Geoff Ralston: Following on from Paul's talk about some of the ways to think about becoming or what it takes to become, or whether you might believe you might become $100 billion business. I am going to have a conversation with Mathilde Collin who is in the process of building one of those $100 billion businesses and she's going to be able to tell us all about that and her company called Front so Mathilde, what Patreon were you in at YC?
Mathilde Collin: Summer 14.
Geoff Ralston: Summer 14 Wow already four years ago. So tell us about if you would your journey to being the CEO of Front.
Mathilde Collin: Sure. In just a few seconds so I think I've always been wanting to start a company but the main thing is I didn't feel confident enough to think that I would one day build a company so I was hearing all these people saying, “Oh yeah, I'll start a company”. And I was like, “I wish I could say that but I just don't feel like a can do it”. Instead, what I did is after I graduated, I joined a startup that was super small, doing a contract management software and that's when I discovered the world of softwares. There is something that went well during this first experience in something that didn't do well so what went well is I became very passionate about software is in general, and I just felt like the fact that you could build something in a few months that could change how people work and people spend so much time at work, I felt was super rewarding. That's what went well.
Geoff Ralston: So you didn't find ... Contract management sounds painful boring.
Mathilde Collin: Yeah. So it's super boring.
Geoff Ralston: But what was cool about it was that it actually changed how people did their daily work.
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, exactly and so when I was talking to people ... I was in charge of launching a new product for them and so when I was talking to people using the product and they were telling me how their day to day was much better because they were using the product it made sense to me and it's still one thing that drives me today so that's what was great. What wasn't great is the culture was terrible and so I was very unhappy. I also understood how much of a responsibility you had, as a founding team of a company to create an environment where people would be happy to come to work. A year after I joined this company I quit this company, and-
Geoff Ralston: Can you elaborate a little bit what was it about the culture that was bad.
Mathilde Collin: I think the main thing is, there was no transparency and so then there is no trust and then there is no engagement from employees so I can tell you more about how I've built Front and I think what's unique about our culture, but one of the things is how transparent we are and 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 and skill so if you ask people at Front, why are you happy to come to work every day? They will tell you, “I'm happy because I can see the impact of my work and that's what I care about”. How do you make sure that people see the impact of their work? You make sure that everything is transparent from where you want to go, how you'll go there, what are the goals that they need to achieve, and how their work relate to these goals.
Geoff Ralston: It seems like there's something really fundamental there for the companies that are going to be successful. Paul talked about what felt like a Google where everyone knew where they were going, and everyone was passionate. Everyone believed and so you had this energy in the company. I guess somehow this is about sharing vision with the team and having them believe in it and every step of the way having them be able to see how that vision is being created.
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, so I think there are two things that are incredibly important as early as you are so one is the vision and of course, you should know where you're going and of course, you don't know yet and that's totally fine. Like I didn't know four years ago how a big Front would be and I still don't know today, but I think we'll just evolve along the way, what you need to have is just what you deeply believe in and so what I've always believed is Front should be a place where people come to work every day and are happy and our customers should be happier because they use Front either because the impact of their work is higher or because it's an email products that they spend hours in the app every day. That's what drove me and so today our mission is work happier and I make sure that I explain to people what it means for us and I think it should be clear to everyone in your company and to you why you care so deeply about what you're doing any doesn't need to be this huge idea because the truth is, I didn't know what Front would be but I knew that he cared so much about it, and people could relate to it so that's one thing super important yet I don't think that that's the most important thing. 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'm sure that not a lot of people agree with me is one of the reason why we've been successful so far is because we've been incredibly disciplined in many things. For example, always having one focus and making sure that it's clear to the entire company so in the early days, we wanted to make sure that we were making something that people wanted and the way we would track that was, can we generate revenue and so every single day everyone in the company would know where our revenue was, and the next day where it was and the next day it's a track for at least a year and anything that we would work on was aimed at increasing that revenue and I was sending daily emails that became weekly emails, there are still weekly emails telling everyone how we're doing against our core targets and I think having these discipline of focusing on a few things and making sure that in every presentation you're doing, every email you send, even to investors to whatever you show that will be one of the key to succeed.
Geoff Ralston: Let's back up before we dig further into the sort of the unique culture and the success you've had at Front you left the lousy startup lousy company with a lousy culture and somehow you ended up deciding your going to start your own thing how did that transpire? What led you to start your company to find your co founder Laurent and get going with Front?
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, so I think I was very lucky for a few reasons, one is I met my co founder. The story of my co founder and I is not that we were best friends or brothers and sisters or whatever. I actually met my co founder three months before we started the company and then we spend so much time together trying to go through every hard conversations that I could think about. Like, I don't know what if I want to fire you? What if you want to fire me? What if you want to sell and I don't want to sell and blah blah blah? And we were just aligned on most things, actually everything so that's one thing that led me to start this company with him. Then we found-
Geoff Ralston: So you knew you wanted to start a company?
