Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front

I think the most pressing and important question is this first one from Tomas Grannis about Lego. Yes, what's your favorite Lego theme? Yeah, my favourite Lego theme is something that not a lot of people know; it's called Ideas. Okay, and so basically, you can submit if you have an idea of a new Lego set that should be built, then people can vote. And then if it gets enough votes, then they build it.

So one of the sets that I just got is three birds. Since boring, they're actually super beautiful. Mm-hmm, and they came from a random person submitting this idea. That's so cool! I was just reading an AMA the other day with a Lego master builder. Did you see that one on Reddit?

Yeah, yeah, you probably knew all that. What kind of birds are they? I... so that will be really hard for me to not tell you in French. Yeah, that's next level in my learning of English. So I know what "fern" is just because I've been around I see. But for the average person who doesn't know what it is, how would you describe it?

So I would describe it as a shared inbox. So you can think about it as, you know, what Gmail or Outlook does, but we've added collaboration features and workflows so that it works better for teams. So we have a few different kinds of teams that are using the product: from recruiting teams, support teams, management teams, client services teams, operations teams. And what they have in common is they have a lot of emails coming in and inside their company, a lot of people inside the team that need to handle these emails, and they struggle managing that as a team because email wasn't made for teams. Mhmm, that's what we do.

And when did you add the personal email to it? Actually, pretty early on. Yes, the thing is it wasn't working that well, so meaning you weren't getting users. Yeah, meaning in order to have a product that people used for their individual emails, you need to get to a level of feature parity with Gmail or Outlook. That's pretty intense. And so even if you could do it four years ago, it's only about two years ago that we started having the features that would allow people to manage both shared inboxes and individual inboxes as well.

So today we have, I think, 40% of our daily active users who are using Front both for shared inboxes and individual inboxes. Hmm, and we're releasing a brand new version of Front at the end of October that we've been working on for nine months, and the goal is to make sure that people can enjoy the individual inbox as much as they enjoy the shared inbox.

Can you be more specific? Meaning, so today, when you have a shared inbox, let's say support@ads.com, it's obvious that they require collaboration; otherwise, you would not have a shared inbox. But for individual inboxes... so they also require collaboration. So I will collaborate with my assistant, with our sales team and specific deals, with our recruiting team and specific candidates, with our product team and product feedback.

And if so, tomorrow with Front, you can also add your individual inbox. Metal at front app and then assignment messages have internal conversations around these messages, integrate it with whatever tool you're using: GitHub, Salesforce, Trello, Asana, etc. So it becomes a full replacement for Gmail or Outlook. Gotcha.

Okay, how do you feel about Gmail, or rather Google, wrapping up Inbox? I think it's zero surprising. So, I mean, so first of all, I wasn't a huge fan of Inbox. I think Inbox brought a few things that were great, like the grouped notifications, they had great snooze features. But I think that if you want people to change how they deal with email, the amount of innovation that you need to bring needs to be super high because it's very disruptive to change. So then the value proposition needs to be like, it needs to be 10x better, and I didn't feel like Inbox was 10x better than Gmail.

Hmm, so I was not surprised. And then when they rolled out their new Gmail version, you could see that it was pretty similar. Then I knew that that was coming. It kind of brought over the better stuff. Yeah, and then also if you are going to have two different products doing the same thing, then they should be super different. Mhmm, and they weren't super different.

Did you find that when you started to integrate individual emails into Front, the people were asking for like all these vestigial features of Gmail that you're like, "This is gonna be outdated at some point," but they still want it? Yeah, I think there are. You know, there are. So yes, they want a lot of features, but I think that's normal, and we should provide them. There are a few ones that are harder to implement just because I can't be convinced that they're better for the world.

So for example, you know, subfolder is like, "Hey," and you can try to build a click again, and maybe... the thing or maybe it's not. Yeah, hmm, okay. How did you end up weighing that out? Like, was it just if enough customers complained that you're enough people like gave you friction about signing up, you would build it?

So, and the question I saw that a lot of people asked on Twitter. Questions about how do you prioritize features, so like I can talk a little bit more about that. So there is one thing that's unique that we did, which is, so it is 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 vote the thing that you want, and you can see what we're working on, and you can see what has been shipped."

