Help Scout

Recorded in person at Help Scout's company retreat in 2025, this episode explores the early days and the current path of Help Scout's founders.

Notable moments in this episode

• (03:31) The vision for a clean, personal support email

• (04:51) Early days of pitching, learning, and “dogfooding”

• (07:07) Designing support for real humans, not tickets

• (08:27) Founders staying close by working in support themselves

• (11:27) Scaling support while keeping the human touch

• (13:04) Hiring for customer-centric values to shape the team

• (15:15) Attracting the right customers and sending them books

• (17:53) Doing the things that don’t scale… and why it works

• (18:52) Living customer values with new tech like AI

• (20:26) Tackling the challenges of company growth

• (22:56) “Finishing customer sentences” to build intuition

• (24:47) Moving from founder-led support to fresh learning

• (25:54) Why the Help Scout mission never needed a pivot

• (26:22) Expanding products without losing focus

• (29:01) Evolving the how of support, not the why

• (31:20) Three timeless lessons for customer-centric companies

The Three Key Learnings

1. Be Your Own Toughest Customer: Help Scout’s founders used their own product obsessively, spotting pain points, fixing issues, and building features that solved their real problems. If you deeply understand and use what you build, you’re always a step closer to delivering real value.

2. Do the Work Others Skip: Sometimes huge competitive advantages come from sweating the so-called “little” things. Help Scout invested deeply in making emails feel natural and personal, leading the market away from soulless ticket numbers and portals. Those details matter a lot.

3. Stay Close as You Scale: Customer focus isn’t automatic once your team grows. Help Scout keeps founders and staff connected to the queue and to customer stories, balancing historic knowledge with new learning. No matter your size, make sure every role stays anchored to real customer needs.

Related links

• Inside Help Scout: How We Implement Whole Company Support

• Help Scout's values

• The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

• Connect with Nick Francis on LinkedIn

• Connect with Denny Swindle on LinkedIn

• Connect with Jared McDaniel on LinkedIn

Mat Patterson [00:00:00]: In 2011, three young men with big plans moved north from Tennessee to Boston, Massachusetts to take part in Techstars, a startup accelerator program. Jared, Denny and Nick were very close in those days. Sometimes maybe too close.

Nick Francis [00:00:15]: Oh yeah. I mean, I slept less than five feet away from Jared for three straight months when we were in Techstars.

Mat Patterson [00:00:21]: Their new venture, Help Scout, a customer support platform, was launched during that program, which also featured companies such as PromoBoxx with two X's and Sennexx with two X's, which really gives you a flavour of the time. 14 years on, Help Scout serves over 12,000 customers around the world as a certified B corp and has become a leading example of building successful remote first companies. Not to mention being the home of this very podcast. This season on the supportive, I'm talking to founders of all types. Software companies, hardware companies, even a brewery. All of them companies that have developed a reputation for being truly customer focused. As they share their stories together, we'll learn what it takes to create the sort of business that can retain and delight their customers. What are the actions or the attitudes or the business structures that tie these customer centered companies together? What might you adopt into your own business? So in this first episode of season two, we're starting Close to Home with Help Scout's own founders.

Mat Patterson [00:01:25]: I mean metaphorically close to home, not literally. This interview was mostly recorded during our company retreat, which almost could not be further away from my actual home. But anyway, let's start by meeting our three founders, the people who've been at Help Scout since and before day one. Between the three of them, they had a pretty good mix of skills and backgrounds. Denny was a developer.

Denny Swindle [00:01:51]: Hello, I'm Denny, CTO co founder, Jared, a designer.

Jared McDaniel [00:01:55]: Hey there, I'm Jared. I am co founder and director of product design.

Mat Patterson [00:02:00]: And Nick sounds like he was one of those entrepreneurial kids that you were probably guilted into buying lemonade from on your street.

Nick Francis [00:02:07]: I was building stuff for the web and I've been starting companies since I was a kid, so I was just doing more of that.

