ZSA

Erez Zukerman, CEO and co-founder of ZSA Technology Labs, shares how a focus on craftsmanship, honest communication and deep support has helped his small keyboard company punch well above its weight. Host Mat Patterson explores why ZSA consistently chooses substance over scale, and how that alignment creates products and customer experiences built to last.

Listen out for:

(00:00) Introducing ZSA and the world of mechanical keyboards

(02:29) Erez’s support background and key influences

(06:10) Launching ZSA and the pivotal role of relationships

(09:14) Support as a value, not a business play

(11:45) The challenge of building high-quality products

(13:26) “Walk the walk” in empowering support staff

(16:31) Agency, authority and burnout in support

(18:06) Why ZSA doesn’t obsess over support metrics

(19:14) Staying small by design and what growth means for alignment

(23:22) How small companies can have a big influence

(25:21) The trade-offs of remaining a small, bootstrapped business

(29:06) The value of being opinionated and serving a specific niche

(31:57) Product launches, flops and listening to your customers

(34:21) Why ZSA has no wireless keyboards

(35:25) Listening deeply to customers (and why analytics can mislead)

(38:24) Aligning product, support and pricing for the long term

The Three Key Learnings:

1. Alignment is everything: Lasting customer support begins with connected, aligned teams and a product vision rooted in real user needs, not just chasing growth or flashy numbers.

2. Empower your team with trust and authority: ZSA’s support team is paid fairly, given autonomy and involved early in decision-making. This creates a culture where support is proactive and meaningful.

3. Serve your true audience openly and honestly: Know who your customers are, communicate clearly and focus on making a genuine difference for them… even if that means saying “no” to features that don’t fit your values.

Links from this episode:

• Connect with Erez Zukerman on LinkedIn

• ZSA's fancy keyboards (Mat uses a Voyager)

• Competing Against Luck – Book

• ZSA Blog

• ZSA’s crowdfunding campaign from 2015

Erez Zukerman: First of all, money. Support people should be paid, should be, you know, should be paid fairly, should be compensated for their skill, for their responsibility, for their authority, for their power over your business.

Mat Patterson: ZSA Technology Labs. The name doesn't give you much of a clue. Maybe something about a zoo. ZSA's founder Erez Zukerman gives this description:

Erez Zukerman: Make plastic for a living. I add plastic to the world.

Mat Patterson: Which is both true but unhelpful in this context. And if you're listening to this in your podcast app, I can't even show you a photo to explain it. But you don't need one really, because I can just do this because ZSA makes mechanical keyboards. Expensive, fancy keyboards that maybe you don't need, but that if you're a certain type of person like me, you might really want. I'm Mat Patterson and in this episode of the Supportive I talk with CEO Erez Zukerman about those keyboards and the business he's built with his co founders and team to create some, sell and support them. Keyboards are typically a utilitarian item, something that you probably got with your computer or you bought for $20 off the shelf at whatever your local equivalent of Office Depot is. Most people don't spend any time at all thinking about their keyboard unless it stops working. But for some people, their keyboard is their primary interface into big parts of their life.

Mat Patterson: It's the tool they use all day to restructure their code, write articles to edit tracks. And for those people, a keyboard that is more comfortable, more flexible, more customizable, or just nicer to use. It's worth spending real time and money on. And those are ZSA's customers, and they always have been from customer number one, who happens to also be the guy who started the company.

Erez Zukerman: I'm Erez Zukerman and I'm the CEO and co founder of ZSA Technology Labs. We make nice keyboards. We've been doing that for a decade now. We're small, we're bootstrapped, and yeah, we're just doing our thing.

Mat Patterson: Jargon explainer bootstrapped means self funded as opposed to taking on external financial investment. Worth keeping that in mind, ZSA launched its first product, the ErgoDox EZ keyboard, in 2015 via an Indiegogo fundraising campaign that we will come back to. But the Erez of 2015 had been almost accidentally preparing himself to run a customer centric product manufacturing company for some years. He'd started out in customer support at Tibbo Technology, a Taiwanese design and manufacturing company who today build all of ZSA's own products.

Erez Zukerman: I used to work there years and years ago and yes, so I it's funny because I did a number of things there. The latest One was actually technical writer. So that's what I always go to. I was like, yeah, I was a technical writer with Tibbo. But no, you're right, I was also running their tech support for sure.

