Nick Francis, CEO at Help Scout: Reimagining Customer Support

all right I’m thrilled to welcome Nick Francis co-founder and CEO of Help Scout Uh welcome to the Inside the Workflow

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podcast Nick Thank you Scott Good to be with you Yeah you too Uh so just just beforehand we were talking about uh some

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of the changes that we’ve made over the years you know hairstyles uh business changes and I think um you guys have

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always been a company that I’ve admired and frankly loved you you built the

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early business in Boston and that’s that’s one of the places that’s like close to my heart So I’ I’ve always loved hearing about some of the work

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that you guys have done especially as you have gone from building probably from what you considered early on like a

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maybe single product to multi-product to platform So um I’m excited to talk to you today about a whole bunch of stuff

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But one of the things I was curious about is did you grow up in Boston then i I grew up in Nashville Tennessee Okay

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It or not So that’s where I met my co-founders who I’ve been working with for over 20 years now Uh but we so how

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we got to Boston was we founded the company started working on it in Nashville together and we applied for

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Tech Stars a startup accelerator uh who was like you know what you should go to Boston We went to Boston spent three

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months sort of incubating the business and we launched when we when we were in Boston and we stayed there for another

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seven years Wow Okay And then like what what was you know the the early vision of of the product was it where you are

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now was it completely different did you even have like a a fleshed out thing yeah You know until recently I don’t

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think there’s any been any really big pivots in the business and and until ever there there’s only been one real

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mission which is to uh help customer support teams deliver a great customer

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experience So that that mission has been the same from day one We started with a

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much more simplistic view of the problem which is how can we make it so that teams can just share an email inbox and

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collaborate over communication with their customers without the customer having to deal with some uh ticket

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number robotic email like some system in the middle Can you can we just like deliver that personal touch but have all

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of the collaboration features on the back end that keep us from stepping on each other’s toes So it was a really

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simple view or narrow view of the problem initially but the mission has always been help customer support teams

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deliver a great customer experience Okay Awesome And can you tell me a little bit about you know um where these

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co-founders came from how you found them how you made sure that it was the right fit You know that’s kind of a scary

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thing for a lot of people right it is a scary thing for a lot of people and I’ll be the first to tell you Scott that I’ve just been extremely blessed and lucky to

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have run into these guys Uh so funny story my co-founder Jared and I waited

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tables together at a fancy restaurant in Nashville Uh all three of us have have

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hospitality experience and I I do think that that was somewhat formative in the way that we think about customer support

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Um the first job that Jared ever did for me was an album cover I started in the

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music business believe it or not because that’s what people in Nashville do Yep Uh but long story short uh we started to

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build things for the web together and did so for about six years So we just did consulting uh the three of us So

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Denny had a real job uh at the time but we all started sort of side hustling and then it became the main hustle that we

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were just building stuff uh for clients and consultants and then uh ultimately

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like our job our our dream was to build a software business The people we admired at that time were like Ben

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Chestnut at Mailchimp and Jason and David at 37 Signals and like all these incredible cool like bootstrappy

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companies who were really missiondriven in the way that they operated the business and the way they built their product And that was the dream for us

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and still is We’re lucky that we’ve been living that dream for 14 years Yeah it’s a pretty incredible run especially uh I

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think to be honest I’m so surprised or not surprised it’s it’s so often that I talk to CEOs and founders where they

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follow what seems like a very nonlinear path I’m sure you wouldn’t describe it as a linear path but it sounds like what

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you set out to do you have been doing which is which is super interesting Yeah no major pivots in that regard I I I

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think we’re we are in love with this problem Like I I could spend the rest of my life working on trying to solve this

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problem for some reason and I’m just obsessed with it So I think that’s part of part part of uh you know call that a

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benefit or a feature I don’t know Or a bug I don’t know Yeah I I would say it’s uh definitely a benefit for sure So may

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maybe we could go back actually you know to the hospitality role the the waiting tables Um I I would love to hear a

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little bit about you know maybe how you feel like m maybe you were always the kind of person who liked hospitality and

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enjoyed helping serve people and sure they had a great experience or you needed a job and from that you know role

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you learned some of these skills Which which do you think it was was it sort of a match in heaven you kind of developed

