How we bootstrapped a $1M ARR email client

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.

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.<p>Early on we were featured by Apple couple of times + podcasts, but now, mainly a mix of word of mouth content&#x2F;SEO and honestly a lot of mystery.<p>Today HN :)

It&#x27;s always surprising to see apps like this reach &gt;= $1M ARR, and goes to show that markets are bigger than what you&#x27;d think. I mean this is <i>email</i> we&#x27;re talking about, and there are about 800 clients and 1200 solutions, and yet Missive still carved out a niche.<p>Congrats!

&gt; <i>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.</i><p>Totally agree that long-term planning is less useful for startups than bigger organizations, but I assume the author isn&#x27;t suggesting that any planning whatsoever is a waste of time. I&#x27;d be curious to know how planning enters into their decision-making process, and how they arrived at that equilibrium.

I just tested out your iOS client on my iPhone with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emailprivacytester.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emailprivacytester.com</a> - You failed the &quot;CSS content&quot;, &quot;Image tag&quot; and &quot;CSS background-image&quot; tests. Although you appear to be proxying requests as the IPs were in Amazons cloud.<p>I don&#x27;t see any option to disable remote resource loading, even though it should default to off.<p>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).<p>I think that&#x27;s bad.

It’s great what they did, very impressive and excellent product.<p>However, the article is a bit misleading, mainly for two reasons: “bootstrapped”, and “without spending a dime on marketing”.<p>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.<p>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).

Great write up. As a fellow bootstrapper, I applaud you on making it to $1M ARR so quickly. I&#x27;m not quite there yet, but working towards that goal. I&#x27;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&#x27;ve been looking to attract a similar hire myself but haven&#x27;t had any success yet.

&gt;&quot;On finding customers<p>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<p><i>what would ultimately become our real paid customers: small and midsize businesses.</i><p>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&#x2F;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.<p><i>The hard-learned lesson: have the courage to say no.</i>&quot;

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 &quot;just work&quot;) 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).<p>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 &quot;archiving&quot; 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.<p>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.<p>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 hate that &quot;bootstrapped&quot; now means &quot;we had millions of dollars in funding, just not from a traditional VC&quot;.

Congrats on the success Philippe. I&#x27;ve been following you since that Medium article you showed the world you can build a great app with web tech. [1]<p>I&#x27;m working on founding a SaaS company. How did you manage to charge to worldwide customers? I&#x27;m specially worried about VAT and invoices for EU customers.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;missive-app&#x2F;our-dirty-little-secret-cross-platform-email-client-with-nothing-but-html-aa12fc33bb02" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;missive-app&#x2F;our-dirty-little-secret-cross...</a>

Anyone know what technologies &#x2F; 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.<p>I&#x27;m definitely curious how they were able to create a &#x27;blazing fast experience on phones&#x27; writing their mobile app in just JavaScript.

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 &quot;ither questions&quot;, 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).

&quot;We never spent a dime on marketing.&quot;<p>... except for Luis&#x27; 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.<p>I saw you are using Phonegap&#x2F;Cordova. I&#x27;m curious, if you were developing the product today would you still choose the same framework, or would you look into something like Google&#x27;s Flutter (since they now support iOS, Android, Web, and desktops).

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 &quot;What’s new in Missive?&quot; email.

How does Missive compare to Front?

Congratulations. That&#x27;s the way to do it :)<p>Can you add a &quot;Log in with Microsoft&quot; (or OpenID)? I don&#x27;t have a google or apple account which seems to be a requirement when looking at the web &#x2F; windows version.

Congrats on this milestone! I’m curious, for conferencebadge.com did you guys buy a printer and do all the printing yourselves?

Congrats! How did you you guys validate your idea?

While reading that article, &quot;blog&quot; in the menu wasn&#x27;t highlighted. I trust the app has a better UI.

Fantastic example of agile development for real users. Envious. Congratulations. Here&#x27;s to 10M ARR.

Congrats on the success! I always like to see familiar faces when I randomly read HN articles :)

Congrats @plehoux and the rest of the team, and I wish you continued success!!

Have you considered non dilutive funding like Pipe?

Please don&#x27;t make this the new normal required to get funding. It&#x27;s already insane as it is how much entrepreneurs are expected to carry the expense and risk at this point.

I&#x27;m glad they are making money, but 1M in revenue doesn&#x27;t strike me as a lot of money once you divide it across 4 people. I&#x27;m making 1&#x2F;4th of 1M just by having a job, no startup capital required ;)