Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #96 - Mathilde Collin

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

Mathilde Collin 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.***Topics00:25 - Tuomas Grannas asks - What's your favorite LEGO theme?1:25 - What is Front?3:50 - Google Inbox shutting down5:25 - Prioritizing features7:50 - Features that have increased Front usage9:50 - What Front looked like at launch12:45 - Early user acquisition15:40 - Starting Front and meeting her cofounder19:10 - The idea for Front20:25 - When her cofounder was diagnosed with cancer23:20 - Hardest moments running Front25:25 - Employee retention30:55 - Transparency32:40 - Front's office in France33:30 - 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?36:15 - Did she consider other ideas Front?37:40- 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?39:55 - If she could remove any email feature41:20 - When did they hit product market fit?45:05 - Meditation

Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is with Matild Colin. Matilda is the co-founder 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 frontapp.com, and Matilda's on Twitter at Colin Matild. All right, here we go. I think the most pressing and important question is this first one from Tomas Grana. about Lego. He asked, what's your favorite Lego theme?

Yeah. So my favorite Lego theme is something that not a lot of people know. It's called Ideas. Okay. And so basically you can submit. If you have an idea of a new Lego set that should be built, then people can upvote. And then if it gets enough abvotes, then they build it. And so one of the set that I just got is three birds.

It seems boring, but they're actually super beautiful. And they came from a random person submitting this idea. Yeah. That's so cool. I was just reading an AMA the other day with a Lego master builder. Did you see that one on Reddit? Yeah, yeah. You probably knew all that stuff. What kind of birds of it? 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 front 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? 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. So that's what we do. And when did you add the personal email to it? Actually, pretty early on. Really? Yeah.

The thing is, it wasn't working that well. Meaning you weren't getting users? 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. that's pretty intense. And so even if you could do it four years ago, it's only about two 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 nine months.

And the goal is to make sure that people can enjoy the individual inbox as much as they enjoy the shared inbox. Can you be more specific? Meaning, so today when you have a shared inbox, let's say support ads, sales ads, it's obvious that they require collaboration. Otherwise, you would not have a shared inbox. But for individual inbox, so matilatfrontal.com, they also require collaboration. So I will collaborate with my assistant with our sales team and specific deals with our recruiting team on specific candidates with our product team and product feedback.

And if, so tomorrow with Front, you can also add your individual inbox, like Matilde 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 or Outlook. Got you. Okay. How do you feel about a Gmail or rather Google wrapping up inbox?

I think it's zero surprising. So, I mean, so first of all, I wasn't a huge fan of inbox. I think inbox brought a few things that were great. Like they grouped 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. So I'm not surprised. 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. Yeah. And then also if you are going to have two 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 like all these like vestigial features of gmail that you're like this is going to 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 out look again and maybe it's the a thing or maybe it's not.

Yeah. Okay. How did you end up weighing that out? Like, it was just if enough customers complained that you're, or enough people like gave you friction about signing up, you would build it? So, I mean, the question, I saw that a lot of people ask on Twitter questions about how do you prioritize features. So like, I can talk a little bit more about that.

So there is one thing that's unique that we did, which is, so we did it's in YC four 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 avoid 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. So then we can look at that. 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 two things. One is what's the intensity or how much complexity it is to build a certain feature. And then is like what's the uptake? Like what can we expect from it? Will it, I don't know, increase our market? Will it make our current users happier? Will they pay more? And so you always need to balance these two things. And so for us, we just have a scale of one, two, three. So like in terms of how good it will be for our users, one, two, three, like game changer or like slightly better, nice to have. And then how complex is it to build? And so So then you have nine different scores depending on these three things, and that's how we can