Mathilde Collin: Yes. So I knew I wanted to start a company. I quit the software company. I knew I wanted to start a company in the email space, because I love software's but I was using email to get work done. I wasn't using contracts and so I knew that and I knew that I needed money to start a company because I had to have a loan for my school and so I couldn't start a company if I didn't find money and so I was lucky enough to meet with an angel investor in Paris who committed to giving us money so franchise-
Geoff Ralston: Sounds really risky though, you had college debt, you had just left your job and-
Mathilde Collin: Yeah. I don't know if that's the biggest risk I took or when I moved here with all of our employees and their family and they quit their jobs and sold their house I've taken many are risks in my life.
Geoff Ralston: Right. Wow, so you decided to jump in headlong. You had to get money. You got an angel investor, you found Laurent.
Mathilde Collin: Yes, and the last thing that I think is incredibly important is I found someone that became my husband later on, who believed in me and I think that it's so important to find someone, whether it's a mentor, friend, or whoever, who can tell you that you can do it and maybe you already know that you can do it but at least for me, like these four things were equally important. I would have never started this company. If someone was telling me every day, you can do it.
Geoff Ralston: So you found your future husband and your co founder, different people, by the way, at about the same time-
Mathilde Collin: Although my husband works at Front.
Geoff Ralston: Although your husband does work, but you met them at this ... He didn't work in Front at the time and you met them about the same time-
Mathilde Collin: No I met my future husband a few years before, but he was the one telling me you can do it at that time.
Geoff Ralston: He was supportive of you quitting your job and jumping in headlong into the startup.
Mathilde Collin: Yes, and he did the same thing at the same time.
Geoff Ralston: Right, and how did you meet Laurent?
Mathilde Collin: So in Paris we met in startup to do called the eFounders and it was love at first sight.
Geoff Ralston: How How did the two of you decide who was going to be CEO?
Mathilde Collin: That was very easy, basically everything I love He hates and everything he loves I hate so he's the CTO of Front, he loves building the product but it doesn't like doing-
Geoff Ralston: Talking to people.
Mathilde Collin: What I'm doing right now. He doesn't like managing as much and I think that when I reflect back on Front the thing that I've been most lucky with is my relationship with my co founder because we have the most amazing relationship and what I mean by that is not that we're super close in the sense that we would hang out together, he is actually is a friend but he is not like my best friend or my buddy, but 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.
Geoff Ralston: You had sort of a unique process to figure that out in the beginning, you sort of grilled each other until you were both sure that you were compatible.
Mathilde Collin: Right.
Geoff Ralston: When you began as CEO, can you talk a little bit about how you split up responsibilities and what the role of CEO was, there's a lot of people here who have similar questions as to what exactly they should be doing as CEO, how did you think about that from the beginning?
Mathilde Collin: Few things who my role as a CEO in the early days, I was basically doing everything but being an engineer because I wasn't an engineer, so I was the product manager the recruiter I was for the longest time the only marketing person for three years, I was the only sales rep, I was the only support rep. I was the only customer success person and I guess my job was just to do the job of like, which ultimately will become our team and that was really what my goal was.
Geoff Ralston: Everything but building, that was you right?
Mathilde Collin: Exactly.
Geoff Ralston: How has that changed over time? We talked a bit with Ellad Gil about how the role of CEO evolves as a company gets much larger, but it changes a lot even as you go from two people to five people to 10 people, right?
Mathilde Collin: True. I think what's super important is I wasn't expecting to hire people to figure out things that I would have not figured out so it wasn't like I'm struggling with marketing, like I don't know how to generate leads so I need to hire someone better than me so the way I was thinking about it is there are a few things that I feel are scalable so for example, we would have leads that would send it to Front, I would call them and it would like do you want to send at Front, here is what from does, what's your process and when I started to think that another person could do that and could do it better than me, because the person would be more skilled, then that's when I hired people and so at every step of the way, I hired people better than me. Once I had figured out what roughly their job would be in the mistake I've done in the early days was I have not figured out something and I hoped that someone will figure it out for me. 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 so that's something that I learned in the early days.
Geoff Ralston: So you can't count on someone else to have the answers if you don't have them?
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, for sure and still today. Even today we are 110 people now and I'm not hiring people to figure out things that I've not figured out because I think it's incredibly hard. I'm here to hire people that will scale what's working, so that's what happened. I hired people that were better than me on things that I had figured out and then once they had everyone I hired head of functions and then my job now is to find the head of every function and to make them work together so that's how my job has evolved.
Geoff Ralston: Sounds like from the very beginning, though hiring was foremost in your mind is key role for the CEO.
