Crafting a better work experience

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:

• We’re self-funded.
• We’re a small team of three co-founders and one employee.
• We built a cloud-based collaborative email client (a.k.a. it’s not easy).
• We never spent a dime on marketing.
• We’re incredibly resilient.

On being self-funded

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.

On being a small team

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.

On building a cloud-based collaborative email application

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.

On finding customers

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.

On being resilient

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.

Customer feedback is an integral part of a customer-centric business strategy. Along with excellent customer service, getting feedback from the people who use your product/service is key to achieving customer success.

In this blog post, we share with you four ways you can use Missive to easily acquire, manage and store customer feedback.

We will be relying mostly on User Action Rules. These are triggered by an action defined by the user. For example, you could create a rule that sends a conversation to the trash whenever you type trash in the comment bar.

Let's get started!

Key Takeaways

• Request reviews in seconds: Set up a canned response with links to your review platforms (G2, Facebook, TrustPilot, etc.) and trigger it by typing "#reviews" in the comment bar.
• Send feedback to a spreadsheet automatically: Connect a Missive user action rule to a Zapier webhook that pushes customer emails and messages into Google Sheets—no manual copy-pasting needed.
• Embed surveys in every email signature: Use Missive's managed signature system to add one-click satisfaction surveys from tools like Simplesat across your entire team.
• Never forget to follow up: Create an outgoing message rule that automatically snoozes emails with a specific label, so leads resurface at the right time.

Get social reviews

Send links to multiple review platforms in under 3 seconds. How?

1. Create a Response

Here's the copy if you want to use it. Make sure to add the logos of the platforms you use and add the respective links.

Hey {{ recipient.first_name | default: "there" | confirm }}!

Thank you for trying out our product. If you want to share your experience with others, you might want to review us on:

G2 - Facebook - TrustPilot - Yelp - Google

Cheers!

2. Create a Comment User Action rule for #reviews

Now, when you type "#reviews" in the comment bar, the Platform reviews canned response will be sent automatically to the customer.

Manage Email Customer Feedback

With Missive you can easily manage customer feedback received in emails. You can even have it sent to a spreadsheet in order to categorize it and put words into action. This can be done with Zapier webhooks and Google Sheets.

Although it might sound like a daunting project, it's not. Let me show you.

Create a Zapier account and click on Create Zap.

Select "Webhook" as the trigger > "Catch hook" as the Trigger Event > Continue

To test the trigger, open your Missive settings > Create a "New comment" rule > Set the condition Text is "#feedback" > Add the webhook URL provided by Zapier

Add the comment "#feedback" in any email thread in Missive.

Go back to Zapier and click on Test. You should get something like this:

In the action menu, select "Google Sheets" > "Create Spreadsheet Row" as the Action event > Add your Google account > Continue

Note: Before you continue creating the Zap, go to your Google Drive > Create a spreadsheet and add column names. It could be as simple as having two columns: Email and Feedback.

Select your Drive > Select a spreadsheet > Select a Worksheet. In our spreadsheet, we have two columns: Email and Feedback. We are going to match them to the pertinent data from the webhook.

In this case, we want:

Email -> Latest Message From Field Address

Feedback -> Latest Message Preview

Test it and click on Turn on Zap.

From this point on, whenever you get customer feedback in an email, you can simply type "#feedback" in the comment bar and information will be sent seamlessly to the feedback spreadsheet.

Show satisfaction surveys in signature

Missive offers a powerful signature management system. With it, you can easily add customer satisfaction surveys to each of your teammates' signatures in just minutes.

The dynamic data comes from your team's editable member profiles. Some survey collection companies let you generate embeddable HTML code. In this case, you can copy the code and paste it into the managed signature editor.

You can also add custom field variables like in the example above. Learn more about managed signatures.

Implement proactive follow-ups

One of the most straightforward ways to stay in contact with a customer and to ensure a successful relationship is to follow up after a determined period of time. If you work in a sales environment, it's crucial to follow up on leads. Missive makes it easy for you.

You can create a Rule that snoozes all outgoing emails sent from your account that contain the label "Warm Lead".

You'll never miss the opportunity to close a deal!

FAQ

Can my whole team use the same #feedback and #reviews rules?

Yes. If you create the rules under your organization (rather than under "You" in the rules settings), every team member can trigger them. Anyone on the team can type "#feedback" or "#reviews" in a comment bar and the rule will fire. The webhook data and canned responses work the same regardless of who triggers it.

