I was one of the earliest customers of Front and there is still so much more they can do. For any team that uses email, Front has so many nice features that don’t work or are hard to get working with other email clients.
For a small support or sales team I highly recommend it and I’m looking forward to their growth and hopefully future innovation. Happy to answer more about how we used it and why I love it as a product.
Slackifying e-mail sounds like a nightmare to me. Email is about perfect for what it was designed. I check it when I want to check it, few Times a day. We (as humanity) really give up more and more of our most precious resources: attention and deep focus.
Deep focus is very precious and really requires immersing oneself in the topic - oftentimes far away from a screen or blinky lights. Rich Hickey has a great quote about hammocks: when you're in one, nobody can tell you're not sleeping.
I HATE Slack. For me, it turns into a gross “pinging you” and overall is insanely annoying to be in channels and check back on information. Or, finding files or using search is Hell. Not to mention their insanely painful login experience. I am looking forward to its death at CRM.
Front is the real deal. Hands down the greatest productivity software I’ve used in YEARS. If you haven’t used it check it out. If you collaborate with a small team it will change your life.
It’s nothing like Slack...
Edit: To clarify some more. Slack and Front are for different mindsets.
Front is best when you are a project/assignment driven person. Slack is best when you are just a drone on a project/channel (if that makes sense...).
Slack also is great when the conversation is heavily one sided. Boss bugging employee. Or, someone who doesn’t know what they are doing has lots of questions for someone who knows what they are doing during a task. Which is fine and has a use.
Thinking about it, CRM should have bought Front instead. Their CRM/people integration is getting incredibly good especially as a support desk suite beyond “email”. The Slack sale is one of the greatest heist I’ve ever seen.
Looking forward to Front eating Outlook and Team’s lunch next
> Slack is best when you are just a drone on a project/channel (if that makes sense...).
> Slack also is great when the conversation is heavily one sided.
Honestly, that seems extremely unfair to me. It feels like you're using it wrong. In my experience, Slack is for conversations. The groups I'm in use it for tossing out random thoughts/questions... and people participate as they choose.
If you're using in a way where people are constantly pinging you demanding your attention, then you should change that. That's no different than being in a large office and everyone else feeling free to just walk over to you and tap you on the shoulder every time they want something. If _that_ was happening, it would be something you should fix, too.
Chat is definitely needed and important but nothing ever gets lost really by “tossing out random questions” in Front.
I would rethink twice how you are communicating in the work place. I find that messy and then forces people to juggle back “oh, yeah what did you Slack me about this the other day”. The most annoying people on Slack don’t realize they are annoying.
Either way to each it’s own. Check out Front and stay open minded to how you communicate in work place
I mean you still use Front as email... except you can invite users to threads and assign them to other people and it makes doing anything with a team so much more manageable instead of forwarding things around and being unsure if they have already been handled.
Jeff Bezos probably loves Front for this reason (anyone who has ever received an infamous "?" cc: email from Bezos will understand what I mean by this comment).
I've had this conversation multiple times with my colleagues. One of them always argue that WhateverIsTheNewThingThatsGoingToReplaceEmail will replace email, this time for real; I argue that 10 years from now, email will still be a thing, and all these services will likely be not.
It's been at least 4-5 years of the first time we had it. I never update the "10" part.
The real reason email has problems is that it intermingles messages from real human beings and ones from computers, in a way that Facebook messenger and Twitter to a lesser extent do not.
It’s a little puzzling to me why Gmail does not simply separate machine generated from human originated email.
I've had fewer and fewer emails end up in Promotions. Apparently the initial settings were far too effective, so they had to be turned down in order for promotional emails to actually see eyeballs.
Shameless plug: If anyone is interested in an email client that helps you build healthy email habits, I work on Emailio (https://emailio.com), a YC company that helps you do just that. HN users who sign up can email me martin@emailio.com for free lifetime beta access.
