Crafting a better work experience

Help Scout is a capable help desk software designed to handle customer communication and support. But as with most tools, it has limitations that send people looking for alternatives.

Here are the most common reasons people look for a Help Scout competitor:

• Limited customization. The self-service knowledge base is less flexible than some competitors, and the integration library is smaller than platforms like Zendesk.
• High cost for what you get. Help Scout’s entry tier is $25/user/month (Standard, billed annually), which can be a lot for small teams or solo operators who don’t need the full help-desk suite.
• Support-only scope. Help Scout is built specifically for customer support ticketing. If your team also needs to handle sales, general team email, or internal collaboration, you’ll need a separate tool.
• Missing email client features. Basics like CC support are limited. For teams that think of their inbox as a regular email client, the restrictions feel awkward.
• Developer gaps. Key API endpoints (like knowledge base article control) are missing. Webhook coverage is limited, and SDK support across languages is inconsistent.

We’ve narrowed down the 9 best Help Scout alternatives for 2026. Some are traditional help desk platforms. Others are more flexible communication tools that can replace Help Scout while doing more. Each section covers what the tool is best for, key features, and pricing.

A note on pricing: prices below reflect annual billing where applicable, which is the standard way these tools are quoted. Monthly billing typically runs 20–40% higher. Pricing in this category has been moving fast; we last verified in April 2026, but spot-check current tiers before making a buying decision.

1. Missive

Best for teams who want real collaboration on customer support plus other channels.

Missive and Help Scout both offer shared inboxes, reply templates, integrations, and analytics. Where they diverge is on scope and collaboration.

Missive isn’t just a support tool; it’s a full collaborative email client that works for customer support, sales, internal team email, and multi-channel communication (email, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, live chat). You can use one tool for shared inboxes and your personal email, instead of splitting between Help Scout and Gmail.

Key advantages over Help Scout

• Broader channel support. Email, live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and more in one place. Help Scout is primarily email + live chat.
• Live drafting. See teammates typing in real time and co-edit replies. Help Scout doesn’t support collaborative replies.
• Internal chat inside conversations. @mention coworkers and discuss replies without leaving the email. Help Scout only supports notes.
• Flexible assignments. Assign to individuals, teams, or multiple people. Help Scout’s assignment model is simpler.
• Advanced rules. Content-aware rules (with AI-powered options) that work across all channels, not just email.
• Multiple aliases per inbox. Manage multiple domains from one account. Help Scout doesn’t support this natively.
• Native apps everywhere. Unified experience across web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android. Help Scout’s mobile apps have limited feature parity.

Pricing

Missive is free for up to 3 users. Paid plans start at $18/user/month, materially cheaper than Help Scout’s $25/user/month Standard tier.

2. Zendesk

Best for larger teams that need an enterprise help desk platform.

Zendesk is the industry veteran in the customer support space. If you’ve outgrown Help Scout and need more powerful ticketing, reporting, and workflow capabilities, Zendesk is the heavier option.

Why teams pick Zendesk over Help Scout:

• Wide range of channels: email, phone, chatbots, social media, SMS
• Full help desk toolset: ticketing, knowledge base, self-service portal, SLAs
• Detailed analytics and customer history
• Large integration marketplace (hundreds more than Help Scout)
• Full REST API coverage across tickets, users, and articles

The tradeoff: Zendesk is complex to set up and maintain. If your team doesn’t need its depth, you’ll pay for features you never use.

Pricing

Support Team (email-only ticketing) starts at $19/agent/month billed annually. Suite Team, the plan that actually compares to shared inbox tools with multichannel support, knowledge base, and chat, starts at $55/agent/month. Zendesk consistently pushes buyers toward Suite, so $55 is the more honest comparison number for most teams.

3. HubSpot

Best for teams already using HubSpot for sales and marketing.

HubSpot’s Service Hub is a solid help desk tool if you’re already using HubSpot for CRM, marketing, or sales. The integration with customer data across the HubSpot suite is the main reason to pick it.

Key features:

• Ticketing system with automated routing
• Live chat and chatbot builder
• Customer portal with self-service knowledge base
• Native CRM integration
• Analytics tied to broader HubSpot customer data

If you’re not already in the HubSpot ecosystem, adopting their support tool alone is overkill. The value is in the integration with the rest of the platform.

On the developer side: HubSpot has a capable API but lacks publicly accessible knowledge base endpoints, and webhook coverage doesn’t include article changes or portal interactions.

Pricing

Starts around $30/user/month on Starter Service Hub. A free tier covers basic functionality. Pricing changes frequently; verify current tiers on their site.

4. Zoho Desk

Best for teams that want a configurable help desk at a competitive price.

Zoho Desk is part of the broader Zoho suite. It covers the full help desk feature set (ticketing, knowledge base, live chat) with deep customization options, and it’s price-competitive with Help Scout while often offering more features per dollar.

Key features:

• Ticketing with tagging, prioritization, and rule-based routing
• Multichannel support (email, chat, social, phone)
• Integration with the wider Zoho suite (CRM, Projects, Campaigns)
• High configurability for teams with specific workflow needs

Developer note: Zoho Desk offers broad REST APIs for tickets, users, and automations, but documentation on knowledge base endpoints is limited and SDK coverage varies by language.

Pricing

Standard starts at $14/user/month billed annually, or $20/user/month billed monthly.

5. HelpCrunch

Best for teams that want AI-forward customer service.

HelpCrunch is a more AI-forward alternative to Help Scout, combining customer service and engagement in one platform.

Key features:

• Omnichannel inbox. Manage chat, email, and messenger conversations in one place.
• AI agents. Automate replies to repetitive queries using AI trained on your documentation and customer data.
• Campaigns and triggers. Send automated behavior-based messages for engagement and retention.
• Knowledge base. Create help articles that also train your AI agents.

