Missive: How a Tiny Team Built a $6M SaaS Without VC Funding – with Philippe Lehoux [421]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: Philippe, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Philippe: Hey, thanks, Omer.

[00:00:02] Omer: Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

[00:00:06] Philippe: I don't know. Keep things simple, pretty simple quote.

[00:00:12] Omer: That's that's great. So tell us about Missive. What does the product do? Who's it for? What's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[00:00:19] Philippe: All right, so it's a collaborative email client. So think of like a multiplayer email client. Like if Gmail and Slack were merging the same product and just doing that kind of makes Missive a solution for many types of problems, like email delegation, customer support, just team communication and whatnot.

[00:00:38] Omer: And, and yeah, and basically I think you, you who you for is like. Anybody who uses email or collaborates with teams, right?

[00:00:47] Philippe: Yeah. I would say SMBs. So small and medium businesses we're not a tool like for a call center, but SMBs and pretty much all SMBs do emails. But usually with the SMBs that like email is part of their core communication strategy, right?

[00:01:05] People emailing a lot like people in finance, lawyer. Travel agency, like any businesses that rely on email to communicate with their customers,

[00:01:16] Omer: and give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers size of team?

[00:01:21] Philippe: Right. Right now we are around, we, we serve around 3,700 businesses, and the MRR is at 480K per month.

[00:01:32] USD. And the, the team size now we're 12, but 11, sorry, 11. But we were just three still like few months ago. Like a year ago. So we just recently expanded the team.

[00:01:46] Omer: Great. So you're closing in on 6 million. In ARR the business was founded in 2015 and you've bootstrapped it all the way. You haven't raised any money.

[00:01:57] Philippe: Yeah, we still own 100% of the business.

[00:02:01] Omer: And you're profitable? Yes. Okay, great. So let's let, let's go back to. 2015, like what were you doing at the time and where did the idea for Missive come from?

[00:02:12] Philippe: So the me and my co-founders, Ettiene and Rafael, we were bootstrapping another business pretty much like a name badge editor.

[00:02:21] Like, so let's say you had a conference, you want name badges, you come on our website, you, you connect Evan Bright. You design your name badge and we would print and ship them to you. And so we had a relatively good success with that. We could ditch our job being full-time on conference batch. But quickly we realized like, that's actually not a technological challenge that we enjoy fixing, so let's like use that as a, as a way to bootstrap something more ambitious.

[00:02:51] And I don't know where or how, but. Like at some point I think I was making a lot of typos in my emails and like the guys was like, let's just like bring collaboration in emails so we can like bulletproof your emails. And then just like we start to work on like a, a demo and then launch it for free in 2015.

[00:03:14] And then I think our first customer was 2016.

[00:03:18] Omer: And, and of course before you wrote any code, you went out and talked to a bunch of customers and did a bunch of customer discovery, right?

[00:03:25] Philippe: 0, 0, 0. We were our own customer. Like we were dogfooding this. So for the first year it was just us pretty much working on this without talking about it to anyone.

[00:03:36] Omer: Cool. And, and the first business, you ended up selling that, right?

[00:03:40] Philippe: Yep. Last year we sold it to Tiny from Andrew Wilkinson. It's a, it's a business that totally was alienated by covid conference batch.com. And then, so post covid, we could, like, we, we we successfully brought revenue back and then quickly, like given, like Missive, at, at quite a lot of success.

[00:03:58] We, we couldn't invest more time in it and run it in parallel. So I contact them to. And I think three weeks later it was sold. So yeah.

[00:04:07] Omer: Wow. Okay, cool. So you, you, the three of you start building Missive and how long did it take to, to get that first version of the product out and were you really just building it for yourself or did you have some kind of customer in mind?

[00:04:22] Philippe: I would like to say that we had like communicate or exchange with people, but like, it was pretty much just like, let's build a cool product for us first. I remember that when we were working on conference that we, we were using kickoff. Kickoff was like like iChat or like the, like slack before Slack, and they were sold to Stripe and we really liked it.

[00:04:43] And when they were sold to Stripe, we was like, let's, like, okay, let's, let's build an email account with chat in it so we can actually. You know do like our internal and external come and decide the same application. So we were geeking out around that idea and just pretty much enjoying ourself, geeking out on that idea.

[00:05:02] And then obviously it took a long time and, and after we launched for real, we stopped to talk to customer and took a long time. I think it took, it, it, it took two years to get to 10K MRR. And in those two years we had a lot of conversation. There's things we did not have in. V one that was required for a lot of people and it was assignment, right?