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these skill set uh you know I I always have had an affinity

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for an experience particularly with a a brand of of some sort So you know as a

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consumer like I from a very early age uh you know I learned to code when I was

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very young because I was introduced to Apple computers and you know at that time it was a very small percentage of

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the market but I gained this affinity for this brand that just spoke to me in

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such a magical way and sort of the the experience it created uh the philosophy and mission behind the brand uh and so

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there’s there’s so brands that I just became sort of uh excited by like how they made me feel

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right and and as an entrepreneur I also I’ve been starting companies since I was 15 That’s the only thing I really know how to do Uh I’ve always wanted to

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create businesses that create those sorts of experiences for people I I’ve always had this uh passion for brand and

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and what that means to people and trying to create something of meaning to people that goes beyond the pixels it go but

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it’s more of a philosophy and a mission that they can buy into a value system that they can buy into And so uh I

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mentioned I started in the music business like I still I was never a musician I was always behind the scenes

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observing this incredible experience that the artists I got to work with were creating for people and that was so

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magical to me I being in a studio creating an album and like the sort of visceral experience that they’re trying

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to cultivate for their audience I just can’t get enough So I I became obsessed with experiences of of really any sort

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It could be digital it could be in person Uh but the ability for a brand to

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sort of create those sorts of uh magical experiences is really important to me and customer support is one of those

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places in which uh you know uh brand affinity is won or lost in those trenches And so I’m like man if I could

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help all the small businesses in the world kind of solve for this and create a system that seemed aligned with their

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values their customer centric values and gave them an opportunity to deliver outstanding world-class support to their

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customers I will never tire of trying to trying to solve that for people Okay So

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it it seems like a common thread here You know you you sort of mentioned not not being tired being obsessed Uh you

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could do it for the rest of your life I um I love this and I admire it and I

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think I’m I’m definitely curious like what is it that aside from maybe just finding the right thing um you know I

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think every role every job um can be difficult and challenging and some days you just don’t want to do it Is there

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like some mythical system you’ve developed to help yourself just I don’t know continue you know is it sort of

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like a there’s like a set of uh you know you know the the movie American Psycho where he has sort of his morning routine

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Yeah Have you had to develop your own American Psycho routine to just make sure you’re inoculated against the pain

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just to keep going tell me about that The short answer is yes Uh yeah Okay So

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tomorrow is Help Scout’s 14th birthday Oh awesome Congratulations I I can tell

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you for certain that at no point has it felt as though it got even even like the

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slightest bit easier Every day feels incredibly painful I I am a

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any entrepreneur that’s trying to build and grow a business is a glutton for punishment to some extent And so what

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I’ll say about that is I have developed tools that help me cope with the hard

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things that I’m trying to do because the motivation as you may have been able to pick up on is sort of boundless Like I’m

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endlessly motivated to uh succeed and and to win in this particular uh pursuit

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but it is extremely painful along the way There’s no doubt about it There’s a there’s a lot of really hard things that

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you have to contend with And so I’ve just tried to uh find find tools that help me sort of cope with that manage

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that and at the end of the day uh embrace the the famous Billy Gene

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quote that pressure is a privilege Oh yeah absolutely At the end of the day the hard things I’m doing in the grand

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scheme are not that hard relative to what other people have to face on a day-to-day basis And so I feel

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incredibly privileged and I try to remind myself of that on an ongoing basis that look this might be hard but

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this is a true privilege that I get to learn at this philosophy that I get to work with people that deeply inspire me

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and that I get to make something that people care about Yeah Absolutely Okay I love that Such a great way to position

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it Um another way maybe to to think about this that I’m curious about too is

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um I’ve talked to a lot of CEOs over the years and one thing that they often highlight is that there are sort of like

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areas of genius or energy creating you know like when they do work with product or engineering or they go talk to

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customers or they build brand they just feel like that boundless energy kind of compounds and they they can build the

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reservoir Um you’ve talked a lot about brand you’ve talked a lot about mission So do do you find those areas to be just

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really exciting for you are there certain areas of your business where you go into them and you come out a new

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refreshed man there are certain aspects of the business where I feel as though I

