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Can a small team really bootstrap to $8M ARR in a crowded SaaS market?
In this episode, Rob Walling chats with Philippe Lehoux about how he and his co-founders bootstrapped Missive, a collaborative email and team inbox tool. They deep dive into landing early customers, unique horizontal positioning, content-driven growth, enterprise sales, and how to compete with VC-backed competition.
Episode Sponsor:

Are you a non-technical founder with solid revenue and real traction, but your technology is holding you back? You should check out today’s sponsor, Designli.
They specialize in helping founders like you who are stuck with messy code, unclear roadmaps, or a dev team that just doesn’t get it.
And for listeners of the pod, Designli is offering their Impact Week completely free. That’s a one-week, no-obligation audit where their team dives into your code, your design system, and your product roadmap to show you exactly what’s working, what’s broken, and what needs to happen next.
If it’s a fit, you can move on to SolutionLab, a three-week sprint where Designli takes over your codebase and architects a real roadmap for growth, led by a full-time, cross-functional team.
If your tech is the bottleneck to your next stage of growth, check them out at https://designli.co/fortherestofus.
Topics we cover:
- (2:05) – Missive’s $8M ARR journey and email pivot
- (6:02) – Early idea and first customers
- (11:16) – Unique positioning: horizontal vs. vertical
- (13:41) – How they prioritize features
- (15:39) – Why they stayed bootstrapped and decline funding
- (20:25) – Content strategy and “vs” pages
- (21:39) – Affiliate program driving 30% of growth
- (25:24) – Challenges and benefits of being horizontal
- (30:28) – Enterprise sales and pricing
- (32:06) – Scaling with SOC 2 compliance
Links from the Show:
- SaaS Institute
- MicroConf YouTube channel
- Missive
- Philippe Lehoux | LinkedIn
- Philippe Lehoux (@plehoux) | X
If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you!
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Welcome to Startup For the Rest Of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. This is the podcast where I help developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products. Today I interview Philippe eu, the co-founder of Missive, about how he and his two co-founders bootstrapped to $8 million in a RR and 16 team members. It’s a really interesting story and what an incredible amount of leverage they have as founders to be able to build such an incredibly profitable bootstrapped company. Before we dive in to their story, if you are a SaaS founder doing at least a million in a RR, you should check out the SaaS Institute that’s at SaaS institute.com. This is my premium coaching program where you get access to top your coaches, seasoned mentors, and a curated community of founders. We give you the support and the connection that frankly, it’s very hard to find anywhere else.
It’s an application only community, and we want to get you the systems and the support that you need to scale from 1 million to 10 million and beyond. We have founders in the program doing all manner of revenue. It’s not just a million, but we have people doing four, five, $6 million and you’ll be grouped into a highly curated mastermind. You will have a one-on-one coaching. We have some incredible coaches, and of course you’ll be able to get advice from me. That’s SaaS institute.com. If you want to check it out and apply, it’s great because it’s still early. So it’s a small group and it’s again, really highly curated and high value SaaS institute.com. And with that, let’s start my conversation with Philippe about how they bootstrapped missive to $8 million of a RR Philippe. Welcome to the show. Hey Rob, great to have you on here, man. As someone who has bootstrapped a company to 8 million in a RR, my numbers from producer Ron were 7 million and you’re like, nah, it’s more than that now. Impressive man. And let’s talk about your H one here on your website, missive app.com and your H one is inbox collaboration for teams that run on email, see what’s going on, know who’s doing what, and collaborate behind the scenes without changing your workflow. So I kind of understand what you do from that, and I know of other apps that do this. I think of front is one that I know where it’s like inbox collaboration. Would you equate missive to being in that category?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Yeah, definitely. One big difference, I think there’s no product like missive in that aspect is we really respect the email aspect of it. So any action you do in missive, we really work hard to make it work with your email server. So whatever you do in missive, and there’s a lot that can happen because it’s a collaborative tool. We sync it back to your email servers, which is mostly not the case. Now with those bigger collaborative solution,
Rob Walling:
They do it all in the browser type thing. You have to use the app.