[00:05:23] So people have emails, they want to be able to take them and assign them to other people in their team, right? So just the ability to chat in between email was just not good enough in V one. So we had to talk to customer eventually to understand, you know, where's the value in such a product. And then.

[00:05:40] Iterate it's right. Talk to customer, iterate, iterate, talk to customer. And then eventually we started to have more traction with, with our early customers.

[00:05:49] Omer: So it, it purely started from scratching your own itch, a problem that you were having, and then just following your curiosity and. Basically a bunch of geeks who are like, yeah, we love building products, so let's just spend a bunch of time building something that we are really excited about.

[00:06:07] And then you, you went out there and, and started to find customers. Basically what we tell most founders not to do, it's like how you guys started. Right?

[00:06:15] Philippe: But, but the, the important thing is to know we have conference badge. Which was a profitable product we could, could run for few hours per month. Right.

[00:06:24] So pretty much it was running so big. People were ordering name badges and then we had a printing partners doing that stuff. So we were pretty much just doing customer support for those. And the rest of our time was available to do Missive. Right. And. I would never have done Missive without this first 'cause, like the scope is the ambition of working on an email product you soon realize.

[00:06:49] Okay. It's not like a two months project. Right. It's probably a lifetime project now.

[00:06:53] Omer: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean I think that's a huge factor. The fact that you have that other business and it takes a lot of pressure off. And that was the question I was gonna ask you was like, of all the stuff that you guys could have built.

[00:07:06] Like, this is like a complicated piece of technology and like, you know, wasn't there like something simpler you could have done? And it's like, now it makes a lot more sense that it's, it's like you, you've got a business, it's paying the bills. You, you don't have that much pressure and it gives you that freedom to be able to really explore something that, that you feel like, you know, is challenging or you want to go and fix and stuff.

[00:07:30] So you ended up launching the, a free version of Missive. I think you told me like end of 2015 and then it took, what about a year or so to get the first 10 customers?

[00:07:44] Philippe: Oh, first 10 customer I think was like probably five to six months. Like the first customer was w conference badge, obviously. Right. We were doing like all of the support and everything with it.

[00:07:56] But then I think it took probably, yeah, six months before having like our FirstNet customers and, and to this day, the first two real customer, so not conference badge obviously, 'cause it's us, but the first two customers there are still massive customers. So there's one user, which is a solo user. So but there's a team, ny, NY is like a, a, a product feedback startup you can use, like to gather feedback on your product.

[00:08:22] There's been like our first customer and is still around.

[00:08:25] Omer: Wow. How, how did you get the word out? How did you find those first 10 customers?

[00:08:29] Philippe: I think NY is probably US goal reaching them. Or via product. And I think we launched on product and then that startup view conversation, you know, when you, you release an email client, it's, it's exciting for a lot of people.

[00:08:45] 'cause like there's a lot of already adopt tech adopters and they wanna try everything. And our first version was kind of cool, right? It was kind of beautifully designed for, for, for, for 2016 and or 15. And so we had a lot of good feedback of people interested in the tech that we were. Little thing, it was just like they were not necessarily teams.

[00:09:07] Right. So they were mostly like solo user or developers. I mean, in 2000 fifteens, like Product Hunt was mainly, I guess it's still the same, but it was mainly like Indi and, and yeah, people. You know, everyone on Product one was pretty much people trying to launch a product on Product Hunt. Right? So and then that, that started the few conversation and, and I think canny with like was our real first team customer.

[00:09:33] I think we found them via, via, via Product Hunt. Yeah.

[00:09:37] Omer: So Product Hunt and then you were spending time on like, was it communities or Twitter or wherever and just like. Like where, you know, starting conversations, wherever you heard people talking about issues with, you know, other products.

[00:09:55] Philippe: Yeah. That was just one of the most effective strategy initially was like, hey, like let's say there was a conversation about on Twitter about how do you support.

[00:10:05] Either you do super around email in your business. I would, I would go and like, Hey, I've built that product. You can try it for free. Or if people were talking about competitor product, like another email app or another out desk, I would drop in a, we have a new way to work around your customer support.

[00:10:24] It's a really email client noted for a help desk, and the reaction was surprisingly always. Good. And I think a lot of people converted with this. At first I was, it's not like I'm not a marketer, I. Like, like, I don't like to interrupt people. Like, I don't like sales call. So to me, at first, that was not something easy to do.

[00:10:48] But I learned that because it was relevant to the conversation people were having, it was not salesy. Like reception was always extremely good. And I think that a lot of our early success were from those, those social media conversations.

[00:11:03] Omer: So would it be fair to say that the majority of. Your effort, all the founders was about building the product or do you, or was it like, okay, we're gonna spend like half the time on product?

