- The speaker's favorite Lego theme is called Ideas, where users can submit ideas for new Lego sets and vote on them.
- They recently got a set of 3 birds from a random person's idea submission.
- Front, the speaker's company, is described as a shared inbox with collaboration features and workflows for teams.
- They added personal email functionality to Front early on, but it took time to reach feature parity with Gmail or Outlook.
- 40% of Front's daily active users now use it for both shared and individual inboxes.
- A new version of Front is being released to improve the individual inbox experience.
- The speaker is not surprised by Google's decision to wrap up Inbox, as it was not significantly better than Gmail.
- Front prioritizes features based on user feedback, analytics, complexity to build, and expected impact.
- One feature that significantly changed how Front was used was the ability to have fluid conversations around messages.
- The speaker acknowledges that disruptive product decisions can be painful but often lead to significant changes in user behavior.
- Front initially had a bad product when it launched, but the speaker emphasizes the importance of launching early to gather feedback and improve.

- Building an MVP in the email space is challenging due to high user expectations for features.
- The company focused on building a basic version of Front without attachments and relied on innovation to attract users.
- The founder initially gained customers through writing content on platforms like Medium and Hacker News.
- The early days of the company involved manually onboarding users and continuously building features based on customer feedback.
- Content marketing and PR were the main strategies for acquiring customers in the first 2.5 years, resulting in around 500 customers and $1 million in annual revenue.
- The founder's journey began in a startup studio where they met their co-founder and received initial funding.
- The idea for Front came from the founder's desire to innovate in the email space and their co-founder's dissatisfaction with existing help desk solutions.
- The company initially focused on shared inboxes as a go-to-market strategy before expanding into a full email client.
- The hardest moments for the company were not specified in the summary.

- The speaker reflects on the hardest moment in their life, which was when their co-founder was diagnosed with cancer.
- They emphasize the importance of realizing that a company is just a company and that there is a life outside of work that is equally important.
- The speaker personally practices meditation, exercises regularly, and prioritizes sleep to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
- At their company, they promote a healthy work-life balance through activities such as meditation, lunch and learn sessions, and organized runs.
- The speaker acknowledges that every day as a founder is hard, with constant challenges and unanswered questions.
- They recommend reading "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" to remind oneself that running a company is difficult and normal.
- The speaker discusses the importance of having a mission-driven company, hiring high-quality coworkers, and allowing employees to see and understand their impact for retaining employees.
- Transparency is a key aspect of their company culture, with dashboards showing all metrics, regular presentations on company performance, and accessible inboxes for customer feedback and candidate responses.

- The speaker believes in transparency and sharing information about the impact of work on metrics.
- However, they do not share everyone's salaries or reasons for employee departures to protect privacy.
- The company has opened an office in Paris and makes efforts to include and integrate their employees there.
- The speaker believes that having a fresh perspective without preconceived insights has been beneficial for their email product.
- They believe that email will remain important in a work environment, but personal email may decline in usage.
- The speaker thinks that the email protocol is perfect for external communication, but the interfaces could be improved.
- They would remove certain structural features of email if they were to create a new email product.

- The speaker suggests removing the subject and reply features from CBCC messaging, but keeping the universal messaging and ability to send messages elsewhere.
- SMS lacks workflow capabilities, so workflows are necessary in CBCC messaging.
- It took the speaker's company three years to feel like they had product-market fit.
- The speaker advises being brutally honest about what is working and not working, talking to users and potential users, and focusing on one metric that shows progress.
- The speaker has been meditating every day for 500 days and believes that most founders would benefit from meditation.
- Meditation helps the speaker have more headspace and handle issues with more clarity.
- The speaker suggests trying meditation for a few weeks to see if it can be a game changer.
- The speaker also exercises as a strategy for mental well-being.