Pricing

Basic starts at $12/user/month billed annually (or $15/user/month billed monthly) with AI features included. No free plan, but all tiers include a full-featured free trial.

6. Freshdesk

Best for small businesses wanting a polished help desk with generous free tier.

Freshdesk is a help desk for small businesses with a strong free tier and a clean interface.

Key features:

• Multi-channel support. Email, phone, chat, and social media from one inbox.
• Automation. Workflow automation to handle repetitive routing and assignment.
• Collaboration. Teams can work together on support tickets with assignments, comments, and resolution tracking.
• Developer API. Covers most core objects, though webhooks are limited to ticket events and don’t cover knowledge base article automations.

Pricing

Growth starts at $15/agent/month billed annually (or $29 billed monthly). A free plan covers basic functionality. If you’re looking at Freshdesk Omni (their multichannel product), Growth is $29/agent/month billed annually.

7. Front

Best for larger teams willing to pay for enterprise polish.

Front is a customer communication platform that combines channels into one inbox. It’s less traditional than Help Scout (no out-of-the-box knowledge base) and more focused on team collaboration around messaging.

Key features:

• Multichannel support. Email, live chat, social media, SMS.
• Team collaboration. Real-time collaboration and commenting inside conversations.
• Customizable inboxes. Tailored views for different teams or workflows.
• Automation. Rules and macros for common support workflows.
• Developer features. REST API for contacts, inboxes, and messages, though knowledge base management is read-only and webhook coverage excludes bulk actions.

Pricing

Starter starts at $25/seat/month billed annually, capped at 10 seats and single-channel. Higher tiers (Growth, Scale, Premier) unlock more seats, channels, and enterprise features.

8. Helpwise

Best for small teams wanting a lightweight shared inbox.

Helpwise is a focused shared inbox tool that handles the basics well without the complexity of a full help desk.

Key features:

• Shared inbox. Multiple people work the same email address.
• Collaboration. Built-in commenting on conversations.
• Email management. Assignments, prioritization, and response tracking.

If you want a minimal setup and simple interface, Helpwise is straightforward. If you need developer customization or deep automation, it’s too limited.

Pricing

Standard starts at $15/user/month. Premium is $25/user/month and Advanced is $50/user/month.

9. Hiver

Best for teams that want to keep working inside Gmail.

Hiver is a Chrome extension that adds help desk features on top of Gmail. You keep the interface your team already knows while getting assignments, tagging, and automation.

Key features:

• Familiar interface. Lives inside Gmail, no separate app to learn.
• Multi-channel coverage. Email, chatbots, and internal email threads. Feature depth is limited compared to dedicated help desks.
• Low customization. Minimal API capabilities, limited webhook and automation options, no external SDK.

Good for small Gmail-based teams that want something simple. Not the right pick if you need deep customization.

Pricing

Hiver recently restructured: there’s now a free forever plan, with Growth starting at $25/user/month billed annually ($35 monthly), Pro at $45/user/month annual ($55 monthly), and Elite at $75/user/month annual ($95 monthly). AI features are a separate $20/user/month add-on on top of the seat price.

Conclusion

Help Scout is a well-established customer support tool. But there are plenty of alternatives that offer similar or better capabilities, often at a lower price, with more flexibility, or with broader channel support.

The right Help Scout alternative for your team depends on what you actually need. For teams who want real collaboration across email, SMS, and chat, Missive is the clearest fit. For enterprise support operations, Zendesk. For Gmail-native teams wanting something light, Hiver. For AI-forward workflows, HelpCrunch.

Try the top two or three candidates with your real workflow. The best tool on paper is usually not the best tool in practice.

FAQ

Is Help Scout a CRM tool?

No. Help Scout is a customer support platform, not a CRM. It integrates with many CRM tools so customer data can flow in and out, but the product itself is focused on ticketing and support conversations.

What is Help Scout used for?

Help Scout is used by customer support teams to manage email, live chat, and knowledge base content in one platform with collaboration features for team members.

Is Help Scout free?

No. Help Scout’s pricing starts at $25/user/month for Standard. They offer a 15-day free trial.

What’s the cheapest Help Scout alternative?

Missive is free for up to 3 users, making it the most affordable starting point. For paid plans, HelpCrunch ($12/mo annual with AI), Zoho Desk ($14/mo annual), Freshdesk ($15/mo annual), Helpwise ($15/mo), and Missive ($18/mo) are all meaningfully cheaper than Help Scout’s $25/mo Standard tier.

Which Help Scout alternative has the most features?

Zendesk has the deepest feature set, especially for larger organizations. But feature depth isn’t always an advantage: more features mean more configuration, more learning curve, and more unused capabilities you’re paying for. For most small and mid-sized teams, Missive or Freshdesk offers a better balance.

Which alternative works best for small teams?

Missive (free for 3 users), Freshdesk (has a free tier), and Hiver (has a free forever plan) are all good fits for small teams. The right choice depends on how much collaboration and multi-channel support you need.

Are these prices billed monthly or annually?

Annually, unless noted otherwise. Monthly billing typically costs 20–40% more on most of these tools. Annual is the standard way these platforms quote pricing, but verify your specific plan’s terms before purchasing.

The role of executive support has evolved a lot. Whether you're a Chief of Staff, Executive Assistant, or Team Lead, managing someone else's communication is no longer just about forwarding emails to/from a Gmail account and sending basic responses.

Today's email delegation requires strategic thinking, careful prioritization, and the right tools to make it all work seamlessly.

With Missive, email delegation is easy and secure — whether you're coming years of mailing through Gmail, Outlook, or or Apple Mail. You decide to whom and what to delegate, the type of access, and actions permitted.