Mat Patterson [00:02:13]: No surprise then that Nick ended up being the CEO. Now, I myself have worked at Help Scout since 2016, so that's a significant chunk of the company's existence. But by the time that I arrived, Help Scout the company and Help Scout the business were already both pretty well formed. So I asked our founders to take me back to those early days when all they had was a pretty basic idea.

Denny Swindle [00:02:36]: Gmail for teams.

Nick Francis [00:02:38]: Yeah.

Denny Swindle [00:02:39]: Do you remember that as our pitch?

Mat Patterson [00:02:41]: That's Denny giving the sort of pitch that you are definitely not allowed to make once you've got a brand team. But that really was the idea. A better way to deal with email customer support. Once you've got more than one person talking to customers, Being your own customer is a theme that we are going to keep revisiting this season. I think a lot of the founders that I've talked to were really trying to fix their own problems. First, there's a term for being your own customer. It's eating your own dog food, or in gerund form as tech people like to use it. Dogfooding.

Mat Patterson [00:03:13]: Quick sidebar on dogfooding. What a gross business term. It maybe came from an exec who used to eat his company's dog food on stage, but even so, somehow it's still less irritating than the alternative phrase that some people like to use, which is drinking our own champagne. Just no.

Nick Francis [00:03:31]: Yeah, we really did pitch Help Scout as a shared inbox. So a shared email inbox. It was really focused on email and it was all about team collaboration because frankly, that was the challenge that we wanted to solve for ourselves at the time. So we were our first customer and that was helpful in a number of ways.

Mat Patterson [00:03:51]: Help Scout launched right in the middle of the 2011 Techstars program. And that meant that the three founders were sitting every day in a co working space that was absolutely full of potential customers. And Nick did not waste that opportunity.

Nick Francis [00:04:05]: And so I would literally go startup to startup and be like, what are you using for customer support? Why do you use that tool? Would you be interested in trying our tool? And so it was a really great way to do customer development, believe it or not, because there were literally 20 startups. We were in Techstars with another 10 startups, but there were another 20 startups in the area that I could just kind of go door to door and I could do interviews with them, I could try to get them to use the product. And so several of our cohort in Techstars I think, were early customers. Some other companies in that space were customers. And so it was so nice to be in that sort of close knit community where we could get real time customer feedback in a way that otherwise would have been really challenging.

Mat Patterson [00:04:51]: While Nick was pitching desk by desk, Jared was noticing other companies who also seemed to be really focused on their customers.

Jared McDaniel [00:04:58]: I do remember one specific customer that wasn't in Techstars, but we met sort of tangentially and I remember them saying the ways in which they obsessed about making sure their customers felt like they were there on the ready in terms of support, that they would literally fake the signature in the email that went out to them saying, sent from my iPhone. And that to me was just one of the, one of the times when I was like, I want to build tools for these people that are customer obsessed, just like we are. But the extent to which these brands that were so like minded to Help Scout were going out of their way to make sure that their customers felt like humans and not a cog in the wheel was really when I wanted to like double down on what we were doing. And I truly believe that there was an opportunity for us to kind of carve out a tool that could solve for that.

Mat Patterson [00:05:50]: When there's just the three people, everybody had to be close to customers. Right? There is no other way to survive. They asked questions, they listened, and then adapted their offering. As Denny says.

Denny Swindle [00:06:01]: I mean, in the early days, we were just building like mad. You know, we launched a product that wasn't fully formed. And so for the first year we were just building around the clock.

Mat Patterson [00:06:10]: Help Scout as a customer platform was in a way a reaction against the existing products that felt almost designed to turn all those squishy, messy, real human customers into nice, clean, straight numbers in a database.

Nick Francis [00:06:24]: Didn't we spend a lot of time on email parsing? I think we spent an inordinate amount of time, it's true, making Help Scout's emails just feel like a normal email. Believe it or not, that's a really hard thing to do. And that's the reason why all the ticket systems that came before Help Scout had ticket numbers and portals to log into and all these other facets. We spent an inordinate amount of time designing. I remember coding the emails. I remember all the work that you did on the email parsing tool. So we built our own tools in order to just make the emails from our system seem personalized and seem like it really came from a friend. And that's, that's the experience that our customers wanted at that time. And it really hasn't changed.

