Missive Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Rafael Mason. He's first and foremost a failed musician. He found solace in building beautiful and reliable software instead. He spent his teenage years playing guitar, then wrote code for all of his career and still really enjoys it. Also developed a love for delivering stellar customer support, and he would blog if time allowed it, says every founder ever. Rafael, you ready to take us to the top? [00:19] >> Absolutely. Yeah. [00:20] Alright. So I love this. We had your cofounder on back in the day about a year and a half ago at missiveapp.com. You guys are team inbox, chat, and tasks. Right? [00:29] >> Yep. That's correct. [00:30] Alright. So tell us who you're competing, obviously very competitive space. Are you similar to sort of Front App and Hiver, these kinds of tools? [00:39] >> Yes, we are definitely similar. Front is probably the one we are closest to [00:47] >> and we had some discussions with Front. They tried our product, we tried theirs and there was some inspiration from both sides and we have a good a good relationship with them. But, yeah, yes, it's it's very similar. [01:04] Have they offered Matilda and the team, have they offered to buy you guys? And you said, no. We we we want we want more. [01:10] >> I I don't think I can I can tell whether this happened or not? [01:15] Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, I love that you guys are well, at least you were bootstrapped a year and a half ago. Are you still bootstrapped today? [01:22] >> We are still. Yes. [01:23] I love this. Okay. I love this. And it was great because when your when your cofounder came on, he told me in 2020, guys are doing about $45,000 a month in revenue. You doubled to 90,000 a month in revenue. I don't wanna ask right now how much you're doing because I wanna leave that as an open hook. So for people that have not heard of missive before, tell us what you're doing. [01:40] >> Yes. So missive is a shared inbox with chat and tasks for productive teams. It's first and foremost, full featured email client where you can chat with your teammates just like in Slack, but within each email thread, you get a separate thread to chat so it keeps things organized and with the right context. [02:08] >> What else? I mean, so you don't have to switch between your email app and chat in task in Slack, sorry. And on top of that, you can easily enable a dedicated team inbox flow with triaging and assignment like you would expect in a help desk. And we also support SMS, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. You can manage these channels collaboratively the same way you manage email all within the same app. [02:40] So, like, if if you're listening right now and you have a team of three, you have, like, a SDR, maybe you have, like, an AE or BDR, and then you have, like, the founder of the company. And when someone signs up for your application, you always send out, like, an onboarding email. You could create a shared inbox where replies to that onboarding email goes into a box where the BDR, the AE, and the founder can all, [03:00] you know, interact together, decide on a discount, reply to the email, all that stuff. [03:04] >> Exactly. You would typically have a company with a info at which lands in the sales or customer success teams. You have you may have sales at, you may have support at, these classic stuff. And of course, a manager, a team of founders, they can always look into things if each team is doing their job and can track work being done. Mhmm. [03:29] Yeah. Very cool. I love this. Okay. So so I guess dive in here. It's kinda cool we're getting the second half of the company on. So did you guys were you there sort of day one? You guys are co founders. Right? [03:39] >> Correct. Yeah. We are three. [03:40] And did you three of you guys? [03:42] >> Yes. [03:44] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [04:07] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [04:31] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is [04:53] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're [05:19] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if [05:41] you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the [06:07] interview. Okay. And did you guys just say, you know what? We love each other. It's just gonna be 30%, 30%, 30%, or do you split it differently? [06:17] >> It's split differently for kind of a historical reason. Missive is second product we built together. We started another business, which is conferencebadge.com. It's for event organizers to build and to design and print name badges for their attendees. [06:35] Conferencebadge.com? [06:37] >> Yes. Correct. And it's still still on. We [06:42] We need that, by the way. We have a big event coming up in September, and I just challenged my team. I said, guys, figure out a solution to print name badges for our event. I don't want us, like, stuck where people have to handwrite on their name badge or the permanent marker at the admission desk. [06:54] >> Well, there there you have it. It's it's what you need exactly. So, yeah, we we built the conference badge first. We met. Phil had started building, my co founder, CEO at missive, he started building conference badge all by himself back in 2013 and we joined him and since he started the product, he had more