How Missive Grew

“For the first two years, we required every single new user to go through a 30-minute onboarding call. We’ve since gone primarily self-serve, but we still give access to only a select number of folks from the waitlist. So, by definition, we’ve deliberately limited our own growth.”

Gorelay high

“And I think that a lot of people discovered us when they were unsatisfied [with other products]. We started doing SEO and these landing pages. The versus pages, that's probably our most successful marketing initiative. And still today, we still rank good for a lot of those pages, even though we d...”

Saasclub high

“We offer weekly webinars potential customers can attend to learn more about the product and each webinar offers a dedicated Q&A at the end. Those webinars have been a great success, specially for people coming from other competitors looking for a validation that the switch to Missive is a good de...”

Missiveapp high

“When you release an email client, it's exciting for a lot of people, because like, there's a lot of already adopters, and they want to try everything. And our first version was kind of cool... So product hunt, and then you were spending time on like, was it communities or Twitter or wherever? And...”

Saasclub high

“Developed integrations with popular SaaS (Asana, Salesforce, Aircall, etc.). This created nice co-marketing opportunities like being featured in their app/integration store. 2019-2023”

Missiveapp high

“Let's talk about affiliates. So that was the next thing that helped you grow. ... We built [our affiliate program] from scratch. Because the reasoning was people love Missive, they're our best ambassador, let's give them value in doing so like monetary value. The idea was like, let's have an affi...”

Saasclub high

“Developed integrations with popular SaaS (Asana, Salesforce, Aircall, etc.). This created nice co-marketing opportunities like being featured in their app/integration store. 2019-2023”

Missiveapp high

“We got serious with G2 and other review sites and started earning multiple customer reviews and earning multiple badges. 2024”

Missiveapp high

“We sent a total of forty newsletters, all were a summary of our progress pushing out the content of our changelog. 2016-2024”

Missiveapp high

“We attended our first trade show in an industry where we find some of our bigger customers, logistic companies. I wrote an article about our experience. 2024”

Missiveapp high

“Open sourced EmojiMart component, now used by big startups (e.g. Figma!). It's a big driver of traffic and backlinks. 2016-2024”

Missiveapp high

“Enterprise sales has become increasingly important, with ex-employee profiles indicating 500% enterprise growth in 2022. The company's enterprise deals typically capped out at 1,000-seat deployments until mid-2024, when they landed their first major consulting firm deal for 2,500 seats.”

Sacra medium

“The company's revenue growth has been driven by two primary channels. Hand-to-hand onboarding specialists historically handled 5-10 calls daily, translating to roughly 1,000 new users per specialist annually. With approximately 12 specialists working at any given time, this channel contributed ar...”

Sacra medium

“One of the most effective strategy initially was like, hey, like, let's say there was a conversation about on Twitter about how do you do support? Either you do support around email in your business, I would I would go and like, hey, I've built that product, you can try it for free. Or if people ...”

Saasclub high

“Our process to decide what to work on next was simple: do customer support ourselves and set out to improve some of the bigger pains our customers were experiencing at that moment. This shows on our changelog, a long list of incremental improvements. This process worked magically at first, we cou...”

Missiveapp medium

“Twitter [Now, X] was fantastic for finding Missive’s early users. It’s totally fine to drop into other people’s conversations, if you do so respectfully. At first, it was a way for us to mention Missive wherever someone was talking about shared inbox or email delegation products. ... Many of thes...”

Gorelay high

“We hired consultants to do SEO + write content. We did with two firms, both times the firm owners were paid Missive users. In both instances we paid $10k/month and the experiment went on for around six months. Six months is not a lot in the SEO world, but each time, both we and the consultant lea...”

Missiveapp high

“We created many case studies to showcase how Missive is used by people in different industries. Those were pushed on LinkedIn and X. 2020-2023”

Missiveapp medium

“Twitter - I monitored conversations about competitors, email clients, etc. and mentioned Missive in replies. 2016-2023”

Missiveapp high

“As a result, we’ve already been featured on the Apple App Store a couple of times.”

Gorelay medium

“Email cold outreach to a few people we admired to get feedback and validate the product. No more than 50 emails total were sent. 2015”

Missiveapp high

“On affiliates doing paid advertising: We initially let affiliates do paid advertising with no limitation. Some did so on our brand keyword, “Missive”. I believe the bulk of the $115,000 we paid out was earned this way.”

Missiveapp high

“Why are we invested in customer support as an SMB-focused, self-serve product? And why do we still do all of it on our own as founders? For one thing, really. Customer love. That is our only marketing strategy. It’s really important to listen to what customers have to say. ... Aside from helping ...”

Gorelay high

“The Chrome Store handled distribution and payments through Google's built-in infrastructure, keeping the barrier to try and buy as low as possible.”

Saasclub high

“I posted on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and the Hampton founders community. My angle was to be transparent about us having zero experience and going there to learn as much as possible. Instantly, people started to reach out privately to give tips on how we should approach this to get as much ...”

Missiveapp high

“Open sourced EmojiMart component, now used by big startups (e.g. Figma!). It's a big driver of traffic and backlinks. 2016-2024”

Missiveapp high

“All co-founders did couple of podcasts & interviews over the years. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, ...) 2016 - 2024”

Missiveapp medium

“Vimcal is a PLG product. As calendars are inherently social, viral, and multi-player. An ideal tool to expand bottoms-up within (and outside) an organization. So lately we’ve shipped some helpful teams-focused features. Solving for complex use cases where ... are incentivized to invite more teamm...”

Gorelay high

“Providing unexpectedly quick customer service and continuing to push as many people as possible towards onboarding calls (to maximize what we were learning from above mentioned experiments!). Over time, our retention rates have become extremely good.”

Gorelay high