Honestly this post came at a very strange time for me. I've been working on a product for a while with little to no success. I have made a decision to freelance so that I can stay afloat and keep funding the product. Only thing which keeps me going is when I demo to an end-user, their face lights-up. Good luck and thank you for sharing your experience. This gives me immense hope.
I visited that landing page a couple of times and had a mental "blip" because it looks exactly like a domain squatter holding page. I don't want to turn the thread into an incitement of your product, but first-impressions count.
You can reach me in private for any constructive feedback you want, but the product seems cool, but that home page is not doing you any favors.
Gonna be negative but truthful here, I wouldn't use your thing, ever. I would google my problem then google alternatives then search hackernews or reddit for opinions and pick the one that seems best from there.
Your story is amazing, but there is this tendency to conflate bootstrapping with re-investing-your-own-earnings which you admit to doing (from your other businesses). I'd rather call that "expanding" your existing business or "pivoting" rather than bootstrapping.
Sure, the line is fuzzy no matter how you look at it, but if you are not drawing from a fixed pot (eg. your personal savings), I don't like it being called "bootstrapping": the core difference is in the type of safety net you've got (and thus the risks you are really taking).
It's always surprising to see apps like this reach >= $1M ARR, and goes to show that markets are bigger than what you'd think. I mean this is email we're talking about, and there are about 800 clients and 1200 solutions, and yet Missive still carved out a niche.
I just looked at their feature list and "Team Inboxes" really stood out. Granted details matter, but g-suites doesn't even have a good solution to this problem, I can see this as being their bread and butter.
> 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.
Totally agree that long-term planning is less useful for startups than bigger organizations, but I assume the author isn't suggesting that any planning whatsoever is a waste of time. I'd be curious to know how planning enters into their decision-making process, and how they arrived at that equilibrium.
I might have mixed both 'goals' and 'long-term planning' in that paragraph; they are not the same.
Goals are useless to us. We tried a few times to set them and just shifted them around until we stopped caring about them. Working under the constraint of goals killed our creativity.
Our long-term planning strategy is simple: is the decision we're taking today making us more resilient? Yes, or no. We apply this strategy to business, finance, marketing, technology stack choice, etc.
We will grow, we can't be four people forever, but we will be as long as we feel we offer our customers a great experience.
I just tested out your iOS client on my iPhone with https://www.emailprivacytester.com - You failed the "CSS content", "Image tag" and "CSS background-image" tests. Although you appear to be proxying requests as the IPs were in Amazons cloud.
I don't see any option to disable remote resource loading, even though it should default to off.
If I use your client, anybody who emails me will know if and when I read their email, and also the fact that I was using an iPhone whilst doing it (you keep the User-Agent).
Their approach works by blocking trackers specifically, similar to an ad blocker, rather than blocking all external resources completely. Hey.com take a similar approach I think. Although the images from that test service are allowed, trackers from all the popular email tracking services will be blocked (in theory at least).
It's not going to be 100% effective of course, but I suspect it's very close to that for most real-world email tracking, and the user experience is dramatically better (i.e. you can read emails that include images with no hassle and avoid being tracked all at the same time). And they do proxy all images through their own servers, so any missed trackers still get only limited info.
It’s great what they did, very impressive and excellent product.
However, the article is a bit misleading, mainly for two reasons: “bootstrapped”, and “without spending a dime on marketing”.
They “bootstrapped” by financing the company with another profitable company. That technically means they were their own investors, but they weren’t limited only to the revenue that their email company was generating.
They didn’t spend “a dime on marketing”, but they did spend time promoting their product on several platforms, including producthunt, and they do have a blog (which is where the article is hosted), and they do have one full-time employee (out of four), in charge of marketing. So maybe what they truly meant is that they didn’t pay for advertising, but that’s different than not spending money on marketing, which they did, and in fact you could even say that it’s probably a significant part of their budget (given one of the only four team members is dedicated to marketing).
Is there such a thing as true boostrapping? One always has to put some sweat/time in the pre-revenue phase. This time has a cost (opportunity cost + you could have had a job / did consulting)
> However, the article is a bit misleading, mainly for two reasons: “bootstrapped”, and “without spending a dime on marketing”.
