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Speaker 1

00:00

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 a $100 billion business, I am going to have a conversation with Mathilde Collin, who is in the process of building 1 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 batch were you in at YC? Summer 14. Summer 14, wow.

Speaker 1

00:36

Already 4 years ago. So tell us about your, if you would, your journey to being the CEO of Front.

Speaker 2

00:45

Sure, so 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 1 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 I can do it.

Speaker 2

01:06

So 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. And there is something that went well during this first experience and something that didn't do well. So what went well is I became very passionate about softwares in general.

Speaker 2

01:27

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. So that's what went well.

Speaker 1

01:38

So you didn't find, contract management sounds painfully boring.

Speaker 2

01:42

Yeah, so it's super boring.

Speaker 1

01:44

But what was cool about it was that it actually changed how people did their

Speaker 2

01:48

daily work. Exactly. And so when I was talking to people, so 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.

Speaker 2

02:01

And it's still 1 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.

Speaker 2

02:09

And 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. So a year after I joined this company I quit this company.

Speaker 1

02:23

Can you elaborate a little bit? What was it about the culture that was bad?

Speaker 2

02:30

So 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 the front and I think what's unique about our culture but 1 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 at scale.

Speaker 2

02:55

So if you ask people at France, 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. And 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.

Speaker 1

03:15

It seems like there's something really fundamental there for the companies that are going to be successful. Paul talked about what it felt like at Google where everyone knew where they were going and everyone was passionate and everyone believed and so you had this energy in the company. So I guess somehow this is about sharing a vision with the team and having them believe in it and at every step in the way, having them be able to see how that vision is being created.

Speaker 2

03:40

Yeah, so I think there are 2 things that are incredibly important as early as you are. So 1 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.

Speaker 2

03:53

Like I didn't know 4 years ago how big Front would be, and I still don't know today. But I think that will just evolve along the way. What you need to have is just what you deeply believe in. And so what I've always believed in 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.

Speaker 2

04:13

Either because the impact of their work is higher or because it's an email product so they spend hours in the app every day. But 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. And it doesn't need to be this huge idea because the truth is I didn't know what front would be but I knew that I cared so much about it and people could relate to it.

Speaker 2

04:44

So that's 1 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.

Speaker 2

04:54

And my personal belief, and I am sure that not a lot of people agree with me, is 1 of the reasons why we've been successful so far is because we've been incredibly disciplined in many things. So for example, always having 1 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?

Speaker 2

05:21

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, et cetera, 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 this discipline of focusing on a few things and making sure that in every presentation you do, in every email you send, even to investors, to whatever, you show that will be 1 of the key to succeed.

Speaker 1

05:59

So 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, the lousy company with a lousy culture and somehow you ended up deciding you were going to start your own thing. How did that transpire?

Speaker 1

06:28

What led you to start your company, to find your co-founder Laurent, and get going with Front?

Speaker 2

06:34

Yeah, so I think I was very lucky for a few reasons. So 1 is I met my co-founder. So the story of my co-founder and I is not that we were best friends or brothers and sisters or whatever.

Speaker 2

06:45

I actually met my co-founder 3 months before we started the company. And then we spent 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?

Speaker 2

06:58

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 1 thing that led me to start this company with him. Then we found Android.

Speaker 1

07:12

So you knew you wanted to start a company.

Speaker 2

07:14

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 softwares, but I was using email to get work done, I wasn't using contracts.

Speaker 2

07:25

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, Franches, the company.

Speaker 1

07:43

It sounds really risky, though. You had college debt.

Speaker 2

07:46

Right.

Speaker 1

07:46

You had just left your job. And... I don't know if

Speaker 2

07:49

that's the biggest risk I took or when I moved here with all our employees and their family and they quit their jobs and sold their house. So I've taken many risks in my life.

Speaker 1

08:00

Right. Wow. So you decided to jump in headlong. You had to get money.

Speaker 1

08:06

You got an angel investor. You found Laurent.