equity and it's while running and building Badge that we found the need to communicate, to deal more efficiently with customer support and [07:30] >> we started building missive. So conference badge is the is what allowed missive to to be built, to pay the bills. And so it's two companies, but since one funded the other, the the equity remained the same. [07:47] So in missive, Phil owns about 50% and then you two split the other 50%, something like that? [07:52] >> Something like that. Yeah. [07:54] Yeah. Very, very cool. Okay. So talk to me talk to me about growth. I think when we last chatted, you guys were just you're flirting with 2,000 customers, I think. What are you guys at today? [08:05] >> Flirting with 2,000? [08:07] Well, sorry. The question yeah. The quest [08:09] >> Yeah. Yeah. I understand. But I believe because I looked at the the numbers to be kind of prepared for this interview and I believe this was more like users, including free users [08:20] I see. For 2,000. [08:22] >> Because we are at close to 2,000 paid customers right now. [08:28] And how many free today? Free users total? [08:32] >> Something like a a like a thousand. A a thousand. I have my numbers. It's it's like a a thousand six hundred, 1,600, I I think. [08:43] So you have 1,600 free users and then another 2,000 paid? [08:47] >> Correct. Yeah. [08:49] So so I guess do you usually people have more free users and they convert a percent of those to paid. Do you not let your free users stick around they have to choose at the end of a trial or something? [08:58] >> We do let them stick around. The free plan is unlimited in time, but you only keep access to your 15 last latest emails or chat history fifteen days. So you quickly kind of get the need to pay to have more history or [09:18] Rafael, this is super rare. Like, I've done them almost 3,500 of these interviews. I've never had someone come on with a product led growth model and a free plan, where their free plan is like where your upsell is so compelling, you have less people on the free plan, 1,600, than you do on the paid plan, 2,000. [09:36] >> I guess that makes sense because I was about to say you if you don't upgrade to a paid plan, it's because it's because we probably don't want you as a customer. Your your need is you're you're probably a solo user who just who's just shopping around for the best email client. They tried them all. They tried Polymail and whatnot and maybe superhuman, but they stick with us. And they don't, like, they don't use email professionally because [10:03] >> any professional using email needs to go further the back then. [10:09] But do you have a free option? Like, your pricing page, I only see start, productive, and enterprise. Do you have a free option people can keep using or no? [10:16] >> Absolutely. It's it's we're gonna tweak this design because it's confusing to some, but [10:21] Oh, you're right. It is confusing. I now I look down and I see the free plan. [10:26] >> It's is there there's no we didn't write $0 in the header, but whatever. Maybe we should [10:33] Okay. It's clear to me now. Got it. This makes sense. Okay. Well, this is very impressive that you convert so much into paid plans. Now there's obviously 14 a month, eighteen a month, twenty six a month, and these are per seat. So people probably sign multiple seats at once. What's the average business paying you per month to use the tool? [10:48] >> The invoice they get per month? [10:52] Yeah. Like on average, what's the company paying you the actual? [10:54] >> A $100. It's Okay. Very like, we have solo users. We have companies over a 100 seats. So it's very it's it's very variable. [11:06] So what would you don't don't don't don't obviously name the customer. Right? But what what's your largest customer pay you per year? [11:14] >> Oh, it's something like [11:18] >> let me just make it times 12. Fifty, 50,000. [11:24] Five zero thousand? [11:26] >> Yes. That's impressive. So thousand. Yes. [11:30] 50 or 15? [11:32] >> 50. Yeah. [11:34] Yeah. Yeah. 50,000. Yeah. No. That's impressive. So you guys do there is a clear sort of enterprise sales motion here then. [11:42] >> You mean an enterprise what do you mean exactly? [11:46] When you talk about whenever I talk to a founder that has sort of a lower price plan under a $100 a month, but then they have a customer that's paying something like 50,000 a year, to me, that's a signal that there's an opportunity to upsell all their other customers eventually to $50,000 a year. [12:00] >> Well, definitely. Well, it helps that we recently introduced the enterprise plan that you see, like over 80% of our users are on the productive. But we recently introduced the enterprise and it does help a lot that this biggest customer is the biggest in terms of seat and they are on the enterprise plan. You can do the math, it helps a lot. And well, enterprise users is, we're not even scratching the enterprise market. We want to get [12:34] >> there eventually and analytics [12:39] >> is the feature we are missing that people are expecting and that it's table stakes for these larger companies and we are working on it actively. It's going great. [12:52] How are you tell me how you're trying to speed up your product loss so can get analytics live faster. How many engineers are on the team today? [12:59] >> We we actually hired our first