prioritize what we built. And we should always put that in perspective of 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 one of the biggest thing that you need to achieve when your story is being super focused. And of those features you've rolled out in the past four years, where there's certain ones where you really noticed a giant uptick and usage or growth? Yeah. Yeah. So there is one 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 one specific message. So If you had three messages, you could decide to comment on message one or message two or message three. The bad thing about that is it was really hard to have a conversation that was flowing. Because you could comment on message one and then someone comment on message three. But then a new email came in. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And so, but we wanted to let people have conversations that were fluid around. So we decided to do two things. One is reverse the order of conversations. 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 five hours a day and they've built workflows around commenting on messages and you're introducing the huge shamed, then they're pretty upset. But then what we saw is the number of comments that was made per daily active users

that was growing that way and then it grew that way. And so I feel like most of the decisions, product decision that we made that led to like a significant change in behavior were the most painful. And another example is we're releasing a new version of France in October. Like, I can't tell you how upset our customers are going to be. And I can tell you how excited I am that we're rolling this out. But it's going to be super disruptive. So a bunch of people add questions about like.

how you guys were getting customers in the early days. So I think what would be helpful is for context. Like what did Front look like when you guys launch? Because I'm sure it's different now. Yeah. I mean, so the front sucked when we launched it. Like I remember we were in YC and our batchmates would come to me and ask and I use the product.

And I was like, no, you should use a competitor. Like our product is really not as great. So like it wasn't great. But you should launch it 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're making something people want. So the product was bad. 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, etc. So basically what we did was we had like the most basic version of front without attachments. 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 like medium or 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 liked reading about or like communication, collaboration, Slack, like things. 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, you know, took to my coffender and tell him, we're one feature away. like at a chance and then we're good.

Then we'd build it and then I would talk to customers and they were like, no, that's missing. So then one feature away. 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. Yeah. We didn't do. Okay. So I was emailing with Wade from Zapier about their content marketing.

marketing, Kat and I are doing a class startup school this week. Yeah. And one 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. Yeah. Were you able to differentiate that in the beginning, or were you just trying to get any kind of attention?

So it might be true. The truth is, like, first of all, I had no other idea. So, yes, in an ideal world, I would find a legend source that's as effective as possible. I knew nothing about ped acquisition. SherlinVox is not something people are looking for. So I felt like that wasn't working. We had a horizontal product and we weren't sure who was going to use it. So outbounding wasn't necessarily the best thing because we have this general tool.

And so for me, yes, the truth is I would agree with them. I think from our beta we had 3,000 companies that signed up to our product. And I think, I don't know, 10 of them ended up using our product. So the conversion rate is not high. 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? What problem are you trying to solve? And so even if, you know, they don't end up converting, then you get a ton of information. Okay. 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 paid acquisition. versus in the early days, it was the main source for us to get users.

And I don't regret it. I don't think it was scalable, but I think it was doable and confronted us with the market. What was the most successful piece? It's like email will last forever. Yeah. Okay, so it's kind of like this opinionated essay type of thing. It was a lot of thought leadership and a lot of sharing my journey as a founder. And how far did that get you?

So, you know, you said, you know, out of 3,000 companies, you got 10 maybe. How did you get to 100? So we hired our first marketing person in January 2017, so two and a half years after we launched the product. So that's where it got us. So PR and content was 90% of what we did in the first two and a half years. Which is how many customers, roughly? So it got us to probably one million in AR. And so that was probably a thousand customers, maybe.

Something like that. That's great. Yeah. Wow. Less than that. Less customers. Yes. 500.

You guys started making this in some kind of like startup lab thing, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Can you talk more about that? Because we haven't had someone on the podcast that's been through one of the 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. And so two things happen. One is I made some money so that it was good. And two 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 these beauty. tool and I said 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 was clearly wasn't made for

businesses. So a year after I joined the company, I was lucky enough to meet with this. So they're called eFounders. They're a startup studio. And what they do is they either find technical co-funders or business co-founders and they try to have people meet. And then if, you know, 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, Lauren. And so when I think about my journey at front, like where I got most lucky was meeting with him and with them five years ago. And so I met him and for two months.

Wait, wait, wait, how did you meet? Was it some kind of like speed dating situation? No, it's like the host events. I eventually quit my job. And so I spent a lot of time in their startup studio helping on lots of different projects. And Lauren was there. And he was the same thing. Like he had quit his job, was working on one specific project, met him, and then really liked him.