Modern Email Delegation

Gone are the days of sharing passwords to a Gmail account or setting up complicated email forwarding rules for an shared mailbox. Modern email delegation is about creating efficient workflows that grant access while maintaining security and accountability.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

Executive Assistants

• Managing multiple executive inboxes
• Managing multiple shared email addresses (i.e. Google Groups)
• Drafting responses for review
• Triaging urgent emails
• Deleting emails that aren't relevant
• Coordinating cross-department communication
• Maintaining relationship management through timely responses

Chiefs of Staff

• Overseeing strategic communications
• Delegating between executive team members
• Handling sensitive information with discretion
• Aligning communication with company objectives

Team Leads

• Delegating customer inquiries
• Managing shared department inboxes
• Coordinating project communications
• Training new team members
• Maintaining communication standards

3 Missive Configurations for Email Delegation

Missive offers powerful workflows designed for modern email delegation (whether you have Gmail accounts, Outlook accounts, or IMAP accounts):

Out-of-the-Box Delegation (aka @mentions)

Once you've added all your email addresses to Missive, basic delegation requires no setup. Team members can delegate by mentioning @coworkers in the chat bar to collaborate and grant access to specific threads. No more forwarding endless email threads—everything stays in Missive for easy tracking and reference.

Other settings, such as sharing email aliases, can be used to allow a team member to send emails from another team member's address. With this configuration, a team member can reply on your behalf but won't have access to all incoming emails unless they're being shared.

You will always have access to all emails sent by a delegated user.

Full Delegation with Team Inboxes

For roles that need full access to another’s inbox, such as an executive assistant needing a CEO’s inbox, Missive offers a Team Inbox solution. Connecting an email account (like a Google Workspace email) to a Team Inbox allows all communications to be managed in one centralized space. This makes it easy to stay organized and adapt as your organization grows. Simply add new members to the Team, and they’ll instantly gain access to the shared emails.

With team inboxes, there’s no need to mix shared emails with personal inboxes, and multiple team members can work together seamlessly, which is especially helpful for remote teams.

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Assistants can be granted members of the team, and owners can be observers, these don't get notified of new emails, but they can keep an eye on everything at all times. You can customize who is an observer or member in the admin console.

The assistant can reply as the owner of the email account (ceo@acme.com). Also, a custom signature can be created.

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Assistants can also triage emails by creating color-coded shared labels.

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Triage-only access

Similar to the case above, all email arrives in a Team Inbox but through a shared email address.

The big difference is the shared email addresses nature. In this configuration, the assistant can see all incoming emails but cannot reply as the recipient (ceo@acme.com), only as themself (assistant@acme.com).

Automated, Privacy-First Delegation

If an account contains private messages, Missive allows you to set up rules to filter these from the assistant’s view. For example, family, friends, or finance-related emails will not be delegated, ensuring personal information stays private. This setup balances delegation with privacy, providing peace of mind while maintaining workflow efficiency.

In this case, the owner imports a private account. Here, email sharing is done automatically through rules. This configuration of delegation is essential when the content of some emails is private and can’t be seen by the assistant.

The owner (ceo@acme.com) can create rules to delegate only some emails with the assistant (assistant@acme.com) and keep the rest private.

In the next example, a rule is set to keep all family/friends/finance related emails from going to the assistant's inbox.

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Actions such as removing a conversation from the owner's inbox can also be achieved with rules. For instance, when the assistant labels an email as "Non-essential", the rule will close the conversation, removing it from the owner's inbox, keeping it tidy.

Creating a Delegation System That Works

The key to successful email delegation isn't just about tools – it's about creating a system that works for both the delegate and the owner. Here's how to build one:

1. Clear Access Levels

Different roles require different levels of access. Consider creating tiers:

• Full access for trusted executive assistants
• Filtered access for department managers
• Specific thread access for project coordinators

2. Communication Rules

Establish clear guidelines for:

• Which emails need executive review
• Standard response templates
• Urgency levels and response times
• Internal communication protocols
• Signature and formatting standards
• VIP email addresses

3. Privacy Protocols

Set up boundaries for:

• Personal vs. professional communication
• Confidential information handling
• Internal sensitive matters
• Financial or legal correspondence

Best Practices for Modern Email Delegation

For Assistants

Mastering Triage:

• Create clear labeling systems
• Establish urgent vs. important criteria
• Document recurring patterns

Communication Management:

• Draft responses in your executive's voice
• Maintain relationship continuity
• Track important conversations
• Manage calendar integration
• Keep contextual notes

For Executives

Delegation Success:

• Provide clear preferences and guidelines
• Establish regular review times
• Give feedback on responses
• Share context for important relationships
• Trust your delegate's judgment

For Teams

Collaborative Efficiency:

• Set up shared response canned responses
• Create Team Inbox protocols
• Establish assignment rules
• Maintain consistent communication standards
• Track team performance metrics

Making It Work for You

The key to successful email delegation is finding the right balance between:

• Access and privacy
• Efficiency and accuracy
• Speed and thoughtfulness
• Automation and personal touch
• Standardization and flexibility

Remember, effective email delegation isn't just about managing messages – it's about facilitating communication that moves your organization forward.

Whether you're new to delegating emails or looking to improve your existing system, the most important thing is creating a framework that works for your specific situation. Start with delegation basics , refine as you go, and always keep security and efficiency in balance.

Five Missive features that quietly save the most time once you actually use them: merging email threads, customizing your sidebar, inserting canned responses inline with #shortname, the command bar (Cmd/Ctrl+K), and renaming threads so they make sense at a glance. Most people know Missive has these. Fewer people build them into their daily workflow.

When I started my career, my first experience with team email was chaotic. Multiple inboxes, scattered conversations, constant back-and-forth about who was handling what. It was a nightmare.

