How To Bootstrap to $1m with VC Funded Competitors With Just 4 People

45.695 - 65.626 Nathan Latka

Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion. We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.

66.107 - 86.661 Nathan Latka

There, you'll find a private RSS feed that you can add to your favorite podcast listening tool, along with other subscriber-only content. Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked.

88.583 - 109.604 Phil Liu

Hello everyone, my guest today is Phil Liu. He's building a great tool called missabout.com with a shared inbox and chat SaaS tool. Are you ready to take us 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 Missive App playing in a competitive space, shared inbox and team chat. When did you launch the business?

110.886 - 139.503 Phil Liu

We actually started working on the project in 2014, but it was mostly like a tool for itself, building another previous startup 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 paid version. And so how did you, you know, the starting years for any founder paying yourself is difficult.

139.523 - 166.08 Phil Liu

So what did you do between 2015, the first line of code or 2014 and the paid launch in 2016? How'd you pay yourself? I think that's the interesting part of our own story is that, um, I met my co-founder at the whole working space that I created in complexity, uh, in 2012. And, uh, so my co-founder were the absolutely best like developer I knew at the time designer at the time.

508.903 - 538.077 Phil Liu

Would you remember first year revenue in 2016? So conference batch was a bit earlier, 2013. Okay. Okay. For missive, I want to get into the missive story here. I just want to sort of push past the pre-missive. Okay, first year of missive was like, I don't know, not a lot of money. I think like 3K for the whole year. Okay, and how did you get your first 10 customers? Do you remember?

538.816 - 561.668 Phil Liu

Early tech, so we post like to product on and kind of cold reach like people we admire that we thought like could have a use for the product. Like the Stripe people, I'd kind of write a paper about how they collaborate around email and how they were full transparent around their own internal communication. And that was kind of one of the idea, but I miss it is the ability to share the

561.648 - 586.95 Phil Liu

emailed easily with the people in your company. So we reached out to people at Twitter, over on Twitter and launched on Producton. And those were the earlier user Most of those earlier users were excited by the product but 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 customer kind of are willing to pay for.

586.97 - 607.04 Phil Liu

And fast forward to today, those are your first 10, 20 customers. How many customers are you serving today? I think we're around like 2,000 businesses using this, 2,000, yeah. That's right. And help us understand how you decide to price this. Again, very competitive space. What's the average price look like? So right now, so you pay per seat.

607.06 - 626.333 Phil Liu

So if you're a company of 10, you're going to pay 10 seat. And right now it's 15 bucks per seat, US dollars 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 way less popular. And so 15 bucks in our space is really low compared to other offering.