And I think the thing that we tried to do for two months was asking ourselves all these tough questions that can happen in the journey of two 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 this in the company and things like that? Like would you move to San Francisco? And I think we agreed on everything. And so then after two months, we're like, okay, let's do it. And it worked out so well. So it was super lucky.

But so I think for us, a startup studio was great for two reasons. one, the fact that we met, and to 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, and then YC was great, and then other things were great. Everything's great. At different stage of the company.

Yeah. I'm sure things were painful, too. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So did the idea come about before you even join? So France is at the intersection of two things. One is I was willing to innovate in the email space. And Lauren, my co-founder had been in two companies before where they had a lot of users.

They were forced to implement help desk solutions like Zen desk or fresh desk, etc. Hated them. And so what you wanted to build was a lightweight support tool. And so in fact, like, France started as this email tool, but with a go-to-market being shared in boxes. And the reason was because I wanted to do that. I wanted to do that with that, okay, but email is impossible to start from scratch. Like no company has managed to build a business starting with an email product because 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 in boxes?

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 like this very big vision, but this very simple pain point that we addressed at the beginning. And just to go back really quickly, what have been the hardest moment so far? Of Front? Yeah. I mean, so I can share one that's business-related, then the one that's, the one that's, more personal. So 18 months ago, my cofander was diagnosed with a cancer. So that was the hardest moment by far. 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 turn. Like, it's really hard for me to tell that it was the like hardest moment because that's far harder than anything you can conceive. And now is great. And so all of it was turned out in a super positive outcome. But I think when that happened, it was like 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, you know, 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 know, you have because, you know, things could be very different tomorrow. Yeah. And how do you, how do you maintain that balance? You mean, you like goof around with Legos, play soccer? So I mean, I'm 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 Lauren got sick.

And so I personally meditate every day. 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, like I play soccer, I run, I skate surf, 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 eight hours a night every night. That was like the biggest game changer for me, actually, in terms of like feeling better. I know it's like so dumb and obvious, but just like prioritizing that. Yeah, for sure.

I 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 organize a few runs. And so also whenever people join, I explain what Front is about. And I explain that I care about it.

So that's in our culture as well. Yeah. And you just kind of try and lead by example. Yeah. In the same way. Yeah. Yeah. And in the hard moment for your company, what was that?

I mean, so the thing is, so every single moment is super hard. And so one of my biggest learnings from YC four years ago when, you know, the company was super small. And every Tuesday we had people coming and talking about all kinds of things. And we had the founders of Stripe, of Facebook, of Optimacy 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. I mean, that's the story of my life. Like, you know, it's super easy to think about France. as, you know, this company that has, you look at our metrics because I'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. Like, 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.

And so every single day is hard. And we still have customers that churn and I'm extremely sad about it. We still have employee situations that are not easy to deal with. I still have, you know, moments where I'm wondering if we should do what we're doing. And that's true for every single founder I've ever met as successful as they are. And so I think nobody should wonder whether like it's hard or easy. like it's just consistently hard. And do you need help reminding yourself of that or were the dinner is enough?

No, so I read, you know, the hard things about hard things. I mean, a lot of founders have read the book, but for me it was like really game changer to just read about the fact that it's hard. You should stop wondering about it. Yeah. Just a given. It doesn't mean anything about the health of your company. Yeah.

So I just need to remind myself that it's normal and it's just a job. Yeah. Yeah. You said something interesting about retention. I know that's like something you guys are particularly good at and proud of, I'm sure. Yes. Do you have kind of pro tips in that category? Yeah.

So I'm preparing a talk about that. So I've been thinking about it. So here is, I think it's a super complex question because if the answer was, let's do that and you have a great retention of employees. So yeah, but we have super high retention and super high NPS inside the company. So I think that there are three categories of things you can do within your company to make sure that that's happening. The first one is like how do you hook people? And I think that's by having a mission driven company.