At my last job, we used Missive, and it was night and day compared to my previous experience. But it wasn’t until I discovered some of the hidden features that things really clicked for me.

Over the past few years I’ve used Missive daily, and for the last year I’ve been helping Missive customers uncover the hidden gems. Today I want to share the five features that transformed how I handle communication. These aren’t the flashy ones, they’re the practical, everyday tools that make a real difference.

1. Merging email threads

You know when someone starts a new email thread about something you’re already discussing in another thread? This used to drive me crazy. In Missive, you just drag one conversation onto the other and they merge into a single thread. Everything stays in order, nothing gets lost, and suddenly all your context is in one place.

Where this shines:

• A customer replies to an old email instead of the original thread for the same issue
• Multiple customers reporting the same issue
• Getting quotes from different suppliers
• Project discussions that branch off and need to be reconnected

Pro tip: You can’t undo a merge, but you can move messages out of a merged conversation into new private or shared ones.

2. Your sidebar, your rules

Customizing your sidebar might not sound revolutionary at first, but trust me: it’s like finally organizing your desk after years of chaos.

What makes it special:

• Move your most-used mailboxes to the top
• Hide the stuff you rarely touch
• Group things however they make sense to YOU
• Create separate sections for different projects or clients

How different teams use this:

Support teams:

• Support Team Inbox at the top
• Urgent issues section with labels
• Team chat of the Support team
• Archived mailbox hidden but accessible

Sales teams:

• Hot lead labels front and center
• Separate sections for each pipeline stage
• Quick access to Sales team room
• “Follow-up” label pinned

Project managers:

• Project-specific inboxes grouped
• Client communication sections
• Team room easily accessible
• Deadline-sensitive items labels

Pro tip: You can also create whole new sections. Just drag an item on top of the +More button in the sidebar.

3. Type # and save hours

This feature is genuinely powerful: inserting canned responses inline. Do you know what I mean?

Type a hashtag followed by your response name, and boom, your full message appears right where you’re typing. No more copying and pasting, no more digging through templates.

My team’s favorite uses:

• #hi: Personalized welcome messages for new email requests
• #followup: “Thanks for reaching out”
• #lmka: “Let me know if you need anything else, I’d be happy to help”
• #meet: Inserts a link with my Calendly availability
• #thanks: Thank-you messages with next steps

Power user tips:

1. Create variations of common responses (formal vs. casual)
2. Include variables for personalization
3. Set up team-wide responses for consistency
4. Use short, memorable hashtags for the ones you use most
5. Create responses in multiple languages

4. The command bar (Ctrl/Cmd + K)

If you learn one keyboard shortcut in Missive, make it this one. Press Cmd+K on Mac (or Ctrl+K on Windows) and you’ve got instant access to pretty much everything.

Things you can do from the command bar:

• Create new emails, events, or tasks
• Access settings and preferences
• Switch between 1:1 rooms
• Search for specific messages
• Manage rules and labels
• Open contact books
• Set a status
• And much more

If I time-track myself for a week with and without using the command bar, the difference is about 3 minutes saved each day just from reducing mouse usage and menu navigation. Compound that over a year and it adds up fast.

5. Custom thread names that actually make sense

This last one is simple but brilliant. You can rename email threads to whatever you want.

Smart ways to use this:

• Add project phase indicators (“Brand Design - Phase 2 Feedback”)
• Include priority levels (“URGENT: Server Issue Resolution”)
• Add dates for time-sensitive stuff (“Q4 Planning - Due Oct 30”)
• Tag conversations by department (“HR: New Hire Onboarding - Sarah”)

Putting it all together: power user workflows

The real magic happens when you combine some of these features.

Handling an inbound request from big leads:

1. Pin your “Big Leads” label to the sidebar
2. Merge all email communication and Calendly invites into one thread
3. Use the command bar for quick navigation between your other tasks

For support teams, try this workflow:

1. Merge support requests from the same customer
2. Rename threads with issue types and status
3. Use canned responses for common solutions
4. Organize the sidebar by priority levels

The impact on your daily work

Depending on your use case, after implementing these features across your team:

• Email response time drops by a few minutes per day
• Context switching goes down
• Team coordination improves

Getting started

Don’t try to implement everything at once. Start with the feature that addresses your biggest pain point:

• Drowning in split conversations? Start with merging
• Spending too much time on repeated responses? Focus on inline canned responses
• Can’t find anything? Organize the sidebar
• Lost in endless threads? Start renaming conversations

Give them a shot. Start with one, get comfortable, then move on to the next. You might be surprised at how much time you save. For more on how Missive fits into team email workflows, see our guide to shared inboxes.

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.

Everything we did marketing-wise

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).

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.

Starting with metrics

After crunching our numbers (organization size, core functionalities usage, ease of onboarding), the answer was:

1. Logistics/Transportation (mostly brokers & carriers)
2. Travel/Property management (luxury travel agencies, tour operators)
3. Finance/Legal (accountants, law firms)
4. Retail (various sectors)
5. Manufacturing (various sectors)

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:

1. A 7-minute demo on the live stage
2. A 6x6 booth
3. A 10-minute interview on "What the Truck?!?" radio show

Organization

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.

1. Contacted our existing customers in the industry
2. Make noise on LinkedIn/X
3. Cold outreach to attendees

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.

Execution

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:

1. Potential customers (brokers)
2. Potential industry-specific integrations (TMS)
3. Content/marketing partnerships (industry influencers, founders)
4. Big shots (investors, VPs of large logistics businesses)

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.

Conclusion

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.

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.

On Missive + Tasks

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.

On SOC 2

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.

On Product Metrics

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:

• Have they created rules?
• Have they created labels?
• What are their use cases?
• Have they connected email accounts?
• Have they had any failed payments?

If you don’t have access to Mixpanel, just ask, and I will invite you.