Mathilde Collin: So one Funny thing is anytime ... So I was in the summer 14 batch and so every week we had a speaker and every time the speaker was talking about hiring, that's the moment I was in my phone because I was like I don't care hiring is a long time from now on and that's probably a big mistake I've done because then you understand that hiring is the key. If you fail on that your company will fail so you should listen and take notes and read the notes later on so this I can tell you. One piece of advice that I got from Patrick Collison, the CEO Stripe that I said was super insightful so he said in the early days, every time you hire someone, just think about whether you want 10 times this person. Because the truth is, this person will hire people like them so I'm interviewing you and I'm like, “Do I want 10 Jeff in this team?” So if the answer is yes-
Geoff Ralston: Maybe no.
Mathilde Collin: Maybe I do so if the answer is yes, then you can hire you. The answer is no, but the bar should be as high as that and I think that was a good piece of advice that I received.
Geoff Ralston: From the very beginning, it seems like Front has a strong specific culture. Did you pay attention to that as you're hiring from the beginning, and how did you how did you implement that? How did you think about it?
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, so I think very early on, I was very deliberate about what we call today our values, but I basically know who I think I would work well with, and who I wouldn't work well with and that's the truth like our values or just extensions of who we are as co founders and so some of our values or low ego and high standard secure and collaboration and the last one is transparency and I just believe that I'm incredibly demanding and that's why high standard is part of our value and I don't want to hire anyone that doesn't have the standards also I think very low ego like it doesn't mean I don't have an ego but when I make a decision I think about Front first and I think about our employees first and I think about myself after. I think that just putting words on what we care about as co founders and then making sure that you're assessing that during your interview process is what matters it's not useful to display them on the wall and to explain them and all of that in the early days, but at least being self aware is what will help you hire the right people.
Geoff Ralston: And it does speak to the fact that you are going to play an important role in hiring everybody in the beginning.
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, and I kept interviewing everyone till like employee number 80 or something.
Geoff Ralston: Did you ever find yourself in a position of needing or wanting or having to compromise on those values or did the value is always take presence. Like there's there was someone who maybe didn't quite match the values but was like the perfect fit for the designer job.
Mathilde Collin: No, we never or if we did then we let go the person after which is worse-
Geoff Ralston: Never worked.
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, never worked and I think it's incredibly important in a company that starts growing for example, I've been willing to hire a head of finance for six months and it's so important. Like, we don't have any finance person at Front and we are 110 people we've raised 80 million and I don't know what I'm doing because I've never done any finance work before, but I've never found someone that I was incredibly excited about that had both the skills and would match our values. I'm not hiring anyone and I think being very disciplined about not hiring even if you disparately need this person is important.
Geoff Ralston: I want to move on to product but before we do that, I'm just saying wondering if you were going to talk to relatively new startup founders or people with young companies, like most of the companies and startup school? Is there specific advice you'd give about creating a culture of success creating the culture you have at Front for them?
Mathilde Collin: I think my biggest advice would be one to be incredibly demanding. I just feel like in the early days, if you have someone that's not working out being very tough and letting this person go, I think that's a mistake I've seen because if you have a team of five and one person is not working out and you know and you always know, and you're not making this tough decision that it has an impact on your entire team. It's easy to say hard to do, and I can tell you how we've done it. I think that's super important. I think transparency is just so important in the early days, and even at scale, but so making sure that everyone in your company knows everything. Like there is no reason why you should hide anything. Maybe except for salaries-
Geoff Ralston: I was going to ask when you say transparency, people throw that word out a lot. In actual practice what does that mean for you at Front?
Mathilde Collin: It means that everyone knows what I ... Few things when I think there is bad transparency and good transparency. Good transparency is everything that you can share that will help people do their job better and help answer questions they have bad transparency will raise more questions and create more problems than you need for example, like sharing salaries like we can have a debate about that, but I think it raises more questions than it can actually solve problems but then everything else, everyone knows or revenue or churn every email about I don't know leads coming in and telling us where they want customer complaining about this or being happy about that, every NPS score that is here either people are super happy, super upset, everything is public, our runway, the amount of cash we have in the bank account, every board meeting that we do we publish the board deck, then I do an all hands and I share what the board said, in order to answer a question on the board deck. I share just everything that's business related, and also how I feel like I'm happy to say I'm extremely, extremely happy about that and I'm extremely unhappy about that.
Geoff Ralston: And every one of the company ends up knowing that.
Mathilde Collin: And they know that and I think it's good because then if you really want people to work on this things that are broken, there is no point in hiding what's broken and there is always this human feeling of I will not share because they will be worried. I'm going to tell them that that's broken and some people joined two days ago and they're going to know that it's broken but that's fine because which again is the fact that they will all work on the problem and that's better than avoiding the question.
Geoff Ralston: And it feels like people stay aligned and moving in the same direction.
Mathilde Collin: Yes, and I mean, you know that, but I think Front is at least one there. Let's assume that we struggle with but one thing that we've done, I think really well is our retention of employees so people are super happy or NPS is at 87, which is super high. If you look at Glassdoor we only have five stars reviews, if you look at our attrition, there are just two people that have left Front ever, and it was one to go back to school, one to join the company of their best friend, so I think we've done a good job and I believe that we've done a good job because of this engagement that we've created thanks to this transparency.