So at the end of the day, so I was asked to do a talk about retention. And so then I emailed our employees and I was like at the end of the day, why are you engaged, motivated, happy, why do you work hard? And a lot of them were saying, because we care about the mission. And so I think you need to make sure that you have a mission. It's clear. People can interpret it in the way they want. Our mission statement is work happier.

And, you know, it means different things for different people. But if people can relate to it and can feel like, you know, they have purpose when work on front, then it's good. So making it super clear. and as your company scale, just making sure that you say it over and over and everyone knows what it means, everyone has examples of what it means is super important. Then I think that then there is like the push, what will enable them to go above and beyond. And I think that for that, it's really the quality of coworkers. So one advice that Patrick Collison gave me when I

was hiring our first employees was two things. One, when you hire your, first employees, you should think about every person that you bring with a bar that's as high as could this person be my co-founder. And that was super helpful because then you hire people that are really great at the beginning. And then the second advice he gave me was when you hire someone, you should wonder whether you want 10 person like this in your company. Because the truth is they will hire people like them. And so then if you don't want 10 people like this, then you should probably not hire this person. And so I think we did a really good job in the early day. at hiring super talented people

that were a really good match with our values. And so then as we grew the team, I think the team became really good and good meaning they're talented, but also they are, we have some values. They are low ego, high standards, collaborative, caring. And I think that making sure

that even when you're desperate to hire people, you don't lower your bar, and you've heard it so much, but like it's so important. that's, I think, something that contributes to us having a really good culture. And I like to think about every single employee that we bring as someone bringing something new on top of, you know, all the baseline being here. So that. And then the third thing is, I think so people want to see and understand that they have an impact. Because if they care about the vision and the mission and they have great co-workers, so they want to do their best.

but they don't sure how to contribute, then at the end of the day, they will probably not do as a good of a job or be as happy. And so for that, I think there are like a lot of things that you can implement within your company. So one of them is transparency. So it's a word that's being used a lot, but it's super easy to claim that you're a transparent company and super hard to implement. And it gets just harder as you scale.

So for us, being transparent means you have dashboards that show. everything. Every Monday morning, we go over all our metrics. Every quarter, I do a presentation, last quarter at front. I review everything that has been going well, not going well. Every board meeting, I send a board deck. Every, I don't know, every inbox is accessible in front. So you want to see what customers want to say, like good things and bad things. You can access it. If you want to see why a candidate didn't accept an offer, you can know why. Like, whatever you want to, if you want to know what's our run. you can also know what's our runway.

And when you say every inbox is accessible, does that mean personal inboxes as well? No. So personal inboxes usually there are, so if you are a manager, you have access to your direct reports inboxes. And the truth is I tried, we tried to make, so we tried to make as many inboxes as possible public. But the truth is you have to implement some rules because, I don't know, there are HR emails that should not be shared.

There are financial emails that should not be shared. So we try to share as much of the personal emails, name at company.com as possible, but not a hundred percent are shared. So I think transparency is just like a really good way to have people understand what the impact of their work is on all these metrics that are displayed. So these are a few tips.

Yeah. What else don't you share? So the way I think about transparency is if something, is going to create more problems and raise more questions than bad use of transparency. Is something is going to answer a lot of questions and solve a lot of problems, then good use of transparency. So what don't we share? We don't share the salaries of everyone.

It's why. So I can give you an example. There is like a person at France that might have health issues and our insurance doesn't cover it. So we might pay this person an additional. know, I don't know, a few hundred dollars a month instead of paying for the insurance. And so then if everything was public and then people would be like, whoa, why is this person paid as much? And then I would have to explain.

And so that's, and I don't care. Like it doesn't bring anything great to the company. So the way I think about compensation is if anyone knew everything tomorrow, I could explain and it's fair. And that's what matters. Now it doesn't mean that I will share it. because it's actually not super helpful. And I mean, another example is, you know, when people leave or are let go, usually we don't share why.