employee, like not even a month ago. So everything I'm telling you today is we built it at, we were three. Wow. Just the three founders. We are all engineers. We are definitely not salespeople. We are engineers and we all do customer support. But yeah, three developers. [13:22] Three developers. And so just to be clear, 2,000 customers at a $100 a month. You guys are doing about $200,000 per month right now in revenue. Right? [13:29] >> Roughly like 2,000,000 a year. Yeah. [13:32] Yeah. That's obviously a great run rate. That's almost double from a year ago. Again, you're doubling year over year in your bootstrapped. You are the example. When I tell people it is possible to grow fast and you don't have to raise VC, you're the example of that. So how are you doing it? No business, no marketers. Was it SEO? What's the playbook? [13:48] >> SEO, yeah. We do have some pages on our website that we kinda optimized, like like we we think we optimize them and it seems to work because we have customers. These pages bring customers. But yeah, we did try a little Google AdWords, a little bit like Capterra ads, but we we canceled these. We should, if we wanted to go to be serious with this, we would hire some professional to help us and probably something we'll do [14:20] >> eventually. [14:23] >> But yeah, it's word-of-mouth. It's really word-of-mouth and we reach out to folks. Phil has this this little Twitter search for some keywords and, hey. You probably should try missive, this classic little [14:36] What's the sir what's the Twitter search he looks for? [14:40] >> I guess it's something like team email, maybe some competitors. So some yeah. Some competitors'products and email. I don't know what. [14:52] Would you say this is Phil's biggest trick? I mean, again, you have no business people, no marketers on the team. You're at 2,000,000 run rate. So it's this Twitter search for specific keywords that's driven a lot of your growth. [15:02] >> I would doubt it. I would believe it's much more word-of-mouth and these pages we have, like missive versus x customer x competitor. [15:13] Oh, okay. Tell me about tell me about those pages. People are always asking me, Nathan, how do we build compare pages on our website? You guys have missive versus I'm trying to find an example on your site. It's [15:22] >> all in the footer. Yeah. [15:25] Missive versus Spark, missive versus Slack. Okay. So walk me through one of these pages. I'm on the missive versus Sparkmail right now. So what makes this page do so well from an SEO perspective? [15:35] >> From an SEO? Oh man, it's a good question. I mean, it's it's honest. It's a honest take. When there are some shortcomings in missive compared to the other product, we do state it clearly and we we don't want to bring users in who won't like missive and would actually rather use Spark or like a more personal oriented email app. It's just honest and I believe it kind of scores nicely on the the Googles in this world. [16:10] It's a very it's a very long form page, guys. This is not Yes. Little pager. Mean, it's a very long page with a lot of very rich text, clear h one tags, and then social, you know, imagery throughout. And then, honestly, Rafael, you got nice social proof at the bottom with embedded tweets. [16:25] >> Yeah. [16:26] So this makes a lot of sense. Very cool strategy. I love this story, right? Because everyone always goes, well, Nathan, we wanna grow fast. That's why we wanna go raise VC. And I'm like, guys, it's completely possible to grow very fast and keep your equity. You know? And you guys are proof of that. [16:41] >> Yep. We're glad of it. We're proud. [16:43] Your your founder your cofounder told me you guys turned down a $30,000,000 offer last time we chatted. What's the highest offer? You turned on any higher offers the past twelve months? [16:50] >> No. Not higher than that. [16:52] No. Alright. So what's the next plan? It sounds like analytics is coming up. What's coming up after analytics? [16:59] >> Yes. Feature wise, it's after analytics, it would probably be like non exciting, boring features for the enterprise plan, like master user, master admin that can log in as their own users or at least edit every single of their settings as if they were their employees. That kind of stuff, you know. Also, always like incremental [17:28] >> improvements in the app just to make the the experience even more delightful. We're big into that. [17:35] Awesome. Well, we're rooting we're rooting for you guys. In the meantime though, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book. [17:42] >> This is a shame, but, I cannot answer this honestly because [17:47] >> I I do not read, I don't find the time. I know it's not an excuse, but I would probably No, no. [17:52] That's say fine. That's fine. [17:53] >> A business book, but I back in high school, I loved this one book about all the philosophers of the the the past centuries. Like, I like philosophy. It was one of my favorite subjects in school, actually. [18:12] >> Yeah. [18:13] >> Philosopher book. [18:13] Number two I [18:14] >> don't even recall the name. [18:15] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [18:21] >> I like Adam Wathan. He's from is that his real name? Am I pronouncing this correctly? Adam [18:30] >> Yes. He's the creator of sorry. I did Wethan. Yes. He he is the creator of the the