[00:11:15] Half the time on growth,

[00:11:16] Philippe: it was 90% time on, on product. I, I mean, I'm the only one who did marketing. I did two other, it was 100% product and I probably spent just 10% of my time with marketing.

[00:11:30] Omer: Okay, so you, you were doing this sort of cold outreach, just looking for opportunities to start conversations.

[00:11:36] And then you started building these, these alternative pages, right? Or versus, versus pages. Can you talk about that?

[00:11:45] Philippe: Yeah. So our competitors most of the time massively funded Silicon Valley businesses. They had, first they did a lot of marketing, good marketing, and they were able to educate people on what is a sharing box or you know, how, what is a good modern email client or, and so.

[00:12:04] We were looking for a way to ride those, you know, so let's say they spend 20 millions in marketing and we can actually insert ourself in the conversation with, people are dissatisfied with it them, or they're actually, when they're planning to buy them, looking for, there's other product that are similar to it.

[00:12:24] So we build those long versus page like not, you know, there's two types of versus page just like. Hey, this is our product and it's five bullet points and it's always the same against each like product or versus page rate. In our case, it was like, Hey, you cannot do that or you can do that. Or, yeah, it's actually this product is best for this use case, but our product is based for this product.

[00:12:48] So we tried to do a honest job there. And all products were always evolving, so sometimes we had email. Hey, you were saying that in your versus page. Oh, sorry. And we would like. Fix it or change, change a copy to, to, you know, to still make it fair. And, and, and I think to this day, that's probably our most successful marketing institute.

[00:13:10] And, and still today we, we still rank good for a lot of those page, even though we don't really put much effort in those anymore.

[00:13:16] Omer: I mean, the thing with those pages is like everybody does them now and it's getting harder and harder to rank in terms of like organic search for those pages.

[00:13:25] Especially if you are competing against some of the, you know, the bigger players. And probably, I'd say most people are getting to the point where they probably don't believe what it says on the page. Anyway. Right, because it's so biased most of the time, but it's still a great way for people to discover you, right?

[00:13:46] And it's like, they may still be skeptical, but it's like, okay, great. There's another. Product on the list. I'm looking for something else. I should at least check them out.

[00:13:54] Philippe: Yeah, definitely. Like these, it's normal actually. People are skeptical. I am a like, extremely skeptical customer, so I wasn't expecting people to read those.

[00:14:02] Basically like, oh, you know that other, because all products are, you know, those other products, they are goods and their. On niches or they offer things that we don't. So I tried to do something first, but yes, the idea was having people to download Missive and actually like try it or attend our webinar.

[00:14:19] I. Or we could explain the difference and and because those other products like Front Superhuman, invested so much in marketing, even if we could insert ourself in just 5% of the people that knew about those, it would still be a big win for us. And a lot of time was the crazy part is like I was doing all the webinars for a long time.

[00:14:43] And a lot of people that used those products for a few years and didn't discovered us when they were unsatisfied via the verus page. Sometimes they were pissed. They was like, what? You've been around since 2015? Like, like, come on, man. Like. Beef up your marketing man. I have like, why didn't I know about you?

[00:15:02] Right? Like, you're a god damn good product, right? So, so that this is just an illustration that first, like we were riding the success of those other businesses and that we're absolutely the worst marketers.

[00:15:16] Omer: So when I was looking at Missive. Like we, we talked a little bit about this earlier, but before we started recording, like I was trying to like figure out the positioning where, where does Missive fit? Because it was like, is this an email client that's sort of competing with, you know, the Superhumans and other clients out there? Is this a team inbox that's competing with the Zendesk and fresh desks and those types of products? Or is this some kind of communication tool that's competing with Slack?

[00:15:50] And when I asked you that you were like. All of the above. Right. And it was, and then, and then you, you, you, you gave me an interesting fact where you broke down and you said like, you know, how horizontal your product is. Can you just explain that in terms of like the, the niches or the types of customers that you serve today?

[00:16:08] Philippe: Yeah, so so if, if you look at our mix panel where we break down, like our customer base and, and what industry they are, and we do that by first asking them in the product or. Why other ways? Looking at the domain and whatnot, and I think like the biggest industry is like 7% of our customer base, and I think it's.

[00:16:30] Like logistic and transportation, like freight brokers, things like that. Right? And then travel businesses, travel related business, if so, like travel agency people with many Airbnbs or or, or things like that. And then there's lawyers, then there's financial accounting. Those are like four or five, 6%, never more, more than that.

[00:16:54] And in term of use case, we also ask in product, what's your use case with it? And it's all over the place, right? It's it's in between like email delegation, customer support just internal external communication. Like, like you said at the end, like Slack plus Gmail, right? So all over the place. So we're pretty much do like.

