Why is this in your inbox? Start Mode is a series by Hexa Media, hosted by Mat Vaxelaire, Partner at Hexa. Every month, we share a new candid conversation with an exceptional founder about what the 0–1 journey was really like: the doubts, the small wins, and the turning points, before their company took off. Prefer to skip future episode drops? Unsubscribe from future Start Mode notifications here.
Watch on Youtube for English subtitles (settings > auto-translate > English).
In this new episode of Start Mode, Mat Vaxelaire (Partner @ Hexa) sits down with Laurent Perrin, CTO and cofounder of Front (HX14), the customer communication platform that reinvented the shared inbox.
Born at Hexa in 2014, Front has since become a global reference in customer communication software.
While many founders eventually drift away from the product, Laurent never stopped coding. Ten years later, he’s still in the codebase, still talking to users, and still learning from what happens on the ground.
In this conversation, he shares how Front made it from zero to one, by operating in tight three-month cycles, listening obsessively to users, and holding the bar of quality impossibly high. It’s a masterclass in how to stay alive, lucid, and product-driven through the most uncertain phase of company building.
Watch the full episode above, or read the key takeaways below 👇
1) From default dead to default alive
At the beginning of Front, Laurent and Mathilde operated in three-month cycles.
“In my head, the project ended in three months. Every day, I asked myself: what do I need to do today so that in three months we decide to keep going?”
This rhythm helped them balance short-term focus with long-term vision, a simple framework to stay grounded through uncertainty.
“If from the start you say the goal is to build a successful company, it’s too far away. Three months is something you can actually see, and you move forward step by step.”
2) Build fast, understand faster
Front’s original concept wasn’t what it is today.
“We wanted to build a simple support tool, but the market we thought existed didn’t really exist.”
By listening to early users, they uncovered a different opportunity, a collaborative inbox that could connect everyone in the company around customer interactions.
“What we’d built ended up solving a much broader need, a tool anyone could adopt.”
3) Mimicking email: blessing and curse
Front’s email-like interface made adoption easy, but also raised expectations sky-high.
“People would get into the product easily, but make shortcuts. They saw an email client, so they behaved like it was an email client.”
That meant zero tolerance for bugs.
“With email, users expect perfection. Everything you think is simple, isn’t.”
That relentless standard created a real moat, and a culture of extreme engineering rigor.
4) When coding is still leadership
Laurent never wanted to become a distant executive.
“I told myself, I don’t want to be just another exec. I want to do the things an exec can’t do.”
By continuing to code, he keeps a vertical view of the company, from the boardroom to the codebase, and stays connected to reality.
“I see things even managers might miss. It gives me a very global perspective.”
5) The cofounder as anchor
His partnership with Mathilde Collin is built on deep trust and mutual respect.
“We trusted each other from day one. If she was working on something, I knew I could go focus on something else.”
They share the same ethic of work and the same conviction that this project had to work.
“There were too many strokes of luck in how we met. If it didn’t work, we couldn’t just ‘redo it somewhere else.’”
6. Advice for 0→1 founders
Laurent’s philosophy: move fast, stay lucid, and don’t cling to bad ideas.
💡 His advice:
Test fast, kill fast.
Don’t over-engineer. “For six months, Front didn’t even have a database.”
Beware of the sunk-cost fallacy: the more you invest in an idea, the harder it is to drop it.
