A Decade of Lazy Marketing
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).