3% CMGR is 42.6% a year, which is slower than Asanas trailing 12 months of growth (48.74%) and only a bit faster than Smartsheet (36.88%), which are trading at 15.9 and 13.7 projected 2021 revenue respectively. At $38m in ARR that means that at 1.3bn you'd be paying 24x 2021 revenue, which seems a bit expensive compared to Asana (obviously a different product, but similar buyers, market, cost structure, and monetization)
I've brought a tiny bit of sanity to my Outlook inbox [0] by using many, many rules. The goal is to move an email out of my Inbox and to a folder of my choosing on receipt. I hit about 80%. (And every week or so I update the rules to try to capture more of the 20%. But the goalposts constantly move.)
I then use a search folder to show "all unread messages", group the view by "in folder", and treat that as my inbox. (It still shows messages in the actual Inbox.)
I find this very useful in removing some of the cognitive load of email.
Before:
- 10 emails arrive in Inbox.
- Email 1 is about project x. You figure that out, switch mental context to project x, action it perhaps, move on.
- Email 2 is about project y. You figure that out, switch mental context to project y, file it, move on.
- etc.
After:
- All (most) of the email regarding project x is filtered to the project x folder.
- When I choose to, I go there and do things.
- I never have to cognitively switch out of 'project x mode' until I choose to.
Setting up and maintaining the rules is a pain in the ass, and Outlook fights you at every turn. But for me it's 100% worth the effort.
[0]: Corporate environment, so it's not like I can use any of these funky cloud services. It's what I got.
This sucks. Now instead of having channels for particular topics or organizational areas etc, you have a channel for every problem or question or tedious issue someone raises.
At this point most my emails are automated responses from companies. Slack on the other hand is people, that suggests that people want conversations that are more nuanced that just back and forth. Email certainly has its place, but it's not right for groups of people talking to each other.
The times I've seen a Slack transition, email usage fell by 80% or more. With my current employer, Slack is used for almost everything in team. Email has become more about conversations with external people. Except the ones that we interact with enough that they're now in our Slack.
More annoying and adrenaline-driven than email, but also more plugin-friendly
Slack integratons are not full-featured but they're more flexible than what you can embed in an email, even with gmail's markup actions. There's no other 'inbox for interactive widgets'.
Work e-mails for me have always had a high noise to signal ratio. Daily reports that I can't opt out of, alerts, team e-mails. I only check my e-mail once a day now.
I don't like the randomization of that chat can bring, but being able to join and leave channels is much preferable to e-mail.
Call me old-school, but I still don't buy into these "revenue multiple" nonsense. Traditional valuation metrics like PER, EV/EBITDA, DCF etc. all tie back in one way or another to the cashflow-generating potential of a company.
Revenue multiples have, at best, only tenuous relationship to cashflow. If you sell $10 notes for $1, in theory you can have infinite revenue.
I wish investors would just stop pretending tech valuation these days have anything to do with financials, which is actually fine.
Maybe it is time we shift what we think the equity market is about. Nowadays its less a place to go looking for returns and more one-giant-PATREON where you buy a stake just because you are a fan.
>> Revenue multiples have, at best, only tenuous relationship to cashflow. If you sell $10 notes for $1, in theory you can have infinite revenue.
Sure, but revenue multiples are specific to a business or product type. A consulting company's revenue multiple might be 2x or 3x. A cloud-based SaaS with no hands-on setup might be 10x. A HelloFresh/BlueApron business might be, say, 7x. For some types of businesses, I wouldn't even pay 1x. If an investor is applying the wrong multiple to a business, they wont be around for long.
I've done a DCF of a tech SaaS S-1 to test at the advice of a friend who is a PM in tech at a hedge fund.
It still seems like magic, and even more so then, but it penciled. Sponsor got in with the last pre-IPO round (think like a Wellington/Fidelity who essentially buys their IPO allocation by entering slightly early) at $3.5B, IPO was $4.5B, and Friday night post dinner w/ redbull DCF spit out ~~$5.0B to $6.5B. After a few months it trended up to that Enterprise Value. The mind is simply not good at understanding compounding at 70% (or whatever) free cash flow conversion. Not having COGS or working capital or CAPEX is magical.
