Oh, hello
I didn't see you come in
I firmly believe that excellent product support is the difference between a good product and a great one. No matter how terrific your product may be technically, customers need to be able to get it working and integrated into their environments. If they can’t, then they aren’t going to buy, they aren’t going to expand, they aren’t going to renew. When I was building my support team, I was shocked to find almost no discussion online about:
- what makes a good support team for a startup
- how to structure the team
- how to structure support offerings
- what skills to look for in a candidate
- what goals to try to achieve for the team
Now that I’ve been doing it a while, I want to make it easier on everyone else by collecting all of my hard-earned experience in one place. That place is here!
Why me?
I came into startup tech support from almost zero. I had customer-facing experience from my prior gigs doing security consulting and deployment engineering, and a long information security career. But I’d never spent any time providing technical support, apart from a college summer job doing help desk work. Beyond that, I’d never built or led a team, which was one of the longer-term goals for the startup I’d just joined. And speaking of startups, I’d never worked for one before. So I was really starting from the ground up, and had to learn a lot of things the hard way. But my pain doesn’t have to be the norm, and I feel strongly about sharing everything I’ve learned through this experience.
Why now?
I’ve spent the past five years building a world-class support team at StrongDM. I have insight to share about what worked well, and sometimes-entertaining stories about what didn’t work so well: some of our false starts, stumbles, and outright failures on the long road from going from 0 to 1, 1 to 2, then 2 to 10 and beyond in our support organization. Beyond that, I have plenty of opinions about where the tech support function is going, and how it can become more efficient in leaner times, that I look forward to batting around with like-minded individuals. The tech world, and the startup world, is evolving, and technical support needs to prepare itself for the future as well.
What’s the bottom line?
I’ll be posting every Monday, with topics spanning the gamut of issues facing a startup support team, from hiring your first engineers and how to write a terrific support email to meditations on the nature of technical support. While a lot of what I talk about will be relevant to all sorts of customer-facing support teams, I’ll mostly be addressing an audience of technical support for startups, particularly B2B SaaS.
I can’t wait to hear from other leaders in the startup technical support space, and look forward to going on this journey with you all.
Thanks,
Andy
Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!