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.
You 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.
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.
You are in good company.. there are dozens of similar startups/companies out there that address some form of this problem in various ways (ranging from the AWS marketplace to libhunt, producthunt, etc etc).
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)
Unsolicited product feedback forthcoming. Feel free to ignore as I don’t know what I’m talking about.
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.
Thanks for taking the time to go through the site. I agree a 100% with every feedback and I am being very sincere when I say that I am sorry you had to go through this bad experience. My focus has been on the core product and now I am going to be focusing on marketing site. To that end, the product I have built is requirements management for SaaS applications. It's behind login page. I have taken some screenshots with some description and posted here https://imgur.com/a/XZoVUZR
Ah that makes a bit more sense. How closely does this UI mirror a report that might be prepared by someone working on a requirements management project? Or did you design a new format for this?
The requirements traceability matrix is usually built in excel cross-referencing requirements with tests. It’s a matrix at the end of the day. I am following industry best practices for this.
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).
> 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.
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.
Uhm, of course profits from the "bootstrapped" business does not count as external business profit: you had exactly the "fixed pot" I talked about, so your example is a great case in point.
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.
I guess since it was the same team and the money was coming from the team's first bootstrapped business it all seemed like just adding another product to me. But yeah, it was written up more like it was simply subsidized by a group of investors who happened to be the founders.
In 1989 the term was "free software" (the term "open source" had not yet been applied to software). It was pretty unknown at that point so we had to explain it to people.
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.
The 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.
I 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 :)
His prior company, ConferenceBadge.com, was bootstrapped too [1]. If his prior company was venture backed, I would agree with you. This is a completely new business and target market so I don't think it can be considered an expansion either.
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'm not sure this is a SV mantra. Plenty of companies with products in spaces with lots of players get funded by very good VCs. Stripe. Zoom. Snowflake. 50 other data analytics companies. Arguably Airbnb. Lots of CRMs.
I guess so. IIRC somewhere Ben Horowitz talks about the fact that you are just going to have to face competition? I (and I guess others) often try to think of "new" ideas when anecdotally "better mousetraps" seem to have a better track record.
I long ago rid myself of any conceit in originality in going to market. There is much more security in aiming at large and compounding markets with such a wedge as this company. The difficult part is in convincing investors who are looking to party. Quite simply: you can't.
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.
I 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.
> 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.
Thanks for clarifying. How do you factor in considerations other than resilience? I assume the resilience question is an overlay that is applied when finalizing a decisions.
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.
CTO 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.
Hi, I work in the tracking space, specifically first party trackers. This approach is not effective.
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.
Blocking "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.
By the time you check if the image is 1x1, you've already downloaded it.
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.
> rather than blocking all external resources completely
> 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.
It sounds like their implementation prevents some wide-spread tracking, but that it doesn't prevent any targetted tracking. I know of at least one person that has suffered from targetting tracking of this variety, so I will say that this is still a bad setup for anybody that cares about privacy.
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.
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.
Exactly. If Jeff Bezos starts a new company tomorrow and funds it using only his own wealth with no outside investments, it counts as bootstrapped.
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.
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.
IMO, the parent comment was not hairsplitting, it was making quite valid critiques. Take the marketing critique. Far FAR too many techies think "marketing" == "advertising". It's not. Paid advertising is a small part of the art that is marketing. I considered the comment to quite helpful.
>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.
I think the OP has a valid observation. You don't say "we didn't spend a dime for our software" when you have hired someone to write it for you. Why would it be different for marketing?
How can it be an investment if you are the sole artificer of the outcome of your investment? An investor finds one or more companies that look good and are worth their money and then mostly wait for the profits. But in this case the same people who put the money are the ones planning and executing the business plan. What's the difference in using money earned by running another company rather than using money earned by working for another company? It's the very definition of hair-splitting.
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.
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.
I 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.
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.'
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.
Please 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.
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).
With 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.
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.
Thank 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.
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.
I 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.
Please 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.
I'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 ;)
This 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.
Scaling 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.)
The 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.