Denny Swindle [00:07:07]: I feel like we were one of the first companies to actually do that.

Nick Francis [00:07:11]: I think we were the first.

Denny Swindle [00:07:12]: And then everyone started following suit and got rid of the ticket numbers. # Please reply above this line #, et cetera. So I think we were the leaders in kind of that.

Nick Francis [00:07:21]: Yeah. It's funny that our differentiated advantage when we first launched was just like a clean email.

Denny Swindle [00:07:26]: Right.

Mat Patterson [00:07:28]: I think that this idea of a clean email, it's really key to what Help Scout is about actually as a business. It sounds pretty basic. Just make your customer interactions look like the email client that they're already using instead of some sort of high tech system. But to make it work, it took a whole lot of effort. And putting that effort in rather than taking the easier path that other tools had taken. That is a real world manifestation of a belief. It's the belief that the customer should not have to adapt to the computer system just to get help. It should feel like they're talking to a person who is helping them.

Mat Patterson [00:08:02]: That is a customer centric mindset made real right from the very start of the company. And that was important to the founders because they hated personally interacting with all those reply above this line emails when they were customer. And it was important to the people that they convinced to be early customers of Help Scout. The team spent a whole lot of time listening to people to make sure they understood what was needed.

Nick Francis [00:08:27]: Any way in which they would talk to us, we were getting on. So there was a time when I remember we required a phone number and I would just call, I would just cold call and be like, hey, what? It wasn't about selling, it was just about learning. Right? I was so eager to figure out, like, hey, why did you sign up? What problem are you looking to solve? What made you think that Help Scout could solve that problem for you? Is it working so far? Right. Just walking through a series of questions with these customers to understand what problem they. Because we're literally just building to try to solve some of these challenges. And so we talked with so many customers, whether it be kind of on the phone, just dialing people up, or over email. It was such a beautiful time because literally you get an email, it's like, hey, this thing over here is broken. And like in two hours it's fixed and you can email the customer right back.

Mat Patterson [00:09:21]: Of course, nothing is perfect. People need help, things will break, questions will need to be answered. And Help Scout's founders all spent a lot of their time working in the support queue, helping customers and experiencing their own problems with a constantly developing help desk that they were using.

Denny Swindle [00:09:36]: The three of us did all of the support for so long and so we were so close to the problems, the things that were working well, etc. And so I think that was really helpful as well.

Mat Patterson [00:09:47]: For at least the first two years, there was nobody else to answer the customers.

Nick Francis [00:09:51]: Customers because if we wanted to hire, like, it was much more valuable for us to hire another engineer or something like that. So. And I loved, you know, I just, I think we were all eager. We couldn't get enough customer feedback. So, to be honest, like, that was work that we wanted to continue to do. And if we could hire out some of the other functions, that would probably be more valuable because we still had a lot more learning to do with our customers.

Mat Patterson [00:10:14]: Justin Seymour was Help Scout's first customer support professional, the first one of only two heads of support that Help Scout has ever had. Shout out to the wonderful Abigail Phillips, who is in that role today. But even now, Justin remains connected to the team.

Denny Swindle [00:10:29]: The first customer support leader is still in our back pocket and still finding things and still assisting us along the way, even though they have long since left the company.

Nick Francis [00:10:39]: Right. He's a customer now.

Denny Swindle [00:10:40]: He's one of our biggest supporters.

Nick Francis [00:10:42]: So we love you, Justin.

Mat Patterson [00:10:45]: When you're a support pro, it's hard to turn that helpfulness off even after you leave the company. Even once there was a support team in place, the founders still made intentional efforts to get into the support queue right up to the present day and to encourage everybody else in the company to do the same thing. And in the show notes, I will include links to our whole company support program. But there's a new challenge that arises for companies once they start to succeed. When you have more customers than you can practically talk to regularly, you need to gather information differently because there's a risk that if you're just listening to one major customer or a couple of people, you'll get a distorted perspective on what your overall customer base needs.