> They “bootstrapped” by financing the company with another profitable company. That technically means they were their own investors, but they weren’t limited only to the revenue that their email company was generating.
That is the definition of bootstrapping with no need for quotes. They pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, starting with existing resources and created something more complex and effective.
the hairsplitting of HN never ceases to amaze and amuse me.
Yes, realistically, bootstrapping means you are only allowed to use money you find on the street, and "no marketing spend" means you press "publish" and can only wait.
Great write up. As a fellow bootstrapper, I applaud you on making it to $1M ARR so quickly. I'm not quite there yet, but working towards that goal. I'm kind of curious how Luis found you, and how you attracted him to Missive. Did you bring on a growth hire in the early stage with a company % stake, or was it later once you passed that profitability mark and could afford the hire? I've been looking to attract a similar hire myself but haven't had any success yet.
I meet Luis at my coworking space in Quebec city. He first started to work on Conference Badge as the sole employee (we were transitioning to Missive ourselves). When the pandemic began, as Conference Badge revenues collapsed, we slowly transitioned him to Missive. Now he works full-time with us on Missive. 100% salary.
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."
I was a paying customer for a while. The web-app was super snappy and the ui (minus usability and simplicity and minus sane defaults that "just work") design was state of the art and reminded me of apple or metalabs in some regards (reading about them also being in canada is especially interesting).
BUT i had to leave because the usability and amount of settings and exact reasonability about the workflows and data was just not doable for me. Especially sharing with my PA and managing a small team gave me nightmares. I would maybe setup all the preferences one day and understand what my assistant could see and do at what point and what "archiving" exactly meant in which situations. But after a few days it was all a blur again and i was just anxious about using this thing without accidentally missing messages or losing track of what was going on. They seem to have build every feature on earth and support any workflow for teams possible but without the guide, visual feedback and structure to be effective.
Going back to stupid gmail was just relieving, because it was possible to reason about even though it felt ancient in comparison. The fact that i had to write them to delete my account instead of just being able to do that in settings made me really angry back then because i had no idea it was just 4 people, i assumed a team size of front.app or intercom.
A major problem of email team inboxes in general (missive was better than others but also had issues) is the sync with gmail, they all do not sync back in a way that you could go back without losing significant metadata and labels. I know this is a hard problem but especially front.app gives me the feeling they also use this knowingly for a hidden lock in.
Yeah, this is an odd use of bootstrapped. One of the core tenets I see is remaining "independent" or at least free of massive pressure to grow at break neck speeds. I'd imagine they have that.
Shameless plug: If you're interested in alternative financing for startups, worth checking out https://www.trypaper.io/ which is a catalog of non-dilutive funding options.
Congrats on the success Philippe. I've been following you since that Medium article you showed the world you can build a great app with web tech. [1]
I'm working on founding a SaaS company. How did you manage to charge to worldwide customers? I'm specially worried about VAT and invoices for EU customers.
Hey, I've got a SaaS component to my business and I found paddle [1] as a way to do payment processing for worldwide customers. They serve as a "merchant of record", basically a reseller of your software, and just send you your monthly check.
That being said, there's a lack of features and flexibility, and since the vast majority of my customers are in the US I ended up going with a different SaaS payments processor.
Anyone know what technologies / frameworks they used for the mobile apps (or have any guesses or recommendations)? I was under the impression webview apps tended to be slow and had some limitations.
I'm definitely curious how they were able to create a 'blazing fast experience on phones' writing their mobile app in just JavaScript.
Very cool and collaborative plehoux, thanks for sharing! Just to lightheartedly roast you a little bit, I particularly love the typo in the frontpage email "ither questions", partially because seems like a little breadcrumb to a neat UX design opportunity, maybe a Grammarly or Languagetool integration opportunity, since you already appear to have the collaborative proofreading feature (very cool).
... except for Luis' salary, hosting the website, and the rest of the marketing stack, which might include Calendly, video conferencing, mailing list, etc.