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can add more value and I can bring a bit more vision and special sauce to the

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work and whenever I get to be involved in shaping that work it absolutely gets me uh excited So as so all three of the

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founders at HubScout are product people we love to build and so typically that

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for me is getting in a design review with a team that’s building something and just trying to shape it together

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That’s the most fun for me I also love spending time with customers So every time I travel I put together a customer

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breakfast in whatever city I’m in and I try to gather together every uh everybody that uses our product in that

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in that area and just like spend some time with them and I tell you that just fills my cup Absolutely Uh so there’s a

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number of different practices typically around crafting the product and crafting that relationship with the customer that

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that really gets me juiced But uh frankly there’s a lot of things that get me juiced in this business But you know

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the day-to-day grind of just trying to grow and grow and grow uh and try to

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build something that that uh has significant market share in a world where we’re like surrounded by

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competitors with like exponentially more resources uh that that that can always feel like a grind I I think though that

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you know it sounds like you have the one attribute that is hard to beat or you know to take away which is that mission

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boundless energy desire to actually have an outcome for your customers as opposed to like I’m just in this for a few years

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I want to make a paycheck or whatever which which is awesome Like that’s a moat that you can’t get over Yeah I I I

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recently heard an interview with uh Ben Chestnut where that felt like I had a visceral reaction because I felt so seen

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by what he said But he just said entrepreneurship is not something that

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you should necessarily uh encourage It’s it’s such a deeply like challenging and

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difficult thing It’s not something that he for instance wanted to do more than once He did it once and he did

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everything he wanted to accomplish and he and he he decided to move on with his life Like I I see myself as the kind of

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long-term focused founder If I if Scott didn’t exist and I had to do this again I would just do the same thing right i

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just feel so fiercely committed to what we’re trying to build together that this is probably the only thing I’ll do

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Beautiful Okay Um what what one one of the areas that I I’ve seen you post a lot on LinkedIn over the years I’ve met

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a bunch of your your team members at conferences and meetups Um you you went

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from a team that sort of started I guess closer together I’m not sure if it was entirely in the same office but either

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way you know over the years I think you’ve expanded to being a fully remote team Um and I think there’s a great

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upside and there’s also some interesting aspects of that that have to be challenging I’d love to hear a little bit about your

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sort of approach to building a great team and culture I’ve met so many great people and I’m always impressed and

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surprised and I’d love to know how you how you were able to accomplish that Yeah So uh we went through Tech Stars

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together as founders right and we always have been in the same geographic location However uh Jared uh decided to

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move back to Nashville after a couple of years in Boston And so we had worked remotely previously And so within two

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years we were well really within six months we were remote first from a hiring standpoint So we decided you know

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again some of the companies that we absolutely admired at that time were already operating remote businesses It

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was very niche but there were there were companies who were doing remote successfully And in an ecosystem like

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Boston I looked around you know HubSpot Trip Advisor like all these incredible companies all around us I’m like how the

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hell am I going to attract the sort of talent that we need to be successful like I’m going to have to I think I’m

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going to have to use a different playbook And so that ended up being sort of

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the decision uh pre so to speak was hey how can I attract the best talent and uh

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in order to attract the best talent I understand that there are a series of trade-offs that need to be made So you

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talk a lot of people talk about it in like terms of pros and cons I just think they’re tradeoffs uh in terms of making

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remote work well from a cultural standpoint And so uh we decided very on

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early on in the business to invest in understanding those trade-offs and then

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creating a culture that was meant to compensate for those trade-offs in meaningful ways that could create the

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sort of connection that a team anybody’s looking for in a work environment but at the same time the sort of like

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flexibility and autonomy and uh being surrounded by like extraordinary talent

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all the time that remote can can kind of give you and so we were just willing to make those trade-offs I’m happy to go

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into more detail about any specific aspects Well I think one one area that I’m interested especially is like um I

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think there’s a lot of techniques tactics principles of remote work but like when it when it comes down to it you know it’s easy to to escape into you

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know the the guy who works at home behind a computer and it’s hard to get

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to know you So I I think I would imagine you have to be a great communicator You have to think about how to plan out

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either meeting up physically or doing some sort of team stuff But like I get the work part That part is is I feel

