#frontapp

As the bold, intelligent face of FrontApp, Mathilde Collin is an impressive example of a CEO on a mission to change how we communicate...using the ubiquitous email.

Q: What are the top two things that motivate you or get you inspired?

A:  1. Our customers' feedback. Good: I'm super motivated. Bad: There is room for improvement! 2. Our mission: Deeply change how people work.

Q: If you could send personal or business advice back in time to yourself in 2010, what would you tell yourself?

A:  1. "You can do it" 2. "Don't compare yourself to successful entrepreneurs": Everyone started as small as I did. Even the most successful founders had feelings of doubts, fear or even of throwing everything out the window. They weren't born successful entrepreneurs, they worked their butt off to get where they are today, you and I can too. 3. "Make something people want": Y Combinator's #1 advice, but it's true that it's all that matters at the beginning of a company.

Q: What are five reasons why Front could fail and five reasons why it will succeed?

A:  1. Innovating in the email space is hard 2. Having a team split between Paris and San Francisco is not easy to manage (9 hours of time difference…) 3. People don't like to change something they already do all day (& have habits, workflows, process etc.): email. 4. We build too many legos and don't work hard enough ;-) Why Front will succeed: 1. We have the best team in the world 2. Slack has proved that there is room for companies to innovate in the communication space. They've changed how companies communicate internally, we're changing how companies communicate with the outside world. 3. We've got amazing investors to help us! 4. Customer's feedback is very good 5. Customer churn is extremely low

It is 2014, and I can’t believe when I try to contact a company and they comeback with something like: [email protected]. This is usually indicator of the following:

Maybe the company is really young, so young the haven’t even bought a domain name…and I really worry about the services a company like this can provide.

Or, the company is from the 1950s and they do not have a domain name…and again I really worry about their services.

Every company should have business email addresses, but with this usually comes different problems:

Are they going to be: lastname.firstname@, firstname@, etc

How is going to handle the generic ones: sales@, info@, contact@

This last part is going to be a heavy load for just one person, and services like FrontApp get the clutter out of this tasks.

The process is simple: get whatever email addresses you need for you company and re direct them to FrontApp. This helps you in a lot of ways:

More than one person can answer to those, and everyone stays in the loop.

You can assign specific conversations to specific people, so there is no more that I didn’t see the message excuse.

You can comment on conversations and give your opinion about what the answer should be.

Assign tags to the conversations to know what they are about.

And as a marketeer, the most important one for me…ANALYTICS, at the end you can see how many information requests you got, how many sales emails, etc. and the average time you needed to respond. This will help you optimize your client communication flow.

I think the whole idea of Front is great, more than that: Huge!. Thing is I think people is not getting that Front is like a "single inbox" for the whole team where a single mail is just ONE mail. If someone does something (tag, respond, delete, archive or whatever) to it, others will see that change on their side. The kind of problem Google tried to solve with wave, unsuccessfully.

My humble recommendation to @frontapp : to better communicate Front BUILD ON THAT