That being said it’s insanely hard to move from a “things might be worth 10x EBITDA” to “things might be worth 10x revenue”. It’s like using different parts of the brain (left vs right) or quantum physics versus more traditional physics: there’s some magical stuff that’s probably rules based with underlying structure underneath that just doesn’t make sense.
A 7x revenue multiple < 15x ebitda multiple with 50+% free cash flows. That’s that most old school investors can’t seem to understand. Weird. Basic math.
> Dear [sender], thanks for bringing this to my attention. Booleandilemma is actually busy on other work at the moment, and needs to be able to focus on that. Please send these requests to me, rather than to booleandilemma, and I will get take care of prioritising them. If we need to discuss this further I'd be happy to jump on a call with you.
> Thanks, and have a nice day
> Booleandilemma's boss
I guess we can dream :)
(But seriously, as a manager, this is what I'd likely try to do. I'd check with you first, to see how you felt about the situation, of course. Being CC'd is an invitation to get involved on behalf of my team)
But seriously, I find including someone's boss on the first email to them (I'd imagine to just prioritize the sender's task and make the recipient look bad if they don't follow through) is highly passive-aggressive. In general, my boss is concerned in what I accomplish for/with my team, and it sure would be nice to do whatever thing you're foisting upon me, but I'd just like to tell them to add it to the ever-elongating queue of other teams' requests. I've got my own job to do!
I'd also like to add that internships are all about learning the corporate world, right?
Well, way back when, as someone who likes to do a good job, but quickly (Personally, I just don't like a backlog of work,) as a bright-eyed intern, I learned very quickly not to ever 'be nice' to anyone not on your team.
It was 'just another internship-learning-experience,' but it sure opened my eyes to the two Iron Laws of corporations:
(1) If it breaks, and you touched it last, it's entirely your fault.
(2) [This was an extremely hard lesson to learn as a 'naturally helpful' kind of person:] If you help someone with something, it's your responsibility. Forever.
Needless to say, I learned quickly. I learned that corporations are more or less perversions of regular society where everyone tries to punt work off to whoever else seems most suitable or exploitable.
You can get back at them by cc'ing their boss when you respond. ;)
FWIW, I'll often cc my own boss when reaching out to someone in a different team, as I figure he can help with any coordination required. Hopefully that doesn't come off as passive aggressive but I guess it really depends.
I am surprised there is no mention of Google Wave, the promising technology that did all of this, but died due to an unfortunate release/invite process.
I logged in to Wave using my hard-earned early-invite in excitement only to realize I couldn't communicate with non-wave gmail users :(
Lets say you have an engineering employee with a base salary of 150k. His total cost to the company when you factor supporting roles is perhaps 300k. Assume this person needs to generate 2x that in value for the company, so lets say 600k a year. So that's 0.01% of the job he needs to do. If the tool is even somewhat useful that seems like a very fair price.
I am not sure how an engineering employee with a base salary of 150k would eventually cost 300k and why a customer should pay for that engineer to make 2x his pay for the investors gluing a couple of 3rd party APIs and making a dashboard.
Customer support teams would, easily, to manage shared inboxes. Competition includes Salesforce Desk ($75/mo), HelpScout ($35/mo), Zendesk ($89), and so on.
And if Front's shooting for the broader business email market, well, you have Superhuman ($30/mo) at least closer to that price range.
My company has been using front for a few years. We like it a lot. Before that we used zendesk and have found front to be a better fit for our team. I would invest in almost any of the tools we use given the opportunity. Without front and airtable we would be lost.
first time I hear of both Front and Missive. After browsing Front I felt like I was drowning in marketing, whereas missive just felt so clear and upfront in comparison. Also really liked their pixel blocking and refusal to use any![0] not very common in the industry.
We’re currently on Helpscout and quite happy. But have to admit I felt very tempted to switch to missive after visiting their page. And I didn’t even look for an alternative nor have any major issues with helpscout to begin with.
Anyone with firsthand experience of any of those tools that can compare?
> Front is like Slack for your email, except instead of creating another distracting, noisy, always-on tool, Front allows users to spin up ephemeral chats within email threads themselves.
