
Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs - cissou
https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/22/shared-inbox-startup-front-raises-59-million-round-led-by-other-tech-ceos/
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cm2012
I always find it informative to check a company's fb ads to learn how they
pitch themselves. Front has pretty neat ones:
[https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...](https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=all&country=US&impression_search_field=has_impressions_lifetime&view_all_page_id=488712274602127)

I'd probably test big text on a static image that says, "Make your businesses
email way better" or something like that to get business manager's attention
quicker as people scroll fb.

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stenlix
Curious how you got the search to work in the fb ad library. My queries seem
to just hang there?

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hkhanna
Do you have an adblocker enabled? If so, that may be the issue here.

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1123581321
Interesting product. I can see some value in noting that I’m going to be
responding to a group email or asking someone else to respond.

The shared inboxes seem like a low cost alternative to help desk/support
software and would be likely outgrown quickly by an organization with the
budget for premium email.

Can anyone discuss their usage of it?

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arey_abhishek
We were paying customers for front for a few months in 2018. We quickly
outgrew it because our daily email volume grew from a few hundred to a few
thousand a day. Moved on to Freshdesk which isn't as pretty as Front, but
worked better for higher volume of emails.

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jokull
They charge per seat so it gets expensive if you have lots of people that need
access but are not full time support. That being said we never switched and
are still paying! Good product. Surprised there isn’t more competition. Lots
of SMB’s need this.

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rolleiflex
There is! We do Aether Pro ([https://aether.app](https://aether.app)), which
is like Front, but focused on internal collaboration for engineering and
product teams. We’ve found that it reduces the distraction overhead of
engineering teams by quite a wide margin, because it removes a lot of pressure
from Slack.

In our case what seems to be happening to people who use Aether Pro is that
the important bits of discussion that needs to be preserved go into Aether
with its email-like structured threads, and Slack becomes more of a water-
cooler talk kind of space, which you can now safely check out from.

It personally removed lots of noise from our Riot instance which we use
instead of Slack, for what its worth. Most of the work can happen without
being mutexed into a Slack channel now. In the end, whatever makes your
engineers more productive is what works.

~~~
goatherders
Love Aether. Really good way to manage distractions without missing anything
important.

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deedubaya
I'm a happy paying Front user.

We transitioned to them for support after leaving Intercom. Shared inboxes
work well. I really which they had a chat component that we could use (theirs
is incompatible with pjax/turbolinks enabled sites and they don't intend to
fix it).

Saved replies, snoozing, assignment, and in-thread private chat are the best
features.

~~~
andygcook
HelpScout has similar shared-inboxed software as Front and recently launched a
chat feature that's similar to Intercom. Might be worth checking out.

I'm not affiliated with HelpScout in any way nor am I a customer. Just know of
them because they used to be headquartered in Boston (where I'm from) before
they went distributed.

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deedubaya
Thanks! If we lose interest in Front, I'll take a look.

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jiveturkey
Interesting, because on the surface it's just another ticketing system. From
the screenshot on techcrunch, it does look like it has a compelling UI, but
I'd be hard pressed to think a better UI will be competitive against
entrenched players. Obviously I'd be wrong since they seem to be getting
significant traction.

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jeffshek
[https://firstround.com/review/the-founders-guide-to-
discipli...](https://firstround.com/review/the-founders-guide-to-discipline-
lessons-from-fronts-mathilde-collin/)

A really good podcast about how her strategy on efficient fundraising.

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sebasmurphy
The pricing on some of the higher tier plans looks a little ridiculous. $40
and $79 per user/month O_o.

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goatherders
Really? I think it's one of the better priced SAAS tools out there for what it
does.

