9 ms·

Front (YC S14) Raises $66M

133 points by julien_c 9y ago

fs111 9y ago
Why do they raise so much money if they do not need it?
- doctorcroc 9y ago
  Insurance against a downturn maybe? Depends on the terms of the round I suppose.
- patothon 9y ago
  Sometimes you need capital to explore new growth opportunities while keeping your edge in your core business. Especially since they are going to hire mostly in R&D, seems like they have some product lines they want to build as fast as possible. Seems money in this case, will basically not be used to maintain current business, but to grow it faster.
- tommoor 9y ago
  The best time to raise money is when you don't NEED it ;)
jonwachob91 9y ago
Possible acquisition spree coming soon... Polymail, MailTime, Slidemail, Taskpipes, and maybe a few other YC companies look like they have email technology that could help replace Outlook. Any others?
- ProAm 9y ago
  Im surprised at the push to overturn Outlook. For business it's useful and has a lot of features that dont cause issue. If anything I could see more opportunity to replace Gmail.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Indeed. I use the latest version of Outlook at a large enterprise, and I prefer it to Slack and Gmail UX.
strictnein 9y ago
To misquote The Princess Bride: > You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - the most famous of which is "never go head to head with Microsoft Outlook"
- imglorp 9y ago
  I think the key there is not outlook but all its friends that get dragged along like cobwebs. First there's Exchange, then AD, then the whole CALs thing, then you need spam and malware filtering, then there's archiving and backups, and don't even talk about client compatibility and upgrading all the desktops and _THEIR_ licenses. Or you skip all that and pay the other hand with 365 seats. So it's not just Outlook, because it's designed to be not just Outlook.
  - fleitz 9y ago
    Exactly, and the corporate IT dept is railing against it because it means a loss of budget and having to fire all the people who maintain the morass. Company's on 365 would actually probably be an easier target.
- joejerryronnie 9y ago
  "But only slightly less well known is this: Never take $66 million from a VC when $15 million will do!" Just kidding and congrats! I would take every cent, you never know what kind of funding your competitors might receive. Just try to remain focused and remember to never go full Duplan.
crsv 9y ago
Best of luck to them. Written communication and digital communication in general is a wide open market. I think the Slacks, Discords, Gsuites of the world will all be players in this market. Cracking large enterprise will be where the money is made, but you can't help but wonder if the growing vastness of service providers will introduce a certain race to the bottom effect. At a 66MM raise, they're probably valued somewhere around 350~450MM, so they'd need to roll in 115M ARR to be worthy of a 4X topline multiple of that valuation. That's a lot of growth required in a hyper competitive saturated market with a super dominant player that's not exactly planning to stop fighting. Interesting bet to take.
debt 9y ago
It's crazy how far we've come but things like email/voice/video conferencing somehow are still so essential yet completely broken. But then have we come that far if those things are still broken? idk but good job Front!
- curiousDog 9y ago
  I wouldn't say they're broken, they're bloated. When you build something that has to fit the multitude of Fortune 500 requirements, localize to 200 countries, you'll end up with a lot of complexity that is unnecessary to most users.
Analemma_ 9y ago
You can’t just “replace Outlook”, you need to replace Office 365, which is a much steeper hill to climb.
- longerthoughts 9y ago
  I was thinking this as well. If they're fully focused on email right now their best case outcomes are getting acquired by somebody who offers a full suite (email, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.), or using email as their proof of concept to raise more money and expand their offerings.
horsecaptin 9y ago
Front's current scope and future scope are going to have a big fight and destroy the company.
CPLX 9y ago
Does anyone have feedback on the product itself? I'm an old person, and still use Outlook for Mac as my main email program, though I keep webmail (Google Apps) open at all times for searching mail. I'm still a hardcore believer in standalone desktop apps for email, and I'm not particularly excited about Outlook, and I have a busy office full of people, so this is interesting. Is it any good? Who is it ideal for?
- qubex 9y ago
  I’m not an aged codger but beyond that I agree with you wholeheartedly: I expect, nay demand, desktop and mobile native applications for email in particular, and just about anything in general. All this “go through a browser” stuff with its lack of locata storage, overlaid interfaces (browser chrome above web-designer's UI), and muli-tasking metaphor breaking (switch between apps to go to browser, and then select the tab you want) drives me insane. Yes, it's a uniform platform and it needs to exist in case somebody wants to access through the web, but they shouldn't be forced to use only the web-interface.
