Week 24: I'm on call
When it rains, it pours. ShadowTraffic saw a lot of active usage this week, including paying customers.
If you’ve been following my newsletter, you’ll know I’m a big fan of Derek Sivers, who advocates prioritizing customer needs over basically everything else. So I did what he would do—I dropped everything and played support agent for the week.
Here are a few real-world observations about customer support for very early companies.
Ugly ducks
I have this disillusion—and I think many people do—that if I simply build a good enough product, people will adopt it with zero problems and love it.
But when a product solves a complicated enough problem (like nearly all enterprise software), that’s almost never the case.
In the beginning, everything is an ugly duck. The solution you come up with is probably a bit complex because the problem it solves is complex!
But here’s the thing: troubled usage is better than no usage. You have to go through this painful phase where people are constantly stuck or confused and need help.
Sanding off the rough edges of the product, building great educational material, and iterating on your company narratives are the only way forward.
This week my ugly duck got a little less ugly.
Prioritization under pressure
Having started my company only 5 months ago, and being the sole member, all problems to solve are left to me.
And that is dauting when multiple, critical issues arrive at the same time.
There were a few times this week when I felt overwhelmed, and started thinking, man is this even worth it?
But each time, I caught my breath and fell back on my system: I write down all of my daily goals and adjust them as the day goes on.
The key to prioritizing under pressure is to have a policy you thought of ahead of time so you don’t question it. For me, that’s: paying customers > POC projects > everything else.
Each time I reprioritized my list, I picked the top task off and focused. Eventually I drained the list.
Be fast
To be frank, when people are adopting your product, it’s kind of make or break.
Sure, there’s some forgiveness in early products. Everything doesn’t need to be perfect.
But when people are relying on it to do something important for the first time, you need to show up and make it work at all costs.
If you don’t, your customers will lose confidence and leave. I think it’s important to have a healthy fear of customer churn. Customers are hard to acquire and easy to lose.
I spent most of this week pinned to my support channels. It was exhausting, but I don’t regret it a bit.