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How we bootstrapped a $1M ARR email client
- lquist 6y agoHow does Missive compare to Front?
- plehoux 6y agoMissive is geared towards small to midsize businesses as a collaborative platform to manage all communications (internal and external). We wrote this post explaining some of the differences: https://missiveapp.com/frontapp-vs-missive https://missiveapp.com/frontapp-vs-missive
- adanto6840 6y agoThank you for the link -- is a very informative post. My small organization recently adopted (and loves) FrontApp, it's been a tremendous upgrade over trying to handle inbound support via shared inboxes. That said, it's pretty darn expensive & it's probably "overkill" for us -- we only have ~5 team members. By the time we added in all our forward-facing "aliases" (ie support@gameX, support@gameY, media@gameX media@gameY, etc) plus a few Twitter accounts, our bill ends up around $240/month. Comparing the two services via the [relatively] detailed comparison breakdown at your link, it sure seems like Missive would scratch the same itch that FrontApp does for us currently -- possibly better even, especially for a small team like ours -- and looks like it'd be ~50% cheaper than FrontApp. Will definitely be taking a closer look in the future; I don't look forward to the migration (though sounds like it can be done pretty smoothly), but it's certainly an attractive product and the price point makes it quite tempting.
- plehoux 6y agoAwesome, don't hesitate to write me an email at philippe[a t]missiveapp.com if you have more questions! We have a lot of happy ex-Front users.
- plehoux 6y agoPost author here, someone on Twitter asked to expand a bit on where our users came from, given some of you might have the same question. 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 :)
- necovek 6y agoCongrats! 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).
- plehoux 6y ago> but if you are not drawing from a fixed pot (eg. your personal savings) Profits from another business, in and itself, are technically also from personal savings. But yeah, maybe our story doesn't subscribe to the purest form of bootstrapping.
- achillesheels 6y agoI would define bootstrapping more on par with autonomous scaling. The criterion pertains to the risk in capitalization. The more the risk is self-owned, the more the "quality" of the bootstrap :)
- necovek 6y agoThe only distinction is that personal savings usually do not grow at the same rate, thus the different qualification of risk. Anyway, your story is enlightening and interesting regardless if it was "impurely" bootstrapped, so apologies if I made it seem as if that was the most important thing.
- 6y ago
- notshift 6y agoAnyone 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.
- plehoux 6y agoYou should listen to the podcast of my co-founder Etienne on the Synthax. podcast: https://syntax.fm/show/184/desktop-and-mobile-apps-with-a-single-codebase https://syntax.fm/show/184/desktop-and-mobile-apps-with-a-si...
- paulryanrogers 6y agoCan you summarize here?
- rorykoehler 6y agoPlease don’t ask people to invest valuable time in listening to a podcast without also providing a simple answer to their question. This is a text forum.
- sbarre 6y agoCounter-point: I appreciated the link to the podcast, it was quite interesting.
- rorykoehler 6y agoI never said don’t post the link
- sopromo 6y agoYou can use react native and deploy an app for mobile phones and web.
- gnicholas 6y ago> We don’t set goals or long-term road maps. Daily, we look at what seems to be a good use of our time, and we do it, period. Long-term planning is tiresome and always looks pretty useless for a team like us. 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 6y agoI 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.
- polira 6y agoIs it all the same person in that photo?
- warent 6y agoI get your comment on diversity but imagine saying the same thing if they were black. Just because they're white that doesn't make it less offensive
- polira 6y agoAhh the reverse racism argument rears its ugly head.
- betenoire 6y agoI totally disagree. If it is a comment on diversity, it might be sarcastic or unprofessional, but that doesn't make it just as offensive. Saying all minorities look the same reveals ignorance and biases, which is the offensive part, not the comment itself.
- dubcanada 6y agoThis type of comment has no place in HN, keep it to reddit.
- ta1234567890 6y agoIt’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).
- maxs 6y agoIs 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)
- notfromhere 6y agoIf they didn’t write their own OS is it even bootstrapping?
- MattGaiser 6y agoThey probably used a computer obtained for another project. With off the shelf parts.
- dekerta 6y agoIf you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe
- mdeck_ 6y ago
- mike-cardwell 6y agoI just tested out your iOS client on my iPhone with https://www.emailprivacytester.com 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). I think that's bad.
