Comment by plehoux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plehoux | Hacker News Reader

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Hi Jared and Trevor,

I'm a co-founder at https://www.missiveapp.com, a collaborative email client (Slack meets Gmail). We've launched our open beta last January and are actively recruiting beta users.

We're a fully bootstrapped team of 4 working from Quebec city, Canada. We were able to bootstrap Missive with the $ we rake in from another project we launched three years ago called ConferenceBadge.com [1].

My question is, do you think it's a mistake to run two businesses in parallel?

Right now 85% of our time is invested in Missive even though it's bringing $0 in revenue.

Our philosophy is that if we were to look for funding, we would have to invest at least 15% of our time on fundraising and investor relationships.

We also believe that looking for investment before market fit is a recipe for disaster (need not to forget that we are not from/in the valley).

[1] https://medium.com/@plehoux/successfully-bootstrapped-a-prod...).

[2] What are chat conversations doing in an email client? Here are few examples of cool possibilities they enable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcRQhGfT620

First some product advice: You're trying to replace various more specialized tools with a general purpose tool. For example, I use Slack, Front, and Lever in addition to gmail, for internal, external, and recruiting-related conversations respectively. You should explain clearly how your one tool will be better than a combination of the many special-purpose tools.

If you can support yourselves with only 15% time on the old project, that's pretty good. You can probably get Missive off the ground with 85%. Once it's off the ground, it should be easy to get investment to focus on it full-time.

I like to think that investors aren't just a time sink, but can give useful advice about the parts of the business that are common to the other businesses they work with, like customer acquisition, hiring, and managing teams.

Co-founder here, we indeed thought of crafting our tagline in such a way:

“With all these carefully thought collaborative features baked within an email client, Missive might very well replace your help desk, CRM, and messaging app.”

We do think there is a cost to always switch between multiple apps, but as new kids in a crowd full of big players, we’ve been wondering whether we should expect / try to catch users by “playing well with others” or be bolder and encourage them to ditch other apps?

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