That's the exact opposite of what I'd want. Most small businesses have the same email problem that I always feel like I do. Too many requests come in via email and it's hard to track, discuss, resolve, and (at a later date) reference all that info.
This is what I wanted on MS365:
- Forward an email to a special address. Ex: ryan29@todo.example.com (the TODO address for ryan29@example.com).
- Use Power Automate to create a Teams channel for the email.
- Use Power Automate to post some cards to the channel; one to (optionally) create a Planner Task, one to resolve the topic.
- Notify @ryan29 about the new topic.
- I deal with the topic. If it's long lived or complex, I create a Task. If I need input, I @mention others that can help. If it's simple 5-15 minute thing, I do the work and click the link to resolve the topic.
- When the topic is closed (by link or by closing the related task), the Teams channel is archived and the original email thread gets a reply saying it's done with a link to the Teams channel.
That way all conversation about the task is consolidated into Teams, long lived tasks are tracked via Planner, email stays relatively clean from internal communication, and I don't waste a bunch of time dealing with some 3rd party's idea of optimal workflows or value adds.
The issues I had were that Teams, Planner, etc. have limits on the number of channels / tasks and Power Automate / Teams lacked some functionality that would make it really streamlined.
However, I was close enough after a few hours of playing around that I can't believe something like "adding Slack chat to email threads" is a $1 billion problem.
I provide oversight and technical reviews for a 10 person team. I also have a boss above me who needs information from me. E-mail was getting incredibly inefficient for me when everyone starting working from home earlier this year. I lost oversight and missed tasks. I was getting 25-50 emails a day that required some type of response or action from me.
I switched my team over Teams and asked them to create a card in the planner tasks if they needed something from me - instead of emailing me. That was much easier for me to keep track of everything. E-mail is good for communicating a thought, I don't find it good for tracking tasks - particularly tasks that have a deadline.
There is a very very narrow area where the ability to create ephemeral chats around email threads is useful: agencies and consultancies. The ability to discuss a client email, workshop a response, and delegate response authority to someone else is a huge game changer for the client services industry. Buuuuuut, there aren't enough agencies out there to justify a $1.3B price tag.
> Forward an email to a special address. Ex: ryan29@todo.example.com (the TODO address for ryan29@example.com).
This should be possible with ryan29+todo@example.com though .. in conjunction with filtering. I use this for bookmarking and some basic categorisation.
Yes, there are many ways email could be used to assign tasks. The way I said, the way you said, by dragging it into a folder. It doesn't really matter how it works in detail as long as the general concept is there; people want to assign work to me via email and they don't want anything more difficult / time consuming than forwarding an email.
Maybe ticketing systems have gotten better, but I've never used one where I didn't feel like I was "spending time" dealing with the ticket system. As of right now, I end up with discussions spread across email, SMS, phone, and an issue tracking system (Redmine).
I think the main reason that happens is that I get delegated work and it often starts via email; "Please deal with this.", "Can we do this?", etc.. Based on my experience, that type of delegation is common for owner operated small businesses. Most of those small business owners don't want to create a ticket, assign it, set a due date, and track it when they're used to something as efficient as forwarding an email and expecting the recipient to understand the implied "do this" that comes along with it.
Plus, a forwarded email saying "Can we do this?" doesn't make sense as a ticket when sometimes the answer is going to be a 15 second "No." Other times it might be "Yes, but..." after 30 minutes of research and additional conversation. That warrants some type of tracking or ticket because you're going to need that info if it turns into a billable job.
So as the delegate, I want to be able to decide an existing thread of communication warrants conversion to a trackable conversation or issue. In addition to that, I want to be able to take future out-of-band communication and move it in-band by associating it with an existing conversation, ticket, topic, or whatever you want to call it. For example, if a customer emails someone with extra info or questions, it would be useful to forward the whole thread into an existing Teams Channel.
I mostly deal with small businesses and very often it's the owner interacting with a customer and delegating to employees via whatever means is appropriate. It usually doesn't make sense for the business owner to manage a ticket tracking system because that's extra work they don't want to / can't waste time on. It makes way more sense for the delegate to manage tasks / communication instead of the delegator IMO.