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Well, some will just not sync both ways.
Rob Walling:
I
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
See. Basically they will ingest the emails and apply collaboration in, but that don’t deal with the syncing, which kind of is hard to not become a mass.
Rob Walling:
Yeah.
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
So if you use missive, you can use it for five months and then all your emails are still in your email server. Everything is archival. Marcus read as it should. So we really respect that aspect of it.
Rob Walling:
And when I think about this space, there’s a lot of competitors that do something similar to this. I even think of this being a support inbox for a SaaS company of course, where my mind goes. And if go into, if support is a category, we’re talking hundreds and hundreds of competitors, how have you possibly bootstrapped into this space to 8 million a r, your team size is 16 fully remote or mostly remote more than 4,500 customers with 30,000 users net negative churn. How did you get here? It feels like an impossible thing these days.
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
I would say one step at a time, but I mean I know it’s not a good answer, but we always respected the email aspect of it. We’re an email client first and foremost, so when you start using missive, even if you’re a solo user, we want to make it a great experience. And I think there’s a lot of businesses in that space that kind of forget that first and foremost, they’re an email client. We’re not like a customer support L desks, we’re an email client with a collaboration. A lot, lot businesses prefer to use that over outdesk because they do a lot of emails in a lot of contexts, not just support. And the other aspects is we embrace that we are SMBs like small and medium. We don’t really go towards the enterprise market even though we do have bigger customers now because for the smaller businesses, one of their main issue in life right now is they have too many tools and they certainly use email for communication and they also need to chat.
And with Mississippi you can kind of do both, so you can pretty much ditch a lot of silos by basically just using our app and by respecting email, you can actually stop using your Outlook or your Gmail, so it’s one less place to go look at things. And I think for those reasons, we were able to create a lot of loyalty by our customers. There’s a lot of customers that would say, every time I check my SaaS bills, missive Clear is the only one I wouldn’t change. I’m too dependent on it. There’s nothing else on the market and it’s sometimes hard to realize, like you said, there’s a lot of competitors, but there’s not a lot that respect email and the email aspect of it.
Rob Walling:
Interesting. Yeah, I would not have thought of that as a unique selling proposition that respecting email would be the big deal. Now, did you build missive for yourself for a need that you had at a prior company? Yeah. Let’s talk through that because the inception of the idea I think is intriguing. And then next I’m going to ask how’d you get your first 50 customers? But yeah, talk us through where the idea came from and why you built it.
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Basically, me and my two co-founders, we were building another project called conference batch.com, which got to profitability quite quickly and quickly. We were like, that’s a done product, we want to work on something else and we start to brainstorm. A lot of indie would do you spend weeks trying to find your next ideas and for us, at one point it was just me doing a lot of typos in my emails and my co-founders would like, ah man, so wouldn’t be nice if we could just a Google doc just collaborate on your draft. That was before AI obviously. So nowadays typos are a bit harder to do, but previously, and that was the first prototype, let’s do a collaborative draft editors connected to Gmail and then we’re like, well, that’s not kind of, okay, let’s build an email client over it and then oh, let’s chat. And then slowly the prototype become a full-fledged email client. Then when we launch a collaborative email client
Rob Walling:
And with conference badge, then you said it was a done product, which I find to be, it’s kind of an interesting concept, but folks who listen to this show are well familiar with the stair step method of entrepreneurship that I’ve been talking about for almost 15 years now, where you start something and usually eventually it just has a limit and you kind of can’t push it past that without making a serious change to it. Adding a second product or really changing what it does or expanding was conference badge kind of like that where it was just a limited, it was a single feature or a couple features, and once it was done, it was done. What did it do?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Yeah, basically it was like Vistaprint for badges. So you would go there, connect your br, and then design couple of different badges and then associate through a spreadsheet or your EverBrite data, those guys should have that badge, those one, this one, and then we would print and ship them.