Mat Patterson: Yeah. So that company obviously was to become quite influential in a different way for you other than paying your bills at the time.

Erez Zukerman: Yeah.

Mat Patterson: Do you think that your experiences there were formative as to customer service? Did you learn from that company how we treat customers?

Erez Zukerman: Absolutely. So it's an easy line to draw. There were really two companies. One is Tibbo and the other is Mad Mimi, who was later bought out by GoDaddy. They do email marketing and both of these companies had email only support. And both of them were remote teams and they really emphasized excellence in what they do, excellence in the product, but also excellence in support. And I learned a lot there from both of these places.

Mat Patterson: Yeah, two remote companies focused on serving customers really well over email. Those are for Erez, the clearest influences on his own approach as founder. And at Mad Mimi, which is an odd company name, only marginally better than GoDaddy itself, Erez worked as a developer and saw customer service from a new perspective. He heard from the support team and saw customers dealing with the output of his development work. So manufacturing support, software development, and the third leg of this skill stool is communication.

Erez Zukerman: Yeah, I was a tech journalist, I guess you could say. I wrote for PC World. I wrote and edited for makeuseof.

Mat Patterson: makeuseof.com was a popular tech recommendations blog. Don't go there now. It's been bought out and ruined, of course. So in 2014, when Erez came across the ErgoDox keyboard layout, which was a free design for a mechanical keyboard that you had to literally solder together yourself, he was in a unique position to become his own first customer for what he wanted, which was a fully constructed, pre built product. There was already a community of people very deeply into mechanical keyboards. But it wasn't necessarily the friendliest place for the typical consumer to visit. Certainly not for Erez.

Erez Zukerman: It's not the most inviting dynamic for me. Maybe I am intimidated. I'm concerned I will not be understood correctly. There is group dynamics that I don't love. Where I do find I do well is one on one relationships. Just long term years and years of knowing people. Like when I left Tibbo, I left Tibbo long, long before 2014. But I left on really good terms and I stayed, you know, friendly with Dima, who is their managing director and now my, my partner at ZSA.

Erez Zukerman: And that was the natural place for me to go, right? It was like, okay, what relationship do I have? People sometimes ask me, oh, did you go and like, compare factories and like reach down and like, no, I compared zero factories because I already had, you know, I knew who I wanted to work with. So that's really the start. And that's really a pivotal aspect for me again and again and again, both with Dima and individuals in Tibbo. Not just Dima, and also with my own team, the people who work at ZSA now, long term relationships, that's where I find that I do best. And that's where we can make stuff happen.

Mat Patterson: Even so, most people in that position would probably not have launched an entire company to build physical products based on a design that they could not own. But Erez understood that there was a real market need, and he had the combination of skills and relationships to meet that need.

Erez Zukerman: I wanted the keyboard years later, so I was like, okay, let's, you know, I must not be the only one who doesn't want to, like, you know, stumble at it. So let's, let's make something.

Mat Patterson: And Zukerman is the Z in ZSA, but they were also an S and an A who brought their own skills.

Erez Zukerman: So there's me, Zukerman, Slepov, and Aitken, which is Andrew Aitken, he's an IP lawyer based in Maryland. Very senior, very really nice guy.

Mat Patterson: That's Dmitry Slepov, the managing director of Tibbo, where Erez first worked in support and tech writing. They knew they could build the keyboard. They had the knowledge, they had the access. What they did not have yet was the money or the customer base. And that's where indiegogo came in. In what turned out to be a very successful crowdfunding campaign that still very nearly sunk the whole business before it even started. Some anonymous people in the keyboard community didn't believe it was possible to achieve what errors was promising, and they made complaints to Indiegogo.

Erez Zukerman: Let's be charitable. Maybe it really did. Like, it's possible that there were some hurt feelings or potential future competitors involved, but it's possible that some people genuinely did think it sounded shady. Even though we did a lot to make it clear that it's legit, it's hard to build trust in this environment. So, yeah, there was, you know, early on, people wrote Indiegogo saying, oh, flag this. This is a scam. And we had a whole thing where we had to clear it up. No, not a scam. We're for real.

Mat Patterson: But because you had that relationship, you were pretty confident that it just could be done in the way that you thought it could be.