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like a little easier sometimes but you have to build trust remotely You have to build culture remotely So that that’s an

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area that I’m interested in and how you guys have done that Are there certain things that you feel like have worked really well for you yeah So aside from I

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think all remote first businesses do have to have an extremely strong written culture meaning like everybody becomes a

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strong writer and learns to communicate with their teammates in writing very well So uh we’re we’re incredibly

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engaged in Slack as you can imagine Uh but we also spend a lot of time together

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just like you and I are right now face to face on a video chat Even if we’re doing work together if we’re pairing up

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like there’s a lot of in-person time believe it or not uh in our culture and we try to design for that Believe it or

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not the the call I was on just before this one was what we call a fica It’s a Swedish term for like basically grabbing

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coffee together And uh I get randomly paired up with people on in our company

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on a regular basis just to hang out and just to kind of talk about what’s going

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on in life uh to sort of get off topic a little bit and and just get to know the

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human being So that’s one of the tradeoffs So let’s talk about both sides of the trade-off One is that I can be

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highly productive because I get to sit in a room all by myself and just focus on the work for an eight hour day The

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trade-off is hey I’m not really feeling that sort of connection I I don’t have any sort of spontaneous like run I don’t

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run into anybody in the office So you have to design for that connection right like you have to optimize for creating

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those sorts of connections And one way we do it is just kind of randomly p uh pair out people for uh we do an annual

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retreat all hands Everybody uh goes somewhere Next month we’re going to Rome Italy to all be together for an entire

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week And so I see u you just have to make some really significant sort of u

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investments in order to create connection because it’s not going to happen organically like it would in an office culture So that’s a bit what I

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mean with the trade-offs like you get high productivity but you really have to work at creating connection

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And and and then maybe for you personally I know you love to work and you love the mission Um do you ever

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leave your room uh are you there all the time like tell me a little bit about like the uh the CEO outside of the CEO

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room Uh yeah So uh I have learned over the years that yeah I have to work at a

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sustainable pace and I have to optimize my time I don’t really work more than maybe let’s say a 50 hour week on

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average 50 to 55 hours Uh and I find a lot of different ways to uh sort of

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disconnect As you can imagine I’m addicted to hard things So I like to do hard things outside of work as well and

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uh sort of sort of get into the adrenaline side of it So what what’s like uh what’s the adrenaline side are

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we talking about like base jumping and uh bungee or what i’ve tried a lot of stuff Uh the things that I’m most into

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right now that are hard things that so I I’ve actually written about this before or I don’t know if I’ve written publicly

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but uh I I do believe that doing hard things is like something that you can practice and you can build up sort of a

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mentality and uh a an excitement and a passion for like running at hard things

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So for a while for me it was uh surfing Uh I live in Boulder Colorado now and so

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it was it’s rock climbing Uh and my wife is like a much better rock climber than me and so she just crushes me every week

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and I love it Um and I I’ve always been super passionate about cars Uh and so okay I

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am out on a track somewhere as much as much as I can be Uh or I’m in a sim

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actually uh racing with some some peers uh in that regard too So learning the

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craft of driving fast is a is a really fun thing that I have a passion for Oh

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interesting Very cool I I I love the um the practice of doing hard things My my

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preferred uh I don’t know out outside is is it’s probably overly pragmatic It’s

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like what broke in my home or in my kids’ lives or in my car So I like my

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minivan I have four kids I got to have a minivan That’s that’s I’m a minivan guy And uh the front of our whole hood all

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the paint came off So I built a paint booth in my garage with PVC and plastic

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Got a paint gun dressed in a whole white suit like the guy from Breaking Bad how and learned how to do it and it it took

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me like all of Fourth of July weekend or something like that But it was so fun Incredible Yeah that’s next level I I

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mean I’m a big detailer I love to do like detailing and stuff but I haven’t taken it that far That’s pretty amazing Oh it’s uh you know it’s kind of like

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one of those things where you do the work and you can see all of your mistakes and then at least my friends or

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my wife sees it and they’re like “Wow that’s that’s incredible.” And I’m like it’s hard to balance the I don’t know

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what you would call it perfectionism craftsmanship or whatever But anyway love that you do that stuff And I