Geoff Ralston: We were talking earlier about one great sign for company's product is having really high retention, but likewise, I guess having really high retention of your employees is a pretty fantastic sign for a company.
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, and it's so important because there is so much knowledge is gathered.
Geoff Ralston: institutional and especially if you lose someone good, you lose so much.
Mathilde Collin: So much knowledge.
Geoff Ralston: So you guys are really interesting case because you're an enterprise company that started with a handful of customers. Well zero, eventually a handful and then you've scaled to thousands. Can you talk about the early days of figuring out that you had product market fit and then and then a little bit about the evolution going from we were just talking about 10 or 100 people who love you to many more.
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, so, I would say a few, a few things, first thing is, I remember when I arrived here in YC four years ago Kevin Hale came to me and was like, “What's your company?” and says, like, “It's Front”. And then it was like, “Oh, so cool. I think it's one of the coolest company from this batch”. And then I was sure that he was talking about another company and it's true I just was-
Geoff Ralston: Maybe he was confused about, “Oh you must be confusing me with another company in the batch”.
Mathilde Collin: Its just like I wasn't confident and another example is my batch mates would come to me and say should we use your product and I was like no use our competitor it's much better it's truly a just I've always been very ashamed with the current state of the products so of course convinced that we didn't have product market fit.
Geoff Ralston: Is that one of the definitions of product market fit is a product that your customers love but that you're ashamed of?
Mathilde Collin: Maybe I think it's actually a good thing that you're ashamed as your product fit so product market fit at least I can tell you that if you feel like you don't have product market fit, great doesn't mean that you're doomed but then I think that there is a lot of things that we ... I'm also someone that's incredibly honest with myself and I can't just wake up and think that I don't have product market fit. I need to fix every single problem that they have so how did they do that? One is I've been incredibly disciplined about talking to as many users as possible so my day to day at YC four years ago and I can tell you what my day to day is today but it's not very different. I was talking to leads and customers all the time and I made sure that every single day I had at least seven eight meetings with people that sign up to our product even if they ended up not using our product doesn't matter I want to talk to them and I want to understand why they got initially interested.
Geoff Ralston: Can I just stop you there do you remember ... This might be a stretch but do you remember any specific conversations that may be changed the trajectory or at least change the product in significant ways?
Mathilde Collin: Yeah and I actually YC ... So we started with this email that was helping companies manage share inboxes so share email addresses like support@ sales@ and that's what it was doing, and then we took to Adora the CEO of Homejoy and-
Geoff Ralston: YC partner now?
Mathilde Collin: YC founder now.
Geoff Ralston: YC startup school.
Mathilde Collin: Awesome and so she told me, “Oh the product that you've built, it's awesome. Could it work with SMS?” Because they were chatting through SMS with all their cleaners and then we looked at TrailO and their API was pretty good and so we realized that in a week, we could just add SMS as a new channel and it drove so much revenue, because I think there was a big need for collaboration around SMS and I would have never thought about it. I've never worked in a company that use SMS to work, that's one example but I have many more. I basically have never ... I worked one year in a company so what do I know about business workflows? Still, today the reason why is to spend a ton of time talking to either leads or customers is because we're going up market we're going in new kinds of companies and new use cases and one of the use case that's super popular in is Logistics and Transportation and so I'm going to this tracking conferences and trying to understand what do I know, but they're work flows? Nothing.
Geoff Ralston: I bet you stand out at a tracking conference.
Mathilde Collin: Right, I do so if I don't talk to them, then I can lead the company in the right way because I can't hire the right people make the right product decisions and so I just believe that that's what I used to do. That's what I still do. I think it's insanely important and the only way you'll manage to do that is by hustling. Like, the truth is when you're early and you need to have eight meetings a day, it's insanely difficult and so you need to do everything you can from reaching out to all the people you know, to finding new ways to writing content in the hope someone reading and then ultimately signing up to your product and that's what I did and I think that's what made us grow quickly in the early days.
Geoff Ralston: When you entered YC, do you remember how many customers you had?
Mathilde Collin: One thing I remember is 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 and then I was onboarding them one by one and everything was the same thing. Great but we don't want to use your product because you don't have XYZ or it doesn't work so maybe out of the 3000 companies, maybe one ended up using the product, but that's just how I built so much knowledge about what they wanted and then I was telling Laurent, need to build that or a one feature away, I promise.
Geoff Ralston: Just one features.
Mathilde Collin: Just one feature away I still say that today.
Geoff Ralston: And when you left YC how many customers did you have?
Mathilde Collin: When we left YC we had 5000 MR and so we had probably like 130 companies using the product.
Geoff Ralston: Which is pretty amazing so do you recall what the retention was of those 130 companies?
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, so we hadn't had a single user churn so basically, the reason why I'm saying that is because every time someone joined the company at Front, I show the video of Demo Day so I know my demo day pitch by heart, because I've listened to it so many times and so part of the pitch is we've haven't had a single user churn.