Does the webhook send data other than the email address and message preview?

The webhook payload includes conversation details, message content, sender information, and any labels on the conversation. When you test the Zap in Zapier, you'll see all available fields and can map whichever ones you need to your spreadsheet columns—for example, you could add a column for the subject line, the date, or which team member triggered the rule.

What happens if the webhook to Zapier fails?

Missive retries failed webhook requests up to 5 times over about 8 minutes. If a webhook rule fails more than 50 consecutive times, Missive automatically disables it to prevent repeated errors. You can re-enable it from the Rules settings tab once the issue is resolved.

Sometimes you need to take particular actions for different groups of customers. Handling these exceptions can be difficult as your company grows. Without an automated system working on your behalf, it's easy to make mistakes.

With Missive, companies can create groups within their contact books. These are very useful tools for segmentation. But even more helpful is the ability to create workflows using these groups or individual contacts as conditions to trigger automatic actions.

Imagine you have a group of highly-select customers that require special attention and faster service. Instead of always having to be alert for when they contact you, with Missive, you can designate a group for them and then let it alert you when someone from this select cluster makes contact.

The previous is an example of our powerful contact-based rules. We're going to explore three scenarios (instructions included) on how you too can leverage this feature.

Key Takeaways

• Group your contacts, then automate around them: Create contact groups like "VIP," "German customers," or "Spammers" and use Missive's rules engine to trigger actions automatically whenever someone from that group reaches out.
• Works across every channel: Contact-based rules apply to email, SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and Live Chat—not just email. Set up the rule once and it covers all your channels.
• Combine contact conditions with anything else: Contact group and company conditions can be combined with keyword matching, time-based triggers, AI analysis, and other conditions for precise automation.
• Add contacts to groups on the fly: You can add a sender to a contact group directly from the email viewer without leaving your inbox—no need to go to settings every time.

But first, let's learn how to create contact groups.

1. Click on your name
2. Go to Contacts

1. If you don't have one already, create a Contact Book.

1. Create a contact
2. Create and add a group

1. Repeat for other contacts

PROTIPYou can add contacts to a group directly from the email viewer. Click on the email address > Add to Contacts > Add Group

Scenario 1

Your top 20% of customers bring 80% of the revenue. You signed a strict Service Level Agreement and they expect the best treatment.

Group name: VIP customers

Actions: Notify Sales Team when they email + label as VIP + display 15 minute SLA post

Scenario 2

You're dipping your toes into the German market and you've hired Hans to help. He's bilingual, so he can answer emails in English and German. You need to have them translated automatically since you don't speak the language.

Group name: German customers

Actions: Assign messages to Hans + translate them to English using a webhook

Scenario 3

Your business (Company Inc) is consulting to the sales and legal teams at Acme Inc. Both teams email you to john@company.com. You need the lawyers' emails to be directed to your own legal team and forward a copy to another outsourced firm.

Group name: Acme Inc (Legal team) customers

Actions: Move messages to the Legal Team Inbox + forward them to the outsourced firm.

Bonus

Trash spam or undesired emails in the future by adding them to the contact group Spammers.

Group name: Spammers

Actions: Trash emails

Beyond Groups: Other Contact-Based Conditions

The scenarios above all use contact groups, but Missive's rules engine supports several other contact-based conditions. You can also build rules that check whether a sender or recipient is in a specific contact company (useful for B2B routing—e.g., route all emails from anyone at Acme Corp to your account manager), in a specific contact book, or simply whether they exist in your organization's contacts at all. That last one is particularly handy for treating known contacts differently from first-time senders—for example, skipping an auto-reply for people you've already been in touch with.

You can also use the "Create contact(s)" rule action to automatically add new senders to a contact book when a rule fires. This is useful for building your contact database from incoming leads or support requests without any manual data entry.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do contact-based rules work for SMS and WhatsApp, or just email?

They work across all of Missive's supported channels: email, SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and Live Chat. The same contact group condition you set up for an email rule can be used in an SMS or WhatsApp rule. The only exception is custom channels, which don't support the rules engine yet.

Can a contact belong to multiple groups at the same time?

Yes. Groups work like tags—a single contact can be in "VIP," "German customers," and "Enterprise" simultaneously. If multiple rules match (one for each group), they'll all fire unless one of them includes a "Stop processing more rules" action.

Can I import contacts from a CSV file instead of adding them one by one?