- The speaker's favorite Lego theme is Ideas, where users can submit and vote on new Lego sets.
- Front is a shared inbox with collaboration features and workflows for teams.
- Front added personal email functionality but took time to reach feature parity with Gmail or Outlook.
- 40% of Front's daily active users now use it for both shared and individual inboxes.
- A new version of Front is being released to improve the individual inbox experience.
- Google's decision to wrap up Inbox was not surprising as it was not significantly better than Gmail.
- Front prioritizes features based on user feedback, analytics, complexity, and expected impact.
- The ability to have fluid conversations around messages significantly changed how Front was used.
- Front initially had a bad product but launched early to gather feedback and improve.
- Building an MVP in the email space is challenging due to high user expectations.
- Content marketing and PR were the main strategies for acquiring customers in the early days.
- The founder's journey began in a startup studio and the idea for Front came from a desire to innovate in the email space.
- The hardest moment for the speaker was when their co-founder was diagnosed with cancer.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of work-life balance and practices meditation, exercise, and prioritizes sleep.
- At their company, they promote work-life balance through activities like meditation and organized runs.
- Every day as a founder is hard, with constant challenges and unanswered questions.
- Transparency is a key aspect of their company culture, with dashboards showing metrics and accessible inboxes for feedback.
- The company has opened an office in Paris and values fresh perspectives.
- The speaker believes email will remain important in a work environment, but personal email may decline.
- They suggest removing certain features from email and incorporating workflows in messaging.
- It took the speaker's company three years to feel they had product-market fit.
- The speaker advises being honest, talking to users, and focusing on one metric for progress.
- Meditation has been beneficial for the speaker and they recommend trying it for a few weeks.
- The speaker also exercises for mental well-being.

Mathilde Collin - https://twitter.com/collinmathilde - is the cofounder and CEO of Front. Front is a shared inbox for teams and they were part of the YC Summer 2014 batch.

You can check out Front at https://frontapp.com/

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon

***

Topics

00:00 - Tuomas Grannas asks - What's your favorite LEGO theme?

1:00 - What is Front?

3:25 - Google Inbox shutting down

5:00 - Prioritizing features

7:25 - Features that have increased Front usage

9:25 - What Front looked like at launch

12:20 - Early user acquisition

15:15 - Starting Front and meeting her cofounder

18:45 - The idea for Front

20:00 - When her cofounder was diagnosed with cancer

22:55 - Hardest moments running Front

25:00 - Employee retention

30:30 - Transparency

32:15 - Front's office in France

33:05 - KP asks - What is the one unique insight about the problem you didn’t have at the start but only discovered later after your launch?

35:50 - Did she consider other ideas Front?

37:15- Jordan Jackson asks - Email at least for me - has taken on a different meaning in a life of messaging apps and chat platforms. It is more serious in a way. How do you see email evolving and the ecosystem that encompasses in peoples lives?

39:30 - If she could remove any email feature

40:55 - When did they hit product market fit?

44:40 - Meditation

I think the most pressing and important question is this first 1 from Tomas Granas about Lego.

He asks, what's your favorite Lego theme?

Yeah, so my favorite Lego theme is something that not a lot of people know.

If you have an idea of a new Lego set that should be built, then people can vote and then if it gets enough votes, then they build it.

And so 1 of the set that I just got is 3 birds.

Seems boring, but They're actually super beautiful.

And they came from a random person submitting this idea.

I was just reading an AMA the other day with a Lego master builder.

So that will be really hard for me to not tell you in French.

Yeah, that's next level in my learning of English.

So I know what frontend is, just because I've been around YC, but for the average person who doesn't know what it is, how would you describe it?

Céline Ré-Hugois So I would describe it as a shared inbox.

So you can think about it as what Gmail or Outlook does but we've added collaboration features and workflows so that it works better for teams.

So we have a few different kinds of teams that are using the product from recruiting teams, support teams, account management teams, client services teams, operations teams.

And what they have in common is they have a lot of emails coming in and inside their company, a lot of people inside the team that needs to handle these emails, and they struggle managing that as a team because email wasn't made for teams.

And when did you add the personal email to it?

Yeah, the thing is, it wasn't working that well.

Yeah, meaning in order to have a product that people will use for their individual emails, you need to get to a level of feature parity with Gmail or Outlook that's pretty intense.

And so even if you could do it 4 years ago, it's only about 2 years ago that we started having the features that would allow people to manage both shared inboxes and individual inboxes as well.

So today we have I think 40% of our daily active users who are using Front both for shared inboxes and individual inboxes.

And we're releasing a brand new version of Front at the end of October that we've been working on for 9 months.

And the goal is to make sure that people can enjoy the individual inbox as much as they enjoy the shared inbox.

Céline Rémy So today when you have a shared inbox, let's say support at sales at, it's obvious that they require collaboration.

Otherwise you would not have a shared inbox.

But for individual inbox, so matilda.frontapp.com, they also require collaboration.

So I will collaborate with my assistant, with our sales team and specific deals, with our recruiting team and specific candidates, with our product team and product feedback.