Cenk 9y ago
We used Front at Wheelys (YC S15), and I consider it absolutely essential for good email teamwork. Definitely 10x’d our email and support productivity. Congrats on raising such a huge round, Mathilde! I just wish they had the front.com domain, everyone around the office always called the product "Front App" because their domain is frontapp.com
- watty 9y ago
  Your email and support productivity was increased 10x, really?
  - Cenk 9y ago
    Definitely. Replying to emails as a team, handing off customers, reviewing contracts, all sorts of team discussions - it was happening all over the place before, and giving us a central place to go where conversations about an email thread can take place right underneath the thread was fantastic. You go from getting a reply from your boss about an email to actually sending that info to the customer in a matter of seconds.
    - rubidium 9y ago
      So you cut your staff by 90%? Or did you devote their time to other activities?
      - Cenk 9y ago
        Neither – we grew our customers by 10x and didn’t hire any more support people.
        matte_black 9y ago
        Approximately what was your original rate of customer acquisition and how large are the customers?
        9y ago
TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
Heh. I hope they can make a dent. I was driving my son somewhere, and pulled up to a light on the left side of a police cruiser. In it, there was a laptop mounted high in the passenger area, and the officer was clicking on Outlook. This caused me to launch into a several-minute-long tirade about how awful the interface is. Buttons EVERYwhere. DOZENS of pages of options. USELESS search. I'm content with Mail on my MacBook, but Outlook on my work lap-concrete-block is a daily bane. Front's product looks heavenly. My guess is that if one of these sorts of startups starts making any serious inroads against Microsoft, they'll release an "Outlook Lite" to stifle the threat. Of course, this simplified version will support plugins, and the world will wind up making enough "mods" to make Outlook "Lite" just as heavy as the original. (Just like what's happening with VS Code.) But it will be enough to hamper serious competition. And, if they do, then we'll have months of posts on here about how Microsoft is "new," and "adaptive," and "enlightened," etc., et. al., ad nauseam.
- jbob2000 9y ago
  They already have "Outlook lite", it's called the Outlook Web App and it has what you want. I don't think Microsoft would be threatened by this at all. Nobody chooses to use Outlook, it's what you get if you work for a big corporation or if you purchase Office 365. It's not a standalone product, I can't just use Outlook. I think it's not doing Front any favours to compare themselves to Outlook. Outlook is an enterprise product, my company has customized the crap out of it and it's hooked up to our global credential/access system. That's not even close to what Front is offering (a better multi-inbox tool).
  - rubidium 9y ago
    Seconding the outlook web interface. It's not perfect, but it's pretty dang good. That plus all else you get with office 365 and I don't think anyone is going to put a serious dent in Microsoft's enterprise office dominance for quite some time.
agopaul 9y ago
It seems they're seeing their customer adopting Front for more than a "simple" shared inbox and so they're grasping the opportunity to expand the scope of the product and reach its untapped potential as a "communication hub" for companies. Good for them. Even though this is David vs Goliath kind of situation, it's more than fair to give it a shot
deleted 9y ago
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dingo_bat 9y ago
Android app screenshot looks very similar to Outlook. The main problem with Outlook is the desktop app. Everything else is good enough for me.
madenine 9y ago
Yikes. At ~60/u/mo for enterprise email & collaboration I would drop the "Replace Microsoft Outlook" line... unless you want people to start looking at what else they get beyond Outlook/Skype for Business from Microsoft for $20-$35/u/mo (E3 or E5 O365 license).
- x0x0 9y ago
  We pay for office365 basically because Excel has no serious alternatives. Founders use Powerpoint. And that's about it. Also, Microsoft have gotten stupid and lazy with Office. Each app eats 2 gig disk, all from non-shared Resources/Fonts/crap. Users who just clicked default install ended up with 9g of disk space gone. Why is this a big deal? Apple's extortionate pricing on mbp disks and the inability to upgrade them for less than the price of an entire new computer. There's a hacky way to fix this. https://aaronweb.net/blog/2016/01/office-2016-mac-decrease-disk-use/ https://aaronweb.net/blog/2016/01/office-2016-mac-decrease-d...