Speaker 2

08:09

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, a 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, these 4 things were equally important.

Speaker 2

08:32

I would have never started this company if someone was not telling me every day, you can do it.

Speaker 1

08:37

So you found your future husband and your co-founder, different people by the way, at about the same time.

Speaker 2

08:44

Although my husband works at Front.

Speaker 1

08:45

Although your husband does work at Front. But you met them at the, he didn't work at Front at the time, and you met them about the same time.

Speaker 2

08:51

No, no, I met my future husband a few years before. But he was the 1 telling me that you can do it at that time.

Speaker 1

08:58

So he was supportive of you quitting your job and jumping in headlong into the startup?

Speaker 2

09:03

Yes, and he did the same thing at the same time.

Speaker 1

09:05

Right. So, and how did you meet Laurent?

Speaker 2

09:09

So in Paris we met in a startup studio called eFounders. And it was love at first sight.

Speaker 1

09:20

How did the 2 of you decide who was going to be CEO?

Speaker 2

09:23

That was very easy. So 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 he doesn't like doing what I'm doing right now.

Speaker 2

09:36

It 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 a sense that we would hang out together and like he's actually he's a friend but he is not like my best friend or my buddy but we have so much respect for 1 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.

Speaker 1

10:16

And 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. Right.

Speaker 1

10:28

So 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?

Speaker 2

10:46

So a few things. So my role as a CEO, in the early days, I was basically doing everything but being an engineer because I wasn't an engineer. But so I was the product manager, the recruiter, I was, for the longest time, the only marketing person for 3 years.

Speaker 2

11:04

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 what ultimately will become our team.

Speaker 2

11:16

And that was really what my goal was.

Speaker 1

11:18

So everything but building. Yeah. That was you.

Speaker 2

11:20

Exactly.

Speaker 1

11:21

How has that changed over time? We talked a bit with Elad Gil about how the role of CEO evolves as a company gets much larger but it changes a lot even as you go from 2 people to 5 people to 10 people, right?

Speaker 2

11:34

True. So 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, oh, I'm struggling with marketing. Like I don't know how to generate leads, so I need to hire someone better than me.

Speaker 2

11:48

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 sign up to front, I would call them and I would be like, do you want to sign up to front? Here is what front 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.

Speaker 2

12:11

And so at every step of the way, I hired people better than me, but once I had figured out what roughly their job would be, and the mistake I've done in the early days was, I've not figured out something, and I hope 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.

Speaker 1

12:38

So you can't count on someone else to have the answers

Speaker 2

12:41

if you

Speaker 1

12:41

don't have them.

Speaker 2

12:42

Yeah, for sure. And still today, like 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 kind of working.

Speaker 2

12:58

So that's what happened. So I hired people that were better than me on things that I had figured out, and then once I 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.

Speaker 1

13:16

So it sounds like from the very beginning though, hiring was foremost in your mind, as

Speaker 2

13:22

a

Speaker 1

13:23

key role for the CEO.

Speaker 2

13:24

So 1 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 you know 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 just take notes and read the notes later on. So at least I can tell you 1 piece of advice that I got from Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, that I thought 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.

Speaker 2

14:07

So I'm interviewing you, and I'm like, do I want 10 Jeff in this team? Yeah, tough. So if The answer is yes. Maybe no.

Speaker 2

14:16

Maybe I do. So if the answer is yes, then I can hire you. If 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.

Speaker 1

14:26

From the very beginning, it seems like Front has a strong, specific culture. Yes. Did you pay attention to that as you were hiring from the beginning and how did you implement that?

Speaker 1

14:38

How did you think about it?

Speaker 2

14:39

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 are just extensions of who we are as co-founders. And so, you know, some of our values are low ego and high standards, care and collaboration.

Speaker 2

15:06

And the last 1 is transparency. And I just believe that I'm incredibly demanding and that's why high standards is part of our value and I don't want to hire anyone that doesn't have these standards. I'm also, I think, very low ego. 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.

