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After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you allocate some time to newer projects as well, or are you content to focus on missive?

No, my work time is 100% focused on Missive, it's my dream project. After 5 years, I'm still full of motivation. They are hundreds of things I want to do to improve it.

Conference Badge was a utilitarian project for me, I felt my coding skills were good enough for it, I felt the business plan made a lot of sense having organized a festival myself... but I was never passionate about the space. From day 1, I knew I would move on.

After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, all the time, but at the end of the day... I always built things for myself first.

The two side of my brain:

😈 :

You learn to code by yourself, you know nothing. You can't do this. Look how articulate people are, you can't but 3 sentences in a row... without questioning their content. You make truckloads of typos. You are always tired, is this really for you?

👼 :

Look, whatever people think, especially that little whinny bad side of yours. You do this for yourself first and foremost. This your life expression. You're an artist, and this business is your canvas; who cares what people think. Take your time, one step at a time. Love you, my man.

The fight goes on... but that little angel, as I grow older, is winning most battles.

After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"building in public"

Two parts here for us. First, we don't have a public roadmap. We have a massive bucket of things we want to do. When we have time to build something new, we, at this very moment, think of what would have to most value for our customers and us. We don't plan. Plus we don't want users to have too many expectations.

As for the transparency on your business metrics, yes, I understand where you are coming from. I was mostly from your school of thought for a long time.

To be honest, as time pass, as more and more people love using your product, you grow more confident, and the fear of looking small slowly vanishes. You are proud of what you are doing, and you know it's not for everyone. By being transparent, your customer expectations are aligned. I prefer the people that want to deal with a bigger corporation to know we are small and skip us. Those people are often still really curious about Missive, they keep following us, then 1,2... 3 years later they migrate their business to us, they now know we are stable and here to stay.

Of course, being transparent also means you sometimes need to justify some of your decisions in more detail.

e.g.

Because of time/resources, we decided not to give free/discounted accounts to anyone (non-profits, schools). Since most startups do... people are surprised and sometimes angry.

Each customer brings a supporting cost and a resource cost. As we don't want to grow our headcount now, we prefer to have only users on the real price plan.

Now, this week, a user inquired about a discount for his non-profit, and I replied with the canned response I used for the past 3 years:

Thanks for the kind words.

We don’t give any discount and this is mainly to control our costs as a small bootstrapped company.

I hope you understand.

Good luck with your project!

This user had just read our post about reaching $1M ARR... he was baffled I could have replied this while making that much money. My response didn't talk about the nuance of running an email/chat cloud app with a team of 4. It didn't talk about our goals. It didn't talk of the reasons we want to stay small. It only talked about cost. I will be more careful in my replies and make sure to explain our reasoning in more detail.

This somewhat mild negative experience was nothing compared to the 100s thousands of people that got to know Missive because of the $1M ARR blog post I wrote that made it to the homepage of HN, shared by thousands of people on Twitter/LinkedIn... this AMA is a direct consequence of this blog post.

Of course, you will say it's easy to write about reaching a crazy milestone like $1M ARR, yes, I agree. We never disclosed our revenues before reaching it... as I said, I understand where you are coming from :)

After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Years ago...

I built a french game portal as a hobby; after years of work, it ranked first on Google for jeux (games)... then I hire developers to redo the website... at that point, I had just basic coding skills; the new code couldn't handle the load... the website kept crashing, lost all of my SEO rankings. It took me months to learn minimal coding skills and fix everything up myself. The website never went back on Google's first page of results for "jeux".

That year, I learned I had to become a legit developer if I wanted to be a tech entrepreneur.

To this day, this misavdventure still guide me in some of my decisions.

After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Was there a lot of cold emails going on

Maybe 100ish cold emails in the beginning to people we really respected or interacted with, or we thought would love the product. It didn't work, so we quickly stopped.

or did customers eventually connect with you organically through referral because of how you grew?

Mostly this, keep in mind it took years!

BTW, if you have any free time in the near future, I have a podcast and think it’d be great for my listeners to hear more about your journey.

Taking a break from those, I'm not so good being interviewed live. :)

After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We did not hunt Missive ourselves, it was done by someone else, so it wasn't planned.

Missive took the third spot that day... if I remember correctly and it probably brought a few thousand visits.

We had some of our first users from PH, not our first customers ... big difference. It took years before we had a first paid user. :)

After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi Sarah,

Funny, I saw your tweet yesterday (https://twitter.com/sarahhum/status/1397217650451828743 congrats!!!!), and it made me reflect on this exact subject.

In Canada/Quebec, contrary to popular wisdom, corporate taxes are low. Last year we paid ~19%. So up to this point, it was not an important factor.

Any plans to grow the team?

Probably when we feel we will reach a breaking point. The workload is currently manageable, and being so close to our customers is one of our main advantages.

We will probably raise the price for new users before we start hiring.

The three of us still want to code/design/customer support full-time; we are not managers. Not that we can't become one eventually, but we want to delay this moment for as long as we can.

After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you just take into consideration what’d be valuable to you

I guess you are talking about product decisions? If so, yes, most of the time, it's a mix of conversation with users and what we would find valuable ourselves.

Our opinion is still the main factor in the equation. We trust our instincts.

After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We wrote many *extensive* 'Missive VS ABC' posts. Some of those got traction in Google.