Tailwind CSS framework. Don't know if you're familiar with it. [18:42] Yep. We use it. [18:44] >> Yeah. It's older age and now their business is Tailwind Labs and they just [18:53] >> seem to have a blast doing. They do just what they want. They found a way to monetize it. It's the a beautiful story. I like these guys. [19:01] Love it. [19:02] Number three, what's your favorite online tool besides missive? [19:05] >> I have to say that I don't know if that counts. It's Heroku, our platform as a service. How we where we host missive and all the smaller apps that needed to run missives behind the behind the scenes. It's it's just it's one of the things that allowed us to be only three and manage to grow our tech stack, and it's just I love Heroku. They have their own downsides, but I love it. [19:32] That's good. Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night? [19:36] >> Seven, seven thirty, I'd say. [19:38] Okay. So seven hours. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [19:42] >> Married with no kids. [19:44] Married and no kiddos. Very cool. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [19:50] >> When I was 20, I guess I'm I would have liked to be aware of what the stock market is and that the next ten years would have been the greatest bull run and have put my money in all the FANG stocks. [20:03] Hello. And how old are you today, Rafael? [20:06] >> I'm 32. [20:07] 32. Last and again, be aware of that stock market. Guys, missiveapp, really incredible story here. Launched back in 2014. Really got going in 2016 with the product launch. They passed $90,000 a month in revenue a year ago. Now at about a $180,000 a month. Again, totally bootstrapped. Doubling year over year bootstrapped. I'm up in a very competitive space. Right? Team shared inboxes. Compete with VC backed competitors that have raised a ton of money. They're still growing [20:29] fast, over 2,000 customers today, 1,500 on the free plans. They convert a ton into that paid plan. Biggest customer pays $50,000 a year, and this is best. They're only a team of three, the three co founders. They just added their first external employee, call it four or five years in. So Rafael, thanks for the story. We're rooting for you guys. [20:46] >> Thanks so much for having me, Nathan. [20:49] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM [21:14] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [21:36] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up [21:58] for that at nathanlatka.com slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. [22:18] We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is phil lew he's building a great tool called misabout.com with the shared inbox cool you ready to take to the top sorry are you ready to take us to the top yes of course very good hey welcome to the show tell us a little bit so miss about playing in a competitive space shared inbox and team chat when did you launch the business uh we actually started working on the project in 2014 but it was mostly like a tool for itself building another previous star we had we had started and we launched it in 2015 as a free product mostly just to test the ground and then a year later in 2016 we launched a first base paid version and so how did you you know the starting years for any founder paying yourself is difficult so what did you do between 2015 the first line of code or 2014 and the paid launch in 2016. how did you pay yourself well i think that's the interesting part of our own story is that um i met michael thunder at the whole working space that i created in quebec city uh in 2012 and some michael thunder were the absolutely best like developer i knew at the time designer at the time and i knew i wanted to work with them right um and at the co-working space i was actually making money from like a really uh from a game portal i created when i was a teen a french game portal actu i created when i was a teen and you know just like ram and money ram and profitable money like if a few case a year just being able to pay the apartment and the food and i live basically with that much money for for 10 years like really like student salary and i really start to work on many different projects and the first one i created was a game jam festival so i wanted to be a a game developer at that time okay so i decided to create like a game jam so the idea was to try and move your mic so that it's not rubbing against your shirt we're getting audio feedback oh sorry yeah do you want to start it over keep going no keep going okay game developer yeah game developers i i create a game game festival actually okay so the edit was like i wanted to meet meet other game developers and so i went to the mayor told him about the idea thought was a great idea decided to fund the project so we made that great festival for five years okay and making no money whatsoever i was just having fun my initial the usual reason i created that festival was just to meet developers but at the end of the day i was mostly just organizing the the festival and never really meeting anyone and uh but the one thing that that festival uh teach me is like uh not not the one thing that the festival teach me but um hey sorry i just want to start over it's really uh do you mind like no no listen it's a conversation man you don't need to be nervous there's no we don't need