2025 Unified Inbox
Led 0-to-1 design of Roofr's Unified Inbox. One hub for email and SMS across the platform, with a global view and per-job threads. Shipped as a paid add-on that became a revenue and stickiness driver.
Case highlights
0 → 259
Paid SMS adoption
companies on the paid SMS add-on by Apr 2026 (launched May 2025)
3.59%
Active-team conversion
of active CRM companies on the paid SMS add-on
11.24%
Gmail integration
of all active CRM companies
After the CRM MVP shipped, a pattern emerged in customer interviews: contractors needed both a daily macro view of communications and a job-scoped micro view for project context. Competitors didn’t offer a unified email and texting hub, and kept the platforms separate.
I led 0-to-1 design of Roofr’s Unified Inbox end-to-end. The system unifies email and SMS across two planes: a global inbox and a job-scoped thread view. Outbound messaging sends from contractor-owned email addresses and phone numbers, which helps establish trust. The SMS functionality was shipped as a texting addon, and the Gmail integration was added to the Elite plan.
- Contractors couldn’t track inbound communications across channels. Operational inefficiencies, missed customer touchpoints, lost jobs.
- Job-level communication history was fragmented across emails, texts, notes, etc. Context evaporated during project progression and handoffs.
- Roofr-branded communications degraded contractor credibility with their customers. Contractors actively avoided the feature previously because of it.
- Lack of integrated comms tooling was a hard blocker during enterprise sales conversations.
A unified inbox was the natural candidate for increasing revenue and adoption: high-value, high-frequency, and revenue-bearing through a texting add-on. The enterprise feedback was also clear; big contractors wouldn’t adopt a CRM without a real comms hub.
Launch
Adoption + setup
- 01 Adoption rate of Gmail integration setup.
- 02 Messages sent per team per month.
- 03 Churn reduction among teams that completed integration.
- 04 Phone-number application volume on the paid SMS add-on.
Strategy
Revenue + enterprise unblock
- 01 Revenue from the paid texting add-on subscription.
- 02 Enterprise deal closure rate improvement.
- 03 Eliminate the 'no real comms hub' sales objection.
- 04 Establish a foundation for follow-up comms feature expansion.
- Compliance for texting is manual at launch. Carrier registration and verification can’t be fully automated on day one. UX had to make manual setup feel intentional.
- Message-volume performance. The original CRM architecture wasn’t sized for conversation history at scale. Surfaced technical debt that required UI-side optimization and BE rework.
- Cross-channel rendering inside a single thread. Email and SMS behave differently (length, attachments, metadata). Had to feel like one unified inbox.
- Sender-identity boundary. Outbound from contractor-owned addresses and numbers, not Roofr-branded.
- Global send component had unexpected engineering complexity. Reconciling context-free sends (from the global inbox) with context-bound sends (from inside a job) strained the data model.
Customer interviews surfaced the macro / micro split that anchored the IA. Contractors needed both a daily overview and job-specific threads. Operations members triage from the global inbox, whereas job managers drop into individual threads to handle the specific project.
Competitive analysis: Construction software focused on templates for email, mainly a basic sending form on a job. Mapping the gap confirmed the differentiation opportunity: a unified comms hub as a tiered feature.
The dual-plane IA. Macro (global inbox) sets up operational triage; micro (job-scoped thread) sets up deep project context.
Two views of the micro plane: filtered thread inside a job, and the surrounding job context the hub surfaces alongside the conversation.
The global-send composer in two stances: context-free from the inbox, context-bound from inside a job.
The inbox was designed mobile-ready. Ops teams triage on phones between site visits; the IA scales down without losing the macro / micro distinction.
REEL Final walkthrough
The Unified Inbox in production. Macro inbox at the top, click into a job thread for context, send across channels from either plane.
REEL Pitch · job context
Job-detail view with comms inline. Activity log surfaces email events alongside other job actions; Compose lives at the job level.
REEL Pitch · global inbox
Global Communications inbox. Cross-channel message list with thread view and inline reply.
Macro / micro IA split
Global inbox (operational triage) plus job-scoped threads (project context), sharing the same conversation data with separate composers.
Contractor-owned sender identity
Outbound from the contractor’s email and phone number, not Roofr-branded. Required external integration setup but unlocked adoption.
Paid texting tier
Phone number sign up and sending texts came with real costs, so we decided to charge our customers for it.
Manual compliance at launch
Designed the setup flow to feel intentional rather than delay launch waiting on automation.
-
0 → 259
Paid SMS companies
May 2025 launch to Apr 2026. Became a new revenue stream.
-
3.59%
Active-team conversion
Of active CRM companies on the paid SMS add-on.
-
11.24%
Gmail integration rate
Of all active CRM companies running a verified Gmail integration.
-
28.66%
Automation attach
Of Gmail-integrated companies layer proposal / invoice automations on top. Cross-channel attach is the load-bearing pattern: contractors connect inbox, then add automations once the daily comms loop lives in Roofr.
-
300+
Texting DAU
Daily active subscribers on the SMS add-on.
-
Sales unblocked
Common objection removed
The 'no real comms hub' blocker stopped surfacing in conversations after launch.
- Macro + micro is the correct frame for comms in a vertical CRM. The dual-plane IA is portable to any workflow product that needs both a daily-overview and a deep-context view of the same data.
- Credibility-preserving sender identity is a hidden adoption lever. Contractor-owned addresses and numbers cost setup complexity but unlocked the feature’s real value.
- Integrations are always harder than they appear. The complexity during early grooming and ticket prep made it seem like a much easier lift than it actually was.
- If repeating: invest in texting-compliance automation earlier. Manual setup was a known friction point.
Post-launch. The Unified Inbox seeded follow-up comms work (templates, AI drafting, automated routing) without re-architecture.
Deep dive
Curious about the specifics?
Adoption cohorts, revenue pivot data, prototype walkthrough videos, and the internal PRD are available on request during a portfolio review.