Speaker 2

15:25

And 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 a wall and to explain them and all of that in the early days, but at least being just self-aware is what will help you hire the right people.

Speaker 1

15:48

And it does kind of speak to the fact that you are going to play an important role in hiring everybody in the beginning.

Speaker 3

15:53

Yeah,

Speaker 2

15:54

and I kept interviewing everyone till like employee number 80 or something.

Speaker 1

15:59

Did you ever find yourself in a position of needing or wanting or having to compromise on those values or did the values always take precedence? Like there was someone who maybe didn't quite match the values but was like the perfect fit for the designer job.

Speaker 2

16:13

So no, we never, or if we did then we let go the person after, which is worse. Yeah, never worked. And I think it's incredibly important.

Speaker 2

16:22

In a company that's fast growing, like you think, for example, I've been willing to hire a head of finance for, I don't know, 6 months. And it's so important, like we don't have any finance person at front and we, I don't know, we're 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. So I'm not hiring anyone.

Speaker 2

16:49

And I think being very disciplined about not hiring, even if you desperately need this person, is important.

Speaker 1

16:56

I wanna move on to product, but before we do that, I'm just wondering if you were going to talk to relatively new startup founders or people with young companies like most of the companies in startup school, is there specific advice you'd give about creating a culture of success, creating the kind of culture you have at front for them?

Speaker 2

17:20

So I think my biggest advice would be 1, to be incredibly demanding. So 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 5 and 1 person is not working out, and you kind of 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.

Speaker 2

17:52

I think that's super important. I think transparency is just so important in the early days and even if, 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, I don't know, salaries. Not super.

Speaker 1

18:09

Yeah, so I was going to ask, when you say transparency, people throw that word out a lot. How do you, in actual practice, what does that mean for you at Front?

Speaker 2

18:19

So it means that everyone knows what I, so a few things. 1, 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.

Speaker 2

18:38

And so, for example, like sharing salaries, like we can have a debate about that, but I think it raises more questions than it actually solve problems. But then, everything else, so everyone knows our revenue, our churn, every email about, I don't know, leads coming in and telling us what 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 O-end and I share what the board said and or I answer a question on the board deck. Every, I don't know, I share just everything that's business related. And also how I feel, like I'm happy to say, I'm extremely happy about that, and I'm extremely unhappy about that.

Speaker 1

19:30

And everyone in the company ends up knowing that.

Speaker 2

19:32

And they know that and I think it's good because then if you really want people to work on the thing 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 you know they will be worried. I'm gonna tell them that that's broken.

Speaker 2

19:50

And some people joined 2 days ago and they're gonna know that it's broken. But that's fine because what you gain is the fact that they will all work on that problem. And that's better than avoiding the question.

Speaker 1

20:02

And it feels like people stay aligned and moving in the same direction.

Speaker 2

20:06

Yes, and I mean, you know that, but I think Fronte is like at least 1 thing, there are lots of things that we struggle with, but 1 thing that we've done I think really well is our retention of employees. So people are super happy. Our NPS is 87, which is super high.

Speaker 2

20:21

If you look at Glassdoor, we only have 5 stars reviews. If you look at our attrition, there are just 2 people that have left front ever and it was 1 to go back to school, 1 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.

Speaker 1

20:42

We were talking earlier about 1 great sign for a company, for a 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.

Speaker 2

20:58

Yeah, and it's so important because so much knowledge is gathered.

Speaker 1

21:02

Institutional, right, And every time, especially if you lose someone good, you lose... So much knowledge. So much.

Speaker 1

21:08

So you guys are a really interesting case because you're an enterprise company that started with a handful of customers, well, 0, 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 a little bit about the evolution to going from, we were just talking about 10 or 100 people who love you to many more.

Speaker 2

21:39

Yeah, so I would say a few things. So first thing is, I remember when I arrived here in OAC 4 years ago, Kevin Hale came to me and was like, what's your company? And so I was like, it's Front.

