Front

Matilda Collins, 28 at the time of this interview, founded Front because she believed making people happier at work was the ultimate goal. She wanted to build both a company people enjoyed working at and a product that fundamentally changed how people work. Her insight was simple but powerful: most knowledge workers spend the majority of their day in email, yet email collaboration was broken for teams. Front aimed to be the easiest way to manage shared inboxes—those generic addresses like support@company.com or Twitter accounts—by centralizing everything in one place and letting multiple people manage incoming inquiries.

Front launched in early 2015 after Matilda participated in Y Combinator's summer 2014 batch. The timing was strategic: she was solving a real pain point she experienced herself. The product positioned itself as superior to Slack (which is better for synchronous, internal communication) and different from Intercom (which focused on customer communication). Front's advantage was being built on top of Gmail—the tool everyone already uses—while adding collaboration features similar to Intercom and eliminating information silos across departments.

By August/September 2016, when Matilda first appeared on Nathan Latka's show, Front had reached 1,200 customers with an MRR of approximately $240,000. The company had raised $13M at that point. The early customer base consisted of primarily smaller accounts paying around $200 ARPU. However, Matilda noticed a crucial trend: bigger companies found the product increasingly valuable because information silos are more problematic in larger organizations.

Matilda credits two primary growth drivers for tripling revenue to $700K MRR in just 11 months. First, land-and-expand within existing customers became a major revenue source—over one-third of net growth came from existing customers upgrading or adding new teams. HubSpot exemplified this: they started with one team on Front (customer success) and expanded to 14-15 teams. This was driven by an active customer success team that identified expansion opportunities.

Second, Front hired their first marketing team—just three people—five months into the growth period. This enabled more co-marketing, advertising, and content marketing. Google Ads became their most effective paid channel, with the company spending approximately $15,000/month on paid acquisition. They tracked SQL (sales qualified leads) as their primary metric, converting 7 trials into 1 new paying customer on average. The sales cycle for SMB/mid-market was just 3 weeks (after a 2-week trial), while enterprise deals took longer.

The company maintained impressive unit economics: 1,700 customers paying an average of $400/month (up from $200 ARPU), with 88% gross margin and negative net churn. While gross customer churn was 3.5% monthly, it was primarily small customers churning; larger customers showed extreme stickiness with negative net revenue churn of -10% annually.

By the time of this interview, Front had doubled their team from 20 to 40 people in just a few months, though Matilda kept burn disciplined at around $250K/month—mostly headcount, not marketing spend. The company had raised $14M total ($10M in Series A, with 80% still in the bank). Despite significant inbound interest from investors, Matilda chose to wait until the end of the year to raise Series B, wanting to prove that their newly launched enterprise sales motion was scalable.

Matilda was thoughtful about the business philosophically. She noted that press coverage (like an Entrepreneur.com article that got 6,500 shares) didn't directly drive customer acquisition but instead attracted investor and candidate interest. She rejected any price on the company, noting that she would only sell when she lost confidence in Front's potential to be a massive business. At 28, building a product that made her genuinely happy, and having never prioritized money despite her success, she embodied the mindset of someone building for the long term.