Why Founders Shouldn't Delegate Support Too Early

We faced this problem at my last startup, and I think we handled it reasonably well.

The team remained 3 founders until Mar 2012 (1 year after launch) when customer support and other operational tasks started significantly distracting us from more critical things like building product and growing the userbase. At that point we hired a community manager to handle support / ops. We were profitable by then.

There were a few major advantages in delaying this long:

- Doing support ourselves helped us achieve product-market fit. It's critical to be in contact with as many users as possible in the early days.

- Saved money. Early on, a community manager would have had 2 hours of real work per day, and would have cost us $50K / year. Didn't make sense unless there were 6+ hours of work to do per day.

- Kept us from building support tools. Since we were all technical, we just ran everything from the command line. And when we hired our first community manager, we hired someone with immense coding aptitude. They handled support from the command line for nearly a year when we finally built out enough tools for a nontechnical person to do the job.

I completely agree - I have seen multiple start ups go from bootstrap to raising money and then filling desks just because they think that is what they need to do - the first place they off load is usually customer support. On a side note, I usually avoid working with / for companies that do this just because I have always thought it was bad signal.

I think this a great approach to creating customer evangelists! I am an early employee (not founder), and spending time in our ticketing system helping users has given me good insight into where we can improve our tutorials/FAQ/etc type materials.

Users also do not expect to get a detailed response directly from the engineer who developed the feature they are asking about. They are usually pleasantly surprised. A few weeks ago, I spent about 30 minutes answering a technical question for a user and he was so happy with my response that he tweeted about it. It made me feel pretty incredible, we have an excited user, AND we now have the start of a good article for our FAQ section relating to that feature. Definitely time well spent.

Totally true. Our founders learned this too, there is a story about it here. http://www.olark.com/customers/why-we-do-all-hands-support. Ultimately the lessons you learn doing support apply to anyone on the team who deal with product or customers (i.e. pretty much everyone).

I'm a huge fan of delegation, though I think the author's points are all excellent. Here's how recommend doing both: Hire someone to process and review customer complaints. Give them very specific guidance about how they're to handle customer concerns. If they can solve the problem within some predetermined short amount of time (say, 20 minutes), they should solve it. If it will take significantly longer, then they should escalate it to someone who can probably solve it faster, and can provide a more remarkable support experience.

The support screener should also summarize all the different types of tickets we get into categories for executive review.

I handled Perfect Audience support for the first 5 months after launch until it just became overwhelming. We then tried moving to a rotation of engineers and that was also overwhelming. Then we hired someone who's done a terrific job of it. Nevertheless I still read maybe 50% of the support requests that come in and help with support on the weekends to keep my head in the game.

StatusPage blog posts from time to time pop up on the front page, and I read all of them, from their very beginning. A great blog, well done guys, you documented the process of working on a startup amazingly well.

Also a great example of content marketing for the target audience (which I'm sure HN is). I guess those HN homepages contributed nicely to the growth? :)

I gave a talk about some caveats we ran into with delegating support early on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs2NN-qQZf0 a few years ago. In particular it bundled up a lot of customer feedback inside of one department/person and started isolating us from our customers.

Completely agree. Learning what your customers are thinking and understanding needs will help you build a better product. If you delegate to others you will lose touch with your customers which will ultimately hurt your startup.

Your customers also feel important if you have the founder emailing you. It really makes you feel valuable as a customer.

Completely agree. Those thinking of delegating/outsourcing customer support should read Fred Reichheld's book on Net Promoter System and I'm sure they will change their mind.