Denny Swindle [00:11:27]: Every time I was in the queue and I saw a pain point that a customer was having, I felt this need to solve it. And even though it was very maybe specific to them, uh, you know, I just, I needed to help. And in fact, I think if you look at our code base, there might still be some tidbits of, like, some this is for this company only or whatever.

Nick Francis [00:11:47]: Yeah, I remember one. There's a feature flag that's still on the back end where we can add the ticket number to the subject line, because people actually wanted a ticket number in the subject line. And we just were like, "okay". And I think like, maybe three customers have that today because you have to ask for it. But it is. There are all sorts of, like, hidden sort of feature flags on the back end just because we wanted to do right by the customer at that time. I think one thing that really helped us figure out what was going to add value to the masses relative to the few was the fact that we were using our own product every day. And so we had a good instinct in terms of what we needed and how badly we needed it.

Nick Francis [00:12:32]: So without that sort of instinct, it would have been really hard to parse out. Well, is this a big need or is it just a single customer and something that they're trying to figure out?

Mat Patterson [00:12:40]: Dogfooding. You cannot escape it in the Help Scout story. Not every company can be such a prolific user of its own products, but if you can be, you should be because it pays off. But another way to develop that broader sense of what customers need today across your whole customer base is, is to have a support team and product teams that you trust to discover, to organize, and share that information, as Jared mentioned.

Jared McDaniel [00:13:04]: Again, we've got one of the best support teams in the business and so we can rely on them heavily to validate things that we're thinking, seeing or whatever. And we have just great cross functional partners that are able to kind of keep us close to the customer at the same time. So-don't want to forget them.

Denny Swindle [00:13:24]: I don't know if this is the right answer, but, I mean, I feel a little bit more disconnected these days in my role. You know, I lean on the product teams. I'm more of a on the back end side of the house, I think, at this point. And so most of my learnings come through the PM layer and everything that they're learning and observing and then I can translate that into back end needs or what we might need to build.

Mat Patterson [00:13:46]: The real trick, of course, is finding those people. And that can be tough, especially if you're not super experienced in hiring, which is true for many new founders. Nick found that the key was to create the right environment first and then find people who were suited to that environment.

Nick Francis [00:14:01]: Well, I wouldn't say we were that great at hiring to begin with. We had to figure that out too. We certainly had some missteps, but to be honest with you, I think there's quite a population of customer centric people with those sorts of values. I just think it's about creating a space for them to do their best work. And for whatever reason, those values are our values. And so this felt like a welcoming and refreshing space to folks who really wanted to live those values in their, in their day to day at Help Scout.

Mat Patterson [00:14:37]: In the same way you can bring in the wrong people to your team, it's possible to bring in the wrong customers. The types of customers who are never going to have a good experience with your business because it doesn't suit them or who will drag you off in an unhelpful product direction to suit their specific needs. In both cases, it's really up to the company to figure out who it is that they want to attract. For Nick and Denny and Jared, it really helped that they all understood the type of service they wanted to provide because that meant they could recognise those values in other people. And Nick shared an early example of spotting the right kind of customer.

Nick Francis [00:15:15]: Yeah. So back in the day, when we first started Help Scout, Gary Vaynerchuk, who was quite...he was like the OG influencer. But Gary Vaynerchuk had just written a book called The Thank You Economy and it was really about these customer centric principles and how he believed that that was the future. And I latched onto that idea. Obviously he was speaking my language and so I reached out to Gary and I said, "hey, man, I think you should say something nice about this product. We'd love to associate with you in some way. I think it'd be really interesting".

Nick Francis [00:15:48]: And he was like, "well, why don't you just give. Give us an account? You know, give my. Give Wine Library an account". And I was like, "absolutely". And so we set up a deal. He recorded a testimonial and we gave Wine Library an account. And I just checked last night and they are still an active customer. I can't imagine how many customers they've helped through the platform.