Rob Walling:
And so you built Missive to help you with conference badge, and then so now you have one customer, which is you. How did you find your next 50 or 40, 30 whatever number makes sense.
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
It’s funny, it’s been 10 years now we’re building missive, right? So it’s kind of a blur, but the beginnings were hard. I remember launching and I was still the product and craze, I think we found our first customer, Kenny, which is still a customer, Cadney is a feedback board that we still use at Missive, and those guys found us through our product on launch, and I think that after that launch, what I did is that every single time people were talking about email issues related to businesses, I would just jump in the Twitter tread and just mention my product. And to my surprise, initially, 99% of the time people were really excited about it and maybe the product wasn’t made sure enough for them, but they were like, oh, that’s a pretty cool concept. So it gave us the fool to kind of persist and go to our first 50 customer and whatnot.
And the second phases of growth was riding the wave of investment from big Silicon Valley startups that would raise a lot of money and build that collaborative space. And for us as a bootstrap company, we didn’t have any dollars marketing dollars, but because those startups front superhuman were kind of creating a lot of content about email and collaboration, we were able to kind of inject ourself in those conversation, put on the a EO aspect, but also in social media, but not a lot of dollars. We could insert ourself in the conversation of people that knew they had a problem, they knew they needed a solution, and they found those big startup VC back solution and us, and that really helped us get to that first million dollar. That one versus page with both superhuman and front probably drove most of our initial customers.
Rob Walling:
Got it. The versus pages are big, and so people were finding, did you have superhuman versus front? Was that the versus
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
No, we worded Superman alternative front alternative,
Rob Walling:
The alternative two. Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, versus works better when you are a brand. Now people are searching for missive, but alternative twos are a big one,
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
So alternative twos and back in the days, those Versa space, you would find them obviously already at that point, but they were pretty simple, just bullet points and the same one for every single competitors. In our case, it was like a 5,000 words essay, all of the feature, how they are better in front, but better and submissive and always keeping that we’re an email client first. Maybe you should go for those guys if you’re for those things, but if you really want to be emailed first, you should at least try us and play with it.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. Again, coming back to that unique selling proposition, I have entrepreneurs who either come on the show or who I advise, and a big thing I talk to them about, especially with SaaS is I don’t mind if you copy another product or enter a category that exists, but the big question is if you copy or if you do something similar, why would anyone use you? And don’t tell me it’s you’re cheaper. What are you actually doing differently? Once you have a brand, you’re doing millions a year, you have thousands of customers, it becomes different. People use you because you are Salesforce or because you’re missive and they just know it and you’re in the conversation. But to get there, there has to be some compelling reason and it can be ux, but it’s often not enough. That’s not a defensible, you know what I mean? And it sounds like for you, it just keeps being the email first, the respect for the email inbox and the server, as you said, you sync it all back. Did you ever consider, because you’re a horizontal tool, did you ever consider niching down and attacking just a few verticals or were you horizontal from the start and that’s just worked for you?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Yeah, I’m a pretty stubborn guy and that has been a lot of people would say that to me like, oh, you should go transportation business, build the one collaboration inbox to them or lawyers or whatnot, and I was like, nah, I like being that Gmail or Outlook for businesses. I was building a product for me, first and foremost, we like building it because we use it on a daily basis, hours a day still today obviously we do emails in it, but we do every single thing about the business in it. It’s like our Slack. We do everything, so it would be sad for me to sell and stop working on that thing.
Rob Walling:
No, that makes a lot of sense. Email is a space. Having built myself an ESP, it’s a space where you can have a lot of success and that negative churn as a horizontal play, there are other spaces where that’s harder. There’s something about that stickiness of email and it’s so permanent. You see this, you have someone who’s been with you for 10 years, your very first customer is still a customer. That’s huge. It’s a huge testament to your product and your support, but also to this
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Space. And there’s a big bar to entry. I mean, just try to remember how many email client has launched in the last five years that you can remember. It’s not a lot. It’s just because really long to get something that work. And so for that reason, that made us defensible, right? There’s not a lot of competition.
