I’m Mathilde, CEO and co-founder of Front. To give more context about our shared inbox, we started by trying to solve the pain points around responding together to group emails like contact@ info@. Email isn’t collaborative; it’s unclear who is supposed to respond to a group email, forwarding/reply all/CCs are messy, and you can’t even internally discussion an email in the inbox. But, it’s still the main communication tool for businesses, so that’s why we’re tackling the team email inbox problem first.
We expanded Front for multi-channel use (live chat, SMS, Facebook, Twitter) because even more teams (customer support, success, operations, marketing, etc) need a centralized communication tool that brings all their emails, channels, apps, messages into one place. It’s been interesting to see the many new use cases that we now support as a result of this change.
Ultimately, our longer term vision for Front is to create a platform that helps to break down the silos between teams that are using various specialized tools/apps and make collaboration easier within an entire company. And I think we can use the inbox to be that central platform. But, we’ve got a long way to get there and things to consider over time (like our pricing). You can see our public roadmap on Trello (http://frontapp.com/roadmap) and submit your ideas to help us get there.
You're right. When I wrote this article I was more interested in replying to Des Traynor's article than promoting our product. I've added a link (even if I'm not sure people care)
A brief look through Front suggests that it is a specialized ticketing system. I predict that, if successful, it will incorporate more traditional ticketing system features.
I think Lifehacker editors read a variety of blogs, so if you appear in one of those, you probably have a better chance of getting noticed. It's been a while, but probably smaller blogs that are focused on new companies - KillerStartups, MakeUseOf, ProgrammableWeb, that sort of thing. You can also try emailing them (tips@lifehacker), but I imagine that they don't read all of those.
in what way? the ui was and still is as fast as most lightweight desktop clients
> powerful search
maybe, although some clients supported powerful search with regex before
I think gmail was not that innovative, but it did bring everything together very well, in a very user-friendly way, along with some new-ish stuff like tags and the no need to delete anything.
Emails are not tasks? I disagree. You're right that they are a communication medium but it not incompatible. From my point of view most of the time they are both.
Sometimes it is just a question of definitions. If I get an email from my mum with an ebook attached, I can regard it as a task (to add that ebook to my reader, to write back later). I'd argue that this is not the definition of a task, the writing back part alone especially not. That is just communication.
But sure, if you use emails primarily to collaborate with others, for you the emails are task thinking might very well be true.
We expanded Front for multi-channel use (live chat, SMS, Facebook, Twitter) because even more teams (customer support, success, operations, marketing, etc) need a centralized communication tool that brings all their emails, channels, apps, messages into one place. It’s been interesting to see the many new use cases that we now support as a result of this change.
Ultimately, our longer term vision for Front is to create a platform that helps to break down the silos between teams that are using various specialized tools/apps and make collaboration easier within an entire company. And I think we can use the inbox to be that central platform. But, we’ve got a long way to get there and things to consider over time (like our pricing). You can see our public roadmap on Trello (http://frontapp.com/roadmap) and submit your ideas to help us get there.
I wrote some thoughts on my vision on Medium if you’re interested: https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/to-new-beginnings-announc...