Front (YC S14) Raises $66M
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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 (http://frontapp.com/roadmap) and submit your ideas to help us get there.
I wrote some thoughts on my vision on Medium if you’re interested: https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/to-new-beginnings-announc...
When I told our CS team about the Series B, they said “Good. They deserve it. We would cry without it.”
Front was transformational for our CS department and I would highly recommend it to everyone.
Also, Microsoft have gotten stupid and lazy with Office. Each app eats 2 gig disk, all from non-shared Resources/Fonts/crap. Users who just clicked default install ended up with 9g of disk space gone. Why is this a big deal? Apple's extortionate pricing on mbp disks and the inability to upgrade them for less than the price of an entire new computer. There's a hacky way to fix this.
https://aaronweb.net/blog/2016/01/office-2016-mac-decrease-d...
Most of enterprise needs a bit more that Google sheets.
We aren't talking gigabytes of data. I can't wait for these shitty cloud services to be replaced with something a bit more capable than pre 1988, whatever form that takes.
But Front won't be replacing anyone's free web mail at any price point. I can't believe they don't have a free plan.
A lot of people compares us to Front, but we are more focused on the email/chat experience than customer support experience.
Thus our pricing reflects this vision, where we charge ~$8-$12/seat/month.
Front's front page slogan is "The shared inbox for teams." I'm always puzzled when they attack modern email in their PR. They should just stick to "universal team inbox".
When I see missive, I see "team email with chat." Well, we chat on Discord already, so that's not the pain point.
Front's main appeal to me at least was their multi-channel inbox. Customer support these days is not just email but social media and even texting. It can all be done through email, and even that can all be done through gmail, which is what we're doing now, and what I suspect a lot of people are doing.
But removing inefficiencies in this day to day process immediately cuts costs when you're paying people for this work. Hence zendesk and their no free plan position, except, they're not multi-channel, and I was never impressed by them being on the customer end of a zendesk using company. I'd always think "crutch" when I saw an email from a business that didn't bother to re-brand their zendesk (assuming it's possible, if not, I guess they did well for themselves and my impressions were unimportant).
PS. Your logo reminds me of men's underwear. I thought twice about mentioning it, and I know others would too. Not that I'd hold it against you, but (I do logo design, is my excuse for mentioning it).
Pain point here is when you start to have those internal conversations spread across many silos.
There is beauty and simplicity to manage all your conversations whether email, chat or mixed of both in a one convenient place.
> PS. Your logo reminds me of men's underwear.
Firs time I hear that one. :)
No, exactly. But you are always at risk of being just another channel. So you need to beat the rest. Or be above them. Or at least consolidate a few.
Front does a better job of marketing themselves as such (not the outlook argument, their inbox argument).
If you could pull in "channels" or have an open API for adding custom channels where users can participate in helping build your catalog, I think that would help.
The beauty of discord is with webhooks. Slack has "integrations" but they needed 1st party support. And I'd use Zapier to bridge the gaps. But most API sets have webhook support. And Discord allows for postings via webhooks. So I have a simple REST webhook processor page that takes incoming webhooks and posts to discord and everything else.
Not that webhooks are your answer, but just an example of a common chat app setup with a drastically better/easier feature set than their major competition.
> Firs time I hear that one. :)
It's the combination of white and the curves. Reminds me of boxer briefs every time. An easy fix would be to sharpen the rounded corners, but it's none of my business.
Either way, I have nothing but respect for you and your business. I wish you only the best ;)
Read receipts, shared inboxes, team communication on emails, and much more. Definitely worth the money.
Good to see more competition in the space though.
Disclaimer: I work at Zendesk
sales@company.com - shared with sales team normal shared inbox
support@company.com - "add ticket option"
first.last@company.com - private email
@company - twitter account
A shared communication hub is a big win. If they could take over some of the internal chat as well - I'd gladly cut them a big fat check. Our helpdesk bill is not cheap. (not zendesk sadly).
As mostly a b2e we have SLAs and reporting requirements to a lot of our customers and automating that, but still capturing/transferring disparate information is just a royal pain.
I did extensive searching for customer support email solutions. I landed at Front. But, I haven't pulled the trigger yet.
Zen was an easy pass for us, but we arrived at Front because of what they do better than Zen. Consolidation.
But the commonality is that these services always charge more than Todo apps or even chat apps. Even G Suite is cheaper. For some reason Google's team mailbox was a joke. They seem to have every feature of every startup somewhere, but have it suck.
I doubt these guys would be similar in pricing unless they were competing for the same market.
Same with buffer.com. They are a bit pricey too, but they can target businesses that save money with their service. Pockets open immediately when that is part of your value proposition -- cost savings.
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...
> You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - the most famous of which is "never go head to head with Microsoft Outlook"
So it's not just Outlook, because it's designed to be not just Outlook.
Just kidding and congrats! I would take every cent, you never know what kind of funding your competitors might receive. Just try to remain focused and remember to never go full Duplan.
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.)
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
Sorry for the basic question -- I couldn't tell from the demo video and the free trial takes some setup. Trying to figure out if this fits existing workflows or would need new workflows to be built around it. Thanks for your help!
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?
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 https://www.lewagon.com - 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!
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.
I don't think Microsoft would be threatened by this at all. Nobody chooses to use Outlook, it's what you get if you work for a big corporation or if you purchase Office 365. It's not a standalone product, I can't just use Outlook.
I think it's not doing Front any favours to compare themselves to Outlook. Outlook is an enterprise product, my company has customized the crap out of it and it's hooked up to our global credential/access system. That's not even close to what Front is offering (a better multi-inbox tool).
Even though this is David vs Goliath kind of situation, it's more than fair to give it a shot
But then have we come that far if those things are still broken? idk but good job Front!
Polymail, MailTime, Slidemail, Taskpipes, and maybe a few other YC companies look like they have email technology that could help replace Outlook. Any others?
I don't see any evidence of calendars in the article's screenshots.
Seems money in this case, will basically not be used to maintain current business, but to grow it faster.
This outfit and app won't exist 365 days from now, I guarantee it.
People who want to replace outlook, already did. ages ago. They have slack, jira, jive, gmail, etc, etc, etc, etc.
People who won't replace outlook, won't replace outlook.
Did you not read the headline? YC Summer 2014 and just raised $66M. They're doing fine.