Rob Walling:
The roadmap for a horizontal product can be tough. You are getting a lot of feature requests. I’m guessing you’re going to have a real estate agent asking for an MLS integration and a support team asking for SLA timers and marketing team asking for social media, just all the features all the time. How do you do this? How do you decide which ideas to build, which are distractions? Do you have a framework for triaging?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Well, initially it was mainly, do I want this for me as well, right? Because you get bombarded with feature requests, but because you use your product a lot, you’re like, wow, I wouldn’t use that myself, so I don’t care. And to be truthful, at first you pretty much say yes to everything. You really want those first customers, but as you grow, it’s just the number of feature requests possible is to infinity. So there’s just more and more as you have more customer, there’s more feature requests, and then it’s pretty much becomes impossible. Even if we would add a thousand developers, we create a bad product. So as we grow, I go back to the first inch, which is would I use that myself? It’s the same conversation we have with the team when we are trying to understand what we should work on next. So there’s not a complex roadmap or complex workflow to decide what we’re working on.
It’s pretty much like all the things we’ve received in the last few weeks, which one I think would improve our workflow the most, and that’s what we work on. That’s the freedom. Also being bootstrapped, there’s a bit less pressure to get to certain milestones so you don’t have that pressure to sign that next big customer to push that feature that you absolutely need. We don’t really have that pressure. So it comes with disadvantage as well. But on the roadmap aspect, it gives us more time to reflect and not be pressured to push things. That makes no sense.
Rob Walling:
Are you a non-technical founder with solid revenue and real traction, but your technology is holding you back? You should check out today’s sponsor design lead. They specialize in helping founders like you who are stuck with messy code, unclear roadmaps, or a dev team that just doesn’t get it. And for listeners of the pod design lead is offering their Impact week completely free. That’s a one week no obligation audit where their team dives into your code, your design system, and your product roadmap to show you exactly what’s working, what’s broken, and what needs to happen next. If it’s a fit, you can move on to Solution Lab, a three week sprint where design lead takes over your code base and architects of real roadmap for growth led by a full-time cross-functional team. This isn’t just another dev shop cranking out features. Every sprint is tied to measurable business outcomes, so you can scale with confidence and enjoy the process. If your tech is the bottleneck to your next stage of growth, check them out@designlead.co slash For the Rest Of Us, that’s DESI, gn li.co/ For the Rest Of Us. Why did you never take investment? I’m sure that in the early days, if you were like me, you didn’t know anybody with two coins to wrap together and couldn’t have raised funding. Maybe that was my situation for years. I bootstrapped five startups because of that. But the moment that you got any type of traction, I know that you were approached by Angels, by VCs, by all kinds of stuff, so what made you decide not to take some funding?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
I mean, initially we did apply to YC because for us it was like, oh, that’s like if we ever want to raise money, that’s the school to go to because I don’t know, I am from Quebec City, I know nobody that raised money and whatnot, and those didn’t work out. We got to sf, the interview didn’t work out, and after that we were like, well, we’re making money with conference badge. We can sustain ourself. We’re pretty lean small team, so let’s just get going as long as we can. And then we had a couple of conversations with VCs, but it was always like our growth rate. I mean, it’s not stellar. It’s not like we’re tripling the company every six months. So it wasn’t like didn’t fly to our door with money. It was like, hi, what’s your name? Tell us our number, maybe we should have another call, whatnot. And then after a few of those we were like, well, that’s leading to nowhere. If one day someone shows up at my door with money, maybe it, I’ll say that guy’s really serious. But to that point it’s just emails and phone calls. So you see, we’re maybe not that sexy because we’re bootstrap because we’re doing the long game, and I think it kind of showed they’re not looking for that anyway.
Rob Walling:
And have you been approached by strategics or private equity that want to acquire you and has that ever crossed your mind?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Oh, every day.