[00:17:15] We're pretty much go against all business advices. Like in like, it's like it's it's app, it's a horizontal product. We don't have any niches we're serving. It's like Gmail, like we're pretty much like doing like Gmail play. Like it is just an email app. Right. Use it as business. You can, of course. Having said that, when we have conversation with customers we try to understand like.

[00:17:41] They have a lot of different use case, but we try to come up with the essence of what's common in between all of those industry, how they use it, and build the feature around those things. But yeah, pretty horizontal.

[00:17:54] Omer: So how did you, how did you focus? Like where, where, I know you said you weren't sort of doing a lot of intentional marketing, you were looking for some of these opportunities, although you did start doing SEO and these, these landing pages, but.

[00:18:08] When you've got a horizontal product, like every time I talk to a founder who's like trying to serve like multiple market, it's like, and not, you know, struggling to get traction, it, you know, I always say like, find one, one niche, one place you can start. It'll be easier to target those people. It'll be easier to figure out the right messaging, the right use case, all of that stuff, and then you can expand from there.

[00:18:34] Did, did you guys try to do anything like that? And, and if not, like, how, how did you, like how, like how did, how did you market to the right people?

[00:18:44] Philippe: We really built miss at first for us. Right. So I think that led us like when you build something you deeply care about, that you use daily. And a funny story is that initially after.

[00:18:56] I think it was probably in the first year we were four Co-founder initially, and one was like, Hey guys, it's not working. We should focus on conference bad and whatnot. It's like, should we stop doing Missive? And like the four of us, we, the four of us, we sit down and I remember. I think it was a 10 saying like, well we can stop working on Missive, but I know I would still code it in the nights and weekends 'cause I still want to use it for myself.

[00:19:22] Right. So, so that really what gave us the energy to work for so long to escape and add velocity and. Other people, industries that we didn't know about. Right. So I would say earlier, probably the people in transportation and finance, that user were like early adopters willing to like take a risk on such product.

[00:19:44] And because it was like a new sexy email client, it was like they could project their own use case into Missive. Right, because it was like, it, it it, it was a email client in the end, right? Everybody is doing emails, so pe people try to innovate with their workflow and whatnot. So I think those things allowed us to insert ourself into those other industries without having to focus or, you know, like target our marketing around their.

[00:20:13] Needs or whatnot. I'm not saying we won't do that, obviously there's like, we're growing a team, we wanna invest more in marketing. So all those traditional things we're probably gonna start doing now and, and add more like clear landing page for each industries, adding case studies with, with customers and whatnot.

[00:20:29] So obviously those things are all good, but I think initially. For us it was important to, to build our original product. 'cause like we didn't wanna restrict it to, to one specific use case on issues, but

[00:20:40] Omer: yeah. And, and those, those the versus pages we, we talked about, how many of those did you, like, start up building and, and how long did it take for them to start driving, you know, at least move the needle in terms of the type of traffic you were getting?

[00:20:57] Philippe: I think the most successful one was all about new products as well. So we've been around for a long time. So anytime there was a new email like app, we would try to come up with a page like that, like front to per human, short wave and whatnot. So, so I think we had success because we could insert ourself, we could build content around new products.

[00:21:21] So there was no content around about those products, right? So so we built one for Slack that never had any traction, right? So we built one for Gmail that never had any so it was our, it was those worked because those product were same age as Missive, right? So I guess Google was like, okay, well.

[00:21:41] Similar industry, similar product, like we should rank those guys at the same,

[00:21:45] Omer: are you a surfer? No, because it's like you guys, it's like this thing you, it is just every exact example you've given me. It's like finding these waves, right? That that are sort of emerging and then figuring out how to ride them at the right time.

[00:22:00] Philippe: I think it's a good analogy. And I think yeah, any SEO success we had or content we had was always around a wave. And I think that's why it's important to be on social media or to read things on social media. Like last year when Open AI released their. Chat GPT is like, it was instant for me. It's like, I mean, I do, I do so many typos in my emails and it's like, okay, that thing can actually make me a good writer, right?

[00:22:29] And so it's like I need that ad subMissive. And I knew that if I, we would be the first email client with that, it would be good for SEO and content. So I think like a month later we released the first like version of the OpenAI plugin, and then to this day we're still like, Hey, best 2024 email client with AI we're always in those lists, right?

[00:22:50] So that helped. That was riding the A waves, even though, but still I built it for myself 'cause I wanted it. But I think it's important. Anything you do, you always need to find a way to insert yourself in, in a movement. And, and, and, and that's how actually you can have an impact, even if you're a small teams.