Yes—right-click on a contact book and select "Import contacts (CSV)." Missive supports CSV files in Google and Outlook formats. If your contact book is synced with Google or Office 365, import the CSV through that provider's interface instead (Google Contacts or Outlook) and it'll sync to Missive automatically.

Can I combine a contact group condition with other conditions in the same rule?

Absolutely. You can combine "From is in contact group" with keyword conditions, time-based conditions (like business hours or unreplied-after timers), conversation state, AI analysis, and more. For example, you could create a rule that fires only when a VIP customer sends a message that's been unreplied for 30 minutes—combining a contact group condition with a time-based SLA condition.

Managing leads and deals from an Excel sheet might work for a short period of time, but it's mostly a hack. What your company needs, no matter the size, is a CRM.

A CRM is a Customer Relationship Management tool, usually in the form of an app that allows companies to properly manage interactions with potential and current customers. Companies of all sizes, including small ones, benefit from integrating a CRM into their tool stack.

Options abound online. But we believe Pipedrive is one of the best out there. It's not just a CRM, it helps you, among other things:

• Manage leads and deals
• Track communications
• Automate tasks
• Generate insights and reports

How to manage leads and deals from my inbox?

In one word: Missive.

Missive is a team inbox and chat app that helps businesses stay on top of all their communication channels and projects in a single app. All while enabling collaboration between coworkers. Missive offers a Pipedrive integration that helps you bridge the gap between emails and your sales funnel!

Missive offers a great integration with Pipedrive that lets you see your contacts, deals, activities and notes right in the context of your Inbox! You can also create and edit them directly from Missive.

The integration will also let you quickly send received emails to your Pipedrive account with the Forward to Pipedrive action available on each email.

Do you need to discuss a deal in real-time? No problem, you can do that too using the chat feature in Missive!

How do you set up Pipedrive in Missive?

Step 1

Create a free Pipedrive account.

They offer multiple sign up options, like Gmail or LinkedIn sign in for example, or you can do it with an email and password.

Step 2

Open Missive and go to Settings > Integrations > Add integration > Pipedrive

A pop-up will open that will ask for your Pipedrive account and permission to access it.

Share the integration with your team if needed.

Step 3

You're ready to start adding contacts, deals, activities and notes from Missive!

Will changes reflect in Pipedrive?

Absolutely! Everything you create or edit in Missive will be visible and available in pipedrive.com in real-time.

Millions of entrepreneurs around the globe have leveraged the internet to increase sales. Now more than ever, current world events have driven many businesses to jump into the ecommerce world in a matter of months.

Shopify is one of the leaders in the ecommerce building space. They claim businesses using their service have generated over 200 billion USD in sales. It's amazing.

But let's not forget that having a medium where you can sell stuff is only half the battle. Providing quality customer support is just as important as offering a quality product.

In today's fast-paced world, customers expect fast, reliable service. With so much competition out there, failing to do so can result in decreased brand loyalty and fleeing customers.

In the online world, live chat is often the most effective channel of communication. According to eConsultancy:

Live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, with 73%, compared with 61% for email and 44% for phone.

In other words, live chat makes for happier customers.

In this article, we will explain how you can add live chat to a Shopify ecommerce site.

Choosing a live chat service to add to Shopify

There are many options out there. But if you are part of a small/medium ecommerce team that is looking to collaborate around live chat, email, and other communication channels, then Missive is the way to go.

Missive Live Chat is powered by Twilio. Right off the bat, it is free, and you can have up to 200 active chats per month. After that, you will pay a low fee, starting at $0.03 for each additional one.

Setting up Missive Live Chat

Once you have created your Missive account, go to your Settings and click Accounts then Add account.

Select the Missive Live Chat option.

As we stated before, Missive Live Chat uses Twilio's Conversations API, so you must first sign up to Twilio. Monthly fees (after the 200 active chats per month) will be charged to your Twilio account.

Once you've signed up, you will have access to the dashboard, where you will be able to see two important pieces of information: your Account SID and Auth Token.

Back in Missive you can continue the process.

Missive is, above all, a tool to collaborate around different channels. You will be asked to choose whether you want the chats shared with teammates or not.

We suggest you choose the first option and share it in a Team Inbox. This will lead all incoming chats into a shared inbox where many teammates can assign cases to each other and work more efficiently.

After that, you will need to enter the Account SID and Auth Token from your Twilio account as well as a Chat service name.

Your live chat is almost ready to be plugged into Shopify.

