
Show HN: Front, Collaborative Email for Sales, Customer Support, Hiring and more - mathouc
http://frontapp.com
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lobster_johnson
Front looks good, but unfortunately it makes the same mistake as some other
apps (Flowdock and SupportFu come to mind): It invents a new email app and
requires that your team members live in this app.

For example, if a customer emails support@example.com, you get an email
notification about the new conversation, but you can't keep the conversation
going solely through your email client. You have to use Front.

This is a dealbreaker, I think. The normal day-to-day interactions — ie.,
responding to mail — that Front handles can, and should, easily be done with
an email client; there is nothing different about Front does that an email
client doesn't do today. People can still use the app, but they shouldn't be
forced to switch.

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mrmch
This is awesome, looking at how we could use it at sendwithus to
replace/augment our current support systems.

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sgdesign
Looks nice! In the same space, there's also Respondly:
[https://respond.ly/](https://respond.ly/)

I've found it hard to pull myself away from Gmail and use these apps though,
old habits are hard to change…

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d0m
There's helpscout that let you reply directly from gmail but still use their
team inbox. However I find it very pricey.

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xtracto
Hello,

This seems like a nice program that we definitely may need in our current
company (we do internet-based loans and use a support@ email which is shared
between several people.

Unfortunately, it is not clear what features your service can provide; what
problems it can solve. I opened an account and played a bit with it but just
couldn't find something that I could show my colleagues to tell them "look, we
_need_ to use this service"

I would recommend showing one of those 2 minute video marketing overviews of
what we can achieve with your service. If you put that in the homepage, it
will be easier for people like me to sell this to other colleagues.

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hengheng
Does anybody have an overview about nice CRM systems for startups and small
companies? I keep feeling overwhelmed whenever I look at this stuff, and
whenever I don't, it takes me five minutes to find essential features lacking.

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aerialfish
We're a small business and we use CapsuleCRM. It took me a long time to find a
simple CRM that did what we needed. Just Google around, there are others that
are made for small businesses.

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randall
We used capsule, but switched to Streak. We found since we live in Gmail, and
it lives in Gmail, it's a really really good fit.

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ElliotH
Landing page wise, a sign up link at the bottom as well as the top would make
a lot of sense. Otherwise there's no call to action when you've read all the
pitch.

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gk1
Also, I'm willing to bet that almost any call-to-action text other than "sign
up" is going to get more clicks. "Sign up" is generic, doesn't say anything
about the benefits of signing up, and simply isn't compelling.

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mglauco
Google Wave?

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mathouc
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKCK16Junz4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKCK16Junz4)
(their video minus that last 10sec)