  - puranjay 9y ago
    For basic spreadsheets, I've pretty much switched over to Google Sheets. Haven't touched Word in nearly two years and couldn't be happier about it
    - rubidium 9y ago
      I'm glad it works for you. I wish it did for me. Most of enterprise needs a bit more that Google sheets.
      - Nition 9y ago
        LibreOffice Calc?
    - Fifer82 9y ago
      I hate Google Sheets. Pasting X lines cause it to complain a minute later that "You don't have permission, and changes might be lost". Ok fair enough... I will just import the whole file... "the file is too big please delete some columns or rows". We aren't talking gigabytes of data. I can't wait for these shitty cloud services to be replaced with something a bit more capable than pre 1988, whatever form that takes.
chewyland 9y ago
Sorry for my low quality post but Outlook is just fine. It's crappy, crashy and bloated...but it's just fine. This outfit and app won't exist 365 days from now, I guarantee it.
- gcbw2 9y ago
  This comment highlights the problem they will have to solve. People who want to replace outlook, already did. ages ago. They have slack, jira, jive, gmail, etc, etc, etc, etc. People who won't replace outlook, won't replace outlook.
- jagger27 9y ago
  Yeah, I'm willing to take the over on that bet. Front is far more than a replacement for Outlook: it's an integrated service with email, chat channels, sales/support management, etc. Did you not read the headline? YC Summer 2014 and just raised $66M. They're doing fine.
- chaostheory 9y ago
  They moved to a different contintent and they've survived for 4 years now. They have good leadership. I'm going to bet that they'll be around whether or not their product changes.
- seem_2211 9y ago
  Good thing they have 9 years of burn in the bank right?
- jvagner 9y ago
  They've already been around for years. $66M is a lot of runway.
- codezero 9y ago
  My team has used Front for three years.
orliesaurus 9y ago
I remember this product from the early inception. If anyone was in London back in 2014 - Front was even pitched at the Don't Pitch Me Bro event. Having used Front in the early days it was a breath of fresh air. Being able to handle support/sales inboxes, as a team, like a boss! I haven't used Front since 2015, but I wish the best of luck to everyone involved - not sure about that replace Outlook, more like get acquired by a big co that works in support-first with heavy email workflows. (zendesk and all the alternatives used by big telcos etc )
0xffff2 9y ago
Does it have calendar functionality? Outlook is at least as much a calendar application as it is an email application for me. I don't see any evidence of calendars in the article's screenshots.
kylecordes 9y ago
We use this product, and it is excellent. It is currently a collaborative team inbox with multichannel capability. Each person here who communicates with the outside world the company's behalf, can log into one place, and jointly be responsible for an incoming flow (and conversations) of email plus various social channels. (Plus website "chat", although that has some rough edges for now.) It also doesn't do a great job of handling people's individual email, and it will be nice to have individual email more fully integrated with the collaborative team in box concept. But. From the amount of the raise and the interview comments, it sounds like the product is headed elsewhere. Like it might loose focus on collaborative team and box features, and instead grow into (yet another) general purpose well-implemented email application, which then gets bought by one of the larger companies, then shut down, and then 10% of the features reappear a year later in the larger company's product. This would be a great outcome for the Front team, but not for Front customers. (For those here that are questioning the price, the price isn't bad considering it typically would apply only to the smaller set of people in the company handling customer facing email, and it provides a bunch of value for that use.)
- x0x0 9y ago
  I learned about Front from this thread and I'm going to try it this week. Shared inboxes are a giant pita. Hopefully Front don't get distracted.
  - mathouc 9y ago
    We won't I promise.
hi123456 9y ago
Google wave
cleeus 9y ago
So they want to build seamless interop with MS Exchange including all calendar features, oh and compat with that plugin the workers' council really needs? ... let the investor money burn ...
- john_moscow 9y ago
  They are likely betting on non-technical methods of getting acquired by Microsoft at a premium.
ssaunier_ 9y ago
We have been using Front since 2014 at Le Wagon. The goal was to be able to handle our contact@lewagon.com inbound email as a team (3 seats in 2014, 7 now). I considered Zendesk but it felt a bit too overkill for our usage. You can view Front as a shared Gmail Inbox where you can assign messages to teammates and have private discussions on top of email threads. They recently added Front Chat which we used to replace the Intercom Chat on https://www.lewagon.com https://www.lewagon.com - This way the team only uses one tool (Front) to handle incoming chats or emails. We've been a customers for 3+ years and are really happy! Congrats on the Series B!