Setting up Missive Live Chat in Shopify

It's very simple to install Missive Live Chat in Shopify.

STEP 1

Go to your Online Store Dashboard > Settings > Actions > Edit code

STEP 2

Click on the file theme.liquid that's inside the Layout folder.

STEP 3

Go back to Missive and copy the code snippet. You can find it in Settings > Accounts > Missive Chat > Setup > Code Snippet.

STEP 3

Go back to Shopify, and paste the code right before the </head> tag.

Congratulations! You now have a live chat on your website. But it's not in sync with the site's branding. Yet.

Customizing the live chat window

Inside the Missive Live Chat settings, you can:

• Change the main color
• Customize various messages such as welcome, help, error, title, etc.
• Change the position of the bubble
• Show online status
• Show avatars
• Show names
• Ask for name and/or email
• Require name and/or email
• Change the bubble messages
• Change the User Interface messages
• Identify and verify users
• And more

The widget is highly customizable. For all options, see the documentation.

Here's the final version of our chat bubble. It looks great, right?

Managing the live chat

Missive Live Chat is the perfect way to interact with visitors and users from your website without creating additional silos of communication.

Whenever someone sends a message through the live chat on your website, it will instantly appear in your Missive app, and like all other channels (email, SMS, social media messages), you decide where these messages land. You may choose for them to arrive in a Team Inbox or everyone's Inbox.

Missive Live Chat offers you fantastic features:

• Identify visitors & authenticate users
• One-to-many interactions
• Customizable widget
• Schedules
• File exchange
• Automation
• Read status
• Attach and display metadata
• Emojis

Go here to learn more about each feature.

We hope this article helped you add a live chat to your Shopify site.

Everyone has a website these days. How can you make yours stand out from the crowd? I think there are three principal elements; First, offer a great product. Second, create a beautiful website, and third, deliver outstanding customer support.

Squarespace is a website builder that allows people to easily create alluring websites in a short time and without any coding skills. They've distinguished themselves by their aesthetic pre-built templates that cater mostly to the creative industry. By building a website with them, you're on the right path to standing out from the crowd!

Now let's talk about customer service. In today's fast-paced world, customers expect fast, reliable service. With so much competition out there, failing to do so can result in decreased brand loyalty and fleeing customers.

In the online world, live chat is often the most effective channel of communication. According to eConsultancy:

Live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, with 73%, compared with 61% for email and 44% for phone.

In other words, live chat = happier customers.

In this article, we will explain how you can add live chat to a Squarespace site.

Choosing a live chat service to add to Squarespace

There are many options out there. But if you are part of a small/medium team that is looking to collaborate around live chat, email, and other communication channels, then Missive is the way to go.

Missive Live Chat is powered by Twilio.  Right off the bat, it is free, and you can have up to 200 active chats per month. After that, you will pay a low fee, starting at $0.03 for each additional one.

Setting up Missive Live Chat

Once you have created your Missive account. Go to your Settings and click Accounts then Add account.

Select the Missive Live Chat option.

As we stated before, Missive Live Chat uses Twilio's Conversations API, so you must first sign up to Twilio. Monthly fees (after the 200 active chats per month) will be charged to your Twilio account.

Once you've signed up, you will have access to the dashboard, where you will be able to see two important pieces of information: your Account SID and Auth Token.

Back in Missive you can continue the process.

Missive is, above all, a tool to collaborate around different channels. You will be asked to choose whether you want the chats shared with teammates or not.

We suggest you choose the first option and share it in a Team Inbox. This will lead all incoming chats into a shared inbox where many teammates can assign cases to each other and work more efficiently.

After that, you will need to enter the Account SID and Auth Token from your Twilio account as well as a Chat service name.

Your live chat is almost ready to be plugged into Squarespace.

Setting up Missive Live Chat in Squarespace

It's quite easy to install Missive Live Chat in Squarespace.

STEP 1

Go to your Squarespace Dashboard > Settings > Advanced > Code Injection

STEP 2

Go back to Missive and copy the account id from the code snippet. You can find it in Settings > Accounts > Missive Chat > Setup > Code Snippet.

It looks like this number:

2846475-c2324-232344-235-dsfds34ffdf233

STEP 3

Go back to Squarespace and paste the code in the HEADER tag.

Congratulations! You now have a live chat on your website. But it's not in sync with the site's branding. Yet.

