How we bootstrapped a $1M ARR email client
missiveapp.com
missiveapp.com
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.
Why should I use appsolite?
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.
Even though I would handle this much like the GP, I still do rely on those sites for some of the alternatives. (and many people don't know about the "productthatmightwork vs " trick to see what happens on autocomplete on DDG/goog)
> With an average of 88 apps per customer, we see some interesting breakdowns:
> Larger customers deploy an average of 175 apps, and smaller companies average 73
> Tech companies deploy the most apps with an average of 155
Ref: https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/2021/ under "Apps here, there, and everywhere"
First, the site is clunky on mobile. Highly recommend you fix that up before anything else. Mainly small things like margins and fonts.
Second, and I realize I am not exactly the target audience here, but I went to your site and had no idea what to do with it because search was the main thing I saw and I didn’t recognize a lot of the categories you already listed as something I would know anything about. So I searched for “CRM” which my phone initially unhelpfully corrected to “Cram”. I got a listing of names of CRMs some of which I knew and some which I have never heard. Oh I also go how long it took to execute the search which I found amusing but entirely unnecessary.
Here is the first problem: so far I don’t know what I can expect from the site and what value it’ll give me but I spent time interacting with it. I paid a cost but didn’t yet get much value.
I ended up clicking on one of the last CRMs I recommended to a customer and what I got was essentially a short description and a grid of features that the CRM has. This is problem number two: you are building a system like an engineer, but you need to think like a sales person or a support person. I am not here to find out if Zen Desk has a chat widget. And even if I am, I can do that just by going to their own site. I am potentially here because I currently use ZenDesk and want an alternative. But the site isn’t super helpful beyond giving me specific names of products.
The experience I actually would find useful: I tell the site that I want a CRM. It gives me a listing of the CRMs it knows about each with a line next to the name that says “Use when you need XYZ.” That’s it. For example “Use ZenDesk when you want a general purpose CRM.” Or “Use LiveAgent when you need the best on-page chat app.” You don’t need to give a million features in a comparison grid. They likely already have those on their sites. You want to do a part of the work evaluating these products for the customer. That way when they are picking out the next bit of software they’ll come to you again for the next recommendation. When the boss asks the assistant to find a new chat widget, you are the assistant, just automated.
Now, I will say that I wouldn’t want to try to monetize this product. You can make it free and try to make money off referrals which feels to me like an uphill battle. Or you can charge a paid subscription and essentially be the Consumer Reports of SaaS, which I think is an easier option but you need to provide value that’s commensurable with what you plan to charge. How much time can you save a boss’s assistant or a boss on doing these evaluations by doing them yourself (or hiring someone else to do them), then resell this consolidated knowledge? That’s how much you can charge.
Short version: you are selling data and I want information.
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 :)
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.
The single codebase for the client. We do have a server/API, which manages push notifications.
Yes, it is.
We had no web fame, Missive wasn't popular and it was a JavaScript app, let's say we were really surprised too.
At the end of the day, most of the users we got from those features, weren't really good fit. But it was good for our confidence.
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).
That seems like a crazy distinction. Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps means not getting outside assistance. Growth through reinvesting your profits is entirely the deal. Otherwise what else on earth could it mean?
We started Cygnus with 15K (about 30K in today's dollars; it was 5K from each founder) and didn't take outside money for seven years at which point we have about 150 employees and had never had an unprofitable month after month 3 (though the three of us had to skip paychecks some months during the first year, and I gave the company free rent for a few months -- but staff always got a paycheck).
edit: It wasn't just the cash; we also had an old Sun-3 that Sun had somehow appeared -- still had a Sun property sticker -- plus we had the first production prototype of the "pizza box" sparcstation which had in fact been legitimately given away.
But the OP had profits from another business. Eg. imagine if Google decided to create a self-driving company with profits from their search/ad business. We wouldn't ever think of calling that self-driving company bootstrapped.
Lived the dream there: making a lot of money maintaining open source. Good stuff :D
In more than once case I sat in a conference room and was told by some exec that I (or we) was a fucking idiot while he (always he back then) handed me a P.O. or signed contract for $1MM. Needless to say I didn't care what they called as as long as they continued to pay.