And if, so tomorrow with Front, you can also add your individual inbox, like Matilda at Front app, and then assign messages, have internal conversations around these messages, integrate it with whatever tool you're using, So GitHub, Salesforce, Trello, Asana, et cetera.

So it becomes a full replacement for Gmail Outlook.

How do you feel about Gmail, or rather Google wrapping up Inbox?

So first of all, I wasn't a huge fan of Inbox.

I think Inbox brought a few things that were great, like they grew up notifications, they had great snooze features.

But I think that if you want people to change how they deal with email, the amount of innovation that you need to bring needs to be super high, because it's very disruptive to change.

So then the value proposition needs to be, like, it needs to be 10x better.

And I didn't feel like Inbox was 10x better than Gmail.

And then when they rolled out their new Gmail version and like you could see that it was pretty similar, then I knew that that was coming.

It kind of brought over the better stuff.

And then also if you are going to have 2 different products doing the same thing, then they should be super different, and they weren't super different.

Did you find that when you started to integrate individual emails into Front, that people were asking for all these vestigial features of Gmail that you're like, this is gonna be ended at some point, but they still want it?

Yeah, I think there are, you know, there are, so yes, they want a lot of features, but I think that's normal and we should provide them.

There are a few ones that are harder to implement, just because I can't be convinced that they're better for the world.

So for example, you know, sub sub folders, like, and you can try to build outlook again and maybe it's the best thing or maybe it's not.

It was just if enough customers complained or enough people gave you friction about signing up, you would build it?

Céline Rémy- So the question I saw that a lot of people ask on Twitter questions about how do you prioritize features.

So I can talk a little bit more about that.

So there is 1 thing that's unique that we did, so we did it in YC 4 years ago.

We built a Trello roadmap and we made it public.

So we're like, here is everything we're thinking about building and you can upload the thing that you want and you can see what we're working on and you can see what has been shipped.

So that gave us a ton of insight on what people wanted.

The second thing that we did was, so obviously we use front to manage incoming inquiries, but any tool that you're using should be able to provide analytics on the kind of requests that your users have.

So you should be able to see in the past month, for example, I don't know, 20% of incoming inquiries were about folders or better analytics or whatever.

And then arrives the moment where you have so many inputs, plus there is also what I personally believe we should build, and you need to make a decision.

And I feel like the decision will be based on 2 things.

1 is what's the intensity or how much complexity it is to build a certain feature?

Will it, I don't know, increase our market?

And so you always need to balance these 2 things.

And so for us, we just have a scale of 1 to 3.

So like in terms of how good it will be for our users, 123, like game changer or like slightly better, nice to have.

And so then you have 9 different scores depending on these 3 things, and that's how we can prioritize what we build.

And we should always put that in perspective of what our 1, what our vision is and making sure that we're not doing something that's against what we want to build.

And then making sure that we remain focused because I think that 1 of the biggest things that you need to achieve when you're small is being super focused.

And of those features you've rolled out in the past 4 years, were there certain ones where you really noticed a giant uptick in usage or growth?

So there is 1 that we released where it's really changed how front was used.

So it's specific to what we do, but basically the concept of front is whenever you have a message that comes in, you can comment on it.

So you have an email and you can have internal discussions about it.

You have a tweet, you can have internal discussions about it.

And so before, you could comment on 1 specific message.

So if you had 3 messages, you could decide to comment on message 1 or message 2 or message 3.

The bad thing about that is it was really hard to have a conversation that was flowing, because you could comment on message 1 and then someone commented on message 3.

But we wanted to let people have conversations that were fluid around.

So now the most recent is at the bottom and not at the top.

And then that would allow us to have conversations not associated to any message anymore, but that would just flow into the conversation.

And so that was a huge disruption because when people use email like 5 hours a day and they've built workflows around commenting on messages and you're introducing the huge change, then they're pretty upset.

But Then what we saw is the number of comments that was made per daily active user, that was growing that way and then it grew that way.

And so I feel like most of the decisions, product decisions that we made that led to a significant change in behavior were the most painful.

And another example is we're releasing a new version of Front end in October.

I can't tell you how upset our customers are going to be.

And I can't tell you how excited I am that we're rolling this out, But it's going to be super disruptive.

Peter Collins So a bunch of people had questions about how you guys were getting customers in the early days.

So I think what would be helpful is for context, what did front look like when you guys launched?

Yeah, I mean so the front sucked when we launched it.