On Price Increase

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:

• Decrease the gap between the price of Missive and our competitors.
• Increase the incentive for organizations to subscribe to the new yearly subscription.
• Auto-filter solo users who were churning at a high rate due to a lack of value in the collaborative features central to the Missive experience.

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.

On Affiliates

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.

On Webinars and Customer Interviews

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.

On Support

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:

On Marketing

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.

On Development

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.

• Implement CI on GitHub (specs and code formatter).
• Created and deployed monitoring system for developers access to production server.
• 1Password secrets to ease development and improve production security posture.
• Automatic deployment from GitHub to multiple Heroku apps to ultimately let devs other than Raf deploy to production.
• Better GitHub integration in Missive.
• Production DB backup monitoring.
• Updated to the latest Rails version.
• Updated to Ruby 3.3.
• Automated user data exports to reduce manual operations requirements.
• Greg, Denys and Louis-Michel all got familiar with part of the code base only Rafael was familiar with.

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.

On The New Office

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.

Customer Field Trip

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:

• You show them that you care. You make them fans for life.
• You gather real honest feedback you would never have got from just an email or phone call.
• You can work on their pain and expand their use of your product.
• They can help us expand our network and share insights on how to sell to their industry.

Trade shows and Conferences

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.

‍

At Missive, we were blessed with eight years of organic growth. As a small team of developers with limited resources, we never invested much in marketing.

One of the few initiatives we did, was quite “cliché” for developer entrepreneurs… we coded an affiliate system from scratch. Two years in, it’s time to assess if it was successful.

Why an affiliate program?

Our customers have always been extremely enthusiastic about Missive, so naturally, developing an affiliate program made sense. This would allow us to delegate our marketing to our customers while they could benefit from their efforts by reducing their monthly invoices. A developer’s dream!

Why build it from scratch?

Missive is a collaborative email client that deals with sensitive customer data, which we take very seriously. It was always out of the question to insert third-party scripts into our app for privacy and security reasons. That meant no easy product metrics, no easy marketing attribution, and most importantly in this case, not being able to create an affiliate program using an off-the-shelf solution.

Building it ourselves also meant we could have more control on the affiliate experience. For instance, every organization owner can automatically open its affiliate dashboard from Missive and see their balance and potential gain.

On rewards

We pay a monthly reward for each seat in a referred organization that upgrades to a paid plan, and do so for up to 5 months. If a seat cancels, let’s say, after two months, the total reward will be limited to only those two months. This way every referral is always profitable.

• Up to $25 per Starter user referred.
• Up to $50 per Productive user referred.
• Up to $75 per Business user referred.

Rewards are either credited directly to customer invoices or paid out in cash, once balances exceed $250. We use PayPal for payouts up to $5,000 and do bank wire transfers for larger sums.

To this date we have paid or credited more than $115,000 to our affiliates. The lion’s share of the payouts was given to just two affiliates, where the biggest one earned more than $60,000 in cash payouts. Our best affiliate was an existing Missive customer who runs a digital advertising business.

On affiliates doing paid advertising

We initially let affiliates do paid advertising with no limitation. Some did so on our brand keyword, “Missive”. I believe the bulk of the $115,000 we paid out was earned this way. We recently changed our mind on this, it is now against our program terms to advertise on search that include our brand “Missive” keyword. The advertising effort of affiliates should be focused on people not already familiar with Missive.

On customers referring other customers

Only around 15% of the total earnings were paid to 55 customers via credits applied to their invoices. Few customers referred others through the program, and thus few received credits on their invoices. Most of our customers, when doing word of mouth, don’t even bother using our affiliate program.

Final takeaways

First, if we want the affiliate program to be a significant part of our new business we need to better market it. The program itself is a product.

Second, we should increase the value of the rewards, especially given we now prevent our affiliates from doing advertising on customers already familiar with Missive.

Starting today, the rewards for referred users subscribing to our latest plans will be increased to:

• Up to $60 per Starter user referred. + 240% increase
• Up to $100 per Productive user referred. + 200% increase
• Up to $145 per Business user referred. + 193% increase

With these new rewards I believe our customer base will have more incentive to share their affiliate link. It will also become more profitable for professional affiliates or influencers.

If you want to try it yourself, just create a Missive account, then from the app open your settings and select the Rewards option!

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, memo numero uno.

👋 Hello team,

Things have changed a lot in the last few months for us at Missive. It's important that we all share a common understanding of our journey, our goals, and the path ahead.

Instead of lengthy all-hands meetings where only I talk, I'll capture our vision, challenges, strategies, and roadmap in writing first so you can participate and ask questions.

I wrote each section of this memo to convey specific insights or updates, designed for clarity and brevity. While some sections are brief, each is important. Feel free to engage with each part as it resonates with your role and interests, but I encourage a thorough read to grasp the full picture of where we stand and where we're headed.

On origins

In 2013, Rafael, Etienne, and I started working together on a product called ConferenceBadge, a simple name badge designing tool for event organizers. The product quickly gained traction, allowing us to work full-time on it. However, early on, regardless of sales increasing, we decided that was not what we wanted to do with most of our time.

We wanted to work on a more ambitious project, Missive. The initial idea, devised by Etienne, was: Could we create a collaborative email draft editor? This idea quickly morphed into the first Missive prototype, a full-fledged collaborative email client merged with team chat.

From its inception, Missive was a bold move. By rejecting a safe path for something more ambitious — discarding a successful, revenue-generating, bootstrapped product like ConferenceBadge to work on an unproven idea — many called us crazy.

There, I see two guiding principles, which I think we all should keep and apply forward:

1. Level up: Build a foundation, a quick win, something achievable with your current means/skills. Then use this as a foundation to propel yourself to the next level.
2. Long-term thinking: Do not limit yourself or your ambitions to your current situation, think long-term where you want to be, and start acting now.