Erez Zukerman: Yeah, it was easy to solve, again because of the relationship. Because what it really took was a phone call with Mitri, with Indiegogo. And they were like, on the phone and like, I was there, right? It was a call together and they saw, no, this is an actual manufacturer. This is someone who's been doing this for decades. This is not like a guy with an idea.

Mat Patterson: The crowdfunding was a success, as was the design and the manufacturing process. Soon enough, real customers were typing on brand new ErgoDox EZ keyboards. And were you very excited when you realized you could make EZ sound like both your initials and EZ names are.

Erez Zukerman: Funny because they just kind of. They just kind of come, you know, the ErgoDox EZ name, I was just like, I didn't. Again, I didn't search for it. It was just like, oh, I know what I'm going to call this thing. Oh, Ergodox ez. And the same thing with the Voyager. When the concept came up, Floriana, our lead developer, shared the concept and he's like, oh, yeah. And I also have a name for it, Voyager.

Erez Zukerman: And that was the name, right? Like, sometimes the name is just there from the start and you go with it.

Mat Patterson: Right from the very beginning, it was clear that ZSA valued customer service. You can read through the crowdfunding campaign website still today, there are early comments in there from customers expressing appreciation for the fast and helpful replies. They're getting to their questions. And I asked Erez if quality support was always part of his goal.

Erez Zukerman: It was not a business play. It just makes sense because at the end of the day, I'm just a guy and I go and I say, hey, I'm going to make this keyboard. This is going to work. And I know this is a weird keyboard and I know it's expensive, and suddenly someone takes me seriously. Someone emails with a question again, doesn't post on a public forum, not like for making noise, but somebody actually reaches out as a person saying, hey, here's a question about this idea you shared to me on a very basic level that deserves respect. Wow. Somebody. Somebody like, you know, one of the first things you learn as a writer is that nobody reads.

Erez Zukerman: Nobody reads. You're gonna. You can, you can, you know, blood, sweat and tears, you know, a thousand two hundred word piece and whatnot. And people just kind of skim it. Or these days they click a button like AI, summarize this. Get half a paragraph and they move on with life. Nobody reads so suddenly, oh, somebody read or somebody watched the video and somebody's asking like an actual relevant question, not something that I answered in the text or somebody cares. Of course I care.

Erez Zukerman: It's not a business play. It's just, it's something that when you take a moment to think about it, it's hard not to appreciate it. Wow, I resonated. I, you know, somebody, somebody got it. That's amazing.

Mat Patterson: Do you still remember some of those very first customers that you were dealing with?

Erez Zukerman: No, but every now and then I do get an email from people. I got one I think a couple weeks ago saying, yeah, I'm using one of the indiegogo units. I, you know, here's a question or whatever. Usually it's something general actually because by now they know how to use the keyword really well. But, but I hear from them every now and then on the supportive.

Mat Patterson: I talk to a lot of SaaS, people who support products that can change with every software update. A bug that's introduced at 10am could be rolled back at 11. When you're shipping people physical products, especially tools that they will use for their own work, the stakes are higher. Quality support for ZSA really relies on the physical product being of high quality to begin with. There is no friendly, helpful email support that can instantly make up for you just not being able to type on your computer. But it's not cheap to make a high quality mechanical product that people will maybe buy once a decade and then use every day. So that means ZSA keyboards are much more expensive than low end keyboards that most people are used to and for errors. Quality product and quality support are very closely tied together.

Mat Patterson: You're really selling them something which could be 10 years before they need to think about it again.

Erez Zukerman: That's the intent then. The intent is to make it like infinitely repairable and, and modifiable. We have like all the 3D printable stuff on the website if you want like to mod it and we show you how to take it apart. The ergodoxyz ifixit actually showed people how to take it apart. They gave it 10 out of 10. So the idea is to, yeah, to make stuff that lasts. At the end of the day, I pay the bills by adding plastic to the world. That's the truth.

Erez Zukerman: I add plastic, right. And that's something that I don't want to dress up. This is it. So okay, I'm doing that. So I got to do that. Really mindfully, the stuff we make a has to matter. It has to not just be this year's model, which is 3% different from last year, it has to actually matter and it has to last. It has to be built to be repaired openly, not just when my company is around or whatever.