I remember we were in YC and our batch mates would come to me and ask can I use the product and I was like no, you should use a competitor?

So like it wasn't great, but you should launch it like as soon as possible because that's how you'll get feedback and that's you want feedback in order to make sure that you are making something people want.

Now what I remember is building an MVP in the email space is tough because people expect a lot of features.

Like they will expect attachments to work, they will expect tags to work, you should be able to CC people, BCC people, forward emails, et cetera.

So basically what we did was we had like the most basic version of Front without attachments, like, but we would still try to see if some innovation that we had brought where you could assign emails to people and have comments would be enough for people to give up on a few of the features.

And I remember that something that we did when Front was super early is I was writing a lot of content.

And so I think probably our first 300 customers were coming from content that I was writing on Medium and then sharing on Hacker News or guest posts or on our blog.

And writing about email, which I think was a topic that people like tweeting about, or communication, collaboration, Slack.

And then people would sign up to our beta, and then I would call them and manually onboard them, and try to have them use the product, and then they would use the product for maybe a few hours, and then stop using the product, But then I would know why, then I would talk to my co-founder and tell him we're 1 feature away, like Adatrence, and then we're good.

And we'd build it, and then I would talk to customers and they were like, no, that's missing.

And really the only things we did for the first year at least was just doing that.

It was writing content, onboarding users, and building features.

And every other distraction that you could think of, we didn't do.

So I was emailing with Wade from Zapier about their content marketing.

Kat and I are doing a class start of school this week.

And 1 thing he said, which I thought was really interesting, was in the beginning they found themselves getting trapped by writing content that would do well on Hacker News, but not actually convert to users for them.

Were you able to differentiate that in the beginning or were you just trying to get any kind of attention?

The truth is, first of all, I had no other idea.

So yes, in an ideal world, I would find a lead gen source that's as effective as possible.

Shared inbox is not something people are looking for.

We had a horizontal product and we weren't sure who was going to use it.

So like outbounding wasn't necessarily the best thing because you're like, we have this general tool.

And so for me, yes, the truth is I would agree with them.

Like we, I think from our beta, we had 3000 companies that signed up to our product.

And I think, I don't know, 10 of them ended up using our product.

But anytime I was onboarding someone and the person was not interested, I learned a ton.

And so if I were to do it again, I think I would do it again, just because that was my best guess to have a lot of people signing up.

And then I had a few tricks, like whenever you were signing up, you had an auto-reply that said, why are you, why are you interested?

And so even if, you know, they don't end up converting, then you get a ton of information.

So at scale, content is not at all how we get users today.

But in the early days, or at least it's still some of the way we get users, but not the main source, which is pet acquisition, versus in the early days, it was the main source for us to get users.

I don't think it was scalable, but I think it was doable and confronted us with the market.

Okay, so it's kind of like this opinionated essay type thing.

It was a lot of thought leadership and a lot of sharing my journey as a founder.

So, you know, you said, you know, out of 3000 companies, you got 10 maybe.

So, we hired our first marketing person in January 2017.

So, 2 and a half years after we launched the product.

So PR and content was 90% of what we did in the first 2 and a half years.

And so that was probably a thousand customers maybe.

You guys started making this in some kind of like startup lab thing, right?

Because we haven't had someone on the podcast that's been through 1 of those.

Yeah, so when I graduated, I joined a startup and then I knew that I wanted to start a company, but I think for me, the main thing is I had to borrow money to go to school and then I had to give back the money.

And so starting a company was pretty tough.

So I took a job in a SaaS company and I was doing sales because I figured that I could probably make a lot of money if I was doing my job right.

1 is I made some money, so that was good.

And 2 is I learned more about SaaS and softwares and I loved it.

Like I really loved the idea of building a product that could then be used by some people, and then their life at work would be drastically different because of the product that we had built.

So it was, at that point I was working on a contract management software, and contracts are super archaic, and then they had this beautiful tool, and I thought it was wonderful, but I was not using contracts, I was using email, and I was as frustrated with this tool that had not evolved in the past 10 years.

So a year after I joined the company, I was lucky enough to meet with this, so they're called e-founders, they're a startup studio.

And what they do is they either find technical co-founders or business co-founders, and they try to have people meet.

And then if a great relationship comes out of it, then they are happy to fund them.

And so that's where I met with my co-founder, Laurent.

And so when I think about my journey at Front, where I got most lucky was meeting with them, with him and with them, 5 years ago.

Was it some kind of like speed dating situation?