Geoff Ralston: And that's good, right?
Mathilde Collin: Great. It doesn't mean though, so that's great but what wasn't great is our conversion rate from trial to paid was terrible.
Geoff Ralston: Why was that?
Mathilde Collin: I mean, just because the product was very early, and so didn't have a lot of the features that the market needed.
Geoff Ralston: Have you managed to shift that over time?
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, I mean, we've built more and more and so our conversion has increased.
Geoff Ralston: I want to talk about how you went from hundreds to thousands of customers but a question that's come up a lot during startup school is like, how do you figure out how to price your product, can you talk about the Fronts pricing journey from where you started to, how you started into where you are now?
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, so we started with a freemium model, so we had $3 or $9 per user per month. One thing I would say is just release your pricing as early as possible because there is ... So first, you're always scared that you're not ready, but you're ready. All of you at least, the good thing is that will confront you to the market and this which you need two is 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 over whelmed with feedback from people that will never pay for your product so we had a freemium model, what we realized is even if we had a free product, I think at the end, we maybe had 15% of our users on the free plan. It was more a distraction. Like it's good to have a free plan if that's a way for you to get leads and then you convert these leads but if it's just something where you end up having 15% of your users is less useful, so we moved it changed it into 9 and 19 consistently increase prices over time. Maybe too much.
Geoff Ralston: Do you feel like you started too low?
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, and I think 99.99% of people will tell you that they started too low so yeah. It doesn't matter, though, because you can increase price later.
Geoff Ralston: It's harder to increase than to decrease, I suppose.
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, true but everyone does it.
Geoff Ralston: How did you come up with those numbers? Was it sort of a 99.99?
Mathilde Collin: 100%. Oh, yeah. You can work as ... So we're now for the first time-
Geoff Ralston: Did you ask customers what they would pay?
Mathilde Collin: No, I don't think they can tell you. Of course, you can look at your competition and then make sure that you're on a 10 times cheaper or 10 times more expensive but then once you know that and you have a range just pick a number and go.
Geoff Ralston: Just pick the number and go.
Mathilde Collin: Like in the scope of destruction that you can have in the early days like thinking too much about the pricing is one of them. Just pick a price and sell the products and you'll see what people say.
Geoff Ralston: I wanted to dig more into one other thing about sort of the initial stages of growth and talking to customers. Is there any advice you would give? Because you just gave a really useful piece of advice, which is to talk to people who are paying more than people who aren't but what advice can you give to people who are trying to extract useful feedback from customers?
Mathilde Collin: Yes. I think first of all, you should understand that not everyone wants to share feedback in the same way and so for us, we had different ways to get feedback so one of them was talking to people and so people that would accept to talk to me, I would talk to them and they would tell me, “I like this. I don't like that”. But another thing that we did was we were using TrailO for product roadmap and so we published our TrailO roadmap and so even today, if you go in Front.com/roadmap. You can see our roadmap.
Geoff Ralston: Its public?
Mathilde Collin: It's public, it's always been public, I can talk about that, but you can vote for the thing that you want and that's one of the way we got a ton of feedback as well so I just felt like some people ... And then another thing that we did was every quarter at the beginning of the quarter, I would email all our customers and I would say, working on the roadmap for this quarter, what do you want to see? And then they would replay. I think it was a good mix of people that want to spend a lot of times people that want to spend some time and people that just want to do one click, but in any way, you need to have these data.
Geoff Ralston: That sounds like it's a little bit later in your evolution. When you had TrailO and you had a roadmap and the very beginning when you're trying to figure out, you talk to Adora and figure out SMS what was that like? How did you know if you're talking to a customer who is giving you useful feedback or basically wasting your time?
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, so I think once you talk to someone, you have to figure out if you understand the person really well, because they can tell you I think I want that and then you build it and that's not what they want so the best way you can think about sales so I would bet that most of you are not excited about doing a sales score. I mean, that's my guess and it's normal because I otherwise would be doing sales in a company and that was how I felt-
Geoff Ralston: Like me.
Mathilde Collin: That's how I felt as well so one thing that I would say is the way I thought about sales in the early days was I wanted to make sure I understood exactly where the workflows of people were, what their issue was, and then think afterwards confront, solve it and I think that then it becomes pretty interesting so today when I do sales score or sales meeting or customer success meeting, like I'm not here to sell extra feature or to demo the product like I find that a bit boring but what I'm here to do is understand exactly what their pinpoint is and what their workflow is and then can I explain to them how that could be better with Front. If it can be better with Front and so I guess they're key things that you need to focus on one is being incredibly honest with yourself about whether Front is a good solution for them. Even today, one of the thing that I struggle the most with is telling our team, these are some use cases we want and these are some use cases we don't want and being very deliberate about saying yes and no, in the early days is insanely important and you know that the truth is, you know where you want this company to be, and you don't know 100% but at least you can tell if that's something you want, or that's something don't want, and then making sure that you are super curious when you were doing the sale scores and making sure that he was more about understanding something that someone is telling you more than demoing the product or showing a list of features they probably don't care that much about.
