Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs

Curious how you got the search to work in the fb ad library. My queries seem to just hang there?

We were paying customers for front for a few months in 2018. We quickly outgrew it because our daily email volume grew from a few hundred to a few thousand a day. Moved on to Freshdesk which isn't as pretty as Front, but worked better for higher volume of emails.

I'm a solo dev working on 2-3 side projects. I have 2 freelance customer support staff helping me with normal support stuff but also acquisition and outreach, while I focus on freelance development (which is unrelated to the side-projects). Possible I will add 1-2 more support in the coming year.

For this use-case Front has been really awesome. Each side project has a different domain and each project has several role-based emails (one for clients -> support@domain and one for content stuff team@domain). Plus Facebook and Twitter.

Email arrives at the person who sent the first email, and I can easily assign emails written to me to a team member. The internal chat functionality is clear (in Zendesk the UI was a bit confusing so sometimes we inadvertently wrote the internal message to the client - nothing bad, but still unprofessional).

I tried Freshdesk, Zendesk, Intercom and some others, but always had some trouble with one of the requirements. E.g. can't use different outgoing signatures. Or a second domain requires a second account or the Enterprise upgrade (for 20 emails a day?), or there were so many different filters and views that I got confused.

Probably for enterprise level you might need something else and you need all the rules and automation stuff, but for my use case it's been great. It's not the cheapest, but it's worth it, because we've been able to answer to support inquiries faster and I have less work to do.

Use it with a team of about 10, for almost a year now. Interface with customers via email, SMS and chat. It is universally liked in our group. The internal discussion on different communication channels is wonderful. The API is well documented and quite permissive as to what you can do. Keyboard shortcuts galore. No direct IMAP connection now, but if you have GApps it works well. UI seems snappy, and I've seen no issue leaving the tab open for weeks straight.

I have been the most impressed with their response to feature suggestions. I raised a few points for improvment using the general help chat in the interface and to my surprise saw my suggestions released as a feature a few weeks later. Granted, they were minor interface items, but the fact someone actually took the time to consider it and slot it in for dev time means something to me, being on the other side of that usually.

Was amazing for us basically to discuss and dispatch incoming and outgoing emails, drafting responses and templates together, without descending into deeper circles of “forward hell” or sharing email screenshots on other messages. Massively reduced inbox/messenger clutter by moving email-centric collaboration much closer to email. Lots of glitches and missing features a couple of years ago when I was relying on it heavily, hope they polished the product since.

There is! We do Aether Pro (https://aether.app), which is like Front, but focused on internal collaboration for engineering and product teams. We’ve found that it reduces the distraction overhead of engineering teams by quite a wide margin, because it removes a lot of pressure from Slack.

In our case what seems to be happening to people who use Aether Pro is that the important bits of discussion that needs to be preserved go into Aether with its email-like structured threads, and Slack becomes more of a water-cooler talk kind of space, which you can now safely check out from.

It personally removed lots of noise from our Riot instance which we use instead of Slack, for what its worth. Most of the work can happen without being mutexed into a Slack channel now. In the end, whatever makes your engineers more productive is what works.

There's also https://www.dragapp.com/ doing something similar.

It looks very similar to Missive (missiveapp.com)

HelpScout has similar shared-inboxed software as Front and recently launched a chat feature that's similar to Intercom. Might be worth checking out.

I'm not affiliated with HelpScout in any way nor am I a customer. Just know of them because they used to be headquartered in Boston (where I'm from) before they went distributed.

Interesting, I've been really happy using Intercom for support so far. Why did you transition away? Curious to know what roadblocks are ahead (or what I'm missing).

Really? I think it's one of the better priced SAAS tools out there for what it does.