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) and submit your ideas to help us get there.
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.
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).
They are expensive, and we'd be paying already had they been closer to 10 mo/user. But it seems they're going the customer service tool route, and this is a pain point businesses are willing to pay for. In this area I'd say their #1 rival is zendesk, which does a better job of justifying their pricing on their site (which had me return to Front for what they do better).
But Front won't be replacing anyone's free web mail at any price point. I can't believe they don't have a free plan.
I'm the co-founder at Missive[1], an email client for teams. Our vision is to become the communication hub for any business, by both replacing email client and chat app.
A lot of people compares us to Front, but we are more focused on the email/chat experience than customer support experience.
Thus our pricing reflects this vision, where we charge ~$8-$12/seat/month.
If you had said you were replacing outlook, I'd be less surprised. You seem more email focused.
Front's front page slogan is "The shared inbox for teams." I'm always puzzled when they attack modern email in their PR. They should just stick to "universal team inbox".
When I see missive, I see "team email with chat." Well, we chat on Discord already, so that's not the pain point.
Front's main appeal to me at least was their multi-channel inbox. Customer support these days is not just email but social media and even texting. It can all be done through email, and even that can all be done through gmail, which is what we're doing now, and what I suspect a lot of people are doing.
But removing inefficiencies in this day to day process immediately cuts costs when you're paying people for this work. Hence zendesk and their no free plan position, except, they're not multi-channel, and I was never impressed by them being on the customer end of a zendesk using company. I'd always think "crutch" when I saw an email from a business that didn't bother to re-brand their zendesk (assuming it's possible, if not, I guess they did well for themselves and my impressions were unimportant).
PS. Your logo reminds me of men's underwear. I thought twice about mentioning it, and I know others would too. Not that I'd hold it against you, but (I do logo design, is my excuse for mentioning it).
> email, chat or mixed of both in a one convenient place.
No, exactly. But you are always at risk of being just another channel. So you need to beat the rest. Or be above them. Or at least consolidate a few.
Front does a better job of marketing themselves as such (not the outlook argument, their inbox argument).
If you could pull in "channels" or have an open API for adding custom channels where users can participate in helping build your catalog, I think that would help.
The beauty of discord is with webhooks. Slack has "integrations" but they needed 1st party support. And I'd use Zapier to bridge the gaps. But most API sets have webhook support. And Discord allows for postings via webhooks. So I have a simple REST webhook processor page that takes incoming webhooks and posts to discord and everything else.
Not that webhooks are your answer, but just an example of a common chat app setup with a drastically better/easier feature set than their major competition.
> Firs time I hear that one. :)
It's the combination of white and the curves. Reminds me of boxer briefs every time. An easy fix would be to sharpen the rounded corners, but it's none of my business.
Either way, I have nothing but respect for you and your business. I wish you only the best ;)
While they have a few similarities, I'm not sure I'd put Zendesk as Front's main rival. They're doing similar things, but approaching them in totally different ways. Front is fully backing the shared inbox, while Zendesk's main messaging is to get away from that concept and move more towards Ticketing for a larger support team.
I agree and disagree. I need ticketing, but I'd prefer Front add it as an option to specific email accounts.
sales@company.com - shared with sales team normal shared inbox
support@company.com - "add ticket option"
first.last@company.com - private email
@company - twitter account
A shared communication hub is a big win. If they could take over some of the internal chat as well - I'd gladly cut them a big fat check. Our helpdesk bill is not cheap. (not zendesk sadly).
I did extensive searching for customer support email solutions. I landed at Front. But, I haven't pulled the trigger yet.
Zen was an easy pass for us, but we arrived at Front because of what they do better than Zen. Consolidation.
But the commonality is that these services always charge more than Todo apps or even chat apps. Even G Suite is cheaper. For some reason Google's team mailbox was a joke. They seem to have every feature of every startup somewhere, but have it suck.
I doubt these guys would be similar in pricing unless they were competing for the same market.
Same with buffer.com. They are a bit pricey too, but they can target businesses that save money with their service. Pockets open immediately when that is part of your value proposition -- cost savings.
Less important for us as b2b/enterprisey, but omni-channel support could potentially allow a tweet to be turned into a ticket associated with a customer... that could be beneficial. Not so much for the day job, but for some of the companies I've been on the board of.
Thanks, make sense. At Missive, we have yet to integrate with Twitter/Facebook... but as you mentioned even if it's less important, it's still a big sale argument for a platform like ours.
The order of priority is probably strongly influenced by the type of company b2b, b2e, b2g, b2c, or marketplace.
As mostly a b2e we have SLAs and reporting requirements to a lot of our customers and automating that, but still capturing/transferring disparate information is just a royal pain.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
"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.
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.)
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
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.
What does the customer see when you reply from Front? e.g. your individual email (youremail@company.com) or a team email (sales@company.com)
Sorry for the basic question -- I couldn't tell from the demo video and the free trial takes some setup. Trying to figure out if this fits existing workflows or would need new workflows to be built around it. Thanks for your help!
Both is possible. You set up separate mailboxes (either team-wide or private) for specific email addresses, and by default you reply from the address they wrote to.
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.
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.
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.
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 - 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!
people seemed lukewarm on the original ShowHN (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
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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 )
Polymail, MailTime, Slidemail, Taskpipes, and maybe a few other YC companies look like they have email technology that could help replace Outlook. Any others?
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.
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 ...
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
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.
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.
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.
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) 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-announc...