to start over i mean you so you have a game festival the game festival revenue is basically enabled you and your co-founder to have a little cash runway to build missive app those first couple of years is that right it's more complex than that okay so okay i'll put pretty simply okay so um when i was a teen i created a game portal right so just with ads i was able to kind of pay myself like student salary for for many years i did my uh my university uh studying and business management uh being able to play myself was another programmer whatsoever it's just like technology right so i had that game porthole and uh after university i i saw it i was like i want to be a game developer actually so i started kind of learning to code myself still being able to play itself to live basically from the the game portal i had created a french game portal understood and uh so i started that festival to meet other like-minded developers right because i wasn't like in any community whatsoever so i created that festival and it really worked right it became like a music festival it was a hell outside like uh many thousand visitors like you know music and um so the idea was like people had 48 hours to create a game right and there was like price uh and it was really successful right but at the end of the day i met no one because i was just organizing the same uh but i still like to learn to code and had different projects on the side and after that project i said well not really i'm not really into game actually just i think i just want to go back to you know create a web web business so at that point i thought like you know what problem did i uh face while organizing that game festival one of them was like like printing the name badges uh before the event right so like when people arrive at the event you just want to end like the name badge so people know like are you from a game company or you know are you a press vip or a participant or whatnot and so it just sucked like the day before to just like go on excel do a mail merge and print those badges so that god just gonna create like a web tool to uh it's so so organizer can actually import like an excel spreadsheet and then we just like print the badges for them and ship them right so that was basically the idea so that's where in my co-working space that i also started by the side i uh i i i actually met my co-founder and decided to work on that idea with them right and um phil did you guys decide to split the company 50 50 early on uh no so it's a company was 50 50 me 50 damn because i i had to kind of you know bootstrap the product uh it was split 50 50 50. yeah yeah okay yeah exactly and just because again i want to get as much of your missive story as possible and it's a quick show so i don't mean to cut you off but let's let's jump into missive so you start working you pivot from this spreadsheet tool for name badges i imagine that matt you you've been pivoting and missing out from that is that right uh yes exactly so conference was was successful okay so we launched it evan wright wrote to us like they did they saw we were paying their api and they said oh are you creating a tool to print badges we say yes and say oh my god like it's it's one of the things that people have a lot of problem doing when they use ivan bryce for the conference and so they featured us and it was really successful right so i applied to y combinator like paul graham saw the revenue of the first year we said oh come on uh we want to interview you and as you can see in the interview we're quite bad so we didn't take classes at work later but the product keep on uh being successful making more money and as a small team we had trouble like doing customer support phil what were you making would you remember first year revenue in 2016 uh so conference batch was a bit earlier 2013 20 uh okay from mississippi i want to get into the missive story here as i just want to sort of push past the previous work okay first sarah mississippi was like uh i don't know not a lot of money like i think like 3k for the whole year okay and and how did you get you know your first 10 customers do you remember early text so we punch we post like to product on and kind of cold reach like people we admire that we thought i could have uh a use for the product like like the striped people i'd kind of write a paper about how they collaborate around email and how they were full transparent uh around their own internal communication and that was kind of one of the idea i missed it is the ability to share the email easily with the people in your company so we reached out to people at twitter over on twitter and and launched on product on and those were the earlier user most of those earlier were excited by the product we're not really willing to pay for it because it was really early stage and we were missing a lot of the things now that our customers kind of are willing to pay for and fast forward to today those are your Currently serving 2000 customers first you know 10 20 customers how many customers are you serving today uh i think we're around like 2 000 comp businesses using this of 2000 yet that's great and help us understand how you decide to price this again very competitive space what's the average price look like so right now uh so you you pay per seat so if you're a company of 10 you're going to pay 10 