So that gave us a ton of insight and what people wanted. The second thing that we did was, so obviously we use Front to manage incoming inquiries, but any tool that you're using should be able to provide analytics on the kind of requests that your users have. So you should be able to see, in the past month, for example, I don't know, 20% of incoming inquiries were about folders or better analytics or whatever.

So then we can look at that and then arrives the moment where like you have so many inputs. Plus, that's, there is also what I personally believe we should build. And you need to make a decision, and I feel like the decision will be based on two things: one is what's the intensity or how much complexity it is to build a certain feature, and then is like "What's the uptake? Like what can we expect from it? Will it, I don't know, increase our market? Will it make our current users happier? Will they pay more?"

Etcetera. And so you always need to balance these two things. And for us, we just have a scale of 1 to 3. So like in terms of how good it will be for users, 1, 2, 3: like game changer or slightly better nice to have. Yeah. And then how complex is it to build?

And so then you have nine different scores depending on these three things, and that's how we can prioritize what we built. And we should always put that in perspective of what our vision is, and making sure that we're not doing something that's against what we want to build, and then making sure that we remain focused because I think that one of the biggest things that you need to achieve when you're small is being super focused.

Hmm. And of those features you've rolled out in the past four years, were there certain ones where you really noticed the giant uptick in usage or growth, or...? Yeah, yeah. So there is one way that we were really used where it's really changed how Front was used. So, and it's specific to what we do, but basically the concept of Frontiers—whenever you have a message that comes in, you can comment on it.

So you have an email, and you can have internal discussions about it; you have the tweets, you can have internal discussions about it. And so before, you could comment on one specific message. So if you had extreme messages, you could decide to comment on message 1 or message 2 or message 3.

The bad thing about that is it was really hard to have a conversation that was flowing because you could comment on message 1 and then someone come in on my email, came out. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and so—but we wanted to let people have conversations that were fluid around. So we decided to do two things: one is reverse the order of conversations, so now the most recent is at the bottom and not at the top. And then that would allow us who have conversations not associated to any message anymore, but that would just flow into the conversation.

Mmm, and so that was a huge disruption because when people use email like five hours a day and they've built workflows around commenting on messages, and you're introducing a huge change, that can be pretty upset. But then what we saw is the number of comments that were made per daily active user surged during that way.

And then through that way, and so I feel like most of the decisions, product decisions that we made that led to like a significant change in behavior, where is the most painful. Mmm, and another example is we're releasing a new version of Front in October. I can't tell you how upset our customers are gonna be, and I don't tell you how excited I am that we're rolling this out, but it's going to be super disruptive.

A bunch of people had questions about how you guys were when, you know, getting customers in the early days. So I think what would be helpful is for context, like what did Front look like when you guys launched because I'm sure it's different now.

Yeah, I mean, so the Front sucked when we launched it. Okay, remember we were in YC, and our batch mates would come to me and ask, "Can I use the product?" And I was like, "No, you should. Like our product is broken, that is great." So like it wasn't great, but you should launch as soon as possible because that's how you'll get feedback, and that's you want feedback in order to make sure that you're making something people want.

So the product was bad. Now what I remember is building an MVP in the email space stuff because people expect a lot of features; like they will expect attachments to work, they will expect tags to work, you should be able to Cc, Bcc, forward emails, etc.

So basically what we did was we had the most basic version up front without attachments, but we would still try to see if some innovation that we had brought where you could assign emails to people and have comments would be enough for people to give up on a few of the features. And I remember that something we did when Front was super early is I was writing a lot of content.

And so I think probably our first 300 customers were coming from content that I was writing on like Medium 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 liked reading about or the communication collaboration, Slack.

And then people would sign to our beta, and then I would call them and manually onboard them and try to have them use the product. And then they would use the product for maybe a few hours and then stop using the product. But then I would know why. Then I would, you know, take my co-founder and tell him for one feature, "We’re away," and then we’re good, and we’d build it, and then I'd talk to customers, and they were like, "No, that's missing one feature."