ConferenceBadge was our foundation, it gave us the means and de-risked our path to working on a product normally built by teams massively funded.

On our long journey

For much of Missive's history, we were a small team of three, ruthlessly prioritizing listening to and delighting our customers.

Our process to decide what to work on next was simple: do customer support ourselves and set out to improve some of the bigger pains our customers were experiencing at that moment. This shows on our changelog, a long list of incremental improvements.

This process worked magically at first, we could fix issues at a speed unmatched by our competitors and ship innovative features at a blistering pace.

After 8 years and more than 3500 paid customers, it started to show its limitations. As we've grown, so has our to-do list. Not too long ago, I found myself knee-deep in customer support, with Rafael and Etienne tackling bug reports that seemed to multiply overnight.

The three of us, juggling everything, had become too big of a liability. We didn't have enough time to do anything meaningful.

Working on a project like Missive can be extremely satisfying when you have the space and time to experiment. Lately, we were more and more heads down, just trying to make things work.

After a couple of attempts at scaling the team unsuccessfully, we were exhausted.

Then, on a rainy November day at a microbrewery near the office, we each took turns, Rafael, Etienne, and I, discussing what we wanted and where we wanted to go. What transpired was that we were absolutely not exhausted from working on Missive, but mostly we were exhausted from doing it alone. On that day, we laid down a plan.

1. Hire someone to help us hire. (Janie)
2. Move from our gloomy shared office to a nice HQ. (in construction…)
3. Hire someone to help us with customer support. (Philippe, Luis)
4. Hire experienced developers. (Louis-Michel, Grzegorz, Denys)
5. Hire a talented designer. (Arnaud)

Fast forward 5 months later and I believe we are on track. The team has grown, each of you brings something unique to the table, be it from past collaborations, as a customer, or through your work experiences. Your fresh perspectives and skills are exactly what Missive needs to leap forward. With more hands on deck, we're not just looking to distribute the workload; we're aiming to multiply our capabilities.

I’m confident in saying we are extremely talented and we have what it takes to make a big impact.

I personally set a high bar for ourselves, aspiring to be mentioned in the same breath as Notion and Linear; products known not just for their utility but for their innovative edge and the quality of their user experience.

We were a tiny team, now that we are a bit bigger, we are still going to punch far above our weight.

On mission

We have the ambition of being a meeting-less culture, that’s even why some of you were interested to apply to a job at Missive. Now to be meeting-less, there's a requirement, we need alignment, we need to agree on where we are going. To that effect I wrote this mission statement:

We are toolmakers. Our tools improve communication by breaking silos and ease collaboration. They are built for teams having an outsized impact on the world, like us.

Toolmakers love their craft. They are obsessed with the end result. They build in service of others. They don’t get lost in convoluted processes. They are always focused on creating the best possible product, in the end it’s the only thing that matters.

Missive 3.0

With more time to think, one of our goals this year is to redefine what Missive is. Aiming to make it not just a shared inbox app but a platform that helps small and medium-sized businesses plan around all the work that revolves around their communications.

This is how we’ve been using Missive at Missive for years now. But it’s not just us, our hubris, it’s also what our most fanatic users have wanted for years:

Etienne and Arnaud will spearhead this project and work together on UI improvements and improvements around task management.

Let me give you an example, a freight transportation broker using Missive will exchange hundreds of emails a day with businesses wanting to deliver parcels.

From these emails, hundreds of tasks need to be completed by different people. Currently, such a customer might use the basic task functionality in Missive to achieve this, but it's not an ideal experience.

They are most likely to fall back on using a platform like ClickUp or Asana to manage those tasks, alongside Missive. The feedback we've consistently received is clear: such users would prefer a seamless experience within Missive, where task management is integrated directly into the communication flow. The current task's implementation is too simplistic and conversation-centric. Once tasks are created, they are lost in the sea of conversations and there is no accountability possible.

I believe there's a significant market opportunity here, as virtually every business that relies heavily on daily communication via email or any other text communication channels could benefit from such a built-in way to manage tasks around communication.

We need to make this vision a reality on the product side but also to clearly articulate this via our brand and our different marketing initiatives. This will set us apart from traditional help desks.

On AI

AI is on everyone’s radar; it’s the new hot thing. To me, it would be a mistake to market ourselves as an AI product or define all of our roadmap around it. Of course, short-term it would be great, free media and a lot of attention. But long term all products will have AI built-in. This won’t be a differentiator at all. There is no moat in AI.

Now, I’m not saying it's not important, it is, what I’m trying to articulate it’s that AI should not be the main part of our DNA. We will experiment with it, we will create buzz with it, it’s just not what will set us apart.

On collaboration

As I wrote before, we were a small team, for a long time. We know we’ve developed ways of working that are not compatible with collaborating with more people. With the help of Louis-Michel, Denys and Greg on the tech side of things, we already started changing some of our practices.

I expect you, the new team members, to teach us, the original three, how to work and collaborate in a bigger team. But I expect us to teach you how to be mighty efficient. This will create tensions, it’s good and expected.

As toolmakers, our goal is to create the best product, not implement the best processes. The processes are only good if they help us achieve the best product.

On growth

Growth is the consequence of a great product. There is no shortcut. Any growth initiative should be about putting fuel on an already strong fire.

Historically, growth has been around 2%-6% month over month. We always had a solid stream of new inbound users.

This nice consistent growth, hides a darker reality, for every new users and existing ones who grow with us (seat expansion) we have a lot of users who churn, and usually, after a short period of time.

In this graphic, subscriptions = paid organizations. Above purple is good, orange is bad.

