How Missive CEO Philippe Lehoux grew Missive to $6.1M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is rafael mason he's first and foremost a failed musician he found solace in building beautiful reliable software instead uh 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 are you ready to take us to the top absolutely yeah all right so i love this we had your co-founder on uh back in the day about a year and a half ago at missiveapp.com you guys are team inbox chat and tasks right yep that's correct all right so tell us how you're competing obviously very competitive space uh are you similar to sort of front app and hybrid hq these kinds of tools uh yes we are definitely similar front is probably the one we are the closest to um and uh we we had some discussions with front the they tried our product we tried theirs and there was some inspiration from both sides and uh we have a good a good relationship with them but yeah um yes it's very similar have they offered a matilda and the team have they offered to buy you guys and you said no we we want more uh i don't think i can i can tell whether this happened or not uh fair enough fair enough well i love that you guys are well at least you were bootstrapped a year and a half are you still bootstrapped today we are still yes i love this okay i love this and it was great because when you're when your co-founder came on he told me in 2020 you guys are doing about 45 000 bucks a month in revenue you doubled in 90 000 a month in revenue i don't want to ask right now how much you're doing because i want to leave it as an open hook so for people that have not heard of missive before tell us tell us what you're doing yes so missive is a it's a shared inbox with chat and tasks for productive teams um it's a first and foremost a 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 contacts and uh um and uh what else i mean so you don't have to to switch between your your email app and chat in tasks and in slack sorry um and uh 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 so like if if you're listening right now you have a team of three you have like uh 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 that onboarding email goes into a box where the bdr the ae and the founder can all you know interact together decide on a discount reply to the email all that stuff exactly you would typically have a company with a info app 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 very cool i love this okay so um so i guess dive in here it's kind of 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 correct yeah we are two did you three of you guys yes oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 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 founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to 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 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 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 going out right now and you're raising your seed round well 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 data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations 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 all right let's jump back into the interview okay and did you guys just say you know what we love each other it's just going to be 30 30 30 or do you split it differently it's split differently for kind of a historical reason missive is the second product we we've built together we started another business uh which is conferencebatch.com is for event organizers to build and to design and print name badges for their attendees and conference badge.com yes correct and it's still still on we 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 hand write on their name badge of the permanent marker at the admission desk well there you have it it's it's what you need exactly so yeah we built the conference badge first um 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 sis since he started the product he uh he had more equity and it's while running and building conference bash that we found the need to communicate to to deal more efficiently with customer support and we started building missives so conference badge is the uh 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 remain the same so in missive phil owns about fifty percent and then you two split the other fifty percent something like that something like that yeah yeah very very very cool okay so talk to me talking about growth i think when we last chatted you guys were just you were flirting with two thousand customers i think what are you guys at today uh flirting with two thousand well sorry the question he had a question yeah yeah i understand but i believe uh because i looked at the the numbers to be kind of prepared for this interview and uh i believe this was more like uh users including free users because we are at uh close to 000 paid customers right now and how many free today free users total something like uh atta like a thousand a thousand i have my numbers it's like a thousand six sixty is six hundred i i think so you have one thousand six hundred free users and then another two thousand on paid correct yeah 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 freezer stick around they have to choose at the end of a trial or something uh 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 15 days so you quickly kind of get the need to to to pay to have more history or uh raw file this is super rare like i've done almost 3500 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 600 than you do on the paid plan 2 000. i guess that makes sense because i was...