OP Congratulations on the steady, recurring revenue! This is great.
I saw you are using Phonegap/Cordova. I'm curious, if you were developing the product today would you still choose the same framework, or would you look into something like Google's Flutter (since they now support iOS, Android, Web, and desktops).
Congrats! Thanks for sharing your story. I was using Missive in my last job between 2018-2021. Thanks for always being responsive with customer support and adding features. My team was genuinely thrilled to read the "What’s new in Missive?" email.
Can you add a "Log in with Microsoft" (or OpenID)? I don't have a google or apple account which seems to be a requirement when looking at the web / windows version.
[+] [-] tarunkotia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codebeaker|5 years ago|reply
You can reach me in private for any constructive feedback you want, but the product seems cool, but that home page is not doing you any favors.
[+] [-] drenvuk|5 years ago|reply
Why should I use appsolite?
[+] [-] pdsouza|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plehoux|5 years ago|reply
Early on we were featured by Apple couple of times + podcasts, but now, mainly a mix of word of mouth content/SEO and honestly a lot of mystery.
Today HN :)
[+] [-] neeeeees|5 years ago|reply
I hope it’s okay to ask a technical question:
How did you build push notifications (especially on mobile) with a single codebase? Do you use something like OneSignal?
Also, is your iOS app still using Cordova? It looks and feels so nice, which is a marked difference from the last time I tried that framework.
[+] [-] kr4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1cvmask|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkotov|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] necovek|5 years ago|reply
Your story is amazing, but there is this tendency to conflate bootstrapping with re-investing-your-own-earnings which you admit to doing (from your other businesses). I'd rather call that "expanding" your existing business or "pivoting" rather than bootstrapping.
Sure, the line is fuzzy no matter how you look at it, but if you are not drawing from a fixed pot (eg. your personal savings), I don't like it being called "bootstrapping": the core difference is in the type of safety net you've got (and thus the risks you are really taking).
[+] [-] dvt|5 years ago|reply
Congrats!
[+] [-] ZephyrBlu|5 years ago|reply
I feel like you have it backwards. Email is obviously an extremely large market, so I'm not all surprised they managed to get to $1M ARR.
It's easier to carve out a niche if the market is bigger.
[+] [-] waynesonfire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|5 years ago|reply
Totally agree that long-term planning is less useful for startups than bigger organizations, but I assume the author isn't suggesting that any planning whatsoever is a waste of time. I'd be curious to know how planning enters into their decision-making process, and how they arrived at that equilibrium.
[+] [-] plehoux|5 years ago|reply
Goals are useless to us. We tried a few times to set them and just shifted them around until we stopped caring about them. Working under the constraint of goals killed our creativity.
Our long-term planning strategy is simple: is the decision we're taking today making us more resilient? Yes, or no. We apply this strategy to business, finance, marketing, technology stack choice, etc.
We will grow, we can't be four people forever, but we will be as long as we feel we offer our customers a great experience.
[+] [-] mike-cardwell|5 years ago|reply
I don't see any option to disable remote resource loading, even though it should default to off.
If I use your client, anybody who emails me will know if and when I read their email, and also the fact that I was using an iPhone whilst doing it (you keep the User-Agent).
I think that's bad.
[+] [-] pimterry|5 years ago|reply
Their approach works by blocking trackers specifically, similar to an ad blocker, rather than blocking all external resources completely. Hey.com take a similar approach I think. Although the images from that test service are allowed, trackers from all the popular email tracking services will be blocked (in theory at least).
It's not going to be 100% effective of course, but I suspect it's very close to that for most real-world email tracking, and the user experience is dramatically better (i.e. you can read emails that include images with no hassle and avoid being tracked all at the same time). And they do proxy all images through their own servers, so any missed trackers still get only limited info.
[+] [-] ta1234567890|5 years ago|reply
However, the article is a bit misleading, mainly for two reasons: “bootstrapped”, and “without spending a dime on marketing”.
They “bootstrapped” by financing the company with another profitable company. That technically means they were their own investors, but they weren’t limited only to the revenue that their email company was generating.
