Live data from Hacker News

Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

sacra.com

111–120 of 139 posts

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#111

Disclaimer: I work on Emailio ( https://emailio.com ), a YC company that is a direct competitor to Front. We help you build healthy email habits. Slack is detrimental to team communication in several ways, and bringing it to email is a mistake imho. Slack combines the stress and urgency of text messaging with the importance of email. Your Slack becomes a Facebook or Twitter feed - another infinite feed that addicts y…

I can't imagine working in a company without any chat tool at all. For me it doesn't matter if it's Slack, Teams, IRC or even Skype but we need something.

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#112
post #46

> Front is like Slack for your email, except instead of creating another distracting, noisy, always-on tool, Front allows users to spin up ephemeral chats within email threads themselves. That's the exact opposite of what I'd want. Most small businesses have the same email problem that I always feel like I do. Too many requests come in via email and it's hard to track, discuss, resolve, and (at a later date) referenc…

Eww, Power Automate or Flow to me is the worst of office modern software. I don't want to click together workflows on a slow website. I don't think any problem will ever be solved by this.

Is there a secret to this? Does an app exist, are there logs in cases of errors? What am I missing about this?

Creating sensible workflows is actually work and there is no import/export to other tenants as far as I know. I recommend it to people that want to have a negative experience with "the cloud".

Didn't take a look, but what theoretically could be nice is somehow lacking. Maybe it got better, wasn't interested for some time now.

It can be nice for very simple things and I would love to have a good workflow engine.

> That way all conversation about the task is consolidated into Teams

You can get any ticket system from around 2005 and it will be much, much better. At least you can actually access the data. Haven't looked into the Teams API, but I somehow don't want to honestly.

It reminds me of Frontpage...

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#114
post #82

Disclaimer: I work on Emailio ( https://emailio.com ), a YC company that is a direct competitor to Front. We help you build healthy email habits. Slack is detrimental to team communication in several ways, and bringing it to email is a mistake imho. Slack combines the stress and urgency of text messaging with the importance of email. Your Slack becomes a Facebook or Twitter feed - another infinite feed that addicts y…

FYI - your home page doesn't load properly for users with (e.g. nextdns.io) tracker blocking. On your point, slack has brought fluidity and lightheartedness to our internal comms. IMHO less demanding than "chat apps" and way better than email chains for internal comms.

I have NextDNS disabled and still doesn't load properly

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#116
post #46

> Front is like Slack for your email, except instead of creating another distracting, noisy, always-on tool, Front allows users to spin up ephemeral chats within email threads themselves. That's the exact opposite of what I'd want. Most small businesses have the same email problem that I always feel like I do. Too many requests come in via email and it's hard to track, discuss, resolve, and (at a later date) referenc…

There is a very very narrow area where the ability to create ephemeral chats around email threads is useful: agencies and consultancies. The ability to discuss a client email, workshop a response, and delegate response authority to someone else is a huge game changer for the client services industry. Buuuuuut, there aren't enough agencies out there to justify a $1.3B price tag.

Are you sure about that? With a global audience?

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a DCF of a tech SaaS S-1 to test at the advice of a friend who is a PM in tech at a hedge fund. It still seems like magic, and even more so then, but it penciled. Sponsor got in with the last pre-IPO round (think like a Wellington/Fidelity who essentially buys their IPO allocation by entering slightly early) at $3.5B, IPO was $4.5B, and Friday night post dinner w/ redbull DCF spit out ~~$5.0B to $6.5B. Afte…

How do you explain Tesla’s 1200 PE ratio despite its COGS, working capital and CAPEX?

Easy. The market is frequently irrational. Unfortunately the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent so...

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#118
post #38

This is about https://frontapp.com which I've never heard about before today.

Same here. I just heard about them yesterday, while browsing for interesting new startups in the "Who is Hiring" thread.

(Link for the curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25266584).

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#119
post #81

Disclaimer: I work on Emailio ( https://emailio.com ), a YC company that is a direct competitor to Front. We help you build healthy email habits. Slack is detrimental to team communication in several ways, and bringing it to email is a mistake imho. Slack combines the stress and urgency of text messaging with the importance of email. Your Slack becomes a Facebook or Twitter feed - another infinite feed that addicts y…

I haven't looked too deeply into emailio or front, but the solution to me looks a lot more like a mix of reddit and discourse (community/forum) than anything else. I'd love to see something that looks and feels like a forum than IM/chat. Systems like Slack are great for quick collaboration, but not ideal for persisting and disseminating information across diverse/large teams and organizations. I want to go to my mess…

I Ctrl-F'ed for Twist, made by the team at Todoist, but couldn't find it.

It has a way to go, but I found it the right mix of persistent, long-form discussion and decision making using Threads, and sync communication using Messages. It's the best of both worlds, if you can educate a team to use it properly.

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#120
post #81

Disclaimer: I work on Emailio ( https://emailio.com ), a YC company that is a direct competitor to Front. We help you build healthy email habits. Slack is detrimental to team communication in several ways, and bringing it to email is a mistake imho. Slack combines the stress and urgency of text messaging with the importance of email. Your Slack becomes a Facebook or Twitter feed - another infinite feed that addicts y…

I haven't looked too deeply into emailio or front, but the solution to me looks a lot more like a mix of reddit and discourse (community/forum) than anything else. I'd love to see something that looks and feels like a forum than IM/chat. Systems like Slack are great for quick collaboration, but not ideal for persisting and disseminating information across diverse/large teams and organizations. I want to go to my mess…

We have been using http://twist.com for several months and it sounds very close to what you described. You create a thread with a title and a message and replies are threaded.
Post reply on HN