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Front (YC S14) Raises $66M

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Re: Front (YC S14) Raises $66M

#72

Post by mathouc »

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.

I wrote some thoughts on my vision on Medium if you’re interested: https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/to-new-beginnings-announc...

Re: Front (YC S14) Raises $66M

#73

Post by Nition »

rubidium wrote: post #40
puranjay wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm glad it works for you. I wish it did for me. Most of enterprise needs a bit more that Google sheets.

LibreOffice Calc?

Re: Front (YC S14) Raises $66M

#75

Post by joejerryronnie »

strictnein wrote: post #6

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"

"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.

Re: Front (YC S14) Raises $66M

#76

Post by robhunter »

mathouc wrote: post #72

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 communicatio…

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.

Re: Front (YC S14) Raises $66M

#77

Post by codezero »

ericcholis wrote: post #70
codezero wrote: post #67

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…

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.

If you want to chat more about this let me know.
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