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think that if you look back on that experience you probably say it was rewarding on on a number of different

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levels going through that process and that you would do it better the next time you try it But that’s that’s the

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fun of the journey Yeah Yeah Absolutely Um so so there’s a lot of I wouldn’t say hard things but there’s new things um

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that present challenges in I think every industry right now like AI is so exciting um and you know there’s AI

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agents you know everybody’s talking about agent agentic X Y and Z um we in

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in the customer support world knowledge knowledge bases etc there’s like so many opportunities to make your product

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better easier faster for your customers so I’ I’d love to hear a little bit about um you know how you guys view this

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new landscape how it’s in a positive way affecting your business and and what you’re looking forward to doing with it

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Boy yeah that’s been the story of my last uh couple of years because it um

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and it ultimately led to this moment where we felt like we were just founding the company again It was kind of day one

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again but I’ll I’ll rewind first I think it became pretty clear early on that customer support was at

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the tip of the spear with regard to large language models And so when when

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you know chat GPT and large language models became a thing I think a lot of the use cases that people would have on

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the tip of their tongue would be like imagine the future of customer support with these tools in the mix And so we

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pretty early on felt as though wow this market is going to get turned upside down and all the assumptions that we’ve

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made for the last 12 years are out the window and we have to make new assumptions and that’s a really exciting

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thing Uh I think we saw a lot of folks in the market and that we’ve been doing

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this with AI for so long It’s it’s sort of predictable but a lot of other companies in the market just went

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towards what we call like a deflection approach It’s like great you can use a tool to talk to your customers less and

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to push them away more and to put a bigger barrier between you and the customer so that you can improve your

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deflection rate Uh that’s just not of interest whatsoever So that’s why we never really built a gen one chatbot

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because we always felt like that was just a poor customer experience But at the end of the day we look at LLMs and

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the future of this kind of cycle of AI and we say “Wow this is incredibly disruptive and it has the potential to

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deliver much better customer experiences.” At the end of the day that’s why we’re excited about it As a

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tool we can actually harness it for a lot of good in the world A lot of other folks are talking about how AI first and

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how you can deflect more That’s great we we now have an opportunity to zag against that and say nope we’re going to

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leverage it for to do even better to tr to provide an even better experience So

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it all came down to like okay what does that look like um for us we had to kind

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of go back to first principles of the business and really question whether it made sense for us to um to continue with

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a a a seatbased business model So that was the really hard thing for us We saw

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as we continued to launch AI features and like make our product better and as other things happened at the macro level

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what we found is that our product kept getting better and our seats were going down Making c you know more customers

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were being helped through our product than ever and we actually had fewer seats were customer served than we had

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ever had And we surveyed the market and found that 78% of the bit of businesses

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said in the next two years they plan to either keep their customer support team flat or reduce headcount in light of the

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cycle that we’re in that everyone’s expecting that AI will create more

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efficiencies on teams I don’t think that’s specific to customer support but we’re certainly right in the sighteline

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of how these efficiencies are going to come to bear So we just had to think

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about the fundamentals of our business model and we were sort of seeing them play out and we said well what would be

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the best way uh for us to approach this if we were founding the company today what would we do and the truth is we

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wouldn’t we wouldn’t charge per se u we’ve had the luxury for 14 years now of

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having everybody in help scout all of our employees we practice whole company support everyone has support shifts and

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we feel as though because everybody has access to the voice to the customer that we collectively make better business

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decisions Why can’t we offer that same capability to our customers without

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taxing them for every seat would that be possible so we really that’s where we where we started and then we said well

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look if we’re not charging per seat then we actually don’t have to charge for any of our AI features either If we’re

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charging based on usage what we call a contact then we can actually just include all AI we can include unlimited

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seats and just charge for the people that you talk to And so we charge for

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contacts today So in November we completely changed our business model And a contact is basically an individual

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that you’ve helped So you can have 10 conversations across multiple channels That’s still just one contact And so uh

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on a monthly basis we add up your contacts and say this is what tier you’re on And you can have unlimited seats in AI kind of backing that process

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and we feel as though that’s a that’s a better way to do this and it’s going to be really hard for some of our

