Canary Ride puts motorcycles in the hands of more than 3,000 riders a year, across two shops in the Canary Islands: one on Gran Canaria, one on Tenerife. For most of those riders, the relationship starts with an email. A question about availability, a group booking request, a follow-up about rental terms. The reply that comes back decides whether they book.

Most of Canary Ride’s riders are 35 and older, and they’re traveling a long way from home for a trip they’ve been looking forward to. They want to know there’s a real person on the other end before they commit. “You want to know that there is somebody,” says founder Ondrej Vymetalik, “not an AI bot, but somebody who is, like, yeah.” For Ondrej, being good at email isn’t just housekeeping. “You can capture more clients,” he says. “It’s something I’m focusing on.”

He’s built Canary Ride from three people to a team of 12 since July 2022, and he runs the whole operation through email: two locations, thousands of riders, Spanish invoicing rules, and inquiries in several languages. The tool holding it together is Missive, the shared inbox his team works out of every day.

Replying in whatever language the rider used

Canary Ride’s inquiries don’t arrive in one language. Riders write from across Europe, and occasionally from Canada and the States, each in their own language. The easy thing would be to answer everyone in English. Canary Ride does the opposite: the goal is to reply in whatever language the rider wrote in.

That’s a hard standard to hold when the language often isn’t your first. Ondrej, who isn’t a native Spanish speaker, runs his replies through Missive’s AI assistant as a proofreading and translation layer before they go out. Custom prompts tuned to Canary Ride’s tone catch the errors, and the translation happens in the same window, so there’s no switching between tools mid-reply. “It’s really good now with the custom prompts,” he says. “We have a lot of questions in different languages, and we try to reply in that same language.”

Here’s the part that matters: the AI never sends. It sharpens the reply; a person still hits send. The nervous German rider who wrote in German gets a fast, correct, human answer in German, which is exactly the reassurance Ondrej is after. The AI doesn’t replace the somebody on the other end. It helps that somebody answer faster and get it right.

A setup built around being reachable

Canary Ride’s shared inbox setup mirrors the business. There’s a general info inbox for Gran Canaria, a booking inbox where new reservations and post-booking questions land, and a separate inbox for Tenerife. Each location runs on its own domain, which keeps the two shops cleanly separated and makes routing simple. (Booking the wrong island, Ondrej jokes, takes some real effort.)

Of the 12 people on the team, five or six are heavy daily users: both store managers, Ondrej, the media person, and the staff handling bike sales. The rest are workshop mechanics who live in Missive but only get pulled in when a technical question is assigned to them. About four people handle 80% of the email volume. To keep the full picture in one place, a Zapier automation drops booking notes from the reservation engine straight into the inbox as emails, so nobody has to copy a customer’s details by hand.

Ondrej’s reason for picking Missive in the first place was partly the product and partly the people behind it. He noticed the founder had recorded the instructional videos himself instead of handing it off, and that signaled care. The product earned the rest. “If you spend time with something you use every day, you just want to have a good feeling of it,” he says. “Useful, works, fast, beautiful, geeky. You just love it.” He compares it to Flighty, the flight-tracking app he loves. Airmail, Front, and Zendesk had each come up short before, too single-user, too omnichannel, or too much enterprise noise, when what he actually wanted was a team working the same email together. “The strongest part of Missive is the team collaboration,” he says. “It’s the platform where everything is happening.”

Fewer doubts before a booking

Nearly four years in, the through-line hasn’t changed. Every choice Canary Ride makes about email points at the same thing: a rider, far from home, with a question and a little bit of nerves, gets a fast and human reply, in their own language, from someone who clearly has it handled. Fewer unanswered questions, fewer doubts before the booking is confirmed.

Ondrej is already looking at the next step. He wants to pull Canary Ride’s email archive, years of rider questions, into Claude to surface the patterns in what people ask most, then use that to sharpen the website and build better reply templates. The team is also moving toward Missive’s WhatsApp integration to replace the website chat widget Ondrej took down for slowing the page. More ways to reach Canary Ride, all landing in the same place the team already works.

Ondrej’s tip: skip IMAP, go straight to Google Workspace

Don’t run a serious business on IMAP email bundled with your web host. Canary Ride’s was slow and unreliable: search took minutes, and a major German provider kept blocking outgoing messages, until Ondrej moved everything to Google Workspace in a single day (40 GB, 18,000 emails). Search got about 10 times faster and the deliverability problems disappeared. “If you’re serious about this,” he says, “it’s a must.”