[00:23:10] And, and obviously the success with that is not like. Tremendous or exponential, but we still had some amount of success. Right. And, and it, it's a good point. A lot of time was about ensuring ourself in a movement, right? So, yeah.

[00:23:24] Omer: Okay. So the, I, I guess the product today, we talk about very horizontal, lots of use cases, but you're still very clear about the types of customers and the types of use cases that Missive is.

[00:23:39] A great solution for, and the people that you can help the most. In the early days, you had a lot of solo customers using the product. Were you, were you marketing it as a collaborative tool from the beginning and like I know, I know like, so like trying to support these solar users. You spent probably like too much time.

[00:24:02] Until you said, no. Look, we need to stop and we need to focus on the collaboration aspect and teams more, but just tell me a little bit about that because that's an interesting. Part of the journey in terms of figuring out who your ICP is. Because even if you had an idea of who that person was, you're getting other people coming and they're paying you money.

[00:24:20] It's good money, right? So it's like what happened? What sort of problems did you start to see that that had you rethinking that?

[00:24:27] Philippe: Yeah. So first, like the first for the first few years, I'd say for me personally, it was important to listen to those solo users. Right. And the reason is we're building an email client, right?

[00:24:39] So to me, there was two pipeline in the roadmap, collaborative, innovation, and then just nailing the email client aspect of the product, right? And this silo here was the artist. Right. Anything, people like it. It's crazy. It can be the shortcuts, it can be like how the quote is rendered, how there's a lot of, there's thousands and thousands of small details.

[00:25:05] And nailing those was possible because we were, we had excited early customers and most of the time those were early tech adopters with no team. They just liked Missive. And they just wanted to use it for their email. 'cause they find like all the other solution was like either old or not good enough for them.

[00:25:23] Right? That was the first few years, but then we just like crunched the number and like the churn rate for p like organization in miss, we call them with more than three people was like 1.6%. And then churn for solo user was like. 16%, right? So it's like, okay, why? Okay, so solo user, I mean, obviously they can use free email client, right?

[00:25:51] So our competitors are pretty much like it, like the competition is free, so it's, it's hard to compete, right? Eventually you can't just compete an aesthetic or, or quality of the product at some point. The product doesn't offer much more value for a solo user, so. Just manually at one point we said, okay, well I think now that we have many customers, especially a lot of teams we should probably price the product for them, right?

[00:26:19] So, and that was increasing a bit the price. So it became out of reach for most seller users. Right? And it might sound counterintuitive, but. For a small team like us, we cannot have too many people in the pipeline, incoming new customer if they turn. 'cause it's like supporting those enthusiastic users take a lot of time.

[00:26:42] 'cause they send you emails, Hey, you should improve that. You should. And right. And at some point it was like, okay, let's, let's change the pricing. So it's, it's, it's still off because it offer a lot of value for the team. It's still affordable and it takes, still makes sense for the teams, but for solo users, it's not gonna even be part of their.

[00:27:00] They're, they're, they're, they're thinking when they, they start thinking about using an email client, right? And yeah, so that, that pretty much slow discovery of, of that. But initially, like, because we didn't have any marketing or any ability to define who our target customer was, like we were pretty much happy with all the customers and all feedback was, was welcome.

[00:27:21] And, and then eventually that, that, that, that changed, like I said.

[00:27:26] Omer: Let, let's talk about affiliates. So that was the next thing that helped you grow, and it makes a lot of sense given what we talked about, this horizontal market and, and, and trying to reach customers directly across the board is a huge, huge undertaking, right?

[00:27:47] So being able to use like inter intermediaries, like affiliates makes a ton of sense. But a lot of startups will put, you know, launch affiliate programs and, and not necessarily see a, a, a huge amount of traction through that. So how well did it work for you, and then just kind of walk us through like what you did, because there was a few things that you did, which again, was a bit counterintuitive to what most startups would do.

[00:28:13] Philippe: Well, first let's start with the counterintuitive things. Like we, we did not use a service or app. Right. We built it from scratch because the reasoning was people love Missive. They're our best ambassador. Let's give them like, they like to talk about it just for the sake of like being happy. Talking about like an interesting tool you're using right.

[00:28:39] But let's give them value in doing so. Like let's let on top of it bring value, like monetary value. So the idea was like, let's like have an athlete program where we can. Either like all the, like let's say I use Missive and I stop talking about it, and then someone, somebody use it. Like I can either get three months, like, or I could, if, if I'm an extremely good athlete, just have get, get a payment.