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competitors to to make the same move But in customer support we just think per seat is no longer the right way to think

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about things And that’s not because seats are going that’s not because like customer support teams are going to zero

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Customer support teams are actually going to add more value than ever because some of the tier one stuff goes away But at the end of the day it’s not

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the right value metric And that’s why you see a lot of other folks in the space charge for seats and then they charge for like 15 other add-ons as well

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because at the at the baseline a user is not necessarily aligned with the value

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that the platform is delivering on an ongoing basis So we just decided to make the really hard decision to reset that

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and we’re in the process of kind of uh navigating that transition now Amazing

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Uh that that is such an incredible example of like run to the hard thing

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Yeah you understand it and then making that decision I I don’t know about you but I probably wouldn’t have slept that

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night and like for a little while because I would be so like I this is the right thing I’m committed but I’m sure

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nervous It was about 18 months Uh and then we finally launched in November of last year So it was about six months ago

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Uh but it’s it’s been an extremely difficult thing but at the same time really rewarding to see people light up

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when they understand this like different approach and how it could impact their business in positive ways And so I I

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really truly believe this is kind of the right approach But I I love I’ve been a student of Klay Christensen and The

27:35

Innovator’s Dilemma I don’t know if you’ve read that book but like uh it’s so cool to actually just be part of the

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movie now because this is a this is a true innovator’s dilemma like we’re a 12-y old company at the time Like we’re

27:47

an incumbent we’ve got this disruptive technology coming to market Like what’s the play in order for an incumbent to

27:55

adjust to this disruptive technology and actually become a disruptor themselves So I I was really thinking about this

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through the the the principles and the framework of the innovator’s dilemma and that helped us build confidence in the

28:07

decisions we were making Amazing I I think this goes back to uh earlier we were talking about the different hairstyles of Nick over the years and I

28:14

I I wonder was the haircut change It was sort of around that time It was the same month we launched the new Amazing Okay

28:20

It’s like old old Nick new Nick I love it Yeah So I wrote a note to the team I just said “Look it’s day one of the

28:26

business again.” So I’m going back to exactly how I looked uh day one of the business Oh that’s amazing um with with

28:34

with respect to you know how you’ve made these changes with your customers I guess uh sort of a maybe a slightly broader question that I’m curious about

28:40

is like you talk with your customers these customer breakfasts which is a terrific idea um you know presumably you

28:48

read lots of feedback you guys do surveys all these kinds of things but how do you make sure you’re building the right product um I I know there’s sort

28:55

of like that Henry Ford approach like if I had asked them they would just told me you know faster horses uh Steve Jobs

29:00

kind of all I’ll all envision it what’s your approach to building a great product well I I do believe that those

29:08

visionaries have a point Uh it’s really important for you to the way I explain

29:13

it to the team is it’s it’s critically important to have a a deep understanding of the problem

29:18

space as it pertains to the solution I’m not so worried about like there’s ways

29:24

to test and validate solutions but I I’m not when I talk to a customer I’m not actually looking for them to tell me how

29:30

to build something I’m looking for them to tell me what they’re struggling with right and so you really have to as a

29:38

product person just remain fully focused on understanding the problem and every

29:43

angle at that problem and what the customer is facing And then like the solution space is all where you can be

29:50

like super visionary and innovative and and actually just get in this creative space where uh you don’t really because

29:57

at the yeah customers are going to think in a in an incremental way but a product team that understands a problem inside

30:05

and out can think in a visionary way that’s that’s three four five steps ahead So uh that’s the way that we that

30:12

we like to think of it At no point did Steve Jobs or Henry Ford or any other visionary think that customer feedback

30:18

didn’t matter They just cared more about the problem space than the solution space as it pertains to the customer

30:23

feedback So I I really try to look at it through that lens And anytime somebody’s like well you just need to move this

30:29

button over here I don’t care What I want to understand is why

30:34

Tell me tell me why that would be better for you so that I can better understand the problem space Yeah it seems right Uh

30:41

I I think that uh you know it’s sort of part of that um reframe rethink and kind

30:47

of ask people a slightly more challenging it’s it’s certainly really easy to just say all right guys I did