I've looked at Trello, Asana, Basecamp, etc. and I'm always left with the feeling "now you're going to have 2 jobs." They're designed for 100% buy-in, someone has to be the person that manages that stuff, and any out-of-band communication is a pain to bring in-band so you spend your time copying conversations into the system.
> As of right now, I end up with discussions spread across email, SMS, phone, and an issue tracking system (Redmine).
That's likely going to stay that way, because there are people on both ends, not machines. They'll write an FB messenger note about "coming with us to lunch?, oh, btw, we found an interesting bug in xyz, you really need to frobnicate the belzebubs"; And then they'll send you an SMS while driving (because their in-car system is older), "oh, and the original fix doesn't fix the bug".
This is a people problem, not a technical problem. It takes discipline, but at an old job I simply refused to respond to anything that wasn't filed in Jitterbug (ultra-low-ceremony issue tracking from the Samba project). And as a result, all was tracked properly.
Now that people have phones that take pictures and whatsapp, they take screenshots and send them to me, and I have no better workflow to offer, so I do accept those issues as well.
I suspect no piece of infrastructure will be the ultimate thing. What you described above will likely make a difference only if it can only receive SMS, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, and somehow do it without requiring your users to call/message/email a different address.
Eww, Power Automate or Flow to me is the worst of office modern software. I don't want to click together workflows on a slow website. I don't think any problem will ever be solved by this.
Is there a secret to this? Does an app exist, are there logs in cases of errors? What am I missing about this?
Creating sensible workflows is actually work and there is no import/export to other tenants as far as I know. I recommend it to people that want to have a negative experience with "the cloud".
Didn't take a look, but what theoretically could be nice is somehow lacking. Maybe it got better, wasn't interested for some time now.
It can be nice for very simple things and I would love to have a good workflow engine.
> That way all conversation about the task is consolidated into Teams
You can get any ticket system from around 2005 and it will be much, much better. At least you can actually access the data. Haven't looked into the Teams API, but I somehow don't want to honestly.
I feel talking about DAUs is a little deceptive for enterprise software given that 'users' are essentially forced to not only use their employer's software stack, but use it daily
Companies have bought a lot of seats for software that employees didn’t actually adopt. Those customers are more likely to churn. Reporting DAU helps account for that possibility.
Sigh while email is not perfect it’s at least not centralized. Also unless they are posting rfcs to the IETF for an open protocol its just a proprietary trap/lockin.
Nice try, but this "$1.3B Startup" is nothing more than a glorified UI on top of email. I wonder how they will justify their valuation in this crowded market.
And this article at this timing (on the same day Slack was acquired) is clearly a marketing article for this company.
They should have just owned it and said "come use our service instead of slack, now that slack is acquired", instead of throwing around the cringe worthy hype words like "slackifying email"
138 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadDisclosure: I read most of it so you don't have to.
For a small support or sales team I highly recommend it and I’m looking forward to their growth and hopefully future innovation. Happy to answer more about how we used it and why I love it as a product.
I said this before, but I hate the direction the workspace is going. Interruption driven work seems to become the new normal.
I HATE Slack. For me, it turns into a gross “pinging you” and overall is insanely annoying to be in channels and check back on information. Or, finding files or using search is Hell. Not to mention their insanely painful login experience. I am looking forward to its death at CRM.
Front is the real deal. Hands down the greatest productivity software I’ve used in YEARS. If you haven’t used it check it out. If you collaborate with a small team it will change your life.
It’s nothing like Slack...
Edit: To clarify some more. Slack and Front are for different mindsets.
Front is best when you are a project/assignment driven person. Slack is best when you are just a drone on a project/channel (if that makes sense...).
Slack also is great when the conversation is heavily one sided. Boss bugging employee. Or, someone who doesn’t know what they are doing has lots of questions for someone who knows what they are doing during a task. Which is fine and has a use.
Thinking about it, CRM should have bought Front instead. Their CRM/people integration is getting incredibly good especially as a support desk suite beyond “email”. The Slack sale is one of the greatest heist I’ve ever seen.