Nick Francis [00:16:10]: But that was a really fun early partnership where we just got some validation from a different type of business, ecommerce, right. And we're able to sort of work hand in hand with their team to implement the tool at a time when we just had not earned a business of that size or magnitude's trust. But because we set up this little deal with Gary, we were able to implement the tool in this kind of big business for us at the time. And so that was the business that really helped us kind of grow up a little bit in the early phases. I mean, I think it was first 20 customers or so, but it's awesome to see that they're still a customer today using the product.

Jared McDaniel [00:16:49]: But talk about doing things that don't scale. I believe for some amount of time we actually sent books to customers.

Nick Francis [00:16:56]: Yeah. I think the first hundred customers got a copy of Gary's book.

Jared McDaniel [00:17:01]: Yeah first hundred. Autographed.

Nick Francis [00:17:02]: Autograph. Autographed copy. Yeah. Gary's ever the salesman. And we were happy to just mail out copies of books to people because we believed in these ideas.

Jared McDaniel [00:17:10]: Thank you notes. We wrote thank you notes for a long time.

Nick Francis [00:17:12]: Yeah, we did random thank. We should go back to thank you notes.

Mat Patterson [00:17:16]: Doing things that don't scale. I personally think this is sort of a tech industry way of explaining why it is that small businesses so often provide better service than large ones. When you're small, you can relate to your customers on a personal level. You can do the things that you would do in your real life, helping a person. You can bend the rules in situations where the rules just don't make sense. You can go above and beyond because you've got the skill and the authority to do that and it feels like the right thing to do. Once you grow a little, that gets harder to do. Now you've got to trust a lot more staff to do the right thing.

Mat Patterson [00:17:53]: You start to implement policies and permissions for good reasons, but you're still creating friction where there was no friction before. It becomes harder to act like a person. That is a battle that every customer centric company is constantly fighting. How can you let the people that you've hired continue to do those things, the things that don't scale, without accidentally destroying your business? That's a real risk. And ultimately it is up to the behavior of the leaders of the company. What is it that they value and how do they express those values in the decisions that they make in who they hire, what they choose to spend resources on, how they allow the people they hire to operate, what it is that they prioritize, and even which customers they choose to work with. Because the customers you serve will shape the way that you deliver service. And I asked Nick if Help Scout had ended up attracting customers with similar values to those that Help Scout's founders shared.

Nick Francis [00:18:52]: 100%. Yeah, we've absolutely built a customer base that shares a lot of the same values as we do, which is 99% amazing, 1% really hard when you're trying to get them to adopt tools that will actually help them serve customers even better. So one thing that we've noticed is an aversion to AI just generally and an association of AI with poor support quality. We don't believe that that's the case. We believe great customer service can be offered and still have AI tooling kind of doing things behind the scenes. So it's been really difficult to sell folks with such customer centric values on different ways of solving this challenge, more efficient ways of solving this challenge, and still delivering on the promise of the product.

Mat Patterson [00:19:44]: That's a really fascinating angle for me. When you attract people who really care about service quality, you're also raising the quality bar on yourself. Now your job is to convince these people that the product that you're offering them is going to meet the declared values that first attracted them to you. And when you want to make a change to your product or to your service or to your business model, well, then the more staff and the more customers you have and the more engaged they are with your stated values, the more energy is going to be required to shift them all safely to the new environment. That's just physics. Jared sometimes misses the simplicity of those early days.

Jared McDaniel [00:20:26]: One of the things that I can't help but look back on and miss at some point or to some degree is our ability to just move and ship at will. We could just do that three, four, five people, you can just go now. A lot less customers, right? Like, like Nick was saying, like the impact is just greater and there's a lot of fun to that today. But just being able to kind of move at will, it's hard not to miss that a little bit.

Mat Patterson [00:20:53]: Nick doesn't miss the early days as much as he feels the additional complexity of keeping everything rolling while also trying to move in new directions.

Nick Francis [00:21:02]: I think we're still learning how to build a plane mid flight. It's hard and the plane just keeps getting heavier, more people boarding and that makes it really hard to upgrade the wings. So we're still learning, but I think we've had to lean into some our change management muscle, even with customers. So we upgraded our product, our core product inbox last year and had to go through the painstaking process of asking customers to change the way that they use our product. And that was a process that took over a year. But we're trying to balance serving customers and delivering a reliable experience to them, but also introducing them to the future. And the fact that, yeah, the how is evolving at a fast pace. And in order for Help Scout to be a long term successful business, we have to continue to evolve in those ways and we got to bring them along.