kwindla 9y ago
We use Front and it's great. Mathilde Collin is a super-impressive founder. She spoke at one of the Tuesday night dinners when we were in YC.
codezero 9y ago
I’ve used front at Heap for about three years. I’ve been extremely happy with their direction over the years. It started as a seemingly simple shared inbox. What attracted me also was the hot key setup was the same as gmail. This made switching from a rather hardcore gmail config to Front really easy. At the time I predicted we’d outgrow it when we hit 10 people but we haven’t yet and the thing that will likely cause us to outgrow it are our customers. The main thing that Front is missing for me, and it’s ok if they don’t service my specific needs, is a lack of ability to easily automate things based on information in either: our webapp, or our salesforce accounts/opportunities. Being able to route conversations automatically based on external stuff we don’t have in front yet is becoming essential. In fairness, if we had the resources we could implement a lot of this ourselves with their API, so it’s not even a very strong complaint against front. The app is electron I believe, but it’s bloody fast. I care about my teams productivity and happiness a lot more than bells and whistles and Front is a pleasure to use day in and day out. I’ve sent something like 30000 emails in the past three years with Front (I know because Front also provides decent analytics!) and have never been frustrated because of Front. The same was not true for Zendesk, Desk, Helpscout, etc...
- ericcholis 9y ago
  Thanks for this high-level overview. I'm evaluating Front vs similar apps in the space. I think the big value add for Front is that it augments service related email, whereas the others like Zendesk replaces it.
  - codezero 9y ago
    If you want to chat more about this let me know.
deleted 9y ago
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mathouc 9y ago
I’m Mathilde, CEO and co-founder of Front. To give more context about our shared inbox, we started by trying to solve the pain points around responding together to group emails like contact@ info@. Email isn’t collaborative; it’s unclear who is supposed to respond to a group email, forwarding/reply all/CCs are messy, and you can’t even internally discussion an email in the inbox. But, it’s still the main communication tool for businesses, so that’s why we’re tackling the team email inbox problem first. We expanded Front for multi-channel use (live chat, SMS, Facebook, Twitter) because even more teams (customer support, success, operations, marketing, etc) need a centralized communication tool that brings all their emails, channels, apps, messages into one place. It’s been interesting to see the many new use cases that we now support as a result of this change. Ultimately, our longer term vision for Front is to create a platform that helps to break down the silos between teams that are using various specialized tools/apps and make collaboration easier within an entire company. And I think we can use the inbox to be that central platform. But, we’ve got a long way to get there and things to consider over time (like our pricing). You can see our public roadmap on Trello (http://frontapp.com/roadmap http://frontapp.com/roadmap) and submit your ideas to help us get there. I wrote some thoughts on my vision on Medium if you’re interested: https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/to-new-beginnings-announcing-our-series-b-fcbc3392dc81 https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/to-new-beginnings-announc...
- robhunter 9y ago
  Front is probably the most valuable SaaS tool our team has. When I told our CS team about the Series B, they said “Good. They deserve it. We would cry without it.” Front was transformational for our CS department and I would highly recommend it to everyone.
iamleppert 9y ago
Can it even dye my eyes to match my gown? Jolly good e-mail client!
ramoq 9y ago
Front is probably doing 7MM ARR (I highly doubt more than that)
- austenallred 9y ago
  ...what is this estimate based on?
  - zbruhnke 9y ago
    I'm not the original poster of this but its both possible and (probably) unlikely - Article says they have 2500 customers - so if their average price per user was $25 and their average customer had 10 users that would be ~7.5MM ARR - this is obviously just some back of the napkin math
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
newman8r 9y ago
people seemed lukewarm on the original ShowHN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869726) - I guess the lesson is to not get too discouraged if initial feedback on a project isn't as amazing as hoped

