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How we bootstrapped a $1M ARR email client
Blog →
by
Philippe Lehoux
April 6, 2021
· Updated on
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
January 5, 2026
What we released in 2025
Looking back at 2025, we doubled the size of our team and set out to tackle some of the most requested features from our users.
Each year gives us 365 days to make Missive better for you, our users. I'm excited for 2026 and I'm incredibly proud of what we accomplished in the last 365 days.
Looking back at 2025, we doubled the size of our team and set out to tackle some of the most requested features from our users. We also shipped a handful of improvements that quietly make everyone’s day‑to‑day work in Missive smoother.
Here are some highlights from our favorite releases this year.
This year we introduced AI-powered rules that let automations understand message content rather than rely on static conditions. We expanded them with multi-channel support, model selection, and practical actions like AI labeling, draft creation, and pre-send checks for outgoing messages, making rules more useful in day-to-day workflows.
Rules also became easier to manage with drag-and-drop editing, support for signatures in rule-generated drafts, and the ability to remove users from conversations automatically.
We’ve completely re-imagined how tasks work in Missive. You’ll now find dedicated views that brings together all your tasks into one place.
We added search and filter options to make it easier and more efficient to find the information you need. Filters with a specific date range, domain names, only conversations with attachments, etc.
See all files and attachments from any conversation in one unified view. Cleaner thumbnails, category-based organization, and Quick Look with keyboard shortcuts make everyday tasks faster.
Taking a well-deserved break? You can now set up automatic replies for your personal accounts right from your out of office status, no need for a rule.
No more forwarding long threads or stitching together feedback from different tools. Guest Access lets you bring people outside your organization, like an accountant, contractor, or client—directly into specific Missive conversations.
You can now toggle your Drafts and Sent mailboxes to show only the conversations with messages you personally created or all the ones from your colleagues, making it easier to focus on your own work.
We redesigned our signup and onboarding flow to better guide new organizations through their first steps, with clearer hand-holding around creating a team and connecting a first shared account.
A new way to organize your teams. Every team has now a dedicated space in the sidebar, and every member will see the right elements depending on their role in the team. Quickly access your team’s inbox, Tasks, and Chatroom from the same place.
Native support for WhatsApp Business. No need to add a WhatsApp account via a third-party provider anymore, import directly from Facebook Business Manager.
As always, we'll be regularly shipping improvements and posting them on our changelog. We can't wait to show you what we're cooking up in 2026 already.
October 1, 2024
A Decade of Lazy Marketing
A look back at the marketing efforts that fueled Missive's growth over the past 10 years.
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.
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).
