On the time Y Combinator cofounder Jessica Livingston tore me a new one and changed the future org structure of Ramp:
At YC, we attended weekly office hours where every startup shared 1/ their weekly growth %, 2/ their biggest problem, and 3/ what they were doing to solve it.
That week in summer 2015 our startup Paribus had grown 20% w/w, our biggest problem was that we were getting too many customer support tickets, and our proposed solution was to hire a customer support person (as the third hire at a then two-person startup).
Jessica pointed out that if our solution was to hire someone to deal with customer issues, then next week when we grew more we’d have to hire another person, then another, and so on. Her point was that the real solution isn’t solving tickets, it’s listening to customers and building a better product so customers never need to write in the first place.
She told us how Brian Chesky of Airbnb, an icon even then, would still walk around wearing a Jawbone headset so he could personally take support calls, hear customer feedback and deal with problems immediately. She (kindly and graciously) schooled us in front of the group, and it was one of the best learning moments I’ve had as a founder.
In a sense, every customer support ticket is a privilege – someone took time out of their day to write about how to improve your product. But it’s also a failure – you could’ve saved them that time by making the product better and more intuitive in the first place. You can’t out-hire a bad product, or compensate for poor taste with a big support team. Support is not a cost to minimize, it’s a key function every company should take seriously. When you listen to customers and make your product intuitive, you get output graphs like the below – where the rate of active user growth far exceeds the rate of support tickets.
To this day, almost a decade later, support reports into product at Ramp
