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What we released in 2025
Blog →
by
Philippe Lehoux
January 5, 2026
· Updated on
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).
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.