10 seat and right now it's 15 bucks precede us dollars for for a seat and that's full featured so you get everything in the product for 15 bucks we kind of have one at 10 but it's not it's way less popular and so 15 bucks in our space is really low compared to other offering uh how many seeds when a company pays you are they usually paying on average like for one seat or like a thousand seats what's sort of a sweet spot team size five seats yeah five feet so it's really smb like smaller than medium businesses using the product yeah so each one five times fifteen each one's just paying something like 75 100 bucks a month something like that exactly exactly and can i take 75 a month times your Monthly recurring revenue 2000 customers what's that oh yeah like 150 000 a month something like that it's it's a bit less so i'd say right now so we cross like the uh 1 million air are like uh uh uh two months ago and uh yeah that was good congratulations that's exciting yeah uh where were you exactly just if you crossed that you know a month two months ago where were you a year ago in terms of monthly recurring revenue let's say half of that so healthy growth where's all this growth coming from is it it's still not is it so product launches or where's the growth coming from i mean like we're the anti-story of like startups we never really invest our time in marketing and we like we just like to build a product and and like email with our customers that's really much like the only thing we do like everything like people say don't do we only do right uh so like the paid customer most of them right now i would say are either they find us through google like alternative to well-known funded product they will find us or it's word of mouth so a lot of like uh real stories realtor going to use missive so like once a two to another one i use that product with my team you should try it and then so wireless mat is also a big factor in our crow and have you Bootstrapped bootstrapped or raised ice bootstrap but the long introduction to that thing is that it's actually bootstrapped from another product that we launched earlier called conference badge right that we were running and now we start missive actually we start building the product missive to help us with the communication in the support at conference badge so is it a blessing or a curse that you didn't get into yc a couple years ago uh i don't know uh i don't think i have you know i don't think i'm the person the best person to raise money right so i'm definitely fine with where we are uh but talk to me more about your team today what kinds of people do you have around you so we're uh so i have two co-founders uh initially we were four co-founders one last uh three years ago now so now we are two well three co-founders plus one employee um so one of my co-founders is a cto so it's gonna like manage servers um and it's gonna do cut review uh and etn is front end developer uh slash designer so it's gonna build like the uh front end and i'm gonna do kind of all of those those things so usually i work on new features and uh rafael's gonna take over card review and then it's gonna take over make sure everything is fine and then we're gonna ship things so this is a great story for people i love the small swat team you only had four people when you broke a million dollar run rate that breaks some other bootstrap stories like lemlist who had six people when they broke a million dollar robbery i love small teams that can go from zero to a million very quickly so congratulations thanks it's yes it's all about uh you know being small it's about being more agile to me uh we really don't lose time and you know my my wife always told me like i would never work with a team like you because you never talk to each other like we actually don't we're always like so focused we we all know what we want to do it's a few like text uh chat comments in the day but the rest of the days just focus on all the work you know custom it's mostly customer support and product development bugs and that's it the rest is just like it's such a big space that even if it's just word of mouth and we're just a small team that it's it's really working out actually because with the word of mouth it sustained our growth and we're just poor guys and it makes good sense now when people start using you do they stick what's your turn look like you can help me here i don't know if we have a good one i think it's like uh if i look at stripe because i don't know like the stripe dashboard it's around like uh it depends your virus visits between three to four percent per month uh per stripe dashboard so is it per month per year okay so you you're not sure if your turn is three percent a month or or 36 percent for the year exactly like like i said we're not we we do not focus on any of those things we only focus on customer support yeah yeah but you care the lagging indicator of great customer support and customer love is do they stick with you so you can still focus on customers loving you and the way you measure that as an mps score or churn right how do you measure if you're doing a good job there we don't look at data actually that's the simple strangest answer i can like honest answers like we don't really look at data it's just the feeling of our customer and and i know chern is low and look when you're a