Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs
techcrunch.com
Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs
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Re: Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs
#2Interesting 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?
Re: Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs
#3Interesting 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?
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.
Re: Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs
#4I 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...
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.
Re: Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs
#5Interesting, 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.
Re: Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs
#6Interesting 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?
Was amazing for us basically to discuss and dispatch incoming and outgoing emails, drafting responses and templates together, without descending into deeper circles of “forward hell” or sharing email screenshots on other messages. Massively reduced inbox/messenger clutter by moving email-centric collaboration much closer to email. Lots of glitches and missing features a couple of years ago when I was relying on it heavily, hope they polished the product since.
Re: Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs
#7Interesting 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?
I'm a solo dev working on 2-3 side projects. I have 2 freelance customer support staff helping me with normal support stuff but also acquisition and outreach, while I focus on freelance development (which is unrelated to the side-projects). Possible I will add 1-2 more support in the coming year.
For this use-case Front has been really awesome. Each side project has a different domain and each project has several role-based emails (one for clients -> support@domain and one for content stuff team@domain). Plus Facebook and Twitter.
Email arrives at the person who sent the first email, and I can easily assign emails written to me to a team member. The internal chat functionality is clear (in Zendesk the UI was a bit confusing so sometimes we inadvertently wrote the internal message to the client - nothing bad, but still unprofessional).
I tried Freshdesk, Zendesk, Intercom and some others, but always had some trouble with one of the requirements. E.g. can't use different outgoing signatures. Or a second domain requires a second account or the Enterprise upgrade (for 20 emails a day?), or there were so many different filters and views that I got confused.
Probably for enterprise level you might need something else and you need all the rules and automation stuff, but for my use case it's been great. It's not the cheapest, but it's worth it, because we've been able to answer to support inquiries faster and I have less work to do.
Re: Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs
#8I 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... 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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Re: Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs
#9I'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.
Re: Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs
#10They 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.