Looking forward to Front eating Outlook and Team’s lunch next
I'm not a big fan of Slack, but it is the best of the chat apps, and I do see a need for team chat for collaboration.
> Slack also is great when the conversation is heavily one sided.
Honestly, that seems extremely unfair to me. It feels like you're using it wrong. In my experience, Slack is for conversations. The groups I'm in use it for tossing out random thoughts/questions... and people participate as they choose.
If you're using in a way where people are constantly pinging you demanding your attention, then you should change that. That's no different than being in a large office and everyone else feeling free to just walk over to you and tap you on the shoulder every time they want something. If _that_ was happening, it would be something you should fix, too.
Chat is definitely needed and important but nothing ever gets lost really by “tossing out random questions” in Front.
I would rethink twice how you are communicating in the work place. I find that messy and then forces people to juggle back “oh, yeah what did you Slack me about this the other day”. The most annoying people on Slack don’t realize they are annoying.
Either way to each it’s own. Check out Front and stay open minded to how you communicate in work place
Not to sound like the Dropbox comment from back in the day, but cc’ing and forwarding are just the basics when it comes to email.
It's been at least 4-5 years of the first time we had it. I never update the "10" part.
It’s a little puzzling to me why Gmail does not simply separate machine generated from human originated email.
I’m just about ready to give up on my inbox as a lost cause, and that’s my work inbox.
I've brought a tiny bit of sanity to my Outlook inbox [0] by using many, many rules. The goal is to move an email out of my Inbox and to a folder of my choosing on receipt. I hit about 80%. (And every week or so I update the rules to try to capture more of the 20%. But the goalposts constantly move.)
I then use a search folder to show "all unread messages", group the view by "in folder", and treat that as my inbox. (It still shows messages in the actual Inbox.)
I find this very useful in removing some of the cognitive load of email.
Before:
- 10 emails arrive in Inbox.
- Email 1 is about project x. You figure that out, switch mental context to project x, action it perhaps, move on.
- Email 2 is about project y. You figure that out, switch mental context to project y, file it, move on.
- etc.
After:
- All (most) of the email regarding project x is filtered to the project x folder.
- When I choose to, I go there and do things.
- I never have to cognitively switch out of 'project x mode' until I choose to.
Setting up and maintaining the rules is a pain in the ass, and Outlook fights you at every turn. But for me it's 100% worth the effort.
[0]: Corporate environment, so it's not like I can use any of these funky cloud services. It's what I got.
Slack integratons are not full-featured but they're more flexible than what you can embed in an email, even with gmail's markup actions. There's no other 'inbox for interactive widgets'.
I don't like the randomization of that chat can bring, but being able to join and leave channels is much preferable to e-mail.
[closes tab]
I mean, seriously.
Revenue multiples have, at best, only tenuous relationship to cashflow. If you sell $10 notes for $1, in theory you can have infinite revenue.
I wish investors would just stop pretending tech valuation these days have anything to do with financials, which is actually fine.
Maybe it is time we shift what we think the equity market is about. Nowadays its less a place to go looking for returns and more one-giant-PATREON where you buy a stake just because you are a fan.
Sure, but revenue multiples are specific to a business or product type. A consulting company's revenue multiple might be 2x or 3x. A cloud-based SaaS with no hands-on setup might be 10x. A HelloFresh/BlueApron business might be, say, 7x. For some types of businesses, I wouldn't even pay 1x. If an investor is applying the wrong multiple to a business, they wont be around for long.
It still seems like magic, and even more so then, but it penciled. Sponsor got in with the last pre-IPO round (think like a Wellington/Fidelity who essentially buys their IPO allocation by entering slightly early) at $3.5B, IPO was $4.5B, and Friday night post dinner w/ redbull DCF spit out ~~$5.0B to $6.5B. After a few months it trended up to that Enterprise Value. The mind is simply not good at understanding compounding at 70% (or whatever) free cash flow conversion. Not having COGS or working capital or CAPEX is magical.