They didn’t spend “a dime on marketing”, but they did spend time promoting their product on several platforms, including producthunt, and they do have a blog (which is where the article is hosted), and they do have one full-time employee (out of four), in charge of marketing. So maybe what they truly meant is that they didn’t pay for advertising, but that’s different than not spending money on marketing, which they did, and in fact you could even say that it’s probably a significant part of their budget (given one of the only four team members is dedicated to marketing).
[+] [-] maxs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IncRnd|5 years ago|reply
> They “bootstrapped” by financing the company with another profitable company. That technically means they were their own investors, but they weren’t limited only to the revenue that their email company was generating.
That is the definition of bootstrapping with no need for quotes. They pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, starting with existing resources and created something more complex and effective.
[+] [-] dkarras|5 years ago|reply
Yes, realistically, bootstrapping means you are only allowed to use money you find on the street, and "no marketing spend" means you press "publish" and can only wait.
[+] [-] ezekg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plehoux|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter_d_sherman|5 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] jFriedensreich|5 years ago|reply
BUT i had to leave because the usability and amount of settings and exact reasonability about the workflows and data was just not doable for me. Especially sharing with my PA and managing a small team gave me nightmares. I would maybe setup all the preferences one day and understand what my assistant could see and do at what point and what "archiving" exactly meant in which situations. But after a few days it was all a blur again and i was just anxious about using this thing without accidentally missing messages or losing track of what was going on. They seem to have build every feature on earth and support any workflow for teams possible but without the guide, visual feedback and structure to be effective.
Going back to stupid gmail was just relieving, because it was possible to reason about even though it felt ancient in comparison. The fact that i had to write them to delete my account instead of just being able to do that in settings made me really angry back then because i had no idea it was just 4 people, i assumed a team size of front.app or intercom.
A major problem of email team inboxes in general (missive was better than others but also had issues) is the sync with gmail, they all do not sync back in a way that you could go back without losing significant metadata and labels. I know this is a hard problem but especially front.app gives me the feeling they also use this knowingly for a hidden lock in.
[+] [-] plehoux|5 years ago|reply
We worked a lot in the last year to simplify some of the app's concepts and help onboard colleagues.
> The fact that i had to write them to delete my account instead of just being able to do that in settings made me really angry back
It's now possible in app. :)
[+] [-] paxys|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plehoux|5 years ago|reply
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/033-philippe-lehoux-of-...
[+] [-] mritchie712|5 years ago|reply
Shameless plug: If you're interested in alternative financing for startups, worth checking out https://www.trypaper.io/ which is a catalog of non-dilutive funding options.
[+] [-] pier25|5 years ago|reply
I'm working on founding a SaaS company. How did you manage to charge to worldwide customers? I'm specially worried about VAT and invoices for EU customers.
[1] https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross...
[+] [-] koverda|5 years ago|reply
That being said, there's a lack of features and flexibility, and since the vast majority of my customers are in the US I ended up going with a different SaaS payments processor.
[1] https://paddle.com/
[+] [-] notshift|5 years ago|reply
I'm definitely curious how they were able to create a 'blazing fast experience on phones' writing their mobile app in just JavaScript.
[+] [-] plehoux|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sopromo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gabriel_Martin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alsargent|5 years ago|reply
... except for Luis' salary, hosting the website, and the rest of the marketing stack, which might include Calendly, video conferencing, mailing list, etc.
[+] [-] TheMagicHorsey|5 years ago|reply
I saw you are using Phonegap/Cordova. I'm curious, if you were developing the product today would you still choose the same framework, or would you look into something like Google's Flutter (since they now support iOS, Android, Web, and desktops).
[+] [-] plehoux|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klyburke|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lquist|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plehoux|5 years ago|reply
We wrote this post explaining some of the differences: https://missiveapp.com/frontapp-vs-missive
[+] [-] ToFab123|5 years ago|reply
Can you add a "Log in with Microsoft" (or OpenID)? I don't have a google or apple account which seems to be a requirement when looking at the web / windows version.
[+] [-] TenJack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] defnmacro|5 years ago|reply