] The data processing is secretly performed, i.e. no information about the data processing is provided to the email recipients from whom the data is retrieved. Furthermore, email recipients are not given the possibility to accept or refuse the retrieval of the information described above. In sum, differently from classical acknowledgement email systems, with these new products, the recipient of emails has no possibility to accept or refuse the acknowledgment information processing towards the software user.

The Working Party 29 expresses the strongest opposition to this processing because personal data about addressees’ behaviour are recorded and transmitted without an unambiguous consent of a relevant addressee. This processing, performed secretly, is contradictory to the data protection principles requiring loyalty and transparency in the collection of personal data, provided by Article 10 of the Data Protection Directive.

-European data protection authorities opinion on email tracking.

You can do mental gymnastics, but read tracking is a predatory feature, privacy wise. Is it legal for a provider like Missive to offer email tracking capacity? Is the burden of using it all on our customers’ shoulders?

This is all debatable, and a lot of our users, when preemptively announced we would retire read tracking, argued that many other apps (CRM, email clients, etc) still offered it.

For instance, Superhuman when faced with controversy for offering read tracking made it opt-in instead of opt-out, probably for that exact reason.

The major difference between us and them is size. Being legally challenged in court or fined would most certainly be a death blow for a small bootstrapped company. Not a risk we are willing to take.

Our competitor funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from Silicon Valley can certainly foot the legal bills, not us.

Conclusion

To summarize, read tracking doesn’t really work, can be weaponized, is most certainly illegal in many places and is potentially deadly to our business. Pulling the plug seemed obvious to the four of us.

This will affect our bottom line, some of our users will leave for competitors*. But today, we took a stance and it feels good.

And to end this post on a high note. We want to officially announce that we're actively working on a full-fledged calendar in Missive! You will be able to accept invites, add events and alerts, share calendars, and more! We estimate that it will be ready in under two months.

* If you are one of those users who cancel their Missive account, we offer to refund your last payment. Just contact us by email by October 15th, 2020.

How to run analytics without a consent banner? It is simple; don't use cookies nor collect personal information.

Frankly, the amount of information our devices give away is scary. Amongst other places, it ends up in the dashboard of a company's analytics app. For product people like us, many of these data points turn out to be irrelevant when making important product or marketing decisions anyway.

Even Google's Head of Insights & Analytics, Janneke van Geuns, said that "The biggest misconception is the perceived need to capture and measure everything and anything." "A common belief is that if you capture every type of metric, it will tell you magically what works and what doesn't. Unfortunately, that is not how we get to insights, and would be comparable to having to find a needle in a haystack."

So, not only does harvesting data without intent can invade your users' privacy, but it can make your work more challenging. Keep it simple they say!

NOTEAnalytics/tracking were never included in our apps (mail.missiveapp.com, iOS, Mac, etc). This post is exclusively about our homepage and marketing site hosted at https://missiveapp.com.

The switch

We asked ourselves if it was time to switch to a less invasive analytics app than Google Analytics; one where lengthy privacy policies weren't needed to figure out their compliance with privacy laws of various countries (GDPR, CCPA, or PECR).

We realized that the answer was yes, a change was needed. Here are a few reasons why:

1. As an email collaboration tool, transparency and our users' privacy are paramount to us. Even if we were only including Google Analytics on our marketing site, we had to reference it in our privacy policy, which made it longer and scarier without a clear upside.
2. Many users are blocking invasive metrics scripts, skewing the quality of the data.
3. We hate those annoying cookie banners required to use Google Analytics legally in Europe. To scroll is not to give consent. So a veritable "consent-wall" is needed for it to be compliant.We are not fans of using free products; there is always a long-term hidden cost.

We looked at three potential replacements: Fathom Analytics, Plausible.io, and Simple Analytics.

After some due diligence, we decided to go with Simple Analytics, a product run by a small independent team from the Netherlands.

They were the only one not using fingerprinting to track users between page views. The upside is better privacy protection, the downside is the unique visitor metric can’t really be trusted.

But as seen here in this exchange between Rafael (our CTO) and the Fathom Analytics team, even with fingerprinting, the unique metric is not so reliable:

After a few days of using Simple Analytics, I'm happy to say it’s a far less overwhelming experience than the Google Analytics dashboard. You get a straightforward single-page dashboard with all the metrics they offer.

Privacy-first service

Let's explore what makes Simple Analytics a privacy-first analytics service:

• They don't save or collect IP addresses.
• They have an interesting way to detect unique visits, again, without cookies or IP addresses. They do it based on the hostname of the referrer of the page. They explain it like this: "When a user comes from one domain to another, their browser shares the previous domain with the next. If the current page's domain is the same as the one in the referrer, we know it's a non-unique visit." Not perfect, but good enough.
• They do collect and store timestamps, but those are entirely harmless and crucial for the graphs they generate.
• User Agents. They use them only for counting operating systems, device sizes, and browsers. They don't use User Agents for fingerprinting.
• Simple Analytics never tracks users, and by default, they ignore visits with Do Not Track (DNT) enabled.

The caveats

Simple Analytics currently offers these metrics: page view count, visitor count, referrals, top pages, screen widths, browsers, and countries. Seven metrics versus dozens in regular analytics apps. Is that a disadvantage? Not for us at the moment.

Since we don't plan to run ads anytime soon, we don't need to profile our audience, get their demographics, likes, interests, behavior patterns, etc.

Also, they don't crunch any data for you, so you will need to calculate ratios and percentages for traffic metrics manually. But again, not a problem for us.

They just rolled out cookie-less event tracking, which we will use to manually track some events like downloads.

On the other hand, they seem pretty engaged and are continually developing new features. You can see the whole roadmap.

And they were great at answering all our questions before the transition.

Conclusion

We traded a ‘free’, privacy-less, and complex analytic dashboard to a paid, privacy-first & simple one. We couldn’t be happier.

Also, thanks to this change our DuckDuckGo privacy rating was upgraded from C+ to B+

We have submited our Privacy Policy to the organization ToS;DR. DuckDuckGo works with them to provide these privacy grades. We will hopefully get the A grade soon.