133 points by julien_c 9y ago

fs111 9y ago

Why do they raise so much money if they do not need it?

doctorcroc 9y ago
Insurance against a downturn maybe? Depends on the terms of the round I suppose.
patothon 9y ago
Sometimes you need capital to explore new growth opportunities while keeping your edge in your core business. Especially since they are going to hire mostly in R&D, seems like they have some product lines they want to build as fast as possible. Seems money in this case, will basically not be used to maintain current business, but to grow it faster.
tommoor 9y ago
The best time to raise money is when you don't NEED it ;)

jonwachob91 9y ago

Possible acquisition spree coming soon... Polymail, MailTime, Slidemail, Taskpipes, and maybe a few other YC companies look like they have email technology that could help replace Outlook. Any others?

ProAm 9y ago
Im surprised at the push to overturn Outlook. For business it's useful and has a lot of features that dont cause issue. If anything I could see more opportunity to replace Gmail.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Indeed. I use the latest version of Outlook at a large enterprise, and I prefer it to Slack and Gmail UX.

strictnein 9y ago

To misquote The Princess Bride: > You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - the most famous of which is "never go head to head with Microsoft Outlook"

imglorp 9y ago
I think the key there is not outlook but all its friends that get dragged along like cobwebs. First there's Exchange, then AD, then the whole CALs thing, then you need spam and malware filtering, then there's archiving and backups, and don't even talk about client compatibility and upgrading all the desktops and _THEIR_ licenses. Or you skip all that and pay the other hand with 365 seats. So it's not just Outlook, because it's designed to be not just Outlook.
- fleitz 9y ago
  Exactly, and the corporate IT dept is railing against it because it means a loss of budget and having to fire all the people who maintain the morass. Company's on 365 would actually probably be an easier target.
joejerryronnie 9y ago
"But only slightly less well known is this: Never take $66 million from a VC when $15 million will do!" Just kidding and congrats! I would take every cent, you never know what kind of funding your competitors might receive. Just try to remain focused and remember to never go full Duplan.

crsv 9y ago

Best of luck to them. Written communication and digital communication in general is a wide open market. I think the Slacks, Discords, Gsuites of the world will all be players in this market. Cracking large enterprise will be where the money is made, but you can't help but wonder if the growing vastness of service providers will introduce a certain race to the bottom effect. At a 66MM raise, they're probably valued somewhere around 350~450MM, so they'd need to roll in 115M ARR to be worthy of a 4X topline multiple of that valuation. That's a lot of growth required in a hyper competitive saturated market with a super dominant player that's not exactly planning to stop fighting. Interesting bet to take.

debt 9y ago

It's crazy how far we've come but things like email/voice/video conferencing somehow are still so essential yet completely broken. But then have we come that far if those things are still broken? idk but good job Front!

curiousDog 9y ago
I wouldn't say they're broken, they're bloated. When you build something that has to fit the multitude of Fortune 500 requirements, localize to 200 countries, you'll end up with a lot of complexity that is unnecessary to most users.

Analemma_ 9y ago

You can’t just “replace Outlook”, you need to replace Office 365, which is a much steeper hill to climb.

longerthoughts 9y ago
I was thinking this as well. If they're fully focused on email right now their best case outcomes are getting acquired by somebody who offers a full suite (email, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.), or using email as their proof of concept to raise more money and expand their offerings.

horsecaptin 9y ago

Front's current scope and future scope are going to have a big fight and destroy the company.

CPLX 9y ago

Does anyone have feedback on the product itself? I'm an old person, and still use Outlook for Mac as my main email program, though I keep webmail (Google Apps) open at all times for searching mail. I'm still a hardcore believer in standalone desktop apps for email, and I'm not particularly excited about Outlook, and I have a busy office full of people, so this is interesting. Is it any good? Who is it ideal for?

qubex 9y ago
I’m not an aged codger but beyond that I agree with you wholeheartedly: I expect, nay demand, desktop and mobile native applications for email in particular, and just about anything in general. All this “go through a browser” stuff with its lack of locata storage, overlaid interfaces (browser chrome above web-designer's UI), and muli-tasking metaphor breaking (switch between apps to go to browser, and then select the tab you want) drives me insane. Yes, it's a uniform platform and it needs to exist in case somebody wants to access through the web, but they shouldn't be forced to use only the web-interface.