[00:29:04] But the, the, the core idea was that plus, because we're an email client, we're not comfortable having third party script or tracking things in our. All, you know, pipeline, whether it's a public website to the app itself. So we had to own that part as well. Not to add those in our, like, let's say GDPR or any other terms of certain page where you, you know, you don't wanna list those marketing ish product that, and, and have to say that they have access to data when they don't really have access.

[00:29:37] So it's a intuitive thing. We, we built it from scratch and, and I think it's a reason, I think why it worked, because now it's ingrained in the product. For a customer, when they start using it, the, like the dashboard is in the product, it's not something on top of it. And I would say half of our athletes right now are customers.

[00:29:59] Now they, the other app is professional marketers, just like either doing ads with it or. Using other strategies. Sometimes I have no idea what they do with it, but we try to monitor things. So it's, it's like they're doing like things that are okay. But I would say half and half nowadays, like half professional marketers, half customers.

[00:30:19] Omer: Cool. So that was the other counterintuitive thing that I think most startups would probably say. You can, you can be an affiliate, but you can't run ad campaigns and. You know, or, or you can't target certain keywords like our branding, you know, whatever. Did, did you do that or did you just give them free reign?

[00:30:40] Philippe: Initially it was like you could do anything. Well, except legal stuff, right? Obviously. Right. But yeah, so like for a long time, and that guy's a customer of my stuff, but you just on the marketing firm, but that for a long time. If, if you type Missive in Google, like the first was like a link that you, like, you use this asset link.

[00:31:01] It was paying eventually once we got our trademark. So we could enforce not using Missive in any ads first because it would make less sense for them. 'cause the, the price of the clicks would, would go up a lot. And also because eventually they were making a lot of money and it was like, okay, I think like we should.

[00:31:19] S stop this and that would change the policy. You cannot advertise on Missive, like, and you cannot use the term Missive and advertise against it, whether it's on Google or YouTube or, or whatnot. But that affiliate actually submitted a list of, keywords that we approve, we could not use like Missive pricing and whatnot.

[00:31:41] A lot of those, and then we say, okay, it's okay if you wanna use Missive some of the times on longer queries, that's fine. No problem. We have our conversation with him because it's good. But in a way it's kind of a way to. Not have to deal with paid ads, right? It's like you, you let your athletes deal with that stuff and we can still be a small team and not adding like, dedicated resource in the company doing it.

[00:32:04] Of course we're probably leaving money on the table, but I, like I said at the beginning, beginning like keep, keep teams simple.

[00:32:10] Omer: Okay. So I wanna just kinda be clear about the timeline. So you, I, I think the first. Paid customer was kinda like end of 2016. It took about two years to get to 10K in MRR.

[00:32:27] And then what, it was another two years to get to the first million in ARR.

[00:32:34] Philippe: Yeah. Two year and a half.

[00:32:36] Omer: A year and a half. And, and if I had to describe it, it's like. I kind of see like this big circle where 90% of this is all about building a great product, doing some PLG, and then outside of that there are these efforts around, okay, we did some cold outreach in communities or in social these versus pages and then starting to.

[00:32:56] Introduce an affiliate program, but outside of those three things, was there anything else that was a significant driver to get to that first million?

[00:33:04] Philippe: No, it's a good summary. I wrote a blog post called 10 Years of Lazy Marketing in the sense that I think there's an, 28 bullet points in it in 10 years.

[00:33:14] That's not a lot of things. And I really like, tried to really remember everything that I did. I look at my Twitter feed, so I scrolled to see like whatever I did that I post right to the years and, and I, I ended up with 28 bullet points in in nine, nine years. So not much, but, but, but yeah, product led being in a space.

[00:33:39] Email client, right? Where people are willing to experiment and try them. It's easy. Like you download, you try it, you like it, right? You, you start using it. Or maybe you're a solo user, you start talking about it to like your friend that owned businesses and whatnot.

[00:33:54] Omer: So what I thought was interesting was that the business today is 480K, nearly 500,000 in MRR.

[00:34:03] Nine months ago in December, the team size was still three people. Yeah. How, how did you manage to go that far, that long with just the three of you?

[00:34:19] Philippe: I don't, I think it goes back to keeping things simple, right? Never spending time on imaginary problems. Or creating fake work. There's a lot of fake work in businesses and a lot of fake work in startups, I believe.

[00:34:33] Right. One reason I always like, people ask me like, like, because like venture firm or people were interested in miss, like always can, what's that thing, right? And sometimes I had conversation and so people were like, Hey, you, you talked to those guys, would you be interested to, to get investment? I was like.

