Founder Mode (pt. 2)

Starting this newsletter was arguably one of my best decisions ever. It’s made six-figures in revenue (while I keep my day job at beehiiv), and I’ve connected with so many readers who have become investors, friends, and colleagues.

My take: every founder, creator, and media operator should have a newsletter. And any time someone asks me how to get started, I send them to my buddy Nathan @ The Feed Media.

He leveraged his newsletter to go from zero to $1M in revenue in just 10 months and 920 email subscribers.

Nathan’s hosting a free workshop next Tuesday at 12pm & 7pm ET for BDE readers (that’s you). He’s going to show how:

I couldn’t recommend it enough (and it won’t cost you a dime). You can thank me later.

Can’t make it live? Register and you’ll get a replay of the workshop!

When we first launched beehiiv, I manually onboarded every single user myself. When someone had a question or found a bug, they emailed me directly.

Obviously that's not the most scalable way to run support.

After a few months we moved to Zendesk and built a way for users to submit tickets directly from the platform. A step in the right direction, but I was still the only one on the receiving end.

I'd wake up early every morning and clear the support inbox before the gym. I'd spend the rest of the day building with the team. Then around 9pm I'd jump back into Zendesk and respond to every ticket before bed.

I did this for about a year before we eventually hired someone to handle support full-time. In retrospect, that's pretty wild. No wonder I was burnt out for the first several years of the business.

That said, I wouldn't change a thing. Answering support tickets as a founder is a superpower. You get up close and personal with users going through real heartache trying to use your product.

It also built the muscle that became one of our biggest strengths: shipping velocity. When you're the one absorbing every complaint, you learn to fix things fast.

One support ticket after another, frustrated users would write in complaining about missing features or something that was broken, then threatening to leave if we didn't fix it fast.

In those days, we couldn't afford to lose users — we only had a handful of them.

So every morning and night, I'd respond with a ton of empathy, promise to fix everything, and beg them to be patient. Then I'd flip the feedback to the engineers so we could prioritize and build it as fast as humanly possible.

Not everyone is cut out to be an early startup employee. Engineers had to context switch daily (legit) — drop whatever they were building to squash a bug or ship the feature I'd just promised someone.

As stressful and chaotic as it was, it made us better. And fast.

Even after we hired a few people on the support team, I'd still spend about 10 hours a week answering tickets myself. There's genuinely no better way to understand what's working and what's not. The more painful the feedback, the more urgency you feel to fix it.

I posted that almost two full years after launching the company. But things did eventually change.

We raised a $33M Series B and doubled the team. I was leading product, had a dozen direct reports, and got pulled in a million directions a day. I found less and less time for support tickets, until it became a relic of the past.

Fast forward to today, and we have a support team our users rave about. At a time when most companies are racing to replace support with AI, we did the opposite. We hired true product experts who are fast, kind, and remarkable at what they do.

Instead of me relaying feedback from Zendesk to the product team, we now have several members of the support team who aggregate and share the common themes each week. The goal is to keep the product team in lockstep with the issues plaguing our users.

In theory: users complain about X, we prioritize improving X, the complaints about X stop. Then we move onto Y and do it all over again.

That's the beauty of building software.

If users are confused or frustrated enough to open a support ticket, there's work to be done. There's always room for improvement.

Lately I've been building a hackathon project of sorts to streamline the information our support team needs to do their jobs. Which means I've been back in Zendesk, answering tickets and testing it out.

And holy shit has it been a shock to be back on the frontlines.

It's one thing to read the aggregated themes in Slack each week. It's another to read ticket after ticket from paying customers who can't figure out how to use the platform. The themes are helpful, but they're an abstraction. You lose the visceral emotion of it when you hear it secondhand.

One user reached out wanting to customize the subscribe forms on his website. I spent legit 20 minutes trying to find the setting myself before giving up.

I use the platform every single day. Hell, I built a lot of the platform (once upon a time). If I can't figure it out, how are our users supposed to?

It lit a fire. I want to "founder mode" the fuck out of this and get back to basics.

I'm going to launch a tiger team with my cofounder, Ben. He's the most talented and creative software engineer I've ever worked with, especially when it comes to building beautiful user experiences.

Speaking of — we’re shipping a new product update today (if you're a beehiiv user, it should be in your inbox shortly). We’re launching MCP v3 with full write access (🎉). And we introduced a command palette with keyboard shortcuts that makes navigating the platform feel like you're on the Limitless drug.

Ben was the brains behind the command palette. Everything he touches becomes one of the most enjoyable, intuitive experiences in the app. You can just feel it.

Back to the tiger team. I'm going to spend the first hour of every day answering support tickets, just like the good ol' days. I'll pick the most frustrating experience or feature, then pair with Ben to ship something 10x better.

My bet: we can rapidly improve 3-4 things each and every week. But not just “improve” them, make them genuinely delightful to use.

I still think there’s a real premium for excellence. Whether physical or digital — there’s so much mediocrity that we encounter in our day-to-day lives. It’s rare to have an experience that genuinely delights you.

We've built a product that people do genuinely love to use. But like I said above, there's always room for improvement. 3-4 things, every single week, for the rest of the quarter (and potentially beyond)… I think will compound in a really meaningful way.

We’re going to win because no one cares about their product or users as much as I do. Back to founder mode we go.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/founder-mode-pt-2

Shoutout Tyler for the reader submission 🫡.

A waterfront office on the beach would be pretty chill. Great mechanical keyboard too.

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