The ridiculous thing we do every day

Most software products these days lean heavily on the efficiency and speed of everything. Not just development or deployments, but customer support, marketing, and all other non-programmatic things. It’s almost tautologous — if you work in software every process must be as efficient and quick as possible. There is no debate.

DoneDone is, as software products go, is sometimes on the far-left of the manual-automation spectrum. We do some things here that many of my contemporaries would consider a completely ridiculous waste of time. I’m comfortable with that.

For example, every single day, we send out a welcome email, by-hand, to each new customer who trials our product . To be completely transparent, we’re not literally writing every single one by-hand each time — our welcome messages are templated.

But, every day, one of us here references a list of customer trial signups in our billing portal from the past 24 hours and creates a new email for each person on the list. It’s just a plain old email (through HelpScout) with a few links to blog posts we’ve written in the past that we think our customers might find helpful.

We average about a dozen or so trials a day, so while the work is a little tedious, it’s quite manageable.

But, doesn’t this seem like a perfect place for automation? Why don’t we hook the signup process up to a service like Intercom rather than perform this silly bit of manual grunt work every day?

Automating this piece was on our to-do list for quite awhile. It just never became enough of a nuisance for us to change it. And, as we kept performing this email ritual every day, we actually found it valuable to us.

The mere act of sending a welcome email to each customer gives us a chance to see who our customers are on a daily basis. Even if it is just ten seconds of acknowledging a new signup creating the email and hitting “send”. In a weird, internet-y sort of way, we make a brief, but real connection with every customer every day.

Now, I get it. All this stuff can be automated. We could write something that sends out emails for us. We could even have alerts when the same company has signed up twice. We could have bots send us a weekly customer report pointing out trends to us. But, you develop a different kind of feeling with your customers when you spend those extra few minutes daily thinking about them. The manual approach is the only one that truly enables this.

Just call us artisanal software developers.