Front (YC S14) Raises $66M

133 点作者 julien_c超过 7 年前

25 条评论

mathouc超过 7 年前

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 (<a href="http://frontapp.com/roadmap" rel="nofollow">http://frontapp.com/roadmap</a>) and submit your ideas to help us get there.I wrote some thoughts on my vision on Medium if you’re interested: <a href="https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/to-new-beginnings-announcing-our-series-b-fcbc3392dc81" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/to-new-beginnings-announc...</a>

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crsv超过 7 年前

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.

madenine超过 7 年前

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).

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codezero超过 7 年前

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 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...

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strictnein超过 7 年前

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"

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kylecordes超过 7 年前

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.)

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Cenk超过 7 年前

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

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CPLX超过 7 年前

Does anyone have feedback on the product itself?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.Is it any good? Who is it ideal for?

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Analemma_超过 7 年前

You can’t just “replace Outlook”, you need to replace Office 365, which is a much steeper hill to climb.

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ssaunier_超过 7 年前

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 <a href="https://www.lewagon.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.lewagon.com</a> - 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!

newman8r超过 7 年前

people seemed lukewarm on the original ShowHN (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869726" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869726</a>) - I guess the lesson is to not get too discouraged if initial feedback on a project isn't as amazing as hoped

TheRealDunkirk超过 7 年前

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.

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agopaul超过 7 年前

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

debt超过 7 年前

It's crazy how far we've come but things like email/voice/video conferencing somehow are still so essential yet completely broken.But then have we come that far if those things are still broken? idk but good job Front!

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orliesaurus超过 7 年前

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 )

jonwachob91超过 7 年前

Possible acquisition spree coming soon...Polymail, MailTime, Slidemail, Taskpipes, and maybe a few other YC companies look like they have email technology that could help replace Outlook. Any others?

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horsecaptin超过 7 年前

Front's current scope and future scope are going to have a big fight and destroy the company.

cleeus超过 7 年前

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 ...

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0xffff2超过 7 年前

Does it have calendar functionality? Outlook is at least as much a calendar application as it is an email application for me.I don't see any evidence of calendars in the article's screenshots.

kwindla超过 7 年前

We use Front and it's great. Mathilde Collin is a super-impressive founder. She spoke at one of the Tuesday night dinners when we were in YC.

ramoq超过 7 年前

Front is probably doing 7MM ARR (I highly doubt more than that)

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fs111超过 7 年前

Why do they raise so much money if they do not need it?

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chewyland超过 7 年前

Sorry for my low quality post but Outlook is just fine. It's crappy, crashy and bloated...but it's just fine.This outfit and app won't exist 365 days from now, I guarantee it.

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iamleppert超过 7 年前

Can it even dye my eyes to match my gown? Jolly good e-mail client!

dingo_bat超过 7 年前

Android app screenshot looks very similar to Outlook. The main problem with Outlook is the desktop app. Everything else is good enough for me.