- pimterry 6y agoThey actually have a tracker blocker as a core feature: https://missiveapp.com/features/auto-block-read-trackers https://missiveapp.com/features/auto-block-read-trackers 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.
- rafBM 6y agoCTO at Missive here. Thanks @pimterry for summing it up nicely. A note about the User-Agent: we do not forward it to the origin server as @mike-cardwell said. Our proxy always passes an iPhone User-Agent as a “lowest common denominator” to ensure CDNs won’t serve WebP images.
- JoshTriplett 6y agoBlocking "known" trackers is always going to be a cat-and-mouse game, though. Blocking all 1x1 images and similar would help as well, if you're doing that. But I'd still be concerned about spam that's using remote images for "this email address exists and a human reads it" verification. I'd also be concerned about read-receipt services, especially those that might support self-hosting rather than using a central service that you can easily identify.
- vcryan 6y agoI'm glad they are making money, but 1M in revenue doesn't strike me as a lot of money once you divide it across 4 people. I'm making 1/4th of 1M just by having a job, no startup capital required ;)
- dvt 6y agoThis is a pretty tone-deaf comment. Any startup can theoretically scale infinitely (and realistically, at least 10x), whereas you can only dream of those numbers. They can also be bought/exit for life-changing amounts.
- atleta 6y agoScaling theoretically is easy. Practically is a bit harder. What would have been interesting info (besides the ARR) is their growth rate and growth history. That would give insight into whether they are on the path you mention or the case is more like what GP said. (Skimming through the article, I didn't see any mention of this.)
- indymike 6y agoThe founders over at Missive also own a share of their company, which is likely worth 3-10x its ARR should they sell the company. So, they've made a nice job for themselves and created a very healthy amount of wealth. Congrats to them.
- philliphaydon 6y agoI wish I earned 1/4th of 1M just by having a job.
- dvt 6y agoIt'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. Congrats!
- waynesonfire 6y agoI 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.
- fergie 6y agoWhat can a "Team Inbox" do that a distribution/mailing list can't? ( <- no snark, genuine question, I'm sure there are things that I don't see here)
- dazbradbury 6y agoAllow customer support at scale / efficiently
- fergie 6y agoYes. But that didn't answer the question.
- waynesonfire 6y agoI help run a small non profit and we have various official positions. Volunteers join for sometime and then pass the baton. A postition could have a team inbox to help with continuity for the next person.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago> markets are bigger than what you'd think ... I mean this is email we're talking about 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.
- paxys 6y agoI hate that "bootstrapped" now means "we had millions of dollars in funding, just not from a traditional VC".
- plehoux 6y agoYou can listen to the interview I did with Courtland Allen from IndieHacker to understand that this is far from the case. https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/033-philippe-lehoux-of-missive https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/033-philippe-lehoux-of-...
- purerandomness 6y agoOP refers to the article, in which the authors seem to think that they bootstrapped the company, while they did not, in fact. > Missive is bootstrapped, meaning we never took a dime from investors. We funded it with the cash flow of our other business.
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoHow is this not bootstrapping? Their other business was 'properly' bootstrapped and then they used the profit from that to start this one.
- purerandomness 6y agoThen bootstrapping lost all its meaning. I don't care where the investment came from, a VC, your dad, or someone being their own VC. If we start calling that bootstrapping, we need a new name for 'starting a profitable business with nothing but a 5 bucks VPS'. It is not '1. Become a VC, 2. Invest in your own company.'
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago> starting a profitable business with nothing but a 5 bucks VPS That is literally what they did with their first company... This is no different to launching multiple products under the same company.
- donnythecroc 6y agoHave you considered non dilutive funding like Pipe?
- plehoux 6y agoNot sure I would know how to spend the money...
- jFriedensreich 6y agoI 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.
- plehoux 6y agoSorry for the anxiety! Your critic is a valid one, and one we struggled with a lot, how to make a powerful and simple app at the same time. 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. :)
- jFriedensreich 6y agoI know how hard this must be and i feel bad for having been an angry customer :D the blog post really put everything into context and shows where you are coming from and how extremely impressive your achievement is. My feeling is to reach the next level of the product you have to upset a lot of users in some areas to really empower the key audience and product.
- gsibble 6y agoPlease don't make this the new normal required to get funding. It's already insane as it is how much entrepreneurs are expected to carry the expense and risk at this point.