And we try to be super transparent about our performance process, making sure that people understand why someone might be let go and making sure that it's fair. Now, privacy of employees is more important than transparency. And so then transparency doesn't mean that they will share. This person wasn't good at doing this and that. And that's why we let this person go. Right. And so do you guys now have employees overseas as well? Yes.

You have an office in France. Yes. So we decided to happen in an office in Paris in January this year. And so now we have about 20% of our team in Paris and 80% here. Okay. And now how do you go about making them feel included? Same thing. We're super deliberate about it.

So every employee in France starts with an. boarding in San Francisco. Twice a year we have company-wide offsides and everyone is coming. We have all hands where we make sure that it's a balance between SF sharing insights and Paris sharing insights. My co-founder went back to France. So like having one founder in each team is super important. We have a lot of people from SF who go to Paris so that they can also share more about the culture here. And so far it's working really well.

I mean, we're still improving a lot of things, but... And he's there full time now? Yeah. Oh, okay. That's great. Yeah, that helps. Cool. A lot.

Yeah, it helps a ton. You got a ton of questions on Twitter. Yeah. There was one that I wanted to bring up now. So, KP, asks, what is one unique insight about the problem, meaning the problem you're working on? You didn't have at the start, but only discovered later after launching. Yeah.

So I think there are a few things. One thing that I always find interesting is one of the reason why I think we were successful building an email product and, I mean, successful so far, is because we actually had, we didn't have a lot of insights. So, you know, I had been working for a year, and so it's not a lot. And so I think, and my co-founder was very technical, so didn't use email, like many, many hours every day or had not built any email product. And I think having

a new pair of eyes on this problem that has I mean, has existed for like ever, I think was something that was really good. So you know, when people sometimes ask questions about the insights that you have

and other people don't have, something the fact that you don't have any insight and you have a like new pair of eyes is actually super insightful. Now, the truth is everything that we discovered about France is things that I didn't know before. So, for example, we have these use cases where logistics companies and travel companies love Front. I knew nothing about these industries. And now I'm going to tracking conferences and I understand

exactly how they work. And so I think it's just we've been super, super honest with ourselves on what we knew and what we didn't know, and then talking with our potential customers so much to understand their insights. And so the way I would answer this question is the truth is 99% of what I know today, I didn't know when I started. Right. I just felt like for sure something could be improved in that space.

And I thought like we had a good team to do it. That's the only thing in you. I mean, you were committed to the problem. I was committed to the problem. But I was, I heard more about. like I want people to be more efficient at work and I feel like email is the tool that people used to get work done and so I care about that more than you know adding collaboration to email or assigning emails or commenting on emails like no I care about people spend their lives in their

inbox yeah and these two has not evolved in the past 10 years and it was not made for businesses so for sure something can be improved. TPD how let's start with you. shared inboxes. Did you go? Yeah. Did you guys consider other options before you really started building front? Uh, no. Like we, we knew that we would start with sharing inboxes. Um, one, one funny story that, um, I sometimes share when I go to YC for dinners is, um, we, we try to have these insights. Like, we were looking for them. So for example, uh, P.B, uh, who created Gmail was, uh, is one of the partners at YC. And so when I joined, um, I joined, um, NYC, I was super excited to meet with him.

And I was like, so here are all our ideas. So we can go in this direction, this direction, this direction. What do you think we should do? And I was like, follow your growth. And I was like, okay, cool, thanks. I'm glad I talked to all my friends about the fact that I was like meeting with the person who created Gmail. But at the end of the day, that's the best advice he could give us because, you know,

he has some insights on like what prime Gmail was trying to. solve, but that's very different from what France is trying to solve. And that's like a different time in history and a different set of wrong. Yeah. I mean, he also, well, I mean, there are multiple ways to tackle this. But like there's so much pattern matching that happens at YC. Yeah. That like you, it's almost like you don't want to get too prescriptive with this stuff because you can negatively pattern match. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So there's another question. Jordan Jackson asks email, at least for me, has taken. on a different meeting in life, in the context of messaging apps and chat platforms, it is almost

more serious in a way. How do you see email evolving and the ecosystem that encompasses it in people's lives? Yeah. So, I mean, so I think it's a good question because you hear so much from companies like Slack, for example, email is dead. So here's, like, the way I think about email is, first of all, for your personal emails. So, like, you're emailing friends and families. I don't think that email will last forever. So if you look at the growth year over year, it's actually decreasing every year. Whereas if you look at work emails, it's increasing year over year. So I believe that email will remain in a work environment.