Customizing the live chat window

Inside the Missive Live Chat  settings, you can:

• Change the main color
• Customize various messages such as welcome, help, error, title, etc.
• Change the position of the bubble
• Show online status
• Show avatars
• Show names
• Ask for name and/or email
• Require name and/or email
• Change the bubble messages
• Change the User Interface messages
• Identify and verify users
• And more

The widget is highly customizable. For all options, see the documentation.

Here's the final version of our chat bubble. It looks great, right?

Managing the live chat

Missive Live Chat is the perfect way to interact with visitors and users from your website without creating additional silos of communication.

Whenever someone sends a message through the live chat on your website, it will instantly appear in your Missive app, and like all other channels (email, SMS, social media messages), you decide where these messages land. You may choose for them to arrive in a Team Inbox or everyone's Inbox.

Missive Live Chat offers you fantastic features:

• Identify visitors & authenticate users
• One-to-many interactions
• Customizable widget
• Schedules
• File exchange
• Automation
• Read status
• Attach and display metadata
• Emojis

Go here to learn more about each feature.

We hope this article helped you add a live chat to your Squarespace site.

You now have the tools to create a great website and offer fantastic customer support. Now focus all your energy on developing an excellent product or service!

Project management from your email client? It's possible.

Asana is a project management tool that has exploded in popularity in the last few years. It can help people of all industries better manage projects using different visualizations, including Kanban-style boards, calendar view, Gant charts, etc.

Asana can also help your team reduce the number of meetings because it lets you clearly define task owners and allows a high-degree scoping. And although Asana can also reduce the number of emails you get, you simply can't get rid of them all. Email is by far the most used communications medium in the professional world. Customers, clients, prospects, employees, etc., they all use email.

Email is actually the simplest way to communicate externally with clients. There's no learning curve to beat or onboarding to account for. You simply send email.

So there should be a way to easily add tasks to projects in Asana directly from your email, right? Without the hassle of shifting between apps and trying to match tasks with specific conversations.

Thanks to Missive's integration with Asana, you can add tasks to workspaces and projects from your email client with just a couple of clicks.

Sounds good, but what is Missive?

Missive is a team inbox and chat tool that helps businesses stay on top of all their communication channels and projects in a single app. All while enabling collaboration between coworkers. Missive offers an integration with Asana that helps you bridge the gap between emails and project management!

The integration gives you access to all your projects, tags, custom fields, and teammates. You will be able to assign tasks to teammates and define due dates. Say goodbye to switching between apps to add tasks to your workspaces.

A customer sent an email with a change request to the project? Easy, click on New Task in Missive, and the whole team will see the new task and can begin to work immediately.

Do you need to discuss a task in real-time? No problem, you can do that too!

How do you set up Asana in Missive?

Step 1

Create a free Asana account.

Step 2

Open Missive and go to Settings > Integrations > Add integration > Asana

A pop-up will open that will ask for your Asana account and permission to access it.

Share the integration with your team if needed.

Step 3

You're ready to start creating and managing Asana tasks directly from Missive! Click on the New task button in the integrations panel.

Enter the task's information and click on Create:

Will changes reflect in Asana?

Yes! Everything you create or edit in Missive will be visible and available in app.asana.com in real-time.

Sometimes a to-do list is not enough to accomplish your objectives.

More often than not, you need a more structured approach. This is where tools like Trello are of great help. Trello is a web-based app that lets you create cards with lists in a Kanban-style to manage projects.

Kanban is a method of organizing work. It's a visualization format in which cards (digital or not) are spread over a board. Each card contains a task or action. Cards are distributed in different lists in categories of progress: To-do, doing, and done. Boards can be customized to hold different degrees of progress granularization.

Trello uses the kanban lean methodology to help people plan and execute projects of all sorts via their application. Trello boards are very popular. Some companies, organizations and communities leave them public for everyone to watch, like the super popular videogame Project JoJo Trello or this company's roadmap.

Nice! You said something about managing Trello from my email?

Short story long, yes, you can with Missive.

Missive is a team inbox and chat app that helps businesses stay on top of all their communication channels and projects in a single app. All while enabling collaboration between coworkers. Missive offers a Trello integration that helps you bridge the gap between emails and projects!

The integration gives you access to all your boards, lists, labels, cards, and teammates. You will be able to add cards, apply labels, move cards to lists, add teammates, and define due dates. Say good buy to switching between apps to add tasks to your project.

A customer sent an email with a change request to the project? Easy, click on New Card on Missive, and the whole team will see the new task and begin to work immediately.

