Ten months ago, Helpful was just an idea. Since @whatupdave’s first commit, 89 people have come together to plan, design, build, and launch a stable 1.0 release.
Building a product in the open was challenging — really challenging. But the increased feedback and collaboration with great designers, developers, marketers, and even potential customers has been totally worth it.
The idea behind Helpful was originally sparked by Kevin Hale’s “support driven design” which greatly contributed to WuFoo’s success. Instead of building on top of GMail, @chrislloyd wanted a new support tool without all the slow, clunky features, focusing on making it easy to respond to support requests.
For support teams, the goal was to keep the interface simple, allowing most actions to take place without ever leaving a shared inbox — which makes responding to support requests super quick.
For customers seeking support, we had to make sure conversations felt like normal emails from real people; none of that automated robot-queue junk (i.e. ##- Issue #402592: Please type your reply above this line -##).
Building Helpful on Assembly allowed anyone excited about the idea to immediately start contributing. Some eventually took on leadership roles, like @whale, our design lead in Greenville, SC; @Wesley, our front-end developer in Belgium; @bjessbrown, a Ruby developer from Atlanta, GA; and plenty more from around the world. Now those talented people (along with 85 others) have a piece of ownership that will give them a portion of Helpful’s revenue forever.
Even before joining Assembly, I (@vanstee) was an early Helpful contributor. Typically, finding the right people to join your team takes a lot of effort, but when anyone can stop by and start contributing real work, bringing on new team members is a low-risk, natural process.
So, a huge thanks to everyone who has been a part of building Helpful. I’m looking forward to what we come up with next. If you’ve always wanted to contribute to an open product, learn about launching a business, or just have great ideas for improving customer support, build it with us.