30:53

some custom interviews the buttons in the wrong place let’s move the move move the button great we’re done like and

30:59

then nothing nothing happens right um right well sometimes we have to check that too I think it’s really important

31:04

you know for us at least especially early on it was so important to just use our own product every day and so what I

31:10

love is that we’re one of the heaviest users of our own product And so a lot of things that we build start with our own

31:17

team We ship it to our own team and get their feedback on how it’s showing up And so I do think we have this

31:23

collective instinct that’s pretty strong as a business because we are the ICP We

31:28

are the ideal customer We are a heavy power user of our own product And so you

31:35

know that can that can put a little bit of blinders on but like 98% of the time it’s a really helpful asset Have have

31:42

you guys over the years maybe sort of going back to the ICP comment you made but you know did you always target and

31:48

support the sort of same size of companies in business in terms of employees has that shifted at all and as

31:54

a result maybe those blinders for your I don’t know presumably smaller cohorts Yeah Has shifted a bit from the

32:01

beginning we’ve wanted to lead the SMB segment of the market When we looked at help desks you know 14 years ago they

32:09

were all seemingly built for more enterprisey use cases and more I’ll use

32:15

the word again like deflectionoriented use cases Treating customer support like a cost center instead of a a growth

32:21

opportunity right the most effective marketing channel Like what if you actually like that’s not how I thought

32:26

of customer support I thought of customer support as like my most effective differentiator in the market

32:31

right like it’s a way to really juice the referral engine And so I don’t think we were the only ones that thought about

32:37

customer support this way We wanted to create a product that was sort of built around those values And I think of those

32:42

as small business values I think of those as as uh this is how small businesses like to operate They’re much

32:49

more customer centric And so we’ve always felt as though SMB is where we want to live So we think of that as up

32:55

to one up to 500 employees We like to say that we win in the one to 100

33:00

employee base and then we just hang on for dear life Uh we’re typically the first we’re typically the first help

33:06

desk or customer support platform somebody adopts Sometimes it’s time to graduate and we’ve seen some incredible

33:12

companies just graduate from us uh over the years Uh but for the most part we’re able to to kind of hang on but we we

33:18

really focus on that that SMB use case because that’s where the values fit They love the simplicity and the ease of use

33:25

of the product and at the end of the day we don’t actually have to check as many boxes uh as our competitors because

33:31

we’re just solving a different use case that ends up being an advantage Yeah I love that It also I think is a great

33:36

example of uh you know what we’ve talked about earlier which is sort of this discipline in this area this problem area that you’re obsessed with You want

33:43

to do great and you’re not sort of comp necessarily compro compromising is probably the wrong word but just sort of

33:48

shifting based on oh there’s a whole lot of revenue over here let’s just go chase it and let’s change the whole thing Like that’s really hard right um so uh one

33:56

kind of final question for you Nick Um you know we’ve talked a little bit about your your business how you are 14 years

34:03

in Um what what are you really really excited about the next couple years whether it’s your business sort of like

34:09

some of the projects you might be working on some of these rating endeavors that you’re you’re getting into Where are you most excited where

34:14

are you finding the most energy i’m definitely most excited about uh the products that we’re building right now I

34:20

I just uh and and how we’re navigating and you’re learning to use this new

34:26

technology So we’re building stuff that I I genuinely thought that would not be possible with science fiction 14 years

34:32

ago And now we get to like really do it And so the access that we have to these

34:38

extraordinary tools to kind of build experiences around is really exciting So

34:44

I love the space Uh I love that we have new ways to sort of solve this problem because believe it or not for 12 years

34:50

it was we were pretty much solving the problem with the same tools and now we have all these new tools that we can

34:56

play with So uh it does feel like sort of a fresh start It with the business model it feels like a fresh start We

35:03

have like four or five months of data whereas we’re used to having many years of data that we could look at So uh even

35:10

from a data orientation lens it feels like we’re back to square one But that’s a in an exciting way because at the end

35:16

of the day it really enables us to to create a better more innovative product I’m so excited about some of the things

35:22

that we’re building and how they’re going to impact businesses in the future So game on Let’s go Awesome Uh well Nick

35:28

thanks thanks for joining us today Really appreciate it My pleasure Scott