Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email
&gt; 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.<p>That&#x27;s the exact <i>opposite</i> of what I&#x27;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&#x27;s hard to track, discuss, resolve, and (at a later date) reference all that info.<p>This is what I wanted on MS365:<p>- Forward an email to a special address.  Ex: ryan29@todo.example.com (the TODO address for ryan29@example.com).<p>- Use Power Automate to create a Teams channel for the email.<p>- Use Power Automate to post some cards to the channel; one to (optionally) create a Planner Task, one to resolve the topic.<p>- Notify @ryan29 about the new topic.<p>- I deal with the topic.  If it&#x27;s long lived or complex, I create a Task.  If I need input, I @mention others that can help.  If it&#x27;s simple 5-15 minute thing, I do the work and click the link to resolve the topic.<p>- 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&#x27;s done with a link to the Teams channel.<p>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&#x27;t waste a bunch of time dealing with some 3rd party&#x27;s idea of optimal workflows or value adds.<p>The issues I had were that Teams, Planner, etc. have limits on the number of channels &#x2F; tasks and Power Automate &#x2F; Teams lacked some functionality that would make it really streamlined.<p>However, I was close enough after a few hours of playing around that I can&#x27;t believe something like &quot;adding Slack chat to email threads&quot; is a $1 billion problem.