Geoff Ralston: Yeah, so I want to come back to that because it seems to harken back to your idea of discipline. Basically, you're saying you have to say no to some customers because if you want to keep your churn down to zero and you sell the wrong person, the wrong product, you're going to have churn.
Mathilde Collin: I think the churn is not the biggest danger. I think the biggest danger is you have a customer and then you care so much about growing your revenues so then they're telling you, I want this and so then you build this and I want that and you build that and then you just you push your product in a direction that you don't want to go and I think that's the biggest mistake.
Geoff Ralston: Let's talk a little bit about sales because you've had to learn about enterprise sales all on your own and you've had to build a Salesforce talk a little bit about what that's been like and what advice you would give to people who are probably just a couple of folks trying to figure out how to get their product into customers hands.
Mathilde Collin: I guess my advice based on a mistake I did was first you need to figure out ... There are different sales missions you can have so for example you can have a bottom up approach or a top down approach so top down you sell to CIO and then they debate product, bottom up is you demo the product to the end user and because they tell you that it's going to be a great tool, then that's how they will buy and I think that we try to do both and we struggled a lot and first of all, I think you should know how you want to sell your product because the people you will hire, the way you will sell your product, everything will be different if your bottom up or top down. Piece of advice number one. Now, I can tell you that we started bottom up so we had a lot of customers and it was a numbers game so the only thing that I cared about was, our reps should call every lead five times and should end up having 15 demos every week and I don't care about how they make it happen but I want to see that level of activity and so every morning we would receive an email saying here are all the calls that have been done and here are all the meetings that have been scheduled and that have been done and 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're so early and two maybe your product is an issue, or maybe your pricing is an issue, you don't know that. I've always felt like, if you look at the end number, it's actually pretty challenging and you might blame someone for not doing a good job whereas they're doing a really good job. Whereas if you look at just number of demos and calls they make, and if you check that they're not saying stupid things, then they're pretty doing a good job and you should be happy and learn from that.
Geoff Ralston: You said something to me the other day about one of the key lessons you learned and you were referring to it earlier about the importance of listening versus describing your product.
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, so I think the tendency like you're all super ... Either you're ashamed or whatever, you want to show your product and I think that's the temptation and every person I talked to that starting their new company wants to show me the product. The truth is resist this temptation. First try to ask me questions, because then it's too late. Like when you've matured your product, that's the moment you can ask so much, because people want to see what's new so they will answer a few questions and I believe that you should spend a lot of time listening to this, understanding and then showing maybe 10% of your features, and it doesn't matter but not doing like if I do the full demo of Front you'll be pretty bored. Now, if I explain to you how when I was in your seat using Front, I think is one of the thing that made us successful as the company then and I'm convinced and I'm obviously super biased, but I'm convinced then maybe you will be more interested to hear.
Geoff Ralston: I'm going to transition a little bit before we go to QA. I have a feeling that you're fundraising experience was maybe-
Mathilde Collin: Unusual.
Geoff Ralston: Not representative, maybe a little bit too simple, but maybe I'm wrong about that. Were there any lessons from fundraising that you think are useful besides grow really fast and have a cool company? Because that helps?
Mathilde Collin: Right, yes, it's unusual. Every time we've raised we've raised ... I think, if I think about why though, so I think it's unusual and that's not what you should expect. Now the thing that we did Well again, coming back to discipline, I've published all my seed series, a series B deck, they are online so you can look at them and you'll see that our metrics are pretty good and it's just like every single day, every single week, and every single month, I care about hitting our targets, and they will do everything it takes for us to hit our targets and that's what's shown in this metrics and at the end of the day, even if of course, people were excited about the team we had the market opportunity and whatever like to ask them why are they crazy about Front it's because of our metrics. I just feel like-
Geoff Ralston: So grow, have good metrics, have a good product.
Mathilde Collin: You can't imagine like, even if it seems obvious, the two things I've seen that I know are wrong from founders. One is coming up with excuses. For example, I'm helping you as a company and you tell me, “I want our revenue to grow”. And then the week after we meet today, I'm like, “What's your revenue?” You're like, “I'm not focusing on that because we had to redo our homepage because the conversion blah, blah, blah”. I don't care about your conversion. The only thing I care about is that I think you've convinced yourself that your website was more important, and that's something that I see all the time just finding excuses for not growing and I understand how hard it is to admit that you're not growing and that's an issue and you need to fix it but if you don't admit it to yourself and your team then you will not grow that's for sure. One-
Geoff Ralston: The ultimate founder delusion.
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, and two is then bring discipline to force you to face the reality and one way is to send this weekly email to your team, monthly email to your investors. I've invested in a few companies in the past few years and you can't imagine how I can tell you after two or three emails so two or three months which companies are going to be successful, and now if I'm the only one to have that opinion or that insight but I just feel like there are people that will send an email and then nothing for four months and then email and then blah blah or some people, that will change the format every single month and some people that are incredibly disciplined about here are our KPIs and I will send it to you every month and that's also what I show my team and that's how we have focus, so important.