Cenk 9y ago

We used Front at Wheelys (YC S15), and I consider it absolutely essential for good email teamwork. Definitely 10x’d our email and support productivity. Congrats on raising such a huge round, Mathilde! I just wish they had the front.com domain, everyone around the office always called the product "Front App" because their domain is frontapp.com

watty 9y ago
Your email and support productivity was increased 10x, really?
- Cenk 9y ago
  Definitely. Replying to emails as a team, handing off customers, reviewing contracts, all sorts of team discussions - it was happening all over the place before, and giving us a central place to go where conversations about an email thread can take place right underneath the thread was fantastic. You go from getting a reply from your boss about an email to actually sending that info to the customer in a matter of seconds.
  - rubidium 9y ago
    So you cut your staff by 90%? Or did you devote their time to other activities?
    - Cenk 9y ago
      Neither – we grew our customers by 10x and didn’t hire any more support people.
      - matte_black 9y ago
        Approximately what was your original rate of customer acquisition and how large are the customers?
        9y ago

TheRealDunkirk 9y ago

Heh. I hope they can make a dent. I was driving my son somewhere, and pulled up to a light on the left side of a police cruiser. In it, there was a laptop mounted high in the passenger area, and the officer was clicking on Outlook. This caused me to launch into a several-minute-long tirade about how awful the interface is. Buttons EVERYwhere. DOZENS of pages of options. USELESS search. I'm content with Mail on my MacBook, but Outlook on my work lap-concrete-block is a daily bane. Front's product looks heavenly. My guess is that if one of these sorts of startups starts making any serious inroads against Microsoft, they'll release an "Outlook Lite" to stifle the threat. Of course, this simplified version will support plugins, and the world will wind up making enough "mods" to make Outlook "Lite" just as heavy as the original. (Just like what's happening with VS Code.) But it will be enough to hamper serious competition. And, if they do, then we'll have months of posts on here about how Microsoft is "new," and "adaptive," and "enlightened," etc., et. al., ad nauseam.

jbob2000 9y ago
They already have "Outlook lite", it's called the Outlook Web App and it has what you want. I don't think Microsoft would be threatened by this at all. Nobody chooses to use Outlook, it's what you get if you work for a big corporation or if you purchase Office 365. It's not a standalone product, I can't just use Outlook. I think it's not doing Front any favours to compare themselves to Outlook. Outlook is an enterprise product, my company has customized the crap out of it and it's hooked up to our global credential/access system. That's not even close to what Front is offering (a better multi-inbox tool).
- rubidium 9y ago
  Seconding the outlook web interface. It's not perfect, but it's pretty dang good. That plus all else you get with office 365 and I don't think anyone is going to put a serious dent in Microsoft's enterprise office dominance for quite some time.

agopaul 9y ago

It seems they're seeing their customer adopting Front for more than a "simple" shared inbox and so they're grasping the opportunity to expand the scope of the product and reach its untapped potential as a "communication hub" for companies. Good for them. Even though this is David vs Goliath kind of situation, it's more than fair to give it a shot

deleted 9y ago

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dingo_bat 9y ago

Android app screenshot looks very similar to Outlook. The main problem with Outlook is the desktop app. Everything else is good enough for me.

madenine 9y ago

Yikes. At ~60/u/mo for enterprise email & collaboration I would drop the "Replace Microsoft Outlook" line... unless you want people to start looking at what else they get beyond Outlook/Skype for Business from Microsoft for $20-$35/u/mo (E3 or E5 O365 license).