Speaker 2

21:53

And then he was like, oh, so cool. I think it's 1 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 so-

Speaker 1

22:04

He was confused about, oh, you must be confusing me with another company in the back.

Speaker 2

22:08

Yeah, it's 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, no, use our competitor, it's much better.

Speaker 2

22:18

It's true, I've always been very ashamed with the current state of the product. And so, of course, convinced that we didn't have product market fit.

Speaker 1

22:29

Isn't that 1 of the definitions of product market fit is a product that your customers love but that you're ashamed of.

Speaker 2

22:37

Maybe, I think it's actually a good thing that you're ashamed of your product. 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, I need to fix every single problem that I have.

Speaker 2

23:04

So how did I do that? 1 is, I've been incredibly disciplined about talking to as many users as possible. So my day to day at OAC 4 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.

Speaker 2

23:25

And I made sure that every single day I had at least, I don't know, 7, 8 meetings with people that signed up to our product. Even if they ended up not using our product, it doesn't matter. I want to talk to them and I want to understand why they got initially interested.

Speaker 1

23:39

Can I just stop you there? Do you remember, this might be a stretch, but do you remember any specific conversations that maybe changed the trajectory or at least changed the product in significant ways?

Speaker 2

23:50

Yeah, and actually in YC, so we started with this email that was helping companies manage shared inboxes, so shared email addresses like support, add, sales, add, and that's what it was doing. And then we talked to Adora, the CEO of Homejoy.

Speaker 1

24:05

YC partner now.

Speaker 2

24:06

YC partner now.

Speaker 1

24:07

YC startup school.

Speaker 2

24:09

Awesome. And so she told me, oh, so the product that you've built, it's awesome. Could it work with SMS? Because they were chatting through SMS with all their cleaners.

Speaker 2

24:20

And then we looked at Twilio 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 used SMS to work. So that's 1 example, but I have many more.

Speaker 2

24:42

I basically have never, I worked 1 year in a company, So what do I know about business workflows? And still today, the reason why I still 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 1 of the use cases that Tronch is super popular in is logistics and transportations. And so I'm going to these tracking conferences and trying to understand what do I know about their workflows, nothing.

Speaker 1

25:13

I bet you stand out at a tracking conference.

Speaker 2

25:15

Right. I do. So if I don't talk to them, then I can't 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.

Speaker 2

25:30

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 8 meetings a day, it's insanely difficult.

Speaker 2

25:42

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 of 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.

Speaker 1

25:59

So When you entered YC, do you remember how many customers you had?

Speaker 2

26:04

So 1 thing I remember is when I interviewed at YC, we had 3,000 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 1 by 1, and every time 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.

Speaker 2

26:21

So maybe out of the 3,000 companies, maybe 1 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, we need to build that. We're 1 feature away, I promise.

Speaker 1

26:34

Just 1 feature.

Speaker 2

26:35

Just 1 feature away. I still say that today.

Speaker 1

26:38

And when you left YC, how many customers did you have?

Speaker 2

26:42

So when we left YC, we had 5,000 MR. And so we had probably like 130 companies using the product.

Speaker 1

26:51

Which is pretty amazing. So do you recall what the retention was of those 130 companies?

Speaker 2

26:55

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 showed the video of demo day. So I know my demo day pitch by heart because I've listened to it so many times.

Speaker 2

27:08

And so part of the pitch is, we haven't had a single user churn.

Speaker 1

27:13

And that's good, right?

Speaker 2

27:14

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.

Speaker 1

27:22

Why was that?

Speaker 2

27:24

I mean, just because the product was very early and so didn't have a lot of the features that the market needed.

Speaker 1

27:30

So have you managed to shift that over time?

Speaker 2

27:33

Yeah, I mean we've built more and more and so our conversion has increased.

Speaker 1

27:38

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, how do you figure out how to price your product? Can you talk about the front pricing journey from wherever you started to how you started and to where you are now?