Away and we're really—the only things we did for the first year at least was just doing that: it was writing content, onboarding users, and building features, and every other distraction that you could think of, yeah, we didn't do.

Okay, so I was emailing with Wade from Zapier about their content marketing. Kat and I are doing a class start of school this week. Yeah, and one thing he said, which is that was really interesting, was in the beginning they found themselves getting trapped by writing content that would do well on Hacker News, but not actually convert to users for them.

Yeah, were you able to differentiate that in the beginning or were you just trying to get any kind of attention?

So it might be true; the truth is like first of all, I had no other idea. So yes, in an ideal world, I would find a lead-gen source that's as effective as possible. Yeah, I knew nothing about product positioning. Sharon Vox is not something people are looking for, so I felt like that wasn't working.

We had a horizontal product, and we weren't sure who was going to use it. So like outbounding wasn't necessarily the best thing because you're like, "We have this general tool." And so for me, yes, the truth is I would agree with them.

Like we, I think for more 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 anytime I was onboarding someone and the person was not interested, I learned a ton.

And so if I were to do it again, I think I would do it again just because that was my yes have a lot of people signing up. And then I had a few tricks like whenever you were signing up, you had an auto-reply that said, "Why are you interested? What problem are you trying to solve?"

And so even if, you know, they don't end up converting, then you get a ton of information. Mmm, so at scale, content is not at all how we get users today, but in the early days, our—it is still some the way we get users, but not the main source, which is paid acquisition versus in the early days. It was the main source for us to get users, and I don't regret it. I don't think it was scalable, but I think it was doable and confronted us with the market.

What was the most successful piece? It's like... you know well... lasts forever?

Yeah, okay, so it's kind of like this opinionated, let’s say, it was a lot of leadership and a lot of sharing my journey as a founder. And how far did that get you?

So, you know, you said you know out of 3000 companies you got 10, maybe how did you get to...

We hired our first marketing person in January 2017, so two and a half years after we launched the product. So that's where it got us. So PR and content were 90 percent of what we did in the first two and a half years, which is how many customers roughly?

So it got us to probably 1 million in ARR, and so that was probably a thousand customers; maybe something like that. That's great! Yeah, wow.

Listen, did you guys started making this in some kind of like startup lab thing? Right, wasn't it?

Oh yeah, yeah. Can you talk more about that? Because we haven't had someone on the podcast that's been through one of those.

Yeah, so when I graduated, I joined a startup, and then I knew that I wanted to start a company. But I think for me, the main thing is I had to borrow money to go to school, and then I had to give back the money, and starting a company was pretty tough. So I took a job in a SaaS company, and I was doing sales because I feared that I could probably make a lot of money if I was doing my job right.

And so, two things happened: one is I made some money, so that was good, and two is I learned more about SaaS and software and I loved it. Like I really loved the idea of building a product that could then be used by some people, and then their life at work would be drastically different because of a product that we had built.

So it was at that point I was working on a contract management software and contracts are super archaic, and then they had this beautiful tool, and I said it was wonderful, but I was not using contracts; I was using email, and I was as frustrated with this tool that had not evolved in the past ten years and was clearly not made for businesses.

So a year after I joined the company, I was lucky enough to meet with this, so there are called Founders. There is a startup studio, and what they do is they either find technical co-founders or business co-founders, and they try to have people miss. And then if, you know, a great relationship comes out of it, then they are happy to fund them.

And so that's where I met with my co-founder, Long. And so when I think about my journey at Front, like where I got most—like he was meeting with them, with him, and with them five years ago. And so I met him and for two months.

How did you meet; was it some kind of like speed dating situation?

No, it’s like they host events. I eventually quit my job, and so I spent a lot of time in their studio helping on lots of different projects. And Loha was there, and it was the same thing: he had quit his job, was working on one specific project, met him, and then really liked him.

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 sell, or like whatever, should we have the same ownership in the company? And things like that; like would you move to San Francisco?

And I think we agreed on everything, and so then after two months were like, "Okay, let's do it," and it worked out so well. So it was super lucky. But so I think for us, the startup studio was great for two reasons: one, the fact that we met, and two, the fact that we got initial funding.