company like us the product is email everyone can use email so there's a lot of people trying the product and um some of those will churn and that's a good thing right because we cannot be a solution for everyone so if i only look at churn it's not really the real picture because the one people i want to serve if those people do not churn and that's you have through conversation right uh you know like i would say even six months ago i've said like i'm not sure i'm even product fit right i'm not even sure like right now we're starting to feel we're at that point because the conversation we have like the range of people that are really really satisfied and loving it is larger like i would say like a year ago was like i'm not sure like some really love us some hate us right but right now like that range has expanded and i feel like the conversation i have is mostly like people really satisfy with it as opposed to a year ago if i just look at the data i never really feel that i could have a real definitive answer it's like oh the turn rate but i don't know right actually i don't know yep no this looks sometimes if you're if you're building something like you're building it it's you know the best the best way for you to collect data is just have your ear on the ground and be talking to customers uh and there's nothing wrong with that um talk to me about look most sas Profits companies are not profitable they're spending way too much on tax they're losing money are you guys profitable yeah so we don't spend money on ads uh so it's we only spend money on servers and like tools to help us manage what would you say your total expenses every month are ah let's say without salary like without this our own for salary you all in do all in including including what you pay yourself i don't know well i break it down because salary let's say everything else except salary i would say like 20ks mostly servers yup and factor in our salary like quebec based canadian like normal wage for recovery or programmer so what what are you guys what 30 40 000 bucks in head count expenses per month less than that less than that so as a founder like i think this is an important question about sort of capital right each month if you're all in costs or something like i'm making this up 40 or 50 000 bucks 20k of server plus your head count and you're doing 90 000 top line that means you have like 40 000 of new cash hitting the bank every month how do you decide what to do with that do you pay out dividends to your team do you reinvest in the product what do you do yeah well that's a good question so right at first like that thing i grow so it's not question we had right now obviously like with the numbers we have it started to be crazy to leave the money in the bank right so well first we decided to start paying ourselves you know a more competitive wage uh and we're starting to think about how to reinvest that more uh but right now it's really pretty much just sitting in the bank yeah what would you value the business at today if someone came to you and said phil i want to i want to buy the whole business for 10 million bucks do you sell no we we uh no uh because we had uh uh uh we were approached three times and by big uh let's say unicorns and more and uh so the the three time was mostly for acquire because yeah i think what we built with a team of four even if we were like now we we had some really good milestone in revenue but like two three years ago it was still really impressive just the fact that the product was completed and full featured a version on all platforms so we were approached just to get acquire and we always said nose and in the offer what was what was the largest offer that you turned down it was equity and and equity i don't know if it means much but uh it was uh 30 millions in in valuation from that business but you had to believe that the equity exactly and i had to move into san francisco if you got an offer 10 million bucks all cash up front do you sell i don't think so interesting very good okay on that note let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book uh rework number two is there is there a ceo you're following or studying i'll say jesus jesus and free for the last three days number three what's your favorite online tool for building missive there's so many but i'd say stride okay and how many hours of sleep do you get every night sorry how many hours of sleep do you get between eight to ten okay that's great and situation married single kids i have four kids married wow okay four kids and how are you uh 37 37 last question phil what do you wish you knew when you were 20. uh take my time guys there you have it launched back in 2014 as a pivot out of a conference business into sort of a spreadsheet tool for name badges eventually they launched missive app a tool that enables you uh to collaborate with your team it's a team inbox and chat tool that allows you to really understand what's happening in your email inbox they've bootstrapped their way to over a million dollar run with just four people turned down 30 million dollar acquisition offers we're rooting for you phil thanks for taking us to the top thanks bye cheers one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sass we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three 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