I'm not convinced about your personal life. And I think like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and all these other tools can actually be better or be used for more than they used to. Now, in a work environment, I feel like email the protocol is actually perfect because it's the only protocol that you can use to communicate with people outside your company. And so even if you have great tools like Slack that enable you to Slack to message people internally, the truth is it will not solve 90% of your communication, which is happening externally. And however, I think the interfaces for email is not perfect. So the protocol is great, interface is not great.

And so if you have a tool that has a good interface and can be inspired by other apps that are doing amazing, like Slack is great because they have a really delightful product that's really fast, that works cross platform. And I think if you can apply some of the things that made these companies or these tools successful and apply them to a protocol that, in my opinion, is the best, then I strongly believe that people could spend 90% of their time. in their inbox versus today it's probably not as high as 90%. No. If you could like wipe everyone's memory of email context and like restart, what would you wipe out and like create a new? Like if I was to start like a new email product. If you could just like delete email from everyone's mind and just have,

all right, this is the new email product. Yeah. So you know, I think I would probably wipe out most of the. the structural features. Because when you think about, you know, the main things are you have a subject, you have a signature, you literally carbon copy and blind carbon copy. So I think I would remove all of that. So I don't think you need a subject. I don't think you need, you should see CBCC forward, reply all these things. But I would keep the fact that it's universal. And you can have a message that's being sent somewhere else. And then that's what I would do. So I would do. So I would,

So it would be similar to SMS. Yeah, but then the tricky thing is SMS has zero concept of workflow. So you still need workflows. And so, for example, everything around the fact that you can assign messages, you can share a message and you can collaborate on a draft, you can comment internally, you can create automation and say if then. Like, that's super important. That doesn't exist in SMS.

But today, these features, CCBC for like, are used? as workflows, whereas really they're not designed for that. So then that leads to a lot of inefficiencies. Okay. So there were just a handful of other questions about product market fit. Yeah. I think it's funny because based on the startup school lectures, I think like the questions are changing with every week and there were just a bunch on product market fit.

When did you guys feel like you hit it? Yeah. So it's a good question. Very late, actually. So I mean, when we, when we raised our seed, we had just a few numbers. I think we're doing like 10KMR. So not a lot.

We might have, I don't know, a few, like a hundred companies using the product. And clearly, I didn't feel great. Like, I've, you know, it was ultimately a good investment, but I didn't feel like we had product market fit. And I think when we raised our Series A, and so we raised our Series A, we were making, I think 1.5 million in AR. So a little over 100K MR. I think that's where, when I felt like some companies were using the product. And even if I had demoed all the alternatives,

Front was actually a better solution for them. And I think that's, and then I felt like the market was big, but didn't really know how big, but at least big enough. And I think so that's, and so that was. was in three years after we started. So a pretty long time. Yeah, it took a while. Yeah.

And so when founders, I mean, imagine, like, you've given talks and stuff now. People are asking you for advice. And like when they're looking to find it, what do you, what do you tell them? What do you, or what do you even point them to to read? Like advice in product market feed or advice in general? Product market fit. So, like, the thing is, at the end of the day, like, you need to be convinced. that you're doing something that people want.

And so I feel like you need to be, and it's a piece of advice that I share in general, like you need to be so brutally honest with yourself and with your team about what's working and not working. I think startups are so hard that there is almost like, as a human being, you want to be happy. And so you don't necessarily want to face every reality. because it can be really hard.

