Every day, professionals around the world open their inboxes to the same chaos: long reply-all chains, confusing forwards, vague CCs, and email threads that somehow become internal debates — but no one knows who’s actually replying to the client, in charge of that task, or responsible for alignment. It’s not a tech issue. It’s a teamwork issue. And Missive, an email collaboration client used by over 4,000 businesses globally, wants to say the quiet part out loud: Email wasn’t built for teams. That’s why it breaks under pressure.
But here’s the twist: the solution isn’t ditching email for the next shiny tool. It’s turning email into the collaborative system it should’ve been all along.
How Teams Became Prisoners of Their Inboxes
If email feels like a relic from another era, it’s because it is. Outlook and Gmail were designed in the age of fax machines and pagers, when communication was mostly one-to-one, and collaboration took place in conference rooms, not inboxes.
Fast forward to now: teams are remote, cross-functional, and expected to move fast. Yet the majority still rely on email as their operational heartbeat, even though it was never traditionally designed to support shared workflows.
So, what do we do? We improvise. Teams forward messages to each other, paste screenshots into Slack, and create endless message threads titled “FWD: FWD: Re: Important.”
The result? No context. No ownership. No visibility. Just noise.
The Myth of “Just Use Slack”
Slack promised to make communication easier. And in some ways, it has, for fast back-and-forth, watercooler moments, or quick file shares. But it hasn’t replaced email. In fact, it’s made the situation messier.
Now, instead of one inbox, you have four tools open to manage the same conversation.
Email for the client.
Slack for your team.
Notion or Trello for the task.
Google Docs for the notes.
This tool overload creates a cognitive tax: switching contexts, remembering where the last update lives, and hoping nothing falls through the cracks.
The modern knowledge worker doesn’t need another app. They need a better way to work together inside the ones they already use, starting with email.
Rethinking the Inbox as a Team Workspace
Missive took a different path: don’t replace email — refactor it.
What if replying to a client could also include private team chat, right next to the message? What if assigning a teammate to respond was as simple as typing @ + their name in the thread? What if you could manage internal conversations and client responses in the same space, without having to bounce between tabs?
This isn’t a dream scenario. It’s how Missive functions: letting teams collaborate directly inside their inbox, with tools that feel natural but powerful: shared inboxes, internal comments, conversation assignments, and built-in task management.
There’s no clunky interface or steep learning curve. It looks and feels like email, just finally adapted to the way modern teams actually operate.
Built With Constraints, Not Chaos
Missive’s story is as thoughtful as its product. The company has been entirely bootstrapped from the beginning; no VC cash, no aggressive scaling, no growth-at-all-costs playbook. Instead, it focused on product depth and real customer feedback.
This lean, patient approach allowed the team to resist the temptation of flashy features and instead double down on what small businesses actually needed: a clean, reliable way to collaborate around email without drowning in it.
And while its competitors burn through ad budgets and chase enterprise accounts, Missive quietly scaled to $8M in ARR with just 14 team members — because its product sticks.
Most customers didn’t discover Missive first. They found it after getting burned by clunky platforms, abrupt pricing changes, or convoluted workflows. Missive didn’t win their attention with a campaign; it earned their trust by making their inboxes work better.
Simplicity Wins In A World of SaaS Overload
As the workplace becomes more remote, more asynchronous, and more dependent on digital communication, the pressure on email will only increase.
But the answer isn’t another dashboard. It’s designing better systems inside the ones we already rely on.
Missive didn’t try to reinvent communication. It simply made email work the way it should have all along, collaboratively.
And in a world where simplicity is increasingly a luxury, that might be the smartest upgrade a team can make.
Byline: Mary Sahagun