Nick Francis [00:22:04]: So there's certainly tension there.

Mat Patterson [00:22:07]: Very often the first people that you need to convince are not your customers, it's your own internal team.

Nick Francis [00:22:14]: Absolutely. I mean, I remember when we were first building our AI products and trying to convince the team to use those products was really difficult, but I wanted that tension to exist. It would have been silly for me to use the CEO card and say, "Abigail, we have to implement this tool". I felt like we had to earn the trust of our own team before we could bring those products to market. And that's what we did. It's not perfect, they'll be the first to tell you. But at the same time, I think we've got, we've worked really hard to try to get their buy in. And so to some extent, we still rely heavily on our own usage in order to validate that a product is good enough.

Mat Patterson [00:22:56]: As we talked that day on our company retreat, what kept coming up for all three of Help Scout's founders and leaders was the importance of knowing your customers and the different ways that you have to do that as your company and your role changes. For Nick, he finds himself using a decade and a half of customer conversations to inform the people who are newer to the Help Scout team.

Nick Francis [00:23:20]: I like to refer to it as "Finishing customer sentences". So if you talk to enough people in the market who are trying to solve this challenge, eventually you get it so that you can just start to finish their sentences. And perpetually doing that hundreds and thousands of times over the years, you just hone and develop these instincts that I think continue to serve us as CEO and now having a much larger group of people that we work with. The most value that I can add in a conversation is just bringing 14 years of finishing customer sentences into the fold. And it helps people sort of take some shortcuts into understanding the customer. And so I find that that can actually add tremendous value in certain situations where I can just use all this historical experience and knowledge and help our team understand the customer point of view a little bit better.

Mat Patterson [00:24:17]: Denny has found himself in the role of librarian as a storehouse of past engineering decisions.

Denny Swindle [00:24:24]: I was going to just tack on and say, I feel like a historian, similar, like in terms of engineering. My day to day has definitely shifted, but engineers still come to me like, why did you all build this XYZ or this way or why? And so, yeah, my goal is to just keep, keep the engineering team moving forward and unblocked and being the historian.

Mat Patterson [00:24:47]: And for Jared, he's constantly finding new ways to widen out his perspective and always be learning about the customer base.

Jared McDaniel [00:24:54]: There's so many unique use cases for Help Scout and how people use it and the value they find out of it. Specifically with some of these features that we're bringing, we're just finding that they're using it such unique ways, even through the lens of like integrations. All that to say there's a lot of net new learning that is happening that we, I am just as equally saying, "help us find the answer" as I am, "oh, we did it this way in the past and here's why". So we're kind of leaving, in my experience and where I sit, we're kind of leaving that world and moving and transitioning to this Space of net, new learning, understanding new use cases and building accordingly through that lens.

Mat Patterson [00:25:34]: Three founders, three different areas of business, all of them with different approaches to keeping customers in the center of their vision, but all of them united by a common set of values. And that single core idea. Easier, better customer support, that is the spine of the whole business. Even 14 years on from founding.

Nick Francis [00:25:54]: Yeah, we have not had a single significant pivot in our history. So the pitch that we gave 14 years ago at Techstars is the same pitch today.

Mat Patterson [00:26:03]: Of course, the world insists on changing for customers as well as for businesses, and that will create friction. Anytime you reach out to grab something new, there is a genuine danger of losing what you've already got in your hands, like a toddler trying to pick up some tennis balls. So there's a tendency to move cautiously, which Nick expressed.

Nick Francis [00:26:22]: I will say we were quite reticent to expand the product beyond the inbox and sort of email collaboration feature. So one thing that it took us, I think, two or three years to build was knowledge base. We didn't want to build Docs at all for quite some time. We just felt like, wow, that would be a whole different product. We don't really want to be a quote unquote "multi product company", but at the same time we were finding a high correlation of customers that wanted to grow and scale with us needing a knowledge base tool that was integrated with the email tool. And we started to see the value of that. But it took us a really long time to come around and agree that we needed to build a knowledge base. I felt like content management had already been solved.