Now a few months after we met, we decided to go whoo! I see where we get additional funding. And so then we weren't very close to them, so it was super great in the first few months, and then YC was great, and then other things were great at different stages of the company.

Yeah, I'm sure things were painful too.

Yeah, yeah. So did the idea come about before you even joined?

At the intersection of two things: one is, I was willing to innovate in the email space, and Laura, my co-founder, had been in two companies before where they had a lot of users. They were forced to implement helpdesk solutions like Zendesk or Freshdesk, and he hated them.

And so like what he wanted to build was a lightweight support tool. And so in fact, like Front started as this email tool but with a good market being shared inboxes. And the reason was because... Don’t want you to do that. Aren't you? Do that with it? Okay, but you know, it's impossible to start from scratch.

Like no company has managed to build a business starting with an email product, because it's super hard to build, super hard to have people pay for it. So I was like, "Okay, what if the good market is shared inboxes, but then we expand as we discussed into like a full email client that can be used by individuals?"

And that's why Front is this combination of like this very big vision but this very simple pain point that we address at the beginning. Mmm. Just to go back really quickly, what have been the hardest moments so far at Front?

Yeah, I mean, so I can share one that's business-related and then one that's more personal. So 18 months ago, my co-founder was diagnosed with cancer, so that was the hardest moment by far.

And so then when I reflect on the journey, you know, it's really hard to say this moment where I don't know we didn't get the term sheet we wanted or like this because in return, like it’s really hard for me to tell that you lose them. Like the hardest moment, because that's far harder than anything you could conceive, and now is great, and so all of it turned out in a super positive outcome.

But I think when that happened, it was like my lowest. And then you start to realize that, you know, like founders are always very committed to making their company work, and it's good, but they should also realize that, you know, their company is just a company, and you have a life outside of your company that's also super important, and you should enjoy every moment that you have because, you know, things could be very different tomorrow.

Yeah, and how do you maintain that balance?

You mean you like good friend of Legos, play soccer—so I mean, I'm so when I'm super deliberate myself and then I tried to implement a lot of things at Front to promote this healthy work-life balance. And clearly, it's been influenced by the fact that Long got sick, and so I personally meditate every day.

I log out of every app: Slack, Front. It's dry every weekend, and anytime I'm on PTO, I don't have any notifications, so I'm never distracted by work. And then I exercise: like I play soccer, I run, I kite surf, I bike, and I just make sure that it's like when I stay late at the office, it's an exception. I sometimes do it, and when I work during the weekend, it's an exception as well.

So that's what I do personally in order to make sure. And I sleep like at least eight hours a night every night. That was like the biggest game-changer for me, actually. I'm feeling better. I know, it's like so dumb and obvious, but it's like prioritizing that.

Yeah, for sure! Oh, isn't it always felt more proactive? And then, you know, as Front they are, if you think so. Last week, we had health and wellness week, and every day you could meditate so that you could understand what it does, and then we had lunch, and Nuran explaining the impact of eating healthy on your emotions.

And I don't know. We organized a few runs, and so, yeah. Also, whenever people join, I explain what Front is about, and I explained that I care about it, so that's, you know, our culture as well.

Yeah, and you're just kind of trying to lead by example, yeah, in the same way, yeah. Yeah, and in the hard moment for your company, what was that?

I mean, so the thing is, so every single moment is super hard. And so one of my biggest learnings from YC four years ago, when, you know, the company was super small, is every Tuesday we had people coming and talking about all kinds of things, and we had the founders of Stripe, Facebook, Opportunity, Dropbox, like which are super successful companies, and they were telling us how hard it was and how many times they've wondered whether the business would go anywhere.

I mean, that's the story of my life. Like, you know, it's super easy to think about Front as, you know, this company that has—you look at our metrics because I've published everything; we've consistently been doing well in terms of revenue; our retention of employees is high; look at our funding stories; we've always raised money super easily.

Okay, cool! Like that's what you can read about it. The truth is every single day I wake up, and there is a list of ten questions where I don't have answers, and I need to figure them out. And I know that the more we grow, the more is at stake.