To increase our growth rate we need to work on that orange part and better nurture our inbound users. The recipe is simple:

1. Better product (make it simple, reduce the confusion)
2. Better support
3. Better documentation
4. Better onboarding
5. Yearly plan
6. Impactful brand/marketing
7. Better product metrics

We need to be more deliberate and eloquent about what Missive is by simplifying the product and the message.

On our changelog

I got curious writing this memo and parsed the data from our changelog and generated a graph showing the number of release elements either tagged as New, Improved or Fixed per quarter over the years.

The trends of both New and Improved features are decreasing faster than the Fixed one. With more and more technical debt and customers to care for, a tiny team can’t forever beat the odds.

On our tool stack

We use Missive, more than anything else, even when it’s not the best fit. We stick to it, we live with its weaknesses… then we improve it. This experience is our fuel; it guides us into creating a better product from a first hand experience.

We avoid using too many tools. Having a simple stack has more advantages than using the perfect tool for every job. The cognitive cost of learning and maintaining many platforms is high. Let’s not fall into this trap.

On the upcoming price increase

On Feb 28th, we announced a price increase. One goal is to make monthly plans more expensive and attract more customers to the new yearly plans.

The announcement email was sent to all ~6k+ admins and owners of paying organizations. We received 124 replies, with 34% neutral, 40% positive, and 26% negative, but none were hyper-negative. So technically, only 0.25% of users replied negatively, which is not bad.

Most of the replies inquired about the possibility of getting their grandfathered seats rolled up into a yearly subscription with a 20% discount. Originally, it was decided that if you upgraded to a yearly subscription, you would move to the new pricing. We decided it would be fair game not to do so. This change allowed me to reply with the following message, to which most responded extremely positively.

I expect to see a lot of customers switching to the yearly subscription next April and May.

On competitors

Who are our competitors? Missive being a pretty general email/collaboration solution, there are a lot of them. From Front to Spark, Superhuman and even to Intercom and Slack.

Should we care? No, we should always refrain from being obsessed with one or listen to only people who switched over to Missive from one of them. We are not copy cats chasing a space with a discounted product.

A lot of our users come from Front, just search for Front on this page to see. Because of this there are strong demands for us to implement their exact feature set. We sometimes do but most of the time we don’t.

We need to find our way.

――――

The end. That's it, this is the starting point, what are we going to achieve together? See you all, tomorrow, at the 🙌 all-hands!

Philippe Lehoux

‍

An auto-reply email is a pre-written message your email client sends automatically when someone emails you, usually to let them know you’re out of office, to confirm receipt of a support request, or to acknowledge a business inquiry. Below are seven proven templates for the most common situations, plus the steps to set them up in Missive, Gmail, and Outlook.

Emails take up more than a quarter of the average workweek, so it makes sense that people dread coming back from vacation to a full inbox. A good auto-reply sets expectations for the sender, tells them who to contact in the meantime, and buys you a little breathing room when you’re back.

The catch is writing one that doesn’t make you look unreachable, confused, or unprofessional. Nobody wants an auto-reply like this one that said she might never answer, or the classic example where one auto-reply replied to another auto-reply in an infinite loop.

This guide covers what an auto-reply is, seven ready-to-use templates for different situations, and step-by-step setup instructions for Missive, Gmail, and Outlook.

What is an automatic email reply?

An automatic email reply (sometimes called an out-of-office reply, autoresponder, or canned response) is a message your email client sends on your behalf when an incoming message meets certain conditions. Common triggers:

• Time-based: dates you’re away on vacation, leave, or at a conference.
• Sender-based: emails from specific addresses, like a job applications inbox.
• Content-based: emails with certain subject lines or keywords, often used for support ticket confirmations.

Most email clients support auto-replies natively. Missive, Gmail, and Outlook all handle the basics, though each has different strengths, which you’ll see in the setup sections below.

7 auto-reply email examples for every situation

Each of these templates uses Missive’s variable syntax to auto-fill the recipient’s name and other details. If you’re not using Missive, just replace the curly-brace variables with plain text.

1. Out-of-office auto-reply (general template)

Whether you’re on vacation, a local holiday, or taking time off for family reasons, this template works for any out-of-office situation. The {{ user.status }} variable pulls in your current Missive status automatically, so one template covers every occasion.

2. Out-of-office auto-reply for maternity or paternity leave

A longer leave needs a longer-horizon reply. Give a clear date range, point to a reliable backup contact, and set expectations about whether you’ll check email at all during the leave.

3. Auto-reply for someone no longer with the company

When someone leaves, their inbox doesn’t stop receiving emails. A well-written auto-reply redirects the sender to the right person and keeps the door open for future business.

4. Out-of-office reply with an alternative contact method

If your email isn’t the best way to reach you for urgent matters, this template gives senders a backup channel (phone, text, or a teammate) without inviting every non-urgent sender to call.

5. New support request auto-reply

Customer support is the most common use case for auto-replies. An instant “we got your message” acknowledgment goes a long way toward reducing anxiety and cutting down on duplicate follow-ups from the same person.

6. General business inquiry auto-reply

For info@ or contact@ inboxes, a quick auto-reply confirms the message landed and sets a response expectation. This prevents the sender from assuming their email got lost and emailing three more times.

7. Job application auto-reply

Candidates often apply to dozens of roles at once and have no idea whether their application was received. A simple acknowledgment with a realistic timeline respects their time and reflects well on your company.

How to write a professional auto-reply

The seven templates above cover most situations. When you’re writing your own, keep these principles in mind.