Rob Walling:
That’s what I was guessing. Yeah, ever. As someone who I didn’t think I was going to sell my last company, and then I kept getting, I got five inbound, serious inbound in 18 months and was just like, huh, maybe I should think about this. And then it was like, well, but I need this number. That’s obviously not going to happen. And then that number happened. I was like, oh, okay, I guess I’m selling this, but I’m curious how you’re thinking about
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
It. Yeah, I never got to those that deep in the conversation, I receive a lot of emails, but obviously you go to LinkedIn and those people are just out of the university, mainly r vesting deals, potential deals and whatnot. Sometimes it’s for more senior people and I might sometimes take those call, but I’m always saying I’m not interested to sell. It’s profitable. We’re growing and that’s kind of the right playbook anyway if you want a big number. So it’s like if someone is really interested one day it’s going to show, and to this point it’s still like, nah, nobody is really that interested and I don’t want to lose time digging into it too much. I prefer investing my time in my business.
Rob Walling:
And I didn’t ask you at the top, but do you have a co-founder or are you solo?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Yeah,
Rob Walling:
You have a co-founder? Three co-founders. Three
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Total. Three total? Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Okay. What are the role breakdowns? I dunno if you have a development background or sales.
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
So all developers, so we all code still today. I’m the generalist, so initially I would do both front end and backend code and my other co-founder is like pull backend, we call is the CTO right now. Really perfectionist makes things work perfectly. My other co-founder is frontend masters, so nails all details about the app itself as a great combination. That would be the one who is more business oriented. Let’s focus on growth, let’s move to another other stage of the business, and they’re really the perfectionists that helped me make it happen. So we really have a great combination.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, it sounds like a very complimentary skills even though because there’s danger in having two or three developers as founders is build, build, build, build, build. Somebody has to be driving sales and doing some marketing, which I guess it sounds like that, was that you? Were you more of the marketing sales side?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Yeah, it was me, but again, for some reason I still feel I was doing that part-time for a lot of years and I don’t know if it’s a good if I ever started another business. To us the conclusion is kind of like we build it and they come, which is usually not it, right?
Rob Walling:
No, that’s the message. I don’t want to spread on this podcast. I always say, well, you get a little lucky, you make yourself your own luck. But
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
I think the reality is that’s kind of my, if you look back, I did a lot of things that are right, it’s just that I don’t consider them, to me marketing is paid ads. It’s not that I really care about those versus page. I really care about those social media conversation. I did a lot of small things that to me weren’t really straight up big marketing. I don’t even know today what is marketing really apart from building a great product and talking about it, which is probably just it, right? I’m not a marketing guy, but yeah,
Rob Walling:
No, that makes sense. Yeah, I’m not either. I’m classically a developer who now builds audiences and write books, writes books and advises people. But when I had built a product and I loved it and I knew that it could help people, I couldn’t stop talking about it. And so it sounds like do similar things to you or it’s like, oh, there’s conversation on Reddit about X, Y, Z or on X or on LinkedIn and content was a big thing for us. First it was written and then I started a podcast, this very podcast that you’re on, this is 15 years old now, and then YouTube channel now with 110,000 subscribers. That all kind of became a thing that I did, but what else did you do? You said the verses or the alternative two pages, which is content marketing. It’s getting found in Google and you get that stuff converts really well and then social media, but it wasn’t audience building. You don’t have a big audience. It was participating in existing conversations and it’s probably Reddit product hunt for sure. Hacker News if something’s up there. Twitter. Yeah, Twitter maybe Quora back when it was a thing. It’s much less of a concern now.
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Yeah, a couple of posts, but also now we have affiliate program that we built ourself that we host in the app. Then people are like, why did you build your own affiliate program? Backhand, right? No
Rob Walling:
One does that. That’s
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Funny. Yeah, exactly. The reason is privacy. We’re always skeptical of implanting all the marketing toolkit in the app itself just because we’re dealing with sensitive stuff. So for us, the app itself is free of any trackers. It’s all on the website, and then we have kind of a flow to make it link to the registration that happened on the app, on the website, but in the app itself, there’s nothing and for that we build it ourself. I guess we could have not built it ourself, but still to that day it drives a lot of revenue. Maybe 30% of the growth now of the new users come from the athlete program.