[00:34:52] Honestly, I, I have no clue what I would do with that much money, right? I would've had to invent things, right? Let's like try those 10 initiative that I'd also, I have absolutely no clue if they're gonna work or not. And just like create work around them for us was always to do just the bare minimum.

[00:35:08] And the bare minimum minimum was often just replying to our customer email as best as we could, fixing their problems, getting into call with them to understand their. Issues their pains and then iterating and improving the product. And of course you need time to do that. You need a runaway. And in our case, like I said, we had that runaway from, from conference badge.

[00:35:34] And in a way, I sold conference badge when we, we stuck, we, we IV was bringing enough revenue, so we didn't need that runaway anymore. So to me it was more annoying to have that small business running in the side. Right. I preferred selling. It wasn't a huge price, it was a fair price, but I preferred to to, to stop adding it 'cause it was a distraction.

[00:35:57] But for a long time it was just an enabler. That's why we could invest so much time into all of this. And so, you know, I think Paul Graham said that like, like, you, you want to be cockroach, like we were like the absolutely best cockroach. I was always like, there's nothing that can kill us, right? Like, let's just like keep doing those small things daily and then that thing, those things compound.

[00:36:21] I think right now we're at a moment where probably in a year or in two years, like the company will look a lot different 'cause I think we, I feel it's a new seasons. And the critical funders are, are our personal situation, the attraction of subMissive. I feel that we're at a place where we are gonna change the ingredients and now we we're cooking.

[00:36:41] But for a long time that was a keep things simple.

[00:36:44] Omer: I love that. Love that. You know you, you were telling me that you felt like you had underinvested in marketing and now you, you are changing that and building a team around you and and I asked you like, you know, Hey, do you think your revenue would be like significantly.

[00:37:04] Greater if you had done that earlier and you were like, yeah, of course. Absolutely. Right. And then I thought about it, and maybe it's just like I'm getting older and like a bit more philosophical and stuff, right? But it was like, hold on a minute. You're, you're running a, a business that's profitable, or at least you had an, you know, another business along as well to put you in a place where collectively it was, it was profitable.

[00:37:28] So you don't have that pressure. It's growing. You are working on something that you really enjoy, all three of you, it's something that, you know, even as you said, if even if we weren't doing this or selling this, we'd still use this product ourselves. And it's like I. Then I then I was like, well, what's the rush?

[00:37:47] Right? It's like you're in a great position. That's what everybody wants, right? To be able to work on something that you enjoy is fulfilling. You don't have to worry about money. So who cares whether it's 6 million or 60 million, right? I mean, if you had investors, obviously they care. And, and now you guys are sort of like into a point where you've been forced to, to really bring on that team because you've realized it's just too much for just the three of you to do.

[00:38:11] But just, just tell us about that. Like, so, so this is the team is now what, like 12 people?

[00:38:17] Philippe: Yeah. So, so like we first, we mostly onboard developers because you know, dealing with emails, just infinite long-term, tell of issues, exceptions that you need to deal with dealt with. And then not only do we have emails, but we, we support many APIs and channels and API and channels always evolve.

[00:38:35] There's always issues and whatnot. So at some point it's just like not possible for just the three of us to cover all this. So we un onboarded developers. I also un onboarded like I think another counterintuitive things we did like my, like the first, I was like a. Operation P person I knew we, we, we had no time to onboard people successfully.

[00:38:56] We were just too many things to do that are, were core to running the business like the three of us. Like whether it's support or it was a infinite flow of things to do. And I knew from past failures that if we wanted to onboard people successfully, we, we, we had like to have a trustable people person that could help with that.

[00:39:15] And so I hired Jeanette operation and then. That helps a lot. She came from a place where there were, she was in bigger teams. I mean, keep in mind we were in three for, for many years, so we were kind of, didn't know how to actually manage a team, right. So she helped with that and then that could help us scale the team.

[00:39:34] So I hired someone at support. Customer experience, I could detach myself from support from webinars, think more long term. And then it's been a year now that we've hired people and we just starting to feel like things to accelerate again. Like the first few months was just like, okay, stop and go, stop and go.

[00:39:52] Teaching was a lot of teaching document, commending documentation and then telling what's the culture telling how. 'cause we never had to explain ourself. It was just the three of us. We were all saying. Funny thing. My wife is always, oh, how's your day? Like, how's Raf like my CDO? Like, I have no clue. I haven't talked to him.

[00:40:13] Like, what? Like how, when was your last meeting? I don't know, like two weeks ago. I was like, it was just like we were all in sync, right? And so you have to unlearn some, some added you've developed in, in that, that way of working. And now that first year with bigger team was like to, to learn and to improve around that, I.