x0x0 9y ago
We pay for office365 basically because Excel has no serious alternatives. Founders use Powerpoint. And that's about it. Also, Microsoft have gotten stupid and lazy with Office. Each app eats 2 gig disk, all from non-shared Resources/Fonts/crap. Users who just clicked default install ended up with 9g of disk space gone. Why is this a big deal? Apple's extortionate pricing on mbp disks and the inability to upgrade them for less than the price of an entire new computer. There's a hacky way to fix this. https://aaronweb.net/blog/2016/01/office-2016-mac-decrease-disk-use/ https://aaronweb.net/blog/2016/01/office-2016-mac-decrease-d...
- puranjay 9y ago
  For basic spreadsheets, I've pretty much switched over to Google Sheets. Haven't touched Word in nearly two years and couldn't be happier about it
  - rubidium 9y ago
    I'm glad it works for you. I wish it did for me. Most of enterprise needs a bit more that Google sheets.
    - Nition 9y ago
      LibreOffice Calc?
  - Fifer82 9y ago
    I hate Google Sheets. Pasting X lines cause it to complain a minute later that "You don't have permission, and changes might be lost". Ok fair enough... I will just import the whole file... "the file is too big please delete some columns or rows". We aren't talking gigabytes of data. I can't wait for these shitty cloud services to be replaced with something a bit more capable than pre 1988, whatever form that takes.

chewyland 9y ago

Sorry for my low quality post but Outlook is just fine. It's crappy, crashy and bloated...but it's just fine. This outfit and app won't exist 365 days from now, I guarantee it.

gcbw2 9y ago
This comment highlights the problem they will have to solve. People who want to replace outlook, already did. ages ago. They have slack, jira, jive, gmail, etc, etc, etc, etc. People who won't replace outlook, won't replace outlook.
jagger27 9y ago
Yeah, I'm willing to take the over on that bet. Front is far more than a replacement for Outlook: it's an integrated service with email, chat channels, sales/support management, etc. Did you not read the headline? YC Summer 2014 and just raised $66M. They're doing fine.
chaostheory 9y ago
They moved to a different contintent and they've survived for 4 years now. They have good leadership. I'm going to bet that they'll be around whether or not their product changes.
seem_2211 9y ago
Good thing they have 9 years of burn in the bank right?
jvagner 9y ago
They've already been around for years. $66M is a lot of runway.
codezero 9y ago
My team has used Front for three years.

orliesaurus 9y ago

I remember this product from the early inception. If anyone was in London back in 2014 - Front was even pitched at the Don't Pitch Me Bro event. Having used Front in the early days it was a breath of fresh air. Being able to handle support/sales inboxes, as a team, like a boss! I haven't used Front since 2015, but I wish the best of luck to everyone involved - not sure about that replace Outlook, more like get acquired by a big co that works in support-first with heavy email workflows. (zendesk and all the alternatives used by big telcos etc )

0xffff2 9y ago

Does it have calendar functionality? Outlook is at least as much a calendar application as it is an email application for me. I don't see any evidence of calendars in the article's screenshots.

kylecordes 9y ago

We use this product, and it is excellent. It is currently a collaborative team inbox with multichannel capability. Each person here who communicates with the outside world the company's behalf, can log into one place, and jointly be responsible for an incoming flow (and conversations) of email plus various social channels. (Plus website "chat", although that has some rough edges for now.) It also doesn't do a great job of handling people's individual email, and it will be nice to have individual email more fully integrated with the collaborative team in box concept. But. From the amount of the raise and the interview comments, it sounds like the product is headed elsewhere. Like it might loose focus on collaborative team and box features, and instead grow into (yet another) general purpose well-implemented email application, which then gets bought by one of the larger companies, then shut down, and then 10% of the features reappear a year later in the larger company's product. This would be a great outcome for the Front team, but not for Front customers. (For those here that are questioning the price, the price isn't bad considering it typically would apply only to the smaller set of people in the company handling customer facing email, and it provides a bunch of value for that use.)

x0x0 9y ago
I learned about Front from this thread and I'm going to try it this week. Shared inboxes are a giant pita. Hopefully Front don't get distracted.
- mathouc 9y ago
  We won't I promise.

hi123456 9y ago

Google wave

cleeus 9y ago

So they want to build seamless interop with MS Exchange including all calendar features, oh and compat with that plugin the workers' council really needs? ... let the investor money burn ...

john_moscow 9y ago
They are likely betting on non-technical methods of getting acquired by Microsoft at a premium.