Speaker 2

27:56

Yeah, so we started with a freemium model. So We had 3 or 9 dollars per user per month. 1 thing I would say is just release your pricing as early as possible because there is...

Speaker 2

28:08

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 that's what you need. 2 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 overwhelmed with feedback from people that will never pay for your product. So we had a freemium model.

Speaker 2

28:29

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, so 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, it's not useful, so removed it, change it into 9 and 19, consistently increase prices over time, maybe too much.

Speaker 1

28:57

Do you feel like you started too low?

Speaker 2

28:59

Yeah, And I think 99.99% of people will tell you that they started to, so yeah. It doesn't matter though, because you can increase price later.

Speaker 1

29:09

It's harder to increase than to decrease, I suppose.

Speaker 2

29:13

Yeah, true, but Everyone does it.

Speaker 1

29:20

How did you come up with those numbers? Was it sort of a 1999?

Speaker 2

29:25

100%. Oh yeah, it's, I mean, you can work as, so we're now for the first time.

Speaker 1

29:29

Did you ask customers what they would pay? And no, no.

Speaker 2

29:33

I don't think they can, I don't think they can tell you? I mean, of course you can look at your kind of competition and then make sure that you're not 10 times cheaper or 10 times more expensive. But then once you know that and you have a rent, just pick a number and go with it.

Speaker 2

29:48

Just pick

Speaker 1

29:49

a number and go.

Speaker 2

29:49

Yeah, it's like in the scope of distraction that you can have in the early days, like thinking too much about the pricing is 1 of them. Just pick a price and sell the product and you'll see what people say.

Speaker 1

30:00

I wanted to dig more into 1 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.

Speaker 1

30:15

But What advice can you give to people who are trying to extract useful feedback from customers?

Speaker 2

30:23

Yes, so I mean 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 1 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 Trello for product roadmap, and so we published our Trello roadmap. And so even today, if you go on frontup.com.com.com roadmap, you can see our roadmap.

Speaker 2

30:50

And public, 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 1 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 reply.

Speaker 2

31:12

And so I think it was a good mix of people that want to spend a lot of time, people that want to spend some time, and people that just want to do 1 click. But in any way, you need to have this data.

Speaker 1

31:23

So that sounds like it's a little bit later in your evolution when you had Trello and you had a roadmap. In the very beginning when you were trying to figure out, you know, you talk to a door and figure out SMS. What was that like?

Speaker 1

31:36

How did you know if you were talking to a customer who was giving you useful feedback or basically wasting your time?

Speaker 2

31:43

Yeah, so I mean, 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 call. I mean, that's my guess.

Speaker 2

32:05

And it's normal, because otherwise you would be doing sales in a company. And that was how I felt. Yeah, that's how I felt as well. So 1 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 what the workflows of people were, what their issue was, and then think afterwards, can front solve it.

Speaker 2

32:30

And I think that then it becomes pretty interesting. So today when I do a sales call or sales meeting or a 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 pain point 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 there are 2 things that you need to focus on.

Speaker 2

32:57

1 is being incredibly honest with yourself about whether Front is a good solution for them. And even today, 1 of the things 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 you want.

Speaker 2

33:27

And then making sure that you were super curious when you were doing these sales goals and making sure that it 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.

Speaker 1

33:42

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 0 and you sell the wrong person the wrong product you're going to have churn.

Speaker 2

33:56

Right and 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 revenue 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 pull your, you push your product in a direction that you don't want to go. And I think that's the biggest mistake.

Speaker 1

34:19

Let's talk a little bit about sales because you have, I mean you've had to learn about enterprise sales all on your own and you've had to build a sales force. 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.

Speaker 2

34:40

So I guess my advice based on a mistake I did was first you need to figure out, there are different sales motions you can have. So for example, you can have a bottom-up approach or a top-down approach. So top-down, you sell to, I don't know, CIO, and then they deploy the product.