And so I absolutely need to find the answers, and so every single day is hard, and we still have customers that churn, and I'm extremely sad about it. We still have employee situations that are not easy to deal with. I still have, you know, moments where I'm wondering if we should do what we're doing, and that's true for every single founder I've ever met as successful as they are.

And so I think nobody should wonder whether like it's hard or easy; like it's just consistently hard. And do you need help reminding yourself of that, or where the dinner is enough?

Um, no. I read, you know, the hard things about how things. And every lot of founders have read the book, but for me, it was like really a game-changer to just read about the fact that it's hard. You should stop wondering about it; yeah, just a given. It doesn't mean anything about the health of your company; yeah.

So I just need to remind myself that it's normal, and it's just a journey.

Yeah, you said something interesting about retention. I know that's like something you guys are particularly good at and proud of, I'm sure.

Yes. Do you have kind of pro tips in that category?

Yeah, so I'm preparing a talk about that, so I've been thinking about it. So here is: I think it's a super complex question because if the answer was, "It's simple, now let's do that," so...

Yeah, but we have super high retention and super high NPS inside the company. So I think that there are three categories of things you can do within your company to make sure that that's happening. The first one is like how do you hook people, and I think that's by having a mission-driven company.

So at the end of the day, so I was asked to do a talk about retention, and so then I emailed our employees, and it was like the end of the day, "Why are you engaged? Motivated? Happy? Where do you work hard?"

And a lot of them were saying because we care about the mission. And so I think you need to make sure that you have a mission; it's clear people can interpret it in the way they want. Our mission statement is "work happier," and you know it means different things for different people.

But if people can relate to and can feel like, you know, they have purpose when working on Front, then it's good. So making it super clear and as your company scaled, just making sure that you say it over and over, and everyone knows what it means, everyone has examples of what it means, is super important.

Then I think that then there is like the push: what will enable them to go above and beyond? And I think that for that it's really the quality of co-workers. So one advice that Patrick Collison gave me when I was hiring our first employees was two things: one, 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?"

And that was super helpful because then you hire people that are already great at the beginning. And then the second of advice he gave me was when you hire someone, you should wonder whether you want 10% existing in your company because the truth is they will hire people like them.

And so then if you don't want ten people like this, then you should probably not hire this person. And so I think we did a really good job in the early days at hiring super talented people who were a really good match with our values.

And so then as we grew the team, I think the team became really good—good meaning they're talented, but also they are— we have some values: we are collaborative, caring, and I think that making sure that even when you're desperate to hire people, you don't lower your bar.

And you've heard so much, but like it's so important. That's, I think, something that contributes to us having a really good culture. And I like to think about every single employee that we bring as someone bringing something new on top of, you know, all the baseline.

Baseline being here. So that and then the third thing is I think. So people want to see and understand that they have an impact because if they care about the vision and the mission, and they have great co-workers, so they want to do their best, but they don't know how to contribute.

Then at the end of the day, they will probably not do as good of a job or be as happy. And so for that, I think there are like a lot of things that you can implement within your company.

So one of them is transparency. So it's a word that's being used a lot, but it's super easy to claim that you're a transparent company, and super hard to implement. And it gets harder as you scale. So for us, being transparent means you have dashboards that show everything.

Every Monday morning, we go over all our metrics. Every quarter, I do a presentation less quadrat Front. I review everything that’s been doing well, not going well; every board meeting, I send the board deck.

Every—I don’t know, every inbox is accessible in Front. So you want to see what customers want to say: like good things and bad things, you can access it. If you want to see why a candidate didn't accept an offer, you can know why; like whatever you want to know. If you want to know what our runway is, you can also know what's our runway.

And when you say every inbox is accessible, does that mean personal inboxes as well?

No, so personal inboxes usually there. So if you are a manager, you have access to your direct reports' inboxes. And the truth is I tried—we tried to make so we try to make as many inboxes as possible public, but the truth is you have to implement some rules because I know there are HR emails that should not be shared.

