Mathilde Collin. She’s the CEO of Front, a SaaS company working on redesigning email for teams. She started with Y Combinator in the summer of 2014, and today has 20 employees and 1700 customers.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Zero to One
• What CEO do you follow? – Patrick Collison
• Favorite online tool? — Slack
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8 and a half
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “People that are struggling should be super motivated because that’s what everyone go through”

 

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:04 – Nathan introduces Mathilde to the show
• 01:33 – Mathilde was in Episode 413 of The Top
  • 01:43 – Back then, they had 1200 customers, $13M raised, around a million in revenue in 2015
  • 01:53 – An average customer pays 200 a month leading to an MRR of $240K
  • 01:58 – Gross churn was 3%
• 02:10 – Front now has 40 team members
• 02:13 – “We tripled our revenue”
• 02:15 – The number of customers didn’t triple because they had bigger companies using Front
• 02:43 – Current MRR is around $750K
• 03:02 – Front still has 80% of what they’ve raised last year
  • 03:13 – Total capital raised was $14M
• 03:45 – Front is burning $250K a month
  • 03:50 – Mostly from head count
• 04:29 – Churn has always been low
  • 04:35 – Net churn has always been negative which -10% monthly
  • 04:50 – User churn is around 3.5 - 4%
  • 05:04 – MRR churn is low
• 05:30 – The teams that are paying Front more per month tend to be very sticky
• 06:10 – Gross margin is 88%
• 06:22 – Front APP is the easiest way to manage a shared inbox as a team
  • 06:29 – A sample of shared inbox is support@contact or a social media account
  • 06:37 – Front simplifies everything in one place
• 06:54 – For Front’s growth, they lend it and extend it
  • 07:00 – Net negative churn is coming from existing customers
  • 07:04 – Existing customers have been upgraded to new plans or added teams
  • 07:10 – HubSpot started with 1 team and now they have 13 teams with Front
  • 07:26 – Front now has a marketing team with 3 people
  • 07:35 – Front has now done more advertising and content
  • 07:41 – The most effective for Front is AdWords
• 07:52 – Monthly CAC is around $15K
  • 08:03 – Front tracks sales qualified leads
  • 08:26 – It takes 7 trials to get 1 new paying customer
• 08:38 – After the trial, the customer will be categorized as an enterprise or SMB and mid-market companies
  • 08:50 – The goal is for the sales people to get the trial set up
  • 09:02 – The sales cycle is 3 weeks
  • 09:20 – 95% of the customer is going through 3 weeks than the offered 2 weeks
• 09:26 – People are using Front than Slack because Slack is usually for before synchronous communication
  • 09:34 – Front is for a synchronous communication
  • 09:40 – A synchronous is every communication that is done externally should have an upfront
  • 09:49 – Slack messages can also be distracting with the team
• 10:13 – Front competes more with Intercom than with Slack
• 10:25 – Intercom is usually better for customer communication while Front is for general communication
• 10:43 – Front is an email client
• 11:40 – Customers are buying Front to replace email
  • 11:46 – In other cases, Front replaces helpdesk solutions like Desk, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout, etc
• 12:12 – Mathilde won’t sell Front now even for $95M
  • 12:25 – “I think I will sell when I’m not as confident as today”
  • 12:37 – Front makes Mathilde happy
• 13:04 – Mathilde is now 28
• 13:15 – Front was launched in early 2015
• 13:29 – Mathilde wanted people to be happy at work so she made Front
• 15:07 – Mathilde has always been happy and confident that they can do a series B
  • 15:56 - “I do have some inbound”
• 16:30 – Mathilde was part of an article in Entrepreneur.com
• 19:10 – The Famous Five

 

3 Key Points:

1. Growth can be measured by several different metrics—the important thing isn’t the metric, it’s the important thing is consistency.
2. Stay with what makes you and other people happy.
3. People love reliability—if you can deliver that in a product or service you’re on to something.

 

Resources Mentioned:

• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives