Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention, with Front CEO Mathilde Collin

Mathilde is the CEO of Front, a shared inbox, like Gmail with collaboration features. (16:30) She met her co-founder at a startup studio where they host events and people meet and talk about projects. They got on well together, got some funding from the startup studio, and then eventually applied to Y Combinator to get some additional funding.

• (5:12) They shared their roadmap for features on a public Trello board, and that gave them a lot of insights from customers. Also use any tool to understand what’s the percentage of requests about a certain features (eg: 20% of requests are about adding folders support to Front).
• (6:20) Understand how complex it is to build something, and what’s the outcome you expect; for example increase your user base, make them happier or make them spend more. Balance these two aspects when prioritizing features. But don’t build something that’s against your vision.
• (7.27) When you launch disruptive features (like reversing the order of messages, for people used to work with emails in a certain way) your existing customers are going to be annoyed, but it could still lead to an increased usage or growth.
• (9:35) When they launched, the first 300 customers came through blog posts she wrote on Medium, their own blog and in other places. Customers would sign up to the beta, and she would call them on the phone and onboard them. If they stopped using the product she would find out why, talk to her co-founder about the wanted missing features, implement them and then call the customer again. They iterate in this way for the first year.
• (12:55) They had 3,000 companies sign up for their beta, and only 10 ended up really using the product, so a low conversion rate, but she learnt a ton by talking to customers during the onboarding she did with them. They also had an automated mail sent out when someone would sign up to the beta, asking what were they trying to solve, and this also gave them a lot of info.
• (13:38) At scale content is not the best way to get users, paid acquisition is, but it was good for the early days.
• (14:28) They hired the first marketing person 2.5 years after the launch. The first 500–1,000 customers came from PR and content published online.
• (21:01) Your company is just a company, but it’s important that you have a life outside it and enjoy it. She tries to completely log off all apps and social networks and don’t have any kind of work-related notifications during weekends, she plays sports and meditate. She leads by example and also promotes the healthy work-balance at Front (eg: organizing runs and have people explaining the impact of eating well), and all this was influenced by the fact that one of her co-founders was diagnosed with cancer (he recovered), which was the lowest point of her experience so far.
• (23:00) Even though they raised money easily, their revenue and employee retention is good, she still has plenty of questions every morning, because the more they grow the more is at stake. It’s always hard, and this is true for every founder she’s met.
• (24:35) She read the book “The Hard Thing about Hard Things: building a business when there are no easy answers” and realized that you just have to accept that things are hard and stop wondering about it. It’s normal, it doesn’t mean your company is bad though.

How to retain employees and have a strong team?

• (25:12) You need to have a mission-driven company to hook employees and have high retention, one that they care about. Ensure that everyone at the company has a clear understanding of the mission, also as the company grows and changes.
• (26:42) The quality of co-workers is what pushes people to go above and beyond and do great work. When hiring the first employees keep a bar as high as possible and ask yourself if that person could be your co-founder. Don’t lower the bar even when you’re desperate. People will hire other people like themselves, so don’t hire someone if you wouldn’t want 10 other people like him/her. Every new employee should bring something new.
• (28:17) People want to see that they have an impact and know how they can contribute.
• (28:44) Transparency is important: they have dashboards that show all metrics, they go ever them every Money, and every quarter she does a presentation saying everything that has gone well or not. She sends around the slide deck for every board meeting, and many email inboxes (eg: customer support) are accessible to everyone, so that people can see what customers are saying, why a candidate didn’t accept an offer, etc. If something is going to raise more questions, it should be public though: things like salary raises, or why someone leaves or is let go, because employee privacy is more important.
• (32:08) They have 20% of employees in Paris and the rest in San Francisco. People from France do an onboarding in SF, people from SF go to Paris to share the culture, and they all meet together twice a year. Her co-founder went back to work from France, because having a founder in each team is important.
• (33:20) Sometimes not having insights about some problem, and basically have a new pair of fresh eyes on it, is super useful. 99% of what she knows now, she didn’t know when she started. But you must care about the real problem, have a strong team committed to it, and the solution will come.
• (37:30) Emails will remain in work environment (and its usage is increasing), but she’s not so sure about email remaining in your personal life, because it’s being replaced by Whatsapp, FB Messenger etc. The email protocol itself is great, but the user interface is not. She believes some ideas and UIs of successful communication apps should be applied to the email protocol.
• (42:30): You need to be convinced that you’re doing something that people want, but you need to be honest about what’s working or not, and that’s difficult because people want to be happy and don’t face reality. When you work 12 hours a day it’s easy to focus on someone that tells you that your product is good, but ignore the 95% that told you it’s not.
• Have one metric in place that clearly shows you whether you’re making progress or not (for them it was revenue).
• (44:47) She’s been meditating on a daily basis for 500 days, 10 minutes in the morning after a shower, sitting on a couch and using the Headspace app. She did it for many weeks before she thought it was beneficial. It helped her realise that if there’s an issue that makes her upset, constantly thinking about it doesn’t make her less upset, and she must be able to do a context switch to focus on different problems. She thinks that 99.9% of founders would benefit from it.