Geoff Ralston: That's a great lesson so last thing I want to talk about was, your co founder recently got sick and it caused the company to have to do a whole bunch of things and maybe change you to sort of re look at your priorities and what was important to you as a person as a CEO, as a friend, as a co founder and as just a human being in the company. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what that experience has been like.
Mathilde Collin: Sure. So December 2016, so year and a half ago, my co founder was diagnosed with cancer and it was pretty bad and now he's fine so he took 18 months and I think the thing that they realized that they would ... Well, you're here and you're listening to how to build a company every single day you're working on your company, it's so important, but you should remember that the most important thing is to be happy and healthy and as much as you care about these companies it's just a job and it's annoying to have to go through these painful moments to realize it but one thing that I do now is anytime ... So there are many things that I've changed personally and for the company, but at least anytime someone joined the company, I go through a presentation, and a share like, what is Front. What I care about, and I will always tell them like, first and foremost, be happy and healthy and if Front is not a place where you can be and be happy and healthy. You shouldn't be here and Front is important but life is far more important, and I think them knowing that that's how you think is insanely important so just tell other people, you love that you love them and spend time with your friends and go on vacation and all these things are equally important or more important than pricing your product in the right way and doing all these phone calls, etcetera. That's just what I've been asked to talk about. The other thing is one thing that changed my life is meditation, and I'm also convinced that it will change the life of probably 95% of human beings, so before I felt like I had a choice between caring so much about my company and so therefore being unhappy because if you care so much, even if your company is doing okay, there are so many things to worry about. I cared so much I was constantly upsets like, “I'm worried this customer is churning and worried this person is not working out, I'm worried, I don't know how we'll hit our goals for next month” Or then sometimes I tried to care less but then the company wasn't doing as well, so I was like either I care, and I'm unhappy, or I don't care, and I'm unhappy because the company is not doing well, so I'm doomed. I think meditation was really good because I meditate 10 minutes every morning I wake up have a shower meditate for 10 minutes using headspace, and it's really something that doesn't have immediate benefits so if you're waiting ... Like, I don't feel better after I've meditated, you have to think about it is a muscle that you're training and what it does is really what it says, which is headspace so it's like I could tell you if you want how things are going at Front right now. There are so many things need to be figured out and the truth is, I feel great. It's like, I know that I have a bunch of things to figure out and I know that either I'm working on them or someone else who's working on them. I care so much but I have this headspace to not be overwhelmed by everything bad that's happening and that's by far has been the thing that had the biggest impact in my life and I think my co founder, being sick is what led me to me being overwhelmed to the point where I was not sure that they could still run Front and so I had to act and meditation was one other thing I did.
Geoff Ralston: Try not to wait until you have something that awful happened in your life or someone you love or someone you're close to his life. We're going to spend more time on the topic of how to stay human being while you're doing a startup tomorrow when Daniel Ross comes in to give a talk. But with that, let's go to Q&A for a while, yeah.
Mathilde Collin: I'm gonna ask the same question again about enterprise how you take care of the security and privacy part of setting it to the enterprise and I understand that you want enterprise customer not to feel desperate about it but like well you're actually at a point where you are dealing with that. What is the best [inaudible]
Geoff Ralston: The question is around dealing with safety and security when you're trying to sell to enterprise customers and how soon can you get it in their hands I think things like that.
Mathilde Collin: Yes and so even if we didn't start as an enterprise sales we are dealing with emails so security was a big deal so what I would say is it's never enough the thing is you have to find the companies that are willing to take more risks because you have no choice like for us of course everyone wanted us to be set to compliant and stuff we're still not compliant today but what we did, we did a lot of things from just a one pager that explain everything about why our businesses secure two very early on, Tesla started using our product and they wanted to make sure that they were using it for product feedback and they were, they wanted to make sure that their information was secure and so we did a few penetration tests like that doesn't cost a lot of money. Then if you can say, “Okay, we had good results, and you can show the results to other companies”. Then at least it unlocks some potential but the truth is, you also needed to agree to not go after a few industries or just not go after a few customers because they always want more, but there are companies that will accept to have their emails deal with companies that's three months old, knows nothing about anything and they will because there are a few things that you can show them.
Geoff Ralston: Okay. You got the same answer twice. So hopefully that helps. Yes. Speaker 3: How did you define [inaudible]
Geoff Ralston: Why in the end did you choose a subscription based model?
Mathilde Collin: I believe that people get more benefit out of the product when they have more users so that's the reason why I also think that most of our most of the competition, so whether you're looking at Health Solutions or email products, they charge per user per month, or per user per year so the combination of everyone does it. Plus, it seems in line with the benefit that people get is what led us to have a subscription model?