Rob Walling:
That’s big. Now, did you typically affiliate, I’d say affiliate marketing or affiliate programs is usually enterprise sales because you have to go out and you have to find the affiliates and you have to recruit them almost, right? They’re influencers busy, they’re not out there looking for affiliate. Has that been your experience as well?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Well, initially a bit, I guess we were stupid is that there is no enforcement. You could actually take it and do ads yourself on the massive term or brand or whatnot. So for us it was like we we’re just three guys. We don’t have the time to do Google paid ads. Let’s build a EL program so somebody can arbitrage it and if they make money with it, fine with us. But at some point we got a brand, we do have some brand recognition now, so there’s a lot of people typing just missive. So it started to make less sense. So we started to enforce you guys, you can’t actually advertise using missive, right? You need to go for new customers. But I would say no. Most of the people that signs up through the affiliate programs are pretty classical missive users, like SMBs, that can be anything. They’re really like lawyers, transportation, business mostly in the us but also uk, Australia, like Anglos Fair countries.
Rob Walling:
And so you must not have, there’s typically with affiliate programs, there’s a concentration where you have a thousand affiliates and three of them drive 95% of your revenue or something like that, that you do have that. So you have just a few.
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
It’s people that arbitrage the fact that we’re bad at marketing and that we don’t do paid marketing. Got it. That’s still to this day, interesting. I mean they’re still profitable for them even without using the missive brand. So they’re going to advertise on the competitors and in other countries, and they’re really, this guide is a big, big, big nerds. They do that on the side of work in Silicon Valley and probably make some money with us. I don’t know how, but how much, but
Rob Walling:
Well, I want to get back to this idea of it being difficult to be a horizontal product, and yet you’ve been successful in spite of potential headwinds, specifically your marketing website. It has to speak in language that works for a cajillion, different job titles, for example, when you think about writing a homepage copy, how do you make it compelling and specific enough to be compelling, but general enough to be inclusive?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
So we’re trying to ize some of our marketing nowadays. For instance, we did a campaign with accountants, a couple of accountants, influencer did YouTube videos podcast mentioned, and then created dedicated landing page with a lot of quotes from existing customer. So both the influencer words, Hey, that’s a pretty cool solution for your accountant problems. If I say it, I’m like, Phil, the submissive developers, they don’t trust me. So that’s why we’re trying to go to create vertical content through influencer. So we did accountant that’s working, we’re going to do lawyers, and then we’re looking for the other ones, but it’s kind of really hard, so many possibilities that it’s more what type of answer, answer in each of those industries and which one are kind of respectable and have enough network that it can actually work for us. So we’re playing with that. As for the OnPage itself, our goal was to make it about emails.
You would be surprised how many people are like, well, I tried all those new product, but in the end, my business is always an email and it just sucks to have to go to all of those other apps. So when you tell them, well, there’s actually an app that respect email, but just make it a bit better that you could least use and solve all of your email problems because you have them, right? Everybody received too many emails and they’re drowning and they can’t collaborate and whatnot. So sticking to the email messaging in the OnPage and then we’re trying to create vertical landing page for some industries. That’s what we’re trying now.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. That would be, that’s a playbook that I’ve seen work with horizontal folks. I guess I have a question about, back to kind of building features. It’s like you’re not just competing with other horizontal tools. You’re competing with probably a thousand vertical specific tools. So a law firm comes to use missive, but they have legal practice management tool that probably has email built in. So what’s the pitch for beating that?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
A lot of those, for instance, we have a immigration law firm in New York. They’re like 150 now in missive, and the way they can use missive and or other more lawyer tool is that they build bridge in between the two solutions. So whatever they’re doing in their more specialized app that they usually don’t like, because when you’re doing a vertical app, you have less insensitive to make it, right? You have less competition, so the UX is less good and whatnot. So missive is their dually driver and they’re going to create integration with their own stack in missive. So those bigger customer, that’s what they’re doing. But now because of ai, we’re seeing even smaller businesses, like 20 employees building really complex custom integration built in missive with all the different tool in their stack. They would say, well, you guys had the Asana integration, but I actually wanted the Asana task plus mash it up with whatever backend I have, and I kind of did it with chat to PT and now it’s working. So missive is their daily driver because of emails and they’re using the integration aspect to integrate themself with their own stack. Initially we were also building integration, but you can’t build them all yourself, right?
