
The Founder’s Guide to Discipline: Lessons from Front’s Mathilde Collin - yarapavan
https://firstround.com/review/the-founders-guide-to-discipline-lessons-from-fronts-mathilde-collin
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exabrial
Just switched our office to Front. The discipline in the article is highly
visible in the product. Nowhere in the product do you get a whiff of the
typical job-half-finished-ship-now attitude that pervades SV. Every feature
works as intended. I can't imagine the amount of testing they do, but getting
to this level of quality takes hard work and discipline.

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anitil
I think I'm a bit slow here - what does Front do? Some sort of way as managing
communication between a customer and a business?

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exabrial
A shared inbox. The thing Google doesn't want you to have

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peteretep
So I was interested in trying Front, and it looks like just what I need, but
JESUS, what a terrible way to greet people to their site. The title is
flashing with kind of instant chat, half the page is taken up with "HI!!!!!"
banners. Does this actually convert?!

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chronogram
You’re right that is the most annoying website so far. They’re taking April’s
fools too far.

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ztratar
Maybe I'm missing something...

I see the chat bubble in the bottom right. Pretty standard nowadays. Nothing
uniquely bad about it here.

And that's all that's jumping at me? The rest is the normal website. What else
is annoying?

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peteretep
[https://imgur.com/a/ima8puj](https://imgur.com/a/ima8puj)

Top and bottom seem to be some kind of contextual banner, also the bottom part
keeps changing colour between primary colours. The title of the tab keeps
flashing back and forth. I think the bottom part may be meant to be some kind
of navigation? But it's partially obscured by the chat box, which has no
obvious way to dismiss it.

It has taken significant willpower not to close it down and never come back,
and I am their target customer and in a buying mood.

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arethuza
I don't think they've tested their website design at smaller window sizes -
full screen for me looks fine, but when I reduce the windows size things start
overlapping unpleasantly.

Personally, I'd rather they stopped the transitions while scrolling and keep
it a bit simpler so it resizes properly!

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smu
I have been following this thread all day, hoping for some additional
discussion. It seems that won't happen, too bad. My $0.02:

To quote Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent
perspiration". The article explains Mathilde's approach. I'm impressed with
her rigorousness and consistency. It's a great way to build trust both
internally and externally.

Building something (anything) from scratch to _really_ complete is an exercise
in persistence. Being in the same boat right now, I admire her for what she's
doing and how she's doing it.

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c0ldlimit
Is anyone else impressed by the text-to-speech audio? I could see myself using
this to consume a lot of written content while on my commute. It's mostly very
natural sounding. Does anyone know what tts tech is used here?

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crsv
Firstround shills for their founders like no other. No mention of the
discipline as it relates to profitability, a healthy CAC:LTV, equity
efficiency - but plenty of vanity metrics to go around, naturally amount of
money raised and team size. These VC fluff pieces are increasingly
insufferable PR.

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GraffitiTim
It's insane to refer to this article as a fluff piece. It's a detailed,
transparent, numerical, inside look at how a particular founder runs various
aspects of her business.

It's one of the _least_ fluffy pieces I've seen about a startup.

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valuearb
Is this one of those “great businesses” that’s never turned a profit and will
disappear like a puff of smoke in the next economic downturn?

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ztratar
Read the article.

See where she says "we're default alive" in an email to her company?

That means they were profitable back in 2016. I assume now with extra capital
that might not be the case, but that's the re-invest in the growth strategy, a
la Amazon (which is smart).

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ak39
I think a TLDR here would be:

Discipline, not vision. Habit, not motivation.

(I wonder often whether discipline is another method my brain tricks me to
block out cynicism?)