Geoff Ralston: Yes. Speaker 4: What's the best way to notify your users you're going to raise the price?
Geoff Ralston: What's the best way to notify your users you're going to raise price?
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, it's a good question. I was chatting with the president of the Federation about that and he gave me some good advice which is the temptation is to say, we're going to raise our price but will do that maybe 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 bam! Again, it's almost as if you increased twice. Ones they get used ... So just tell them and then do it sooner than later. There is no good way to do it. One more trick that we've used that I think is successful is for us we have monthly subscription and already subscription and so you can tell them that if they switched to a yearly plan, they will lock their price for one more year, which is win win. They pay less you have the money upfront so at least that's one way to show that you care about them.
Geoff Ralston: Yes. Speaker 5: [inaudible]
Mathilde Collin: Randomly-
Geoff Ralston: How do you set the target for the first salesperson you hire?
Mathilde Collin: Randomly? The truth is, I didn't know because I was the only one doing the job so there are few ratio you can hear of so, for example they should bring between three X and six X the amount of money they're paid so then you have the range because the truth if they bring less than what they're paid probably not good. 10 X probably not good either like you should hire more so once you have that then building trust with your first rep saying, “That's what I will inquire again I have no idea if it's the right thing but let's reassess every month”. And then let's be realistic about what's feasible or not.
Geoff Ralston: Yes. Speaker 6: [inaudible]
Geoff Ralston: Oh, this is a hard question so if users bounce How can you find them?
Mathilde Collin: Yeah, there are a few technologies that you can use Clearbit is one of them, but for us I care more about the people that sign up never converting because they showed interest the truth is I think our conversion rate on our website is maybe 3% so there are so much and we don't know about them so we don't do much about them.
Geoff Ralston: Wiki follows at the top are difficult, yes. Speaker 7: When you talk about starting [inaudible]
Geoff Ralston: How early should you put pricing out there and be transparent about it even while you're still in beta?
Mathilde Collin: It's a good question one thing I did that I think was a great idea was so implementing Stripe for us took some time but I wanted to know if people were willing to pay for the product before we had Stripe implemented so in private beta when you sign up to Front you would receive an automated email from me saying what would you give me to get access to our product and so the so I like LEGOs and that was my Twitter feed and so some people would send me a LEGOs sets or like when our first customer is a company called Lumio, they do lamp and so they said, “We'll give you a lamp”. I guess I was just very creative into trying to understand what people were willing to give and if it's not money doesn't matter. The truth is even giving an hour of the time you ask them, you can have access, if you spend 30 minutes an hour with me is a proof that they will accept to give something.
Geoff Ralston: In the back. Speaker 8: How did you get the first 3000 signups for private beta?
Geoff Ralston: How did you get those first 3000 signups for private beta?
Mathilde Collin: It was only content marketing. I was doing an email product and I was writing all these blog posts about his email did as Slack is saying, or like all things that I think people were curious to hear about or what will email look like 20 years from now and content Marketing was or then I was YC and I was writing a something about what it's like to be at YC a month in and then another one what it's like to be in YC three months in and people get reading them and so content marketing has been big for us I think it's good in the early days I don't know if it's scales as much I don't think it does but that's how we got our signups.
Geoff Ralston: Yes. Speaker 9: You talked about putting on more features based on what you hear from customers [inaudible] set pricing, I understand that and then they ask for more features. How did you adjust your pricing after that?
Geoff Ralston: How do you adjust pricing in the context of feature demands or new product demands from customers?
Mathilde Collin: The truth is new features are always a great way to upsell and so usually with like I was very happy to build a new feature and put it in a new plan and say like you can have a 30 day trial of these feature but then would you be done to double the price per user you're using that feature. Also, something that we did two years ago, and I wrote a blog post about this is, we built a backend system that enables us to iterate super quickly on our pricing so if tomorrow I want to change one of our enterprise feature and put it in the premium plan, I can easily do it and I can just reduce the new pricing doesn't generate anything for existing users so that's a good way to just look at your cohorts and see where does every feature fit best.
Geoff Ralston: We're going to do one more question right here. Speaker 10: You said you quit your job because you wanted to work in email how did you figure out exactly what product to build?
Geoff Ralston: The question is, you quit your job because you wanted to work in email, but how did you figure out what product to build?
Mathilde Collin: I think email is a big problem to solve and so we had to make sure that we had the right good to market, which was shared email addresses as a way to enter this market. The reason is, it was an easier product to build, people were willing to pay for it and you could have a lightweight deployment within an organization so not the entire company needs to use Front. The reason I chose that is I had a pin point when I was at this company. I remember that we had all these support@sales@ addresses and people kept asking me, “Did you reply to this email?” I was like, “Yes. Do you want me to cc you on every single email?” “No” “So just believe me that I replied to this email”. And that's a pin point that I had seen and so I thought it was a good entry.
Geoff Ralston: Awesome. Thank you Mathilde.
Mathilde Collin: Thank you so much.