Erez Zukerman: If you're trying to build something that lasts, you have to make good stuff. You have to make good stuff and you have to support it in a good way. Again, it comes to relationships and longevity. If this was a fly by night thing, let's just make a quick buck, let's do a big crowdfunding campaign and disappear. Then your alignment changes and everything you want to be doing changes. But if you're building a company, and I always say, like I optimize for sleep at night and you want to feel good about what you're doing and you want to still be here in 10 years, of course you have to. The hardware first of all, has to be extremely good and you have to support it very well. And those two things need to go together.

Erez Zukerman: So for example, for us, I find that for many businesses, support, they talk the talk and they don't walk the walk. You know, they say the classic example, of course, is your call is important to us. Really, if it were, you'd probably pick up by now. So for us, what does it mean to actually walk the walk? It means, first of all, money, support. People should be paid, should be, you know, should be paid fairly, should be compensated for their skill, for their responsibility, for their authority, for their power over your business. So first of all, right, just pay. Well, can I get a amen? But then also an important part is they should have real authority. What does that mean for us? First of all, it means that on an individual thread level, they have a very, very wide range of discussion and real judgment, real ability to help people in many, many, many ways.

Erez Zukerman: And they can go with what they feel. Meaning, yes, if the customer is rude to us, if they are mean, they will get a different treatment compared to a customer who's actually civil and pleasant. And that is by design, because the people doing the support are people and you have to talk to them that way or another way. When we are working on something new, whether it's a new page on the website and you feature in the configurator or a new piece of hardware, support is not like to be notified. Oh, here's a new thing. No, they are crucial to the loop. Nothing gets out before support says, okay, this is okay, like we like this, we get this we see what you're doing. We don't foresee issues.

Erez Zukerman: Green light from support that is essential for anything from releasing a new page on the website to releasing a keyboard or any other hardware product. We make like, they are in it from the initial prototyping phase. So that's. That's how you build quality. Again, you got to walk the walk like, you can't. You know, sometimes I walk down the street here in Southern Ontario and I. I pass someone by a stranger and then go, like, how's it going? And they keep walking. And to me, that's like the epitome of support in most companies.

Erez Zukerman: Like, I'm gonna say it, and then I'm gonna keep walking like, no, you have to do the work.

Mat Patterson: Absolute music to the ears of every support person. I'm sure there is nothing worse than finding out from your customer, oh, the company has released a new update that they didn't even involve us with. But to make this all work consistently, you need those support people to not just be skilled, but. But also trustworthy and engaged. And at ZSA, which is a small and fully remote company, that is an area of active effort.

Erez Zukerman: Why do people like a job or not? Right. Yes, you need to pay enough, but there's also, again, agency what causes burnout. The team is fully remote. We don't do, like, hourly monitoring or stuff like that. It's not a thing I put a lot of thought into. Okay, why would somebody want to work with us? Why is this a good job? What? Okay, sure, money is part of it, but it's a small part, in my opinion. It's like, it's table stakes. It's okay, you have to pay enough, but that's the start.

Erez Zukerman: That's not the end of creating a culture and a place where people are like, yeah, I work here and I want to work here. And I see myself doing this for years.

Mat Patterson: A lot of bad support is not because the people don't know how to do good support. It's because they don't have the authority to do what is obviously the right thing to do.

Erez Zukerman: And because they are beholden to metrics, right? Like, later, they're gonna go like, oh, I can't spend 10 more minutes on this issue because my resolution time will drop, or bs, right? Like, that. We don't do. Also internally, we don't do analytics. I don't know what our resolution time is. Like, who cares? Just help people, you know?

Mat Patterson: Is it true that Erez and ZSA don't care about their resolution time? I mean, Obviously, if they were taking weeks to get back to customers, they would care. It's more that the number itself is not the act of service. It's just one way of paying attention to how helpful you're being. And if you've set up your team with that expectation and you're paying attention, the resolution number will take care of itself. Measuring it is pointless. What matters more is how people think about delivering support, even down to the language that is used.

Erez Zukerman: A term I came across recently is ticket deflection. You. You know that one, which is amazing. Apparently it's a whole subset of technology where the stated goal is to keep it, to keep the customer from getting to support. So I think that's really optimizing for the wrong thing. For example, when you buy one of our keyboards, then you get a game code. We could build a very nice automated system where you put in your order number, you get a game code. We are a technical team.