I eventually quit my job and so I spent a lot of time in their startup studio, helping on lots of different projects.

And Laurent was there and it was the same thing.

Like he had quit his job, was working on 1 specific project, met him and then really liked him.

And I think the thing that we tried to do for 2 months was asking ourselves all these tough questions that can happen in the journey of 2 founders.

Like, what happens if I want to fire you or you want to fire me or you want to sell and I don't want to sell or like whatever.

Should we have the same ownership in the company and things like that?

And, and I think we agreed on everything.

And so then after 2 months we're like, okay, let's do it.

But so I think for us, a startup studio was great for 2 reasons.

1, the fact that we met into the fact that we got initial funding.

Now, a few months after we met, we decided to go to YC where we got additional funding.

And so then we weren't very close to them.

So it was super great in the first few months.

Did the idea come about before you even joined?

So, Front is at the intersection of 2 things.

1 is I was willing to innovate in the email space and Laurent, my co-founder, had been in 2 companies before where they had a lot of users.

They were forced to implement help desk solutions like Zendesk or Freshdesk, hated them.

And so what he wanted to build was a lightweight support tool.

And so in fact, Front started as this email tool, but with a go-to-market being shared inboxes.

And the reason was because Laurent wanted to do that, I wanted to do that, with that email is impossible to start from scratch.

No company has managed to build a business starting with an email product, because it's super hard to build, super hard to have people pay for it.

So I was like, okay, what if the go-to market is shared inboxes?

But then we expand, as we discussed, into like a full email client that can be used by individuals and teams.

And that's why Front is this combination of this very big vision, but this very simple pain point that we addressed at the beginning.

Peter Collins And just to go back really quickly, what have been the hardest moments so far?

I mean, so I can share 1 that's business-related than 1 that's more personal.

So 18 months ago, MyCofounder was diagnosed with cancer.

And so then when I reflect on the journey, you know, it's really hard to say, oh, this moment where, I don't know, we didn't get the term sheet we wanted, or like this big customer churn.

Like, it's really hard for me to tell that it was the hardest moment, because that's far harder than anything you can conceive.

And so all of it turned out in a super positive outcome.

But I think when that happened, it was my lowest.

And then you start to realize that you know, like founders are always very committed to making their company work and that's good.

But they should also realize that their company is just a company, and you have a life outside of your company that's also super important, and you should enjoy every moment that you have, because things could be very different tomorrow.

Yeah, and how do you maintain that balance?

I mean, you goof around with Legos, play soccer?

So, when I'm super deliberate myself, and then I try to implement a lot of things at front to promote this healthy work-life balance and clearly it's been influenced by the fact that Laurent got sick.

I log out of every app, Slack, Front, every weekend, and anytime I'm on PTO, I don't have any notifications, so I'm never distracted by work.

And then I exercise, I play soccer, I run, I kitesurf, I bike.

And I just make sure that when I stay late at the office, it's an exception.

I sometimes do it, and when I work during the weekend, it's an exception as well.

So that's what I do personally in order to make sure, and I sleep at least 8 hours a night every night.

That was the biggest game changer for me, actually, in terms of feeling better.

I know it's so dumb and obvious, but just like prioritizing that.

I've always done that and I've always felt more proactive.

And then, you know, at front, there are a few things.

So last week we had health and wellness week and every day you could meditate so that you could like understand what it does.

And then we had lunch and learn explaining the impact of eating healthy on your emotions.

And I don't know, we organized a few runs.

And so also whenever people join, I explain what front is about and I explained that I care about it.

and you just kind of try and lead by example.

And the hard moment for your company, what was that?

Céline Rémy I mean, so the thing is, so Every single moment is super hard.

And so 1 of my biggest learnings from YC 4 years ago, when the company was super small, and every Tuesday we had people coming in talking about all kinds of things.

And we had the founders of Stripe, of Facebook, of Optimize.ly, of Dropbox, which are super successful companies.

And they were telling us how hard it was and how many times they've wondered whether the business would go anywhere.

Like, you know, It's super easy to think about Front as this company that has, you look at our metrics, because they've published everything, we've consistently been doing well in terms of revenue, our retention of employees is high, you look at our funding stories, we've always raised money super easily.

Okay, cool, that's what you can read about it.

The truth is every single day I wake up and there is a list of 10 questions where I don't have answers and I need to figure them out.

And I know that the more we grow, the more is at stake.

And so I absolutely need to find the answers.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front