Rob Walling:
Yeah. It just becomes too much. At a certain point, do you feel like staying horizontal has maybe even provided you a form of defensibility? Does it make you less vulnerable to shifts in any single industry as well as since the market, the TAM is so much bigger, I don’t talk much about Tamer, but it just being horizontal, it can be an advantage there if you can compete.
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Yes. The answer is yes, because if you look at the pie chart of the industries using missive, I think that the biggest pot is like 6%, so it’s like 6% retail, and then it’s just like 5.5, 5.4 and then goes on. Yeah,
Rob Walling:
It’s all long tail. There’s no head. It’s all long tail
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
And the spread of the seats in organization as well.
Rob Walling:
Yeah,
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Right. So I think the median org is like six, seven, but it goes, it’s not like half of the customers are businesses are seven. It goes like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and then slowly to, the biggest one we have now is 400 seats.
Rob Walling:
And you don’t do, I mean 400 seats to give folks an idea. Your pricing is, it’s $12 per seat, $24, and there are a $48 plan or something like that, obviously with more features. So 400 seats times any of those numbers is an enterprise big plan. Do you do sales calls? Did you do enterprise sales for
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
That? Well, I used to do all of them, close them. We wouldn’t go after them. It was mainly inbound, and usually the bigger customer are using another solution before
And they would know and actively be looking for something to fix their issues or they don’t like the platform or evolve in something they didn’t want. And so they’re looking for an alternative. And for us, winning those deals has always been kind of easy for some reason. I know you said it should not, but we’re cheaper than most of our VC backed competitors. Not by a lot, because usually those, they will show a big price on their own page, but it’s not actually the price people are paying for us, it’s usually the price people are paying. There’s not a lot of, we’re a small team, we don’t want to negotiate, so it’s like, Hey, that’s the price. If you don’t want, you can go negotiate, but we won’t do a quote for you to negotiate with your previous provider.
Rob Walling:
Right. Yeah, no, I was asking, do you do enterprise sales much or is it mostly self-serve?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
It’s inbound, but we do close them in a sales is fashion, so we’re going to do whatever document they need, SOC two, security questionnaire, meetings with IT, security, we’re going to do it obviously. Yeah,
Rob Walling:
To get the big deals you’ve gotten SOC two?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Yeah. How was that? A lot of TinySeed companies that I’m invested in, windy, biding, SOC two. Did you find it relatively easy or relatively painful?
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Yeah, so SOC two, because we were a small team of four or five, I don’t remember adapting new processes was easy for us, so we just need to learn them and apply them in our stack. And we used drta. I think there’s Drta and what’s the other one? I think I would not advise somebody to not use one of those solutions. It’s just like they streamline everything. It’s as a service. I can’t imagine doing that without those service. A couple of buttons, you get a lot of templates for the different processes, you accept them. And for us, we had, so two before we start ING people, so when we are people, we already had the checklist process of what service I’m onboarding them in, they need to sign those couple of legal documents and whatnot.
Rob Walling:
Philippe, thanks so much for joining me on the show today. If folks want to keep up with you on the internet, you are at P-L-E-H-O-U-X on X, Twitter, and of course missive app.com if they want to see the pretty incredible company you’ve been bootstrapping for the last 10
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Years. Thanks, Mars.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, thanks so much for joining me on the show.
Philippe-Antoine Lehoux:
Awesome, thanks.
Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Philippe for coming on the show, and thanks to you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling sending off from episode 806.
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