Nick Francis [00:27:07]: It's not necessarily something that we wanted to solve again, but once we saw the way that content management was actually playing with the email queue with customers, we thought we could add some value there and we ended up building a product.

Mat Patterson [00:27:22]: And as a former customer support manager myself, I think there is a natural pull towards conservatism in support teams too. There's this desire for things not to change too much, because in customer support, every change means extra work. A new feature means there'll be new bugs. Different pricing means you're going to have difficult conversations. Customer service would be easy if it weren't for all the customers, right? But of course, you also realize the products cannot stay still because everyone else is moving. And your customers need you to be helpful in today's world, not in the world of five years ago. And the same applies to the company as a whole, especially when you're building software, customer expectations are always changing based on whatever else they're using, what new systems are available, what their bosses read on the plane this week.

Mat Patterson [00:28:09]: But as Nick points out, the underlying reason for your company existing can remain the same.

Nick Francis [00:28:15]: You know, what I find interesting about this moment is that the problem statement has not changed. People are still trying to solve the same problem, which is talk to their customers and deliver a great experience. But how you solve it, the how has completely shifted, especially in the last two years. Like the how we would solve these challenges has evolved in such a way that I do question my instincts on a regular basis in terms of answering "the how", not necessarily the what, but the how is evolving at a tremendous pace. And I think we've all had to sort of start from ground zero and say, well, given the technologies and tools available to us today, how would we solve that? Because the answer two years ago, four years ago, 10 years ago, was very different.

Mat Patterson [00:29:01]: When you know why you're building a company, you have a tool which helps you make every decision. The fact that Help Scout still has all three founders actively working in and on the business of Help Scout provides a level of consistency that allows for longer term decision making. And yes, there has been ups and downs and wrong turns taken and mistakes made, but there is a consistent and a solid base, a shared "why", a foundational story. And that means a mistake doesn't have to be catastrophic. You can return to that base, get everybody aligned again, and then strike out together in a different direction. And Help Scout's story is not over. Right now there is a huge new challenge on the scene. Artificial intelligence, particularly large language models.

Mat Patterson [00:29:48]: It could fundamentally change the way customer support is done. And Help Scout will need to adapt their products and services, as indeed they are, in order to meet the needs of their current and their future customers. But they-we-will be able to do that because we know what Help Scout is really about. It's not about particular technologies or product features. It's about helping our customers deliver consistently high quality support experiences for their customers or the people they're helping. And that looks different in practice today than it did in 2011, and it will look different again in 2030. But ultimately, it is the same thing. We're all about delighting customers and not deflecting them.

Mat Patterson [00:30:33]: And our job is make tools that make creating that delight easier. So thank you to Nick and to Denny and to Jared for chatting with me and, you know, keeping my family alive. If you want to know more about Help Scout, go to helpscout.com but let me leave you with these three takeaways

1. Eat dog food or rather, be the toughest customer of your own products. If you are solving your own pain, you are immediately more qualified to judge your solution to that pain. Help Scout Team uses Help Scout's products all day, every day.

2. Do the work that your competitors avoid. Nobody was bothering to make support feel like a conversation in 2011. It was too much work for something that didn't seem to matter.

Mat Patterson [00:31:20]: But by investing deeply into that email parsing complexity, Help Scout immediately looked and felt better in a way that attracted customers and ultimately competitors.

3, , Stay close to your customers.

Look, it's easy to be customer obsessed when it's life or death in those early days, but once you have more people on your team, you have to explicitly do the work to maintain that customer contact. It won't always feel like the most important thing to be doing, but it is.

Thank you for listening to this first episode of Season two. I'm so glad to have you here.

Please do rate and review the podcast if you enjoyed it and stay subscribed for the next episode. I'll be talking to a man who makes keyboards that can be very noisy and quite expensive, but that people love, including me.