Front

“And that really helped us get to, like, that first million dollar. Like, that one versus page with both superhuman and front probably drove, like, most of our initial customers.”

“One, if you are a product that needs to be used every day, something like what front is makes sense. Things like DAUs over MAUs, which effectively measures how many days in a month people are using your product. It's really important. A high number there matte…”

“Some of the early ones like Amplitude, Stripe, Front, they were doing up on sales emails, just like the one we described to get started. Those founders were doing those sales emails as they get started.”

“Yes, we are definitely similar. Front is probably the one we are the closest to. And we had some discussions with Front. They tried our product. We tried theirs and there was some inspiration from both sides and we have a good relationship with them, but yeah …”

“Hybrid office centric, also known as synchronized hybrid, this is what companies like Asana and Front are doing, where Most of the hiring is done around hubs in certain locations, and they synchronize when you come into the office two to three days a week, and…”

“The last round in front, which I think was at six or seven hundred million, was all founders. Okay, it was Ryan Smith from Qualtrics, I forget who else, the other billion, our friends, the billionaires of SaaS, but they all, I think, led that round instead of …”

“And if I was running a SaaS app, I would, I'd probably use Help Scout would be my number one, but Front I've heard can do a lot of the same stuff.”

“At the same time, I think that's a bit of an aberration and many companies will decide to continue working with institutional leads where they get just a little bit more than you could handle from a single individual.”

“She's been on three times since, like, no revenue up to, you know, well north of where she is, say, at, like, 1.4 per month, and it's been fascinating all that journey.”

“I actually think it doesn't matter if you don't have a grand vision from day one, because as soon as you know that you're operating in a market that could be huge, then you'll have all the time you need to figure out what will be step two, step three, and then…”

“So I can tell you very honestly that the vision up front I pitched during our Series B 18 months ago is very, very different from the vision I had pitched after my seed round or Series A round.”

“And advice number three is be very precise in the asks that you have for your investors. So for example, at the end of the day, every founder wants more customers and new hires. But if you're saying, do you know any backend engineer? And do you know any compan…”

“And I've been doing that since I started France and I have only missed sending this email once, which was when demo day was happening, which was really crazy.”

“Yeah, so every week, all hands meeting, I show revenue. So, meaning every single week, they know exactly how much churn we've had, how much expansion we've had, and how much new business we've had, and we divide that by the different teams.”

“I always talked about the one that was the best, but also I always said that, so let's, let's say I was at 30 KMR. I would say we're at 20 KMR. So I would always give a number that's below so that, you know, if I raise it in two months and for some reason thin…”

“When I chose Brian, Brian is actually one of the only investors during our series B that I didn't know much before. And so I hadn't built a relationship with him. And so I knew it was very important to understand if we would work well together. So I think I to…”

“If you, let's take, for example, women versus men, if you spend the time to evaluate a lot of people, you should end up with fifty-fifty. If you don't, then you will probably not end up with that ratio.”

“I don't believe that transparency is good in itself. And that's why you should be transparent. I believe that that's the most efficient way I've found to create engagement at scale.”

“I think the most important thing is discipline, and I think that discipline is actually more important than having a grand vision. And my personal belief, and I am sure that not a lot of people agree with me, is one of the reasons why we've been successful so …”

“We have so much respect for one another, and that's the thing that you need to optimize for. It doesn't matter how well you get along, you just need to be so impressed by whatever your other person or other persons are doing.”

“The truth is, if with all the knowledge I have about the company, I can't figure out something, I think it's very rare that someone would come and figure it out.”

“And I kept interviewing everyone till, like, employee number 80 or something.”

“In a company that's fast growing, like you think, for example, I've been willing to hire a head of finance for, I don't know, six months, and it's so important, like, we don't have any finance person at France, and we, I don't know, we're a 110 people, we've r…”

“Our NPS is 87th, which is super high. If you look at Glassdoor, we only have five stars reviews. If you look at our attrition no one has, there are just two people that have left Fronty ever, and it was one to go back to school, one to join the company of thei…”

“When I interviewed at YC we had 3000 companies that had signed up to our product, but it was closed beta, so they were not using it yet”

“When we left YC, we had 5000 MR, and so we had probably like 130 companies using the product.”

“We hadn't had a single user churn. So basically the reason why I'm saying that is cause every time someone joined the company at front, I show the video of demo day. So I know my demo day pitch by heart cause I've listened to it so many times. And so part of t…”

“When you want to listen to some feedback, you should listen to feedback of people that are paying some money because otherwise you can be overwhelmed with feedback From people that will never pay for your products.”

“I think that the input is far more important at this stage than the output, because the truth is, If they don't hit their target, first, your target could be wrong, and how could you know what your target should be when you are so early? and two, maybe your p…”

“Every every time we've raised in a week.”

“The temptation is to say we're going to raise our price, but we'll do that maybe in a year, and so you want to be nice, and so you give a lot of time. The problem is, you actually make your customers angry twice, because by then they had forgotten, and so then…”

“There are a few, ah, ratio you can hear off, so for example, they should bring between three X and six X the amount of money they're paid, so then you have a range, because the truth is, if they bring less than what they're paid, probably not good. Ah, 10 X, l…”

“So it was only content marketing. So I was doing an email product, and I was writing all these blog posts about is email dead, as Slack is saying, or like all kinds of things that I think people were curious to hear about, or what will email look like 20 years…”

“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.”

“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”

“Today we have, I think, 40% of our daily active users who are using Front both for shared inboxes and individual inboxes.”

“So we did it 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 sh…”

“I feel like most of the Decisions, progress decision that we made that led to like a significant change in behavior were the most painful.”

“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 like treating about or l…”

“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, so the conversion rate is not high, but any time I was, ah, onboarding someone, and the person was not interested, I l…”

“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.”

“We hired our first marketing person in January, 2017. So two and a half years after we launched the product.”

“So it got us to probably one million in ARR, and so that was probably a thousand customers, maybe? Something like that.”

“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 s…”

“But so I think for us, a startup studio was great for two reasons. One, the fact that we met and two, the fact that we got initial funding.”

“So 18 months ago my co-founder was diagnosed with a cancer. So that was the hardest moment by far.”

“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, ah, by work.”

“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?... When you hire someone, you should wonder whether you want 10 persons like this in your company. Because …”

“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 the board deck. Every, I don't, every, ah, inbox is accessibl…”

“So if you are a manager, you have access to your direct reports inboxes.”

“The way I think about transparency is if something is going to create more primes and raise more questions, then bad use of transparency. If something is going to answer a lot of questions and solve a lot of problems, then good use of transparency.”

“We don't share the salaries of everyone.”

“So we decided to have an office in Paris in January this year. And so now we have about 20% of our team in Paris and 80% here.”

“So like having one founder in each team is super important.”

“So, you know, when people sometimes ask questions about the insights that you have and other people don't have something, something, the fact that you don't have any insight and you have a, like New pair of eyes is actually super insightful.”

“Ah, but at the end of the day, that's the best advice you 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, …”

“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 a hundred K MR. I think that's where, when I felt like some companies were using the product, and even if I had demoed All the …”

“I've been meditating for every day for, I think, 500 days.”

“I wanted to work on email because I was spending probably six or seven hours per day in my inbox.”

“So I scheduled all the partners meetings the week after. So 11 partner meetings in one week, which was pretty tiring.”