Having to invent a whole new business model going into a mature market is hard and we worked hard at it. Also I had to write the first blanket assignment, the GNU library license (dynamic linking was Gilmore's great idea though), the fork-and-steering committee model (google for my message about splitting of GCC into egcs -- forking was super super controversial back then and was assumed by most people to be doom)... yes, fun times.
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.
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.
[1] https://medium.com/conference-badge/the-epiphany-behind-a-bo...
Congrats!
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.
It would be much easier to fundraise if people saw competition as a healthy barometer for entrance. Google and the search engine is a famous example.
There might be room for 100 small scale products tailored to specific use cases.
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.
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 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.
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.
Here are the reasons: 1) rarely care what client the user views the email in; 2) any request to the server is enough information to identify the user, email, and open/received; 3) a tracking pixel is an antiquated form of tracking; 4) the list provided doesn’t include some big names (FB for one).
The only effective way to stop the tracking, that I’m aware of, is is to cache the result of the request. Even that doesn’t stop newer techniques. Instead what you need to do is to cache the request and then apply a model to determine if a similar request leads to a similar result for other users and serve that from the cache. To the best of my knowledge no one has built that yet, and could probably be circumvented.
The alternative expensive solution is to download EVERY image a user receives and store it indefinitely. That way the trackers aren't any more useful than "was the email received".
In short, I'd love a better solution to " load all images " vs " load no images " but that's where I ended up talking to our frontend engineer at Fastmail. Obviously he had thought about the problem a lot more then me (I do operations not any frontend) and there's no easy solution.
> And they do proxy all images through their own servers, so any missed trackers still get only limited info.
IMO either all external resources should be completely blocked until explicitly requested or alternatively all should be immediately fetched and cached by the server the instant it receives the email. The second option does consume more resources for the server operator but it provides significantly better privacy for users by rendering trackers completely useless.
The only good solution is to automatically fetch all remote content for all incoming email as soon as it is received, regardless of whether or not the message is read.
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).
> 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.
Of course it would be less impressive if someone of Jeff's caliber bootstraps a company, as opposed to a much less wealthy individual. But it would still be bootstrapping in both cases.
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.
>Far FAR too many techies think "marketing" == "advertising". It's not
>Paid advertising is a small part of the art that is marketing.
Sure, I agree that paid advertising is just a small part of marketing. But the post didn't say "we didn't do any marketing". The post said "without spending a dime on marketing".
It isn't supposed to mean they haven't done any marketing. Clearly they did, given the post in question itself. It is supposed to mean they haven't spent any money on marketing. Have they spent any money on marketing? If no, then they are fully in the clear. Unless somehow people assumed the devs just published their work and left it at that, which is a very unreasonable assumption, because how would people find out about the app in the first place if that was the case.
Just like with Tesla. They intentionally spend zero on marketing. But it would be silly to argue that Tesla doesn't do any marketing. Elon's tweets alone can be considered marketing. It's just that there is no actual budget spent on it.
Different words exist for different reasons, and the bootstrapping community has a reason to make sure that term is not being confused with investing.
The distinction is very clear: Bootstrapping a business means you can do it without funds, in a "poor" country, without inheriting money or having savings.
It's important because it shifts focus towards executing a business model that is likely to succeed without having to experiment and see "what sticks" first.
Productizing a consulting business is one example. You repackage knowledge you gained while working for clients, into its own product. The only expense in that phase is your 4,99€/mo root server.
The distinction is important because there are people who are interested in one, but not the other, or who can only do one, but not the other.
When we talk about different things, we need different terms to make sure we know what it is that we are talking about.
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."
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.
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. :)
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/033-philippe-lehoux-of-...
> Missive is bootstrapped, meaning we never took a dime from investors. We funded it with the cash flow of our other business.
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.'
That is literally what they did with their first company...
This is no different to launching multiple products under the same company.
These guys ran their first company for 1 1/2 years, then went full-time and seemingly focused most of their energy on this new product.
This is basically a pivot or new product. There are lot's of ways to frame this approach which are analogous to 'properly' bootstrapping.
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.
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...
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.
I'm definitely curious how they were able to create a 'blazing fast experience on phones' writing their mobile app in just JavaScript.
... except for Luis' salary, hosting the website, and the rest of the marketing stack, which might include Calendly, video conferencing, mailing list, etc.
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).
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.
We wrote this post explaining some of the differences: https://missiveapp.com/frontapp-vs-missive
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.
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.
"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.
They can also be bought/exit for life-changing amounts.