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A Special Team Retreat.
Blog →
by
Luis Manjarrez
December 10, 2019
· Updated on
This end-of-year retreat was different from past ones. We did the usual full week of intense work, but the weekend gave way to a relaxing, cheerful time with everyone's family under one roof.
It all started in mid-October, when Philippe, our CEO, decided it was time for a retreat. He booked a fantastic cabin, barely big enough for the five of us 😗, overlooking the Saint Lawrence River. It was suggested to us by one of our customers: MonsieurChalets.
After doing a quick Doodle to agree on a date, we decided to go during the last week of November. We also decided to hold the company's Christmas party on-site during the weekend. Great idea!
Before we knew it, we were packing suitcases, computer screens, and laptops in two small cars. Did I mention that we bought one week worth of food for five guys? That sort of looks like this:
By 6 pm we were on full retreat mode, our defacto workstation was a big dining table situated on the eastern side of the cabin facing the grandness of the river.
Days passed by very quickly. A typical one went out like this:
6.30-8.30 am - At different times and in no particular order, people would start showing up at the work (dining) table. Some in a grumpy not-a-morning-person kind of way, others with a 5k already under their belt.
8.30-9 am - Self-serve breakfast, which included an array of fruits, eggs, bread, and all-you-can-drink coffee too.
9.30 am - 1 pm - First uninterrupted sprint of work.
1 pm - 1.30 pm - Lunchtime. Delicious and copious lunch prepared by our in-house master chef Philippe.
1:30 pm - 6 pm - Second sprint of work. With a few breaks here and there to refill your coffee mug, take a quick dip in the jacuzzi, go for a jog, or simply to admire the breathtaking view.
6 pm - 7 pm - Dinner time. Another large shared meal and time to open a couple of Coronas.
7 pm - As late as you wish - Third work sprint. For some, the most productive time of day, for others time to slow down and work by the fireplace. For all, a moment to have a ping pong match, a stroll near the cabin or another dip in the jacuzzi.
Tens of commits, five beautiful sunsets and many accidentally broken eggs later, here are a few of the most notable things that we accomplished during this retreat:
By Friday evening, our families started to arrive, and our focus shifted to them. It was time to convert the work table back to a dining table.
Unlike the rest of the week, Saturday started as a sunny bright day; the cabin felt warmer and full of life with children playing and parents preparing breakfast. The day had a holiday feel to it, with people playing card games and kids sledding out in the snow.
By 6 pm, Christmas music started playing from the surround system in the living area, and everyone started chopping food in preparation for the Christmas dinner. We had raclette, some good wine, and a great conversation.
It's safe to say we all enjoyed the time working and the time off with our families. It's the first time we've done it this way and could very well be the last time.
We're at a point where we are small enough to do this, but this will undoubtedly change in a year from now — a good problem some might say. So yes, this was a special retreat.
From all the Missive team, we wish you a happy holiday season!
🎄
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).
June 11, 2024
Missive’s First Trade Show
Our journey to learning the ropes of trade shows and connecting with the right people in the logistics industry.
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.