Do you need to discuss a card in real-time? No problem, you can do that too!

How do you set up Trello in Missive?

Step 1

Create a free Trello account.

They offer multiple sign up options, like Gmail sign in for example, or you can do it with an email and password. Once that's done, you will need to create your first project or board, then add a few cards and you're done!

Step 2

Open Missive and go to Settings > Integrations > Add integration > Trello

A pop-up will open that will ask for your Trello account and permission to access it.

Share the integration with your team if needed.

Step 3

You're ready to start creating and managing cards from Missive! Click on the "New Card" button in the integrations panel.

Enter the card's information and click on Create:

Will changes reflect in Trello?

Yes! Everything you create or edit in Missive will be visible and available in trello.com in real-time.

Update: Now blocking read receipts from other services. Missive now auto blocks read trackers and 1x1 images to prevent senders from spying on what you do with their email.

This week we sunsetted read receipts from Missive. This will cost us a lot, so here is why we did it.

Read tracking is magical. You know instantly when your recipients open your sent emails. This brings incredible power and can be beneficial in many legitimate business scenarios. It’s really popular.

Behind the scenes however, there is an uglier untold story. For us, the technologists who built and offered support around it, it kept getting more controversial over time. In the most extreme cases, we saw first hand how it was misused and weaponized to abuse people. And on the more innocuous and potentially useful scenarios, how unreliable it could be, which could in the end give a false sense of control to our users. A technology that works 70% of the time is a bad one.

The origin

Missive is a team communication app. From day one, we believed that in order to succeed we had to offer an unparalleled email experience. Email is the most important channel in most business communication stacks.

For instance, sales people live and die in their email clients. One really useful feature for them is read tracking. You send an email to a prospect, that person quickly follows up saying they are not interested, but 3 months later, they reopen that same email, you get a live read notification, you instantly take your phone and follow up. You win.

After we launched Missive in 2015, requests for a read tracking feature quickly started to pile up.

We built it.

Reliability

When you advertise read tracking ability, the majority of users don't think about the intrinsic aspect of it, how it works and how unreliable it can be. They expect it to work all the time.

Behind the scenes, read tracking works by checking if an image in the sent email has been requested on a server. Each recipient receives a different version of the email with a unique transparent image. Each time one of those images is requested, the server matches it to a recipient and notifies the sender.

But… false positives and false negatives are very common:

• The recipient may read an email without triggering a read receipt if the images were blocked/not downloaded. Many email clients have built counter-measures to block them by default, rendering them less and less accurate.
• The recipient may not read the email and still trigger a read receipt if the email server downloaded and cached the image in advance. A lot of web-based email clients will do this.

When a user expects read tracking to be a source of truth, those false positives/negatives can cause weird situations.

There is no way to make this more reliable. All apps offering read tracking ability without explicitly mentioning to their users that it sucks, are doing false advertisement.

Now, a lot of educated users know the pitfalls of the technology, and use it with a grain of salt. From our support experience however, those are the minority.

The abuses

With a minimal amount of creativity, it’s easy to come up with scenarios where people can misuse read tracking.

Let’s say you received a love letter (email) from a colleague, you are quite moved and touched by it, but feel it’s inappropriate and decide to not reply. But the words haunt you and you go back and read them again and again.

Now, if the love letter author inserted a pixel tracker, they can know every single time you did go back to that email, and read it again and again. Not cool.

This scenario is fantasy, I just came up with it. But for us, no need to be to creative, people would write us messages like:

Argh… no! Please, don’t do that with our product, please.

The legal landscape

We are no legal experts, but for us, it seems clear offering read tracking ability made us ride on the grey side of privacy laws like GDPR.

[... referring to email tracking … ] The data processing is secretly performed, i.e. no information about the data processing is provided to the email recipients from whom the data is retrieved. Furthermore, email recipients are not given the possibility to accept or refuse the retrieval of the information described above. In sum, differently from classical acknowledgement email systems, with these new products, the recipient of emails has no possibility to accept or refuse the acknowledgment information processing towards the software user.

The Working Party 29 expresses the strongest opposition to this processing because personal data about addressees’ behaviour are recorded and transmitted without an unambiguous consent of a relevant addressee. This processing, performed secretly, is contradictory to the data protection principles requiring loyalty and transparency in the collection of personal data, provided by Article 10 of the Data Protection Directive.

