Jacob Bank knows a thing or two about email. As a former Gmail product manager, he's seen what happens when you try to build email tools for 2.5 billion people. But when it came to building support for his AI startup Relay.app, he needed something Gmail didn't have: deep, specialized team features for a nine-person team handling hundreds of support requests.

The Challenge: Growing Pains with Gmail Groups

Like many small teams, Relay.app started simple. They used a Google Group called support@relay.app, and every team member got every support email delivered to their personal inbox. Some applied filters, others didn't. It was scrappy, but it worked—until it didn't.

The problems started stacking up faster than you could say "Reply All":

• ‍The Collision Problem: With an eager team that actually cared about helping users, they'd often have three people reply to the same email simultaneously. "It looks silly in kind of an endearing way where it's like 'oh look how much they care,' but it was just a waste of effort and made us look silly."
• ‍The Context Problem: Support emails were buried alongside regular business emails, making it hard to get into the right mindset for helping customers.
• ‍The Collaboration Problem: When the team needed to discuss a tricky support case internally before responding, they'd try forwarding emails to Slack or creating side threads in Gmail. "Both of those approaches were high friction and didn't quite work."

Why Email (And Why Not Live Chat)

Despite being tech professionals, Jacob's team was adamant about sticking with email for support. Their reasoning was refreshingly practical:

• ‍Universal Accessibility: "Email was and remains a very broadly applicable communication mechanism that everyone can participate in. Some people would have preferred Slack. Some people would have preferred WhatsApp. But email works for everyone."‍
• Natural Conversations: Unlike support forms that feel like... well, forms, email feels like talking to a real person.
• ‍Asynchronous by Default: "We are a nine-person team supporting quite a large user base. We try to get back to everyone within 24 hours, but we could not staff a live conversation model."

They actually tried those live chat widgets initially. "It just didn't work for us. We didn't have the capacity to staff support in that way."

The Search

After deciding they needed a dedicated tool, Jacob narrowed it down to two contenders, one was the largest player in the shared inbox space and the other was Missive. Both offered solid product experiences, but Missive won for two key reasons:

1. Community Recommendations: "We got more recommendations of it from our user base where people said they really liked it."
2. Philosophical Alignment: "We felt like Missive was more philosophically aligned with the way we run as a company. It was another small team that had a word of mouth oriented product that did really high quality customer support that believed in email as a channel.

‍The Setup: Personal Touch at Scale

Relay.app's Missive setup reflects their philosophy that support should feel human:

• ‍Personal Aliases for Everyone: Instead of everything coming from "support@relay.app," each team member has their own alias. When Jacob replies, it shows "Jacob Bank" as the sender with support@relay.app as the email address. "So you know that there's like an actual human who sent this message and is corresponding with you."
• ‍Shared Responsibility: Jacob, as founder and CEO, probably handles more support tickets than anyone else, but every engineer, product person, and designer also handles support. "We're putting someone with the appropriate expertise, but we also want it to feel like a real conversation with a real person."
• ‍Shift-Based Coverage: They have four people on frontline support doing daily shifts, ensuring quick response times without burnout.

The Secret Sauce: Automated Bug and Feature Tracking

Here's where things get really interesting. Relay.app has built sophisticated workflows that turn support conversations into product improvements automatically.

When a team member identifies a bug during a support conversation, they simply type "file a bug: [description]" in the internal chat. This triggers a cascade of automation:

1. Auto-Bug Creation: The workflow fetches the full email context, uses AI to create a proper issue summary, checks an on-duty spreadsheet for assignment, and creates a Linear ticket.
2. Two-Way Linking: The Linear bug includes a link back to the Missive conversation, and Missive gets a comment with the Linear bug link. "It's really important for us to keep the two-way link between those."
3. Automatic Follow-up: When the engineer fixes the bug and marks it as complete, it automatically pops the Missive thread back into the team inbox with a note to close the loop with the customer.

The same process works for feature requests with "FR: [description]" commands. Here's a video showing this AI workflow.

The Results: Support as a Product Improvement Engine

Jacob's counterintuitive approach to support—treating every ticket as an opportunity to improve the product rather than a cost to minimize—has paid off dramatically.

"The absolute number of support tickets we get per week has not changed in the last year, and our user base has grown a lot in the last year. So the rate at which users are filing tickets on a per-user basis has gone way down."

The secret? "If you treat every support ticket as an opportunity to fix the product, your product will get way better and support tickets will actually go down as a percentage of users."

The Features That Make It Work

• Internal threads: "This is the feature that I love where we can chat internally before replying. I can say '@Ty, what do you think about this before I reply?' And then we have a lot of side channel conversations."
• Thread Merging: "The merge threads feature is so handy. People will often write four emails in a row saying the same thing because they're frustrated... and then we can merge them all into one thread in the Missive UI so that we have all that shared context. This was impossible to do in Gmail."
• Rules and Automation: Their custom rules detect "file a bug" and "FR:" commands to trigger webhooks that create Linear tickets automatically.
• Assignment and Snoozing: When someone needs to talk to Jacob specifically, the ticket gets assigned to him. Holiday weekends? Everything gets snoozed to the following Tuesday.

The Bottom Line

For a nine-person team supporting a rapidly growing user base, Missive has become the secret weapon that lets Relay.app deliver enterprise-quality support without enterprise-level staffing.

"We did not want to have one of these interfaces where you get all this boilerplate... It does not feel like you are having a conversation with a person. It feels like you were having a conversation with a machine."