And so, you know, if you're working 12 hours a day and the thing that you keep hearing is, I'm not super interested in your park, whatever. And then at a point, someone says, oh, it's pretty good. Then you encores so much on the fact that someone said it's pretty good. And then you tend to ignore the fact that, yes, but 95% told you that it was not good.

And so I think, you know, making sure that you, the only things you do is talking to people using the product, talking to people that might be interested in using the product and then building things so that these two things can change and then communicating that or sharing this information with your team and having one metric in place that will show you whether you're making progress on it. So for us, it was revenue because we felt like if people were willing to use the product, they would pay for it. That's the only thing that matters.

And that's the focus you need to have. both in your head you need to make sure that you're super honest. And also from just a process and communication standpoint, you should make sure that every single day you share how many more users, revenue, like whatever you have. Every single week you can calculate your growth and you can look at it because, I mean, I think it's PG who said that. But the first way to have anything increased is to look at it and just be super honest about it.

Yeah, I think that's true across the board. Yeah. You're scared of the truth. I'm curious about all this in the context of your meditation practice. Yeah. What does that look like on a daily basis? And have you been doing this for a long time? So I've been meditating every day for, I think, 500 days.

So it's like not forever, but now quite a long time. Yeah. So, I mean, 500 days is when my cough nervousic. So it was like a more. It was a more challenging period of my life where I think I was overwhelmed, but I think whether I was overwhelmed for that reason or other reasons, I think like when you're a founder in general, I'm pretty convinced that 99.9% of founders would benefit from meditating every day. So that was the trigger, but I wish I had known before. So the good thing about meditation is that as boring as it sounds and, you know, I have, I think, an active. mind and so I don't like not thinking about anything for 10 minutes. I do 10 minutes every morning.

So that's it. So again, like your process is like you wake up and you just like get in it. No, so I wake up, have a shower. Because otherwise I fall asleep when I'm meditating. So I wake up, have a shower and then meditate for 10 minutes. Do you meditate? Do you have like a pillow? You like sit down on something? What do you do? No, I'm in, I have a couch in my living room. Okay. And I just sit there. Great. So I meditate. 10 minutes. Yeah, I just sit. Yeah, I just sit. And. And I just sit. And I just sit. and I have an app, headspace. Okay. So you do a guided meditation.

Getting meditation. And then 10 minutes and then put my stuff on and then live for a week. How long did you have to do it before you felt that it was effective? So many weeks. I think, you know, it's nothing magical. It's really, like, it's really a muscle that you're training. And as anything, like you will notice the results in probably a few weeks or a few months. then not a few hours or a few days.

But really the thing that I get out of it is now when an issue arise, it's like, okay, cool. The issue is here. Before it was, okay, so it's 90% of what's in my head. It's like taking all my attention. I'm super upset. Nothing can make me less upset just because I constantly think about it. And now I feel like there is a distance. Like it's really like headspace is the name and really what it gave me is more head.

space and I can identify all the things that I need to do. Yeah. And there are different elements and it doesn't prevent me from being upset. But then I can, I feel like context switch more easily and be in another state of mind for another set of problems. Fascinating, right? It's awesome. No, I've gotten into a little bit.

I've always found that like exercise has been my like go to strategy. Yeah. But it's, I've done some meditation. It's a little bit different. It's very different. I do both. You do both. Yeah.

It's very different. Yeah. There are only so many hobbies and habits that you can like motivate yourself to keep up. Sure, but 10 minutes a day is something that you can do. Of course. And I feel like it's at least every, everyone should try for a few weeks because I feel like it can be such a game changer. But it's like it's clearly discipline that you need to have. That's really hard to have.

Yeah, absolutely. But you just got to want it. Yeah. And you do it. Yes. This has been great. Thank you for coming in. Of course.

Thank you for having me. All right. Thanks for listening. So as always, you can find the transcript and the video at blog.w.ycombinator.com. And if you have a second, it would be awesome to give us a rating and review wherever you find your podcast. See you next time.