[00:40:33] And yeah, so now probably our long-term goal is to not be more than 20. So it's still important for us to be a small team, so. I think we're probably gonna take a year to reach that 20 person size of the team. And then I want our stuff at 20. I want us to be able to do a lot with just 20 people and knowing that in advance and telling people, I think help us like, like build systems and whatnot to, to, to make it work.

[00:41:02] But that's the long-term goal to be really, it was impressive to just be three. I I I would still want the size to be impressive in 2, 3, 4 years.

[00:41:11] Omer: Love it. All right. We should wrap up. Let's get into the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:41:20] Philippe: Well, I just love all Basecamp books, so I mean, that's probably something you hear a last year. But yeah, pretty much all of their books or teaching

[00:41:29] Omer: any, anything that Jason and DHH says, right? It's like,

[00:41:33] Philippe: yeah. I mean, I was at the Rails world last week in Toronto, and that was the, the first keynote was DHH and that guy is just like, is a giant.

[00:41:41] I mean, you know, you sometimes I'm, I'm, I'm a bit annoyed by, but every time I'm like, I think in first principle I'm like, well, I pretty much agree with everything you just said, right? So.

[00:41:51] Omer: What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:41:54] Philippe: I love biography 'cause I love I pretty much just read biography, no business book, well except Basecamp, but those, I read them years ago now.

[00:42:03] One that I read recently, recently was called Black Spartacus, and it's the story of the black General elaborated it or in, in those time. From, from, and the reason, and that, that one is interesting, but I pretty much love them all. It's like I love to see the struggle of people that had an. And impact in their, their time or in their culture.

[00:42:26] And it really helped relat ize like your own struggles or your own problems. 'cause I mean, all their lives were shit shows usually. And reading about them, them like, like usually like comfort myself and how I, I do things. And

[00:42:42] Omer: What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:42:47] Philippe: I mean, it's a cliche now last few weeks, but they talked about founder mode and it's probably for bigger startup and business, which Missive is not.

[00:42:54] But yeah, caring about the details right to me is really important. And I think the three of us, we really care about all the small details and. Yeah. So not being managers, but being people that cares about small, small details, I think that's, that's one reason where we're successful.

[00:43:12] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:43:16] Philippe: Me personally, I, I, I have, the last two years, I have a three session with a trainer, a gym, gym, gym trainer, and that changed my life. Yeah.

[00:43:24] Omer: Cool. What's in your crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:43:28] Philippe: I want to start a Cidery. Oh, that's my kids.

[00:43:31] Omer: The kids are here. We knew, we knew we were kind of hitting that time, so it's all good.

[00:43:36] It's all good.

[00:43:37] Philippe: Awesome. Yeah. Cidery. I want to have a Cidery at some point. I don't digest beer, but I love to do. Yeah. Drink with friends. So I, I drink cider, so eventually I love to have a cider frame farm. Yeah, that always a dream.

[00:43:48] Omer: The kids have got a perfect timing because the next question is like, what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[00:43:55] And I know the answer.

[00:43:56] Philippe: Yeah. I have four kids. I have four kids. Yeah. So,

[00:44:00] Omer: and they've just come home from school or they're starting to come home.

[00:44:02] Philippe: It's, it's just there.

[00:44:04] Omer: And finally, what sort of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:44:07] Philippe: That one's hard. 'cause I work a lot. And so I would say my passion is still like my work which I don't know if it's it's okay to say, but yeah.

[00:44:15] Work is my passion.

[00:44:16] Omer: Cool. Philip, thank you so much for joining me. It's been the, the thing I love the most about this conversation is about, you know, this constant theme of keeping things simple, focusing on the core stuff, not getting distracted by shiny objects and unnecessary stuff. And just a lot of like.

[00:44:34] Counterintuitive stuff that you've done and that you've made work, which hopefully, you know, other people thinking who might be hitting their heads against the wall today might just get a bit of inspiration from that and say, well, maybe I need to try something different instead of what everybody else is doing.

[00:44:50] Right.

[00:44:51] Philippe: Usually being different is good. Yeah.

[00:44:53] Omer: Yeah. Awesome. So if people want to check out Missive, they can go to missiveapp.com and if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:45:03] Philippe: X.com. Twitter, like plehoux@plehouxlu or on LinkedIn if you search my name or Missive. Yeah.

[00:45:11] Omer: We'll, we'll, we'll include links to both in the show notes. Great. Thank you my friend. It's been awesome. You know, I appreciate you making the time and we almost made it before the kids came back, so.

[00:45:21] Philippe: He's just there. You really wanna get in? You wanna come now? Yeah. Alright, cheers.

[00:45:26] Omer: Take care. All the best.

[00:45:27] Bye.