The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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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: 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: 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…”
Collin: Operational discipline is more important than having a grand vision
“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 …”
Collin: Front lost just two employees in its entire history
“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…”
Collin: Delaying SaaS price increases makes customers angry twice
“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…”
Collin: Transparency is just a tool to generate employee engagement at scale
“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.”
Collin: Co-founders should optimize for mutual respect over personal friendship
“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.”
Transparency is harmful if it creates more problems than it solves
“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.”
Front managers have full access to direct reports' personal company inboxes
“So if you are a manager, you have access to your direct reports inboxes.”
Lacking domain expertise can be an advantage for product founders
“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.”
Alströmer: Amplitude, Stripe, and Front Started With Founder-Led Outbound Emails
“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.”
Collin: A first sales rep must generate 3x to 6x their compensation
“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…”
Collin interviewed every candidate at Front until reaching 80 employees
“And I kept interviewing everyone till, like, employee number 80 or something.”
Collin: Prioritize feedback only from paying customers
“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.”
Front does not disclose employee salaries internally despite high transparency
“We don't share the salaries of everyone.”
Email startups must reach intense feature parity with Gmail to succeed
“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”
PR and content marketing drove Front to $1M in ARR
“So it got us to probably one million in ARR, and so that was probably a thousand customers, maybe? Something like that.”
Paid acquisition eventually replaced content as Front's main user source
“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.”
The most impactful product changes are initially painful for customers
“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.”
Having a co-founder in each regional office is crucial for distributed teams
“So like having one founder in each team is super important.”
Front CEO Mathilde Collin logs out of all work apps every weekend
“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.”
Paul Buchheit's 'follow your growth' advice was the best guidance for Front
“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, …”
Front shares its full board decks and runway with all employees
“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…”
Mathilde Collin spent two months debating hypothetical conflicts before co-founding Front
“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…”
Early startup hires replicate themselves and should meet the co-founder bar
“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 …”
Front finished Y Combinator with $5K MRR and 130 customers
“When we left YC, we had 5000 MR, and so we had probably like 130 companies using the product.”
Front had zero user churn at YC Demo Day
“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…”
Front had 3,000 waitlist signups when interviewing at YC
“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”
Front acquired its first 3,000 private beta signups via content marketing
“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…”
Collin: Front raised every funding round within a single week
“Every every time we've raised in a week.”
Front converted only 10 users from 3,000 early beta signups
“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…”
Front acquired its first 300 customers through founder-written 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 like treating about or l…”
Front hit product-market fit at Series A with $1.5M ARR
“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 …”
Front used a public Trello roadmap to prioritize features during YC
“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…”
Startup studios are valuable primarily for co-founder matchmaking and pre-seed funding
“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.”
Forty percent of Front users utilize both shared and individual inboxes
“Today we have, I think, 40% of our daily active users who are using Front both for shared inboxes and individual inboxes.”
Mathilde Collin's co-founder was diagnosed with cancer 18 months prior
“So 18 months ago my co-founder was diagnosed with a cancer. So that was the hardest moment by far.”
Gil names Airtable, Checkr, and Front as breakout bets
“I think some that are really promising right now are Airtable, Checker, and Front. In terms of three companies that I'm involved with that I just think are, you know, amazing founders great traction, and doing really interesting things.”
Collin: Email was not designed for collaborative team workflows
“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.”
As of 2018, Front's workforce was 80% San Francisco and 20% Paris
“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.”