ssaunier_ 9y ago

We have been using Front since 2014 at Le Wagon. The goal was to be able to handle our contact@lewagon.com inbound email as a team (3 seats in 2014, 7 now). I considered Zendesk but it felt a bit too overkill for our usage. You can view Front as a shared Gmail Inbox where you can assign messages to teammates and have private discussions on top of email threads. They recently added Front Chat which we used to replace the Intercom Chat on https://www.lewagon.com https://www.lewagon.com - This way the team only uses one tool (Front) to handle incoming chats or emails. We've been a customers for 3+ years and are really happy! Congrats on the Series B!

kwindla 9y ago

We use Front and it's great. Mathilde Collin is a super-impressive founder. She spoke at one of the Tuesday night dinners when we were in YC.

codezero 9y ago

I’ve used front at Heap for about three years. I’ve been extremely happy with their direction over the years. It started as a seemingly simple shared inbox. What attracted me also was the hot key setup was the same as gmail. This made switching from a rather hardcore gmail config to Front really easy. At the time I predicted we’d outgrow it when we hit 10 people but we haven’t yet and the thing that will likely cause us to outgrow it are our customers. The main thing that Front is missing for me, and it’s ok if they don’t service my specific needs, is a lack of ability to easily automate things based on information in either: our webapp, or our salesforce accounts/opportunities. Being able to route conversations automatically based on external stuff we don’t have in front yet is becoming essential. In fairness, if we had the resources we could implement a lot of this ourselves with their API, so it’s not even a very strong complaint against front. The app is electron I believe, but it’s bloody fast. I care about my teams productivity and happiness a lot more than bells and whistles and Front is a pleasure to use day in and day out. I’ve sent something like 30000 emails in the past three years with Front (I know because Front also provides decent analytics!) and have never been frustrated because of Front. The same was not true for Zendesk, Desk, Helpscout, etc...

ericcholis 9y ago
Thanks for this high-level overview. I'm evaluating Front vs similar apps in the space. I think the big value add for Front is that it augments service related email, whereas the others like Zendesk replaces it.
- codezero 9y ago
  If you want to chat more about this let me know.

deleted 9y ago

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mathouc 9y ago

I’m Mathilde, CEO and co-founder of Front. To give more context about our shared inbox, we started by trying to solve the pain points around responding together to group emails like contact@ info@. Email isn’t collaborative; it’s unclear who is supposed to respond to a group email, forwarding/reply all/CCs are messy, and you can’t even internally discussion an email in the inbox. But, it’s still the main communication tool for businesses, so that’s why we’re tackling the team email inbox problem first. We expanded Front for multi-channel use (live chat, SMS, Facebook, Twitter) because even more teams (customer support, success, operations, marketing, etc) need a centralized communication tool that brings all their emails, channels, apps, messages into one place. It’s been interesting to see the many new use cases that we now support as a result of this change. Ultimately, our longer term vision for Front is to create a platform that helps to break down the silos between teams that are using various specialized tools/apps and make collaboration easier within an entire company. And I think we can use the inbox to be that central platform. But, we’ve got a long way to get there and things to consider over time (like our pricing). You can see our public roadmap on Trello (http://frontapp.com/roadmap http://frontapp.com/roadmap) and submit your ideas to help us get there. I wrote some thoughts on my vision on Medium if you’re interested: https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/to-new-beginnings-announcing-our-series-b-fcbc3392dc81 https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/to-new-beginnings-announc...

robhunter 9y ago
Front is probably the most valuable SaaS tool our team has. When I told our CS team about the Series B, they said “Good. They deserve it. We would cry without it.” Front was transformational for our CS department and I would highly recommend it to everyone.

iamleppert 9y ago

Can it even dye my eyes to match my gown? Jolly good e-mail client!

ramoq 9y ago

Front is probably doing 7MM ARR (I highly doubt more than that)

austenallred 9y ago
...what is this estimate based on?
- zbruhnke 9y ago
  I'm not the original poster of this but its both possible and (probably) unlikely - Article says they have 2500 customers - so if their average price per user was $25 and their average customer had 10 users that would be ~7.5MM ARR - this is obviously just some back of the napkin math
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

newman8r 9y ago

people seemed lukewarm on the original ShowHN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869726) - I guess the lesson is to not get too discouraged if initial feedback on a project isn't as amazing as hoped