Front hit product-market fit at Series A with $1.5M ARR
Mathilde Collin · Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator · Oct 3, 2018 · at 41:32
Mathilde Collin, co-founder and CEO of Front, discusses how long it took Front to find true product-market fit after launch.
0:00 / 0:39exact quote · 40.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 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 in, in three years after we started.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mathilde Collin
Mathilde Collin would eliminate subject lines, CC, and BCC from email
“So, you know, I think I would probably wipe out most of the structural features. Cause 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. And so I think I would remove …”
Collin: Hires rarely solve company problems founders cannot figure out themselves
“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.”
Collin: Front reached 110 employees and $80M raised with zero finance staff
“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…”
Collin: Early sales teams must be evaluated on inputs, not revenue targets
“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…”
Mathilde Collin: Slack cannot replace email for external business communication
“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 in, to messa…”