- plehoux 6y agoWe did try to get into YC a couple of years ago and made it to the interview. From the rejection email: "However we struggled to convince ourselves that enough people would find this useful enough to switch from Gmail and to pay for an email client." In the end, getting venture capital always seemed so time-consuming that we never contemplated the idea of doing it seriously apart from YC.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoWho else would you expect to bear the risk & expense if not the entrepreneur? Isn't that the very description of the word?
- PostThisTooFast 6y ago"ARR?" Is that supposed to be some pirate thing?
- markdown 6y agoWhile reading that article, "blog" in the menu wasn't highlighted. I trust the app has a better UI.
- TheMagicHorsey 6y agoOP 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).
- plehoux 6y agoI haven't looked at newer technologies. We would undoubtedly re-evaluate what's available and best for a small team like us.
- ghenne 6y agoWith PhoneGap having been discontinued, you'll need to find a replacement when it's time to update your app. Cordova still works great, so you won't have to make a lot of changes. Have a look at VoltBuilder as a replacement for PhoneGap. It does the same job (or more) and it's up to date. Disclosure - I'm on the VoltBuilder team (and a fellow Canuck). I'm happy to answer questions.
- ezekg 6y agoGreat 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.
- plehoux 6y agoI 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.
- pier25 6y agoCongrats 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. [1] https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross-platform-email-client-with-nothing-but-html-aa12fc33bb02 https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross...
- koverda 6y agoHey, 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. [1] https://paddle.com/ https://paddle.com/
- pier25 6y agoI’ve been trying to contact Paddle for some days to figure out some legal details but I’ve been unable to...
- alain_gilbert 6y agoCongrats on the success! I always like to see familiar faces when I randomly read HN articles :)
- plehoux 6y agoThanks Alain!
- mxuribe 6y agoCongrats @plehoux and the rest of the team, and I wish you continued success!!
- tarunkotia 6y agoHonestly 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.
- pdsouza 6y agoKeep fighting brother
- drenvuk 6y agoGonna 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. Why should I use appsolite?
- danielmarkbruce 6y agoYou probably shouldn't. But, you probably aren't the target customer either. "I would never use X" is often a bad proxy for "no one would ever use X". All those stupid ads, stupid billboards, stupid ideas - often they aren't stupid, they are just pitched at someone else.
- tarunkotia 6y agoFair question, that’s not negative at all. The product is built for businesses. Every product category has on an average 100s of products and each of those products have at least a few dozen features. There are about 139 apps/user in a mid-size organization. Even on a rolling basis, that’s a nightmare to evaluate. Companies usually evaluate 40 categories of product each year. Appsolite harmonizes those features across the whole category and you can creat requirements traceability matrix across the whole category.
- nirushiv 6y agoHey! Where does the 139 apps/user number come from? Not saying it's incorrect, but very curious about the source
- defnmacro 6y agoCongrats! How did you you guys validate your idea?
- Gabriel_Martin 6y agoVery 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).
- vassilevsky 6y agoFantastic example of agile development for real users. Envious. Congratulations. Here's to 10M ARR.
- klyburke 6y agoCongrats! 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.
- ToFab123 6y agoCongratulations. That's the way to do it :) 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.
- peter_d_sherman 6y ago>"On finding customers Our initial users were mostly early tech-adopters looking for a new innovative cross-platform email client. We found those by posting on different tech discovery communities like ProductHunt. Those early and mostly solo users wanted a different set of features than what would ultimately become our real paid customers: small and midsize businesses. This tricked us for a while in a race to build more and more features not so consistent with our vision. For instance, we started offering read tracking as it was one of the most requested features of early adopters. Many users upgraded to a paid plan for this alone; they weren’t interested in any of the collaborative features of the app. Those soloish users were churning at a far greater rate than real teams and they were requiring far more customer support/server resources per dollar earned. At some point, this reality sank in and we decided to focus entirely on teams. We ditched read tracking as it was a magnet for such misaligned customers. Our churn rate plummeted. The hard-learned lesson: have the courage to say no."
- TenJack 6y agoCongrats on this milestone! I’m curious, for conferencebadge.com did you guys buy a printer and do all the printing yourselves?
- alsargent 5y ago"We never spent a dime on marketing." ... except for Luis' salary, hosting the website, and the rest of the marketing stack, which might include Calendly, video conferencing, mailing list, etc.