There are financial emails that should not be shared. So we try to share as much of the, like personal emails—their name at companies come as possible, but not 100%. Lessons are shared. So I think transparency is just like a really good way to have people understand what's the impact of their work is on all these metrics that are displayed.

Mmm, these are a few tips.

Yeah, what else don't you share?

So the way I think about transparency is, if something is going to create more primes and raise more questions than values of transparency, is something that is going to answer a lot of questions. So those are firms, then good use of transparency.

So what's the—what don't we share? We don't share the salaries of everyone. It's why? So I can give you an example: there is like a person at France that might have health issues and our insurance doesn't cover it, so we might pay this person an additional, I don't know, a few hundred dollars a month instead of paying for the insurance.

And so then if everything was public, and then people would be like, "What? Is this person paid as much?" and then I would have to explain, and so that's—and I don't care; like it doesn't bring anything great to the company.

So the way I think about compensation is if anyone knew everything tomorrow, I could explain. Mmm-hmm. And it's fear, and that's what matters.

Now, it doesn't mean that I will share it because it's actually not super helpful.

And I mean another example is, you know, when people leave our—let go, usually we don't share why, and we try to be super transparent about our performance process so that people understand why someone might be let go and making sure that it's fair.

Now, privacy of employees is more important than transparency, and so then transparency doesn't mean that I was sure this person wasn't good at doing this or that I would let this person go.

Right, and so do you guys now have employees overseas as well?

Yes, in France. Yes, so we decided to open an office in Paris in January of this year, and so now we have about 20% of our team in Paris and 80% here.

Okay, and now how do you go about making them feel included? Same thing, we're super deliberate about it.

So every employee in France starts with a onboarding in San Francisco. Twice a year, we have company-wide off-sites and everyone is coming. We have all hands, where we make sure that it's a balance between SF sharing insights and Paris sharing its insights.

My co-founder went back to France, so like having one founder in each team is super important. We have a lot of people from SF who go to Paris, so that they can also share more about the culture here. And so far, it's working really well.

I mean, we're still improving and other things, but that's—and he's there full-time now?

Yeah. Okay, that's great!

Yeah! Yeah, that helps.

Oh yeah, it's hopes the time. You got a ton of questions on Twitter.

Yeah, there was one that I wanted to bring up now. So KP asks, "What is one unique insight about the problem, meaning the problem you're working on, you didn't have at the start but only discovered later after launching?"

Yeah, so I think there are a few things. One thing that I always find interesting is, you know, one of the reasons why I think we were successful building an email product—and I mean successful so far—is because we actually had no—we didn't have a lot of insights.

So, you know, I had been working for a year, and so it's not a lot. And so I think—and my co-founder was very technical, so didn't use email like many, many hours every day or had not built any email product.

Yeah, and I think having, you know, a new pair of eyes on this problem that has—I mean has existed for like ever, I think was something that was really good. So, you know, when people sometimes ask questions about the insights that you have, and other people don't have something—so something the fact that you don't have any insight and you have like a new pair of eyes is actually super insightful.

Now the truth is everything that we discovered about Front is things that I didn't know before. So for example, we have these use cases where logistics companies and travel companies love Front. I knew nothing about this industry, and now I'm going through tracking conferences and I understand exactly how they work.

And so I think it's just we've been super, super honest with ourselves on what we knew and what we didn't know, and then talking with our potential customers so much to understand their insights.

And so the way I would answer this question is the truth is 99% of what I know today I didn't know when I started. Right, I just felt like for sure something could be improved in that space, and I felt like we had a good team to do it; that's the only thing you.

Okay, I mean, you were committed to the problem... to the run, but was it more about like I want people to be more efficient at work? And I feel like email is the tool that people use to get work done, and so I care about that more than, you know, adding collaboration to email or assigning emails or communicating emails.

Like no, I care about people spend their lives in their inbox. Yeah, and these tools have much evolved in the past ten years, and it was not made for businesses, so for sure something can be improved. Mmm-hmm.

CVD, how... let's start with your inboxes. Did you get...? Did you guys consider other options before you really started building Front?

No, no. Like we knew that we would start with shared inboxes. When one funny story that I sometimes hear when I go to YC for dinners is we try to have these insights, like we were looking for them.