• Keep it short. The sender should know three things within a few seconds: (1) why you’re not replying right now, (2) how long they should expect to wait, and (3) who to contact if it’s urgent. Anything beyond that is fluff.
• Stay professional. You don’t need to explain why you’re away or where you’re going. “Out of office” is enough. Avoid detailed stories about the vacation you’re on or the medical situation you’re dealing with.
• Warn the person you’re redirecting to. Before naming a coworker as the backup contact, make sure they know they’re the backup contact. Surprise coverage duties breed resentment.
• Be explicit about the alternative. If you’re saying “for urgent matters, contact X,” be clear about what counts as urgent. Otherwise every sender will decide their issue qualifies.
• Proofread. An auto-reply sends to hundreds of people while you’re not looking. A typo in your out-of-office reply is visible to everyone you correspond with for two weeks straight.
• Include a signature. Even for an auto-reply, your normal email signature tells the recipient how to verify they’ve reached the right person.

A few common mistakes worth avoiding:

1. Forgetting to turn it off. Nothing undermines “I’m back from vacation and ready to work” like an auto-reply still saying you’re away until next Monday.
2. Inviting “urgent” contact when you don’t want to be disturbed. If you offer an escape hatch, expect it to be used. If you genuinely don’t want interruptions, say so.
3. Trying to be funny. A joke that lands in person rarely lands in text, and it definitely doesn’t land the two-hundredth time a stranger receives your auto-reply.

How to set up auto-replies in Missive

In Missive, auto-replies are built with rules and canned responses. The combination gives you far more control than a simple out-of-office toggle.

1. Create the response. Go to Settings > Responses and write your template using variables for personalization.
2. Create a rule. Go to Settings > Rules > Create rule, pick Email as the channel and Incoming message as the trigger.
3. Add conditions. Filter which incoming emails trigger the auto-reply (all emails, specific senders, emails to a specific account, emails containing certain keywords, etc.).
4. Add the action. Choose “Send response” and select the template you just created.
5. Optional: throttle. Set “Send at most once every X per conversation” so the same sender doesn’t get the auto-reply 10 times on the same thread.
6. Save.

For personal out-of-office replies, Missive also has a dedicated personal auto-response feature tied to your status. Set your status to “Out of office,” define the date range, and Missive handles the rest.

How to set up auto-replies in Gmail

Gmail’s vacation responder is the simplest option for a basic out-of-office reply.

1. In Gmail, click the gear icon > See all settings.
2. Scroll to Vacation responder at the bottom of the General tab.
3. Turn it on, set the start and end dates, and write your subject and message.
4. Optionally, limit the reply to people in your Contacts or to your organization only.
5. Click Save Changes.

For more targeted auto-replies (specific senders, specific keywords), you’ll need to combine Gmail templates with filters:

1. Enable Templates in Settings > Advanced > Templates.
2. Compose your message, then click the three dots > Templates > Save draft as template.
3. Create a filter (in the search bar, click Show search options) with your criteria, then select Send template as the filter action.

How to set up auto-replies in Outlook

Outlook splits between the new and classic versions; the steps are slightly different.

New Outlook and Outlook on the web:

1. Click the Settings gear in the top right, then go to Accounts > Automatic replies.
2. Toggle Turn on automatic replies.
3. Set a time range if you only want the reply to run during specific dates.
4. Write your reply. You can set a different message for people outside your organization.
5. Click Save.

Classic Outlook for Windows:

1. Go to File > Automatic Replies.
2. Select Send automatic replies.
3. Check Only send during this time range and set the dates if applicable.
4. Write your reply in both the Inside My Organization and Outside My Organization tabs as needed.
5. Click OK.

Microsoft’s setup guide covers the older and Mac versions as well.

FAQ

What should an auto-reply email say?

At a minimum: why you’re not responding (out of office, out of hours, reviewing a support ticket), how long the sender should expect to wait, and who to contact in the meantime if the issue is urgent. Three sentences is usually enough. Long auto-replies signal that you have too much to say about your absence; short ones signal you’ve got it handled.

How long should an out-of-office message be?

Two to four sentences. Any longer and the sender stops reading. Any shorter and you haven’t set expectations. The seven templates above are all in this range and can be used as a length benchmark.

Can I set up an auto-reply for specific senders only?

Yes, in every major email client. In Missive, add a condition to your rule filtering by sender address or domain. In Gmail, combine a filter with a template. In Outlook, use rules (File > Manage Rules & Alerts > New Rule) rather than the simple Automatic Replies toggle, which applies to everyone.

What’s the difference between an auto-reply and a canned response?

An auto-reply sends automatically based on rules you’ve set up, without any human action. A canned response is a saved template you insert manually into an email you’re about to send. The two overlap, most auto-replies are built from canned responses, but the key difference is whether a human is in the loop when it sends.

How do I set up an auto-reply for a shared inbox?

This depends on the client. In Missive, shared inboxes (like support@ or sales@) can have rules that send auto-replies on behalf of the team, so responses don’t get sent from a specific individual. In Gmail and Outlook, shared mailboxes usually need the auto-reply configured by an admin at the mailbox level, not the individual level; personal out-of-office replies don’t apply to shared addresses.

What should I write in an away message for Outlook?

Any of the templates in this guide will work. Outlook lets you set one message for people inside your organization and a different (usually more formal) message for people outside. The “out-of-office general template” and the “alternative contact method” template are the two most common picks for Outlook away messages.

Can auto-replies hurt customer relationships?

They can, if they’re poorly written. The most common complaints: auto-replies that don’t say when the person will be back, auto-replies that promise a follow-up that never comes, and auto-replies with no alternate contact for urgent situations. Done well, they set expectations and reduce anxiety. Done badly, they feel like being put on hold.

Should I include a link to my FAQ or help center?

For support auto-replies, yes. A linked help center deflects common questions and often resolves the sender’s issue before anyone on the team has to reply. For personal out-of-office replies, usually no; it adds clutter without helping.

Missive is a collaborative email client with rules, canned responses, and personal auto-responses that work across email, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, and more. Try Missive free.