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Missive’s First Trade Show
Blog →
by
Philippe Lehoux
June 11, 2024
· Updated on
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.
After crunching our numbers (organization size, core functionalities usage, ease of onboarding), the answer was:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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).
May 17, 2024
All-hands Team Memo • May 2024
A small window into our vision, challenges, strategies, and roadmap. Written by our CEO.
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.
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.
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.
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:
If you don’t have access to Mixpanel, just ask, and I will invite you.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