So for example, PB, who created Gmail, was one of the partners that we see. And so when I joined YC, I was super excited to meet with him. I was like, "So here are all ideas: so we can go in this direction, this direction, what do you think we should do?"

And it was like, "Follow your guts!" And I was like, "Agh! Ka-ching!" Yeah, I'm glad I got to tell all my friends about the fact that I was like, "Yeah! A person created Gmail!" 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 problem Gmail was trying to solve, but that's very different from what Front is trying to solve.

And that's like a different time in history and a different set of runs.

Yeah, I mean he also—well, I mean there are multiple ways to tackle this, but like there's so much pattern matching that happens at YC, yeah, that like you... it's almost like you don't want to get too prescriptive with this stuff because you can negatively pattern...

Yeah, yeah, the wrong thing.

Yeah, so there's another question: Jordan Jackson asks, "Email, at least for me, has taken on a different meaning in life in the context of messaging apps and chat platforms. It is almost more serious in a way. How do you see email evolving and the ecosystem that encompasses it in the future?"

Yeah, so I mean I think it's a good question because you hear so much from companies like, for example, email is dead. And yeah, so here's like the way thing about email is first of all for your personal email. So like you're emailing friends, and the thing is I don't think that email will last forever.

So if you look at the growth, your open rates are actually decreasing every year. Whereas if you look at work emails, it's increasing year over year, so I believe that email will remain in a work environment.

I'm not convinced about your personal life. And I think like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and all these other tools can actually be better—hmm, or be used for more than they are used now. In a work environment, I feel like email 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 message people internally, the truth is it will not solve 90% of your communication, which is happening externally.

And however, I think the interfaces for email are like imperfect. So the protocol is great; the interest is not great. And so if you have a tool that has a good interface and can be inspired by other apps that are doing amazing, like Slack—his creditor is they have a really delightful product that's really fast, that much cross-platform.

And I think if you can apply some of the things that maybe is companies or these tools successful and apply them to a protocol that, in my opinion, is the best, then I strongly believe that people could spend 90% of their time in their inbox versus today. It's probably not as high as 90%.

No, if you could like wipe everyone's memory of email context and like restart, what would you wipe out and like create a new... like if I was to start a like a new... you could just like delete email from everyone's mind and just have—"All right, this is the new email product."

Yeah, so you know, I think I would probably wipe out most of the structural features because when you think about, you know, the main things are you have a subject, you have a signature, you literally have carbon copy, and blank carbon could be...

And so I think I would remember that? So I don't think you need to subject; I don't think you need—you should CC, BCC for reply all these things, but I would keep the fact that it's universal and you can have a message that's being sent somewhere else.

And then that's what I would do; so I would say it would be similar to SMS.

Yeah, but then the tricky thing is SMS is zero concept of workflow, so you still need workflows. And so for example, everything around the fact that you can assign messages, you can share a message, and you can collaborate on a draft, you can comment internally, you can create automation and say if then, like that's super important; that doesn't exist in SMS.

But today, these features CC, BCC are used as workflows, yeah, whereas really they're not designed for that.

So then that leads to a lot of inefficiencies.

Okay, so there were just a handful of other questions about product market fit that I feel like... I think it's funny because based on the startup school lectures, I think like the questions are changing with every week, and there were just a bunch on product market fit. When did you guys feel like you hit it?

Yeah, it's a good question. Very late, actually. So I mean when we raised our seed, we had just a few numbers. I think we were doing like 10k MRR, so another lot; we might have I don't know like a hundred companies using the product, and clearly, I didn't feel great.

Yeah, I've, you know, it was ultimately a good investment, but I didn't feel like we had product market fit. Yeah, 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 ARR.

So a little bit over 100k MRR, I think that's where when I felt like some companies were using the product, and even if I had demoed all the alternatives, yeah 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 three years after we started.

It's a pretty dumb thing.

Yeah, it took a while.

Yeah, and so when founders—I mean, imagine like you've given talks and stuff now, people are asking you for advice and like when they're looking to find it, what do you—what do you tell them? What do you—or what do you even point them to?

