Doesn't sound like a fairytale to me.

It's been my general experience that startups, especially startups built by dev-focussed folk, tend to radically underestimate the impact of people issues (moral, amount of sleep, work/life balance, etc.) on their effectiveness of their business.

In fact I saw almost exactly this story, but with dev rather than support. Going from _perception_ of their being an ever growing list of new features, massive overtime, general feeling of being overwhelmed. To showing that folk were actually getting on top of things with numbers. To some scope adjustment so we could make the hours sane. The team getting happier, and faster at every step.

It wasn't a crushing backlog in the sense that the number of outstanding tickets was increasing. Rather, the backlog was at a steady 250 even when they were adding new customers every month. All it takes for a team of people to get through 250 tickets (and completely eliminate the backlog) is to care enough to put in a concerted effort and clear them out. Makes complete sense to me that such an effort can happen in a single day.

It seems vague but the last sentence describes the reality: discipline.

You can solve a lot of problems through better time management, more efficient processes and improved focus.