That being said it’s insanely hard to move from a “things might be worth 10x EBITDA” to “things might be worth 10x revenue”. It’s like using different parts of the brain (left vs right) or quantum physics versus more traditional physics: there’s some magical stuff that’s probably rules based with underlying structure underneath that just doesn’t make sense.
Just one anecdotal example.
> Thanks, and have a nice day
> Booleandilemma's boss
I guess we can dream :)
(But seriously, as a manager, this is what I'd likely try to do. I'd check with you first, to see how you felt about the situation, of course. Being CC'd is an invitation to get involved on behalf of my team)
But seriously, I find including someone's boss on the first email to them (I'd imagine to just prioritize the sender's task and make the recipient look bad if they don't follow through) is highly passive-aggressive. In general, my boss is concerned in what I accomplish for/with my team, and it sure would be nice to do whatever thing you're foisting upon me, but I'd just like to tell them to add it to the ever-elongating queue of other teams' requests. I've got my own job to do!
Well, way back when, as someone who likes to do a good job, but quickly (Personally, I just don't like a backlog of work,) as a bright-eyed intern, I learned very quickly not to ever 'be nice' to anyone not on your team.
It was 'just another internship-learning-experience,' but it sure opened my eyes to the two Iron Laws of corporations:
(1) If it breaks, and you touched it last, it's entirely your fault.
(2) [This was an extremely hard lesson to learn as a 'naturally helpful' kind of person:] If you help someone with something, it's your responsibility. Forever.
Needless to say, I learned quickly. I learned that corporations are more or less perversions of regular society where everyone tries to punt work off to whoever else seems most suitable or exploitable.
FWIW, I'll often cc my own boss when reaching out to someone in a different team, as I figure he can help with any coordination required. Hopefully that doesn't come off as passive aggressive but I guess it really depends.
I logged in to Wave using my hard-earned early-invite in excitement only to realize I couldn't communicate with non-wave gmail users :(
Seriously who pays for such a rudimentary product all that money. The pricing doesn't make any sense.
And if Front's shooting for the broader business email market, well, you have Superhuman ($30/mo) at least closer to that price range.
At that price, if it helps close 1 incremental sale a month per seat it pays for itself.
It appears this site is using San Francisco.
https://sacra.com/static/fonts/SF-Pro-Text-Regular.837e72701...
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/127350
(Link for the curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25266584).
https://missiveapp.com
https://missiveapp.com/changelog
We’re currently on Helpscout and quite happy. But have to admit I felt very tempted to switch to missive after visiting their page. And I didn’t even look for an alternative nor have any major issues with helpscout to begin with.
Anyone with firsthand experience of any of those tools that can compare?
[0] https://missiveapp.com/features/auto-block-read-trackers
That's the exact opposite of what I'd want. Most small businesses have the same email problem that I always feel like I do. Too many requests come in via email and it's hard to track, discuss, resolve, and (at a later date) reference all that info.
This is what I wanted on MS365:
- Forward an email to a special address. Ex: ryan29@todo.example.com (the TODO address for ryan29@example.com).
- Use Power Automate to create a Teams channel for the email.
- Use Power Automate to post some cards to the channel; one to (optionally) create a Planner Task, one to resolve the topic.
- Notify @ryan29 about the new topic.
- I deal with the topic. If it's long lived or complex, I create a Task. If I need input, I @mention others that can help. If it's simple 5-15 minute thing, I do the work and click the link to resolve the topic.
- When the topic is closed (by link or by closing the related task), the Teams channel is archived and the original email thread gets a reply saying it's done with a link to the Teams channel.
That way all conversation about the task is consolidated into Teams, long lived tasks are tracked via Planner, email stays relatively clean from internal communication, and I don't waste a bunch of time dealing with some 3rd party's idea of optimal workflows or value adds.
The issues I had were that Teams, Planner, etc. have limits on the number of channels / tasks and Power Automate / Teams lacked some functionality that would make it really streamlined.
However, I was close enough after a few hours of playing around that I can't believe something like "adding Slack chat to email threads" is a $1 billion problem.