-European data protection authorities opinion on email tracking.

You can do mental gymnastics, but read tracking is a predatory feature, privacy wise. Is it legal for a provider like Missive to offer email tracking capacity? Is the burden of using it all on our customers’ shoulders?

This is all debatable, and a lot of our users, when preemptively announced we would retire read tracking, argued that many other apps (CRM, email clients, etc) still offered it.

For instance, Superhuman when faced with controversy for offering read tracking made it opt-in instead of opt-out, probably for that exact reason.

The major difference between us and them is size. Being legally challenged in court or fined would most certainly be a death blow for a small bootstrapped company. Not a risk we are willing to take.

Our competitor funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from Silicon Valley can certainly foot the legal bills, not us.

Conclusion

To summarize, read tracking doesn’t really work, can be weaponized, is most certainly illegal in many places and is potentially deadly to our business. Pulling the plug seemed obvious to the four of us.

This will affect our bottom line, some of our users will leave for competitors*. But today, we took a stance and it feels good.

And to end this post on a high note. We want to officially announce that we're actively working on a full-fledged calendar in Missive! You will be able to accept invites, add events and alerts, share calendars, and more! We estimate that it will be ready in under two months.

* If you are one of those users who cancel their Missive account, we offer to refund your last payment. Just contact us by email by October 15th, 2020.

People like texting, that's a fact.

Being able to offer customer service via SMS (short message service) or texts opens up a fresh and dynamic way to reach customers but also for them to reach you better.

According to Gigaom, SMS are opened around 98% of the time! This number is astonishing, especially when we know emails are at best opened 22% of the time.

Why should I use SMS as a communication channel?

Let me give you three reasons why you should add SMS to your omnichannel customer support arsenal:

1. They are affordable

Unlike phone calls, where one agent can only take one call at a time, with SMS a single agent can be working multiple cases at any given time. The actual cost of SMS is also lower than a traditional phone call.

2. They're not frowned upon

People are tired of intrusive marketing calls or having to wait for ages before they are transferred to the "right" area of the company.

With SMS, customers respond when and if they want. Also, if they contact your company, their expectations will be lower in terms of replying speed. This gives companies a little room to breathe and handle cases with more care and diligence.

Additionally, people seem to see SMS as a more relaxed and approachable way to contact and get contacted by companies.

3. They're very popular

Literally, billions of people use SMS every day. There's no special tool, software to download or process to master. You just need a mobile phone and some credit in it. I don't believe there's another communication channel with entry-barriers as low as SMS.

Ok, but how do multiple agents reply from a single number?

This is where we come in to help. We offer a great integration with Twilio SMS that lets you send and receive text messages from your future collaborative email client, Missive. You read that right. Your team can collaborate and respond to SMS and emails from a single app, without stepping into each other's toes. Not only that, but you can also add WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and more!

Missive is a team inbox and chat app that helps businesses stay on top of all their communication channels in a single app. All while enabling collaboration between coworkers.

One of the best features is the ability to collaborate inside SMS. For example, if a customer sends a message, and you don't know how to respond, you can @mention another team and instantly give them access and ask for help.

You can also create team inboxes and assign certain SMS to specialized teams. Maybe a customer has a sales question. Then you can assign it to the Sales Team manually or through automated rules.

And you know how there's are always some questions that come through every day, multiple times per day...? With Missive's canned responses, you can quickly respond to popular SMS questions in seconds!

Pro tipUse the shortcut: Shift + Command + O to quickly open the responses popup

Nice! How do I set up Twilio SMS?

Step 1

Create a free Twilio account and buy a Twilio phone number.

Twilio's Console site allows users to quickly search for and provision phone numbers for your company. You can filter phone numbers based on location, phone number type, capabilities, and more from their Console.

Here's an in-depth guide of the phone number purchasing process. Or, if you prefer, you can also do a third-party phone number porting to Twilio.

You will be able to consult your number(s) in the Phone Numbers option under the Super Network category, which can be accessed by clicking on the sidebar's 3-dotted button.

Step 2

In the Twilio console, go to your dashboard and copy these two critical numbers: the Account SID and the Auth Token.

Step 3

Open Missive and go to Accounts > Add Account > SMS

Select whether this SMS account will be shared with a team, like the support team or if it will be a personal one.

Enter the Account SID, the Auth Token, and your Twilio Phone Number.

Step 4

Start collaborating around SMS with Missive! See how your customer satisfaction ratings go through the charts!