[HN Gopher] How we bootstrapped a $1M ARR email client
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How we bootstrapped a $1M ARR email client
Author : plehoux
Score : 166 points
Date : 2021-04-06 16:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (missiveapp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (missiveapp.com)
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| 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).
| paxys wrote:
| I hate that "bootstrapped" now means "we had millions of dollars
| in funding, just not from a traditional VC".
| plehoux wrote:
| You 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-...
| purerandomness wrote:
| OP 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 wrote:
| How is this not bootstrapping? Their other business was
| 'properly' bootstrapped and then they used the profit from
| that to start this one.
| purerandomness wrote:
| Then bootsteapping 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.'
| dvt wrote:
| 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.
|
| Congrats!
| waynesonfire wrote:
| 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.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > _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.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| 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.
| plehoux wrote:
| Sorry 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 wrote:
| 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.
| polira wrote:
| Is it all the same person in that photo?
| warent wrote:
| I 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
| betenoire wrote:
| 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.
| polira wrote:
| Ahh the reverse racism argument rears its ugly head.
| dubcanada wrote:
| This type of comment has no place in HN, keep it to reddit.
| lquist wrote:
| How does Missive compare to Front?
| plehoux wrote:
| Missive 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
| adanto6840 wrote:
| 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.
| plehoux wrote:
| Awesome, 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 wrote:
| Post 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 :)
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Congratulations! How did you get Apple featuring you? And which
| podcasts worked best?
| necovek wrote:
| Congrats!
|
| 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).
| willyg123 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://medium.com/conference-badge/the-epiphany-behind-
| a-bo...
| gumby wrote:
| > 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.
| necovek wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| For anyone else reading, I actually found Cygnus Solutions'
| business model interesting.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions
|
| Lived the dream there: making a lot of money maintaining
| open source. Good stuff :D
| plehoux wrote:
| > 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.
| kr4 wrote:
| Just curious: how do you get featured by Apple, or by any other
| app store for that matter? Based on users or quality?
| plehoux wrote:
| No clue, I guess quality/luck? Missive was featured multiple
| times in 2017-2018.
|
| 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.
| neeeeees wrote:
| Congrats on the milestone!
|
| 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.
| plehoux wrote:
| > How did you build push notifications (especially on mobile)
| with a single codebase? Do you use something like OneSignal?
|
| The single codebase for the client. We do have a server/API,
| which manages push notifications.
| plehoux wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Yes, it is.
| donnythecroc wrote:
| Have you considered non dilutive funding like Pipe?
| plehoux wrote:
| Not sure I would know how to spend the money...
| markdown wrote:
| While reading that article, "blog" in the menu wasn't
| highlighted. I trust the app has a better UI.
| gsibble wrote:
| 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.
| plehoux wrote:
| We 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.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| "ARR?" Is that supposed to be some pirate thing?
| notshift wrote:
| 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.
| plehoux wrote:
| You 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-si...
| rorykoehler wrote:
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Can you summarize here?
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| 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).
| maxs wrote:
| 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)
| notfromhere wrote:
| If they didn't write their own OS is it even bootstrapping?
| dekerta wrote:
| If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must
| first create the universe
| mdeck_ wrote:
| -Carl Sagan (which you've just slightly misquoted) Credit
| where credit is due :)
| MattGaiser wrote:
| They probably used a computer obtained for another project.
| With off the shelf parts.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > 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.
| filoleg wrote:
| 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.
| dkarras wrote:
| 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.
| ookblah wrote:
| right? apparently if you worked for decades then tried to
| start your own company with savings that isn't bootstrapping
| lol.
| purerandomness wrote:
| Exactly, there's a term for it: "Investing".
|
| Different words exist for different reasons, and the
| bootstrapping community has a reason to make sure that term
| is not being confused with investing.
| darkwater wrote:
| 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.
| purerandomness wrote:
| > What's the difference [...]?
|
| 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 4,99EUR/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.
| rmah wrote:
| 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.
| filoleg wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| rtsil wrote:
| They have a team member in charge of marketing. Surely
| that counts as spending a dime (or two).
| imperistan wrote:
| I assume the employee in charge of marketing gets paid,
| right? That spending money on it too!
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| 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).
|
| I think that's bad.
| pimterry wrote:
| They actually have a tracker blocker as a core feature:
| 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.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > 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.
| rafBM wrote:
| 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.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| 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.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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.
| gnicholas wrote:
| 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.
| vcryan wrote:
| 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 ;)
| dvt wrote:
| 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.
| atleta wrote:
| 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.)
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