Ah, like based on product market or advice in general, product market fit.

So like this thing is at the end of the day, like you need to be convinced that you're doing something that people want. And so I feel like you need to be—and it's piece of advice that I share in general: like you need to be so brutally honest with yourself and with your team about what's working and not working.

I think startups are so hard that there is almost like, as a human being, you want to be happy, and so you don't necessarily want to face every reality because it can be really hard.

And so, you know, if you were working 12 hours a day, and the thing that you keep hearing is, "That's super interesting in your work," whatever. And then at a point someone says, "It's pretty good," then you tend to ignore the fact that yes, but 95 percent told you that it was not good.

And so I think, you know, making sure that the only things you do is talking to people using the product, talking to people that might be interested in using the product, and then building things so that these two things can change.

And then communicating that or sharing this information with your team and having one metric in place that will show you whether you're making progress or not. So for us, it was revenue because we thought like if you were willing to use the product, they would pay for it; that's the only thing that matters.

And—and that's the focus you need to have both like in your head. You need to make sure that you're super honest and also from just a process and communication standpoint: like you should make sure that, you know, every single day you share how many more users, revenue; like whatever you have every single week you can calculate your growth, and you can look at it because, I mean, I think it's PG who said that, but the first way to have anything increase is to look at it and like just be super honest about it.

Yeah, I think that's your cross support dealer; you're scared of the truth.

I'm curious about all this in the context of your meditation practice. Yeah, what does that look like on a daily basis, and have you been doing this for a long time?

So I've been meditating for every day for I think 500 days. So it's like not forever but now quite a long time. Yeah, so I mean 500 days is when Maker 406, it was like a more challenging period of my life where I think I was overwhelmed, but I think whether I was overwhelmed for that reason or other reasons, I think like when you're a founder— I am pretty convinced that 99.9% of founders would benefit from meditating every day, so that was the trigger.

But I wish I had known before. Yeah, so the good thing about meditation is that as boring as it sounds—and you know, I haven't—I think I have an active mind, and I don't like to think about anything for 10 minutes. I do 10 minutes every morning, so that's it.

So, yeah, again, like your process is let me wake up. Yeah, no, wake up, have a shower because otherwise I fall asleep when I'm beginning. So now wake up, okay, have a shower, and then meditate for 10 minutes.

Do you meditate—you have like a pillow, you like sit down on something; what do you do?

No, I mean I have a couch in my living room.

Okay, and I just sit there. Great! So, immediate at eight ten, is it?

Yeah, I just sit, and I have an app, Headspace.

Okay, so you do a guided meditation?

Yeah, getting meditation, and then tennis and then put my stuff on and then leave for work.

How long did you have to do before you felt that it was effective?

So many weeks! I think, you know, it's nothing magical; it's really like, it's really a muscle that you're training, and as anything like you own, this is the result in probably a few weeks or a few months than a few runs or a few days.

That really—the thing that I get out of it is now when an issue arises, it's like, "Okay, cool, the issue's here." Before, it was again, so it's 90 percent of what's in my head; it's like taking all my attention. I'm super upset; nothing can make me less upset just because I constantly think about it.

And now, it's like—though I like, I feel there is a distance; like it's really like Headspace is the name, and really what it gave me is more headspace, and I can identify all the things that I need to do.

Yeah, and there are different elements, and it doesn't prevent me from being upset, but then I can—I feel a context switch more easily and be in another state of mind for another set of problems.

Fascinating, right? It's awesome!

No, I've gotten into it a little bit. I've always found that like exercise has been my go-to strategy, yeah. But it's—I've done some meditation; it's a little bit different.

It's very different, yeah. There are only so many hobbies and habits that you can like motivate yourself to keep up.

Sure, but 10 minutes a day is something that you can do, of course. And I feel like it's at least everyone should try for a few weeks because I feel like it can be such a game-changer, but it's like it’s clearly discipline that you need to have; this is really hard.

Web? Yeah, absolutely, but you just got to want it.

Yeah, and you do it!

Yes, this has been great! Thank you for coming in!

Of course! Thank you for having me!