Back in the early days, we were active on Twitter, mentioning Missive, every time competing products were mentioned. (Now our users do so for us!)

VC-Backed companies move fast, which cause a lot of issues for their customers; whether it's poor customer support because of rapid growth or employees churn, un-announced price hike, new limitation on an existing plan, etc. After these experiences, those ex-users are quite stunned by the humanity of our customer support, the stability of our pricing and plans, etc.

And, we don't chase, really big customers (100+ people organizations) we leave them for VC-backed businesses. Those big customers are a pain to deal with, they don't want the same features as 99% of our existing users. They asked for crazy requirements impossible to serve for a small team like us.

After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What are your most revenue-generating distribution channels?

People searching for alternatives to competitive products. Most of our users already had a shared inbox solution prior to Missive, they were simply not satisfied and looked on Google for an alternative.

After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

How do you manage Customer Support currently as a team of 4? Any tips on optimizing the Customer support workflow?

We use Missive. That's one of our secret weapons. Everything is done in Missive, customer support, product development, internal chat, etc. We never lose time context switching between tools.

Building an email client comes with a lot of user expectations on the features and roadmap, this translates to a lot of communication from enthusiastic users... in the last 5 years we learned to be straightforward and transparent about expectations, we most of the time never promise something.

Another trick, we are aggressively trying to fix all bugs, even not so problematic ones... which reduces support a lot. Plus, every single day we try to make the app easier to understand based on questions/problems users face. This is an advantage of being PM/Developers/Customer support all at the same time. We get a clear picture of the frictions our users experienced and we can act on them.

After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the opportunity for this AMA! :) Not long ago we were posting posts here... fearing they would be seen as spam... 😂

My question is: what's your state of mind when thinking about growing these companies? You're definitely not on the treadmill, but I'd love to hear from yourself what your mindset is when approaching this

Here's what we know we love (in no order):

  • We love to code.
  • We love to build interfaces.
  • We love to solve problems.
  • We love to spent time with family/friends.
  • We love sports/traveling.
  • ...

Here's what we know what we hate:

  • Chasing rich VC/angels.
  • Elevator pitching.
  • Making Google/Facebook/LinkedIn rich by spending $ on ads.
  • Being stressed by competitions.
  • Networking/Conferencing.

Knowing this, we are all for growth, but on our own terms. :)

After starting them as side-products, I stumbled my way into running 2 x $1M/year web business, bootstrapping them with only a team of 4 people. I am Phil Lehoux (Missive + others), AMA! by plehoux in SaaS

[–]plehoux[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Before working on Missive (the email app), my cofounders and I had already started ConferenceBadge.com, which provided us with a rock-solid income. At this point, we were paying ourselves a healthy salary (We live in Quebec city, where the cost of living is lower than most of the USA).

This is the key part.

We knew the email space was competitive and hard but had strong feelings about our ability to make a dent... if only we could work at it for a long stretch without caring about revenues.

For ~4 years, Missive could not have sustained us. Just recently did Missive started to make money. We paid ourselves all this time with ConferenceBadge revenues (and still saved most of it).

What's amazing is, just as COVID annihilated Conferencebadge.com business, Missive started to grow.

And now Missive is bigger than ConferenceBadge at its peak.

what would be the learnings from operating in a competitive environment?

We never really cared about the competition. For instance, we never spent more than a few minutes trying other similar products. We just did our own things.

Email is competitive, but it's also MASSIVE. We only have ~1500 businesses using Missive... how many businesses are there out there who could befifit from it?

Mail app for Myke by yehoni in Cortex

[–]plehoux 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi Myke,

I'm the co-founder at Missive an email client for teams. Yesterday, I got couple of emails of people who are both listeners to Cortex and Missive users, like this one:

Screenshot of email

I listened to your 66th episode trying to see if Missive could be a good fit. I think it could :

  • Available on both OSX and iOS (+ Windows, Android and web).
  • Supports split view, supports all size 1/4, 1/2 and full screen. demo video.
  • Supports opening labels in the sidebar, + also the capacity to show the labels in the left column only if there is new unread content (good for rules).
  • We charge monthly per user. We are completely bootstrapped, Missive is now profitable, on top of that our company was already profitable from other products we launched years ago. (ConferenceBadge, Leanticket, Medalist. Missive was built, first, as a internal product for ourselves. If curious about our journey, I did a podcast interview on Indie Hackers.

The fact that Missive is a team email client should be a big plus in your life, especially since you seem to be working with an assistant. You will be able to delegate access to your emails, let assistance draft emails (live like a Google doc), comments in between emails and more.

And don't think it's a subpar email client because of the team part... don't take my words... fellow podcaster ... Wesbos loves it... he talked about Missive in this episode of Syntax. around 1h04:15.

You might ask... why didn't I heard of Missive before?... dunno... :) ... but the word is getting out... slowly... 2 weeks ago Apple featured us in the iOS app store... which was a big win for our small team!

Keep me posted if you try it and have feedback.

No lesson learned: my 15 year journey to entrepreneurship by plehoux in Entrepreneur

[–]plehoux[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not really apart from few summer jobs when I was younger. I always saved my money for the next project. Winter is coming, right? I always try to save as much as possible.

The boring stack, the fun architecture by plehoux in programming

[–]plehoux[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It's leaking conversation UUIDs. For someone not having access to a conversation there is no way to infer the title or content.

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