HTSAS Lecture 7

I thought many (i.e. all) of the tricks Kevin used in Wufoo were incredibly practical and useful, but I couldn’t write about all of them here. So, I decided to focus on the idea of everyone being on customer support since that’s the one I feel strongest about.

Kevin did an extremely good job of describing the positive effects of the practice (basically a tighter feedback engine is created). So, engineers are more in-tune with what users actually care about, and they actually feel the consequences of their feature decisions. It helps build better software and a strong culture of user feedback. Kevin mentioned, however, that the technical cofounders usually want to write code all the time and would rather outsource some of the more “unimportant” tasks (like customer support), except these tasks are important. Especially before launch, it’s easy to have the technical people only write code since there is very little else to do otherwise.

Before launch, there probably really is little else to do besides build the product (Disclaimer: I’m not sure if this is actually true since I’ve never done a startup before, but this makes sense to me). But this is even more reason to ship as soon as possible. You would not only get user feedback faster, but you would also be able to instill the culture you want at scale faster. After all, the faster you get users, the faster you can get your engineers on support, and the faster you can create a user-centered culture.

Ship fast and make engineers do customer support.