The Founder’s Guide to Discipline: Lessons from Front’s Mathilde Collin | Hacker News Reader

The Founder’s Guide to Discipline: Lessons from Front’s Mathilde Collin

firstround.com

83 pointsyarapavan21 comments

Just switched our office to Front. The discipline in the article is highly visible in the product. Nowhere in the product do you get a whiff of the typical job-half-finished-ship-now attitude that pervades SV. Every feature works as intended. I can't imagine the amount of testing they do, but getting to this level of quality takes hard work and discipline.

I think I'm a bit slow here - what does Front do? Some sort of way as managing communication between a customer and a business?

A shared inbox. The thing Google doesn't want you to have

So I was interested in trying Front, and it looks like just what I need, but JESUS, what a terrible way to greet people to their site. The title is flashing with kind of instant chat, half the page is taken up with "HI!!!!!" banners. Does this actually convert?!

Also their signup form inexplicably won't let me sign up, and doesn't tell me what it doesn't like about the form submission. This does not seem like discipline. Doesn't work in two different browsers.

Anyone have a recommendation for alternative tools that do the same thing, but that aren't quite so customer unfriendly?

You’re right that is the most annoying website so far. They’re taking April’s fools too far.

Maybe I'm missing something...

I see the chat bubble in the bottom right. Pretty standard nowadays. Nothing uniquely bad about it here.

And that's all that's jumping at me? The rest is the normal website. What else is annoying?

https://imgur.com/a/ima8puj

Top and bottom seem to be some kind of contextual banner, also the bottom part keeps changing colour between primary colours. The title of the tab keeps flashing back and forth. I think the bottom part may be meant to be some kind of navigation? But it's partially obscured by the chat box, which has no obvious way to dismiss it.

It has taken significant willpower not to close it down and never come back, and I am their target customer and in a buying mood.

I don't think they've tested their website design at smaller window sizes - full screen for me looks fine, but when I reduce the windows size things start overlapping unpleasantly.

Personally, I'd rather they stopped the transitions while scrolling and keep it a bit simpler so it resizes properly!

I have been following this thread all day, hoping for some additional discussion. It seems that won't happen, too bad. My $0.02:

To quote Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration". The article explains Mathilde's approach. I'm impressed with her rigorousness and consistency. It's a great way to build trust both internally and externally.

Building something (anything) from scratch to _really_ complete is an exercise in persistence. Being in the same boat right now, I admire her for what she's doing and how she's doing it.

Is anyone else impressed by the text-to-speech audio? I could see myself using this to consume a lot of written content while on my commute. It's mostly very natural sounding. Does anyone know what tts tech is used here?

Firstround shills for their founders like no other. No mention of the discipline as it relates to profitability, a healthy CAC:LTV, equity efficiency - but plenty of vanity metrics to go around, naturally amount of money raised and team size. These VC fluff pieces are increasingly insufferable PR.

First Round is not an investor in Front.

They don’t put these pieces together out of a collegial respect for random entrepreneurs.

Correct, it's called content marketing. YC does it too.

It's insane to refer to this article as a fluff piece. It's a detailed, transparent, numerical, inside look at how a particular founder runs various aspects of her business.

It's one of the least fluffy pieces I've seen about a startup.

Is this one of those “great businesses” that’s never turned a profit and will disappear like a puff of smoke in the next economic downturn?

I'd say it's more likely to peter out/be acquired and killed due to the overall lack of vision. Discipline is good for local optimization, but it doesn't build huge companies on its own.

Read the article.

See where she says "we're default alive" in an email to her company?

That means they were profitable back in 2016. I assume now with extra capital that might not be the case, but that's the re-invest in the growth strategy, a la Amazon (which is smart).

I think a TLDR here would be:

Discipline, not vision. Habit, not motivation.

(I wonder often whether discipline is another method my brain tricks me to block out cynicism?)

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