I switched my team over Teams and asked them to create a card in the planner tasks if they needed something from me - instead of emailing me. That was much easier for me to keep track of everything. E-mail is good for communicating a thought, I don't find it good for tracking tasks - particularly tasks that have a deadline.
This should be possible with ryan29+todo@example.com though .. in conjunction with filtering. I use this for bookmarking and some basic categorisation.
I think the main reason that happens is that I get delegated work and it often starts via email; "Please deal with this.", "Can we do this?", etc.. Based on my experience, that type of delegation is common for owner operated small businesses. Most of those small business owners don't want to create a ticket, assign it, set a due date, and track it when they're used to something as efficient as forwarding an email and expecting the recipient to understand the implied "do this" that comes along with it.
Plus, a forwarded email saying "Can we do this?" doesn't make sense as a ticket when sometimes the answer is going to be a 15 second "No." Other times it might be "Yes, but..." after 30 minutes of research and additional conversation. That warrants some type of tracking or ticket because you're going to need that info if it turns into a billable job.
So as the delegate, I want to be able to decide an existing thread of communication warrants conversion to a trackable conversation or issue. In addition to that, I want to be able to take future out-of-band communication and move it in-band by associating it with an existing conversation, ticket, topic, or whatever you want to call it. For example, if a customer emails someone with extra info or questions, it would be useful to forward the whole thread into an existing Teams Channel.
I mostly deal with small businesses and very often it's the owner interacting with a customer and delegating to employees via whatever means is appropriate. It usually doesn't make sense for the business owner to manage a ticket tracking system because that's extra work they don't want to / can't waste time on. It makes way more sense for the delegate to manage tasks / communication instead of the delegator IMO.
I've looked at Trello, Asana, Basecamp, etc. and I'm always left with the feeling "now you're going to have 2 jobs." They're designed for 100% buy-in, someone has to be the person that manages that stuff, and any out-of-band communication is a pain to bring in-band so you spend your time copying conversations into the system.
We're just repeating the all the mistakes of prior CRM and ERP horror stories. Those were cautionary tales, not guidebooks.
That's likely going to stay that way, because there are people on both ends, not machines. They'll write an FB messenger note about "coming with us to lunch?, oh, btw, we found an interesting bug in xyz, you really need to frobnicate the belzebubs"; And then they'll send you an SMS while driving (because their in-car system is older), "oh, and the original fix doesn't fix the bug".
This is a people problem, not a technical problem. It takes discipline, but at an old job I simply refused to respond to anything that wasn't filed in Jitterbug (ultra-low-ceremony issue tracking from the Samba project). And as a result, all was tracked properly.
Now that people have phones that take pictures and whatsapp, they take screenshots and send them to me, and I have no better workflow to offer, so I do accept those issues as well.
I suspect no piece of infrastructure will be the ultimate thing. What you described above will likely make a difference only if it can only receive SMS, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, and somehow do it without requiring your users to call/message/email a different address.
Is there a secret to this? Does an app exist, are there logs in cases of errors? What am I missing about this?
Creating sensible workflows is actually work and there is no import/export to other tenants as far as I know. I recommend it to people that want to have a negative experience with "the cloud".
Didn't take a look, but what theoretically could be nice is somehow lacking. Maybe it got better, wasn't interested for some time now.
It can be nice for very simple things and I would love to have a good workflow engine.
> That way all conversation about the task is consolidated into Teams
You can get any ticket system from around 2005 and it will be much, much better. At least you can actually access the data. Haven't looked into the Teams API, but I somehow don't want to honestly.
It reminds me of Frontpage...
How does it help me if they have 1.3 Bn? Or are valued at 1.3 Bn?
Generally speaking, why would I care how much they're valued at? Shouldn't I care if they solve a problem for me?
Unless what they want is my investment money, not me as a customer. In which case I worry they don't solve any problems I have...
And this article at this timing (on the same day Slack was acquired) is clearly a marketing article for this company.
They should have just owned it and said "come use our service instead of slack, now that slack is acquired", instead of throwing around the cringe worthy hype words like "slackifying email"
Shudder.