Erez Zukerman: We chose not to. To get the game code, you have to write in and a human will reply, say, hello, thank you, here's the code. So I think it's very important to look at what companies actually do, what.

Mat Patterson: They choose to optimize for keeping things personal. Encouraging contact, not relying on metrics to know if it's working. Is that a model that's viable for a much larger company? Maybe not, but that's an advantage of small companies. There's no need to metric your team to death. You can do things differently. And of course, yes, all growth will bring new challenges. That is something that's on Erez's mind.

Erez Zukerman: I think one thing people kind of miss sometimes when they think about growth. A company at 10 people and the same company at 100 people. It has the same name, maybe even some of the same people. It is not the same company. It is an entirely different entity. It's not the same thing, but bigger. It's not like, you know, a kitten now it's a cat. No, it's like it's a. It's a kitten now it's an elephant. It's a different animal. So, yeah, I, I don't want that. Again, I think it's very, very important to be clear on what are we doing, what are we optimizing for, where are we going? And there is a default assumption, I think, when you go into business or when you create a company saying, oh, let's, let's grow. Like, this is a keyboard on every desk and all that. And that assumption is so pernicious and destructive and brings about so many Things that shouldn't be, you know. No, not a keyboard on every disk. Not everybody needs a weird split, expensive keyboard.

Erez Zukerman: A keyboard for the people that it will make a difference for. And that would then do what we said it would do. That is the non catchy motto.

Mat Patterson: You know, I don't know about that. It worked for RonSeal. "Use Ron Seal Quick Drying Wood Stain. It does exactly what it says on the tin. "

I think that once you get comfortable with smallness, once you are not like into this ego of like, oh, yeah, I'm like going to be the biggest in the niche. The biggest. No, like I'm going to do my thing that brings about such a, you know, it's such a breath of calm and like, okay, it's fine, you know.

Mat Patterson: Yeah. I think the phrase that you wrote recently was an island of stability and positivity. Mat Patterson: Is that what it feels like?

Erez Zukerman: It really does. And it's interesting because once you get comfortable with that place, it is surprising how much impact you do have. So one thing we do, I said we don't advertise and we don't. But what we do is we have an excellent email newsletter. Newsletter. Totally tooting my own horn here because I write a newsletter, so it's good. Very immodest thing to say. But I put a lot into it and of course support reviews it before it's out.

Erez Zukerman: Like everything. But I'm struck every month because I routinely get replies to the newsletter and they're not like support replies. They replace people saying, hey, thanks for writing this. Oh, I love this thing you pointed out. Oh, here's something you might like. It's. So when we talk about smallness, the newsletter, right now we are at over 70,000 subscribers. We're, I think 75,000, all fully organic, just people signed up and the open rate is around 50%.

Erez Zukerman: So like around 35,000 people read it when we send it out. It's been growing quite rapidly. And so it's important, I think, to qualify that smallness. To me, for example, our reach does not feel small. Or when I look at other keyboards, and I don't want to name names, but when I look at other keyboards, obviously I know what we introduced first and what standards in manufacturing, in packaging, in service, we, we simply put out there. And then I, I can see, you know, other companies, sometimes much larger companies, you know, suddenly, oh, now they're doing this. Oh, now they're offering this feature. That's interesting. Erez Zukerman: You know, I'm not saying, oh, this is all because of us. But I'm also not saying we did not have any part. So. So I think there is dollar smallness or like okay, overall if you. Again, this comes down to analytics versus qualitative stuff. If I were to only look at dollar numbers, sure. I want to stay small. We are small. Erez Zukerman: We're not like some multi billion dollar company. We're small. We're not pretending otherwise. And I'm happy to stay small. I don't think that a small dollar number necessarily means a small impact either on the personal level, in relationships, on real people, real customers, individuals, and as a result on you know, maybe my niche or our niche, maybe even something a little bit wider.

Mat Patterson: Yeah, I think you can be a small company that has a disproportionate influence in the world that you're in and you can grow without growing. Right there is that we are now speaking to more people, but we're still the small company.

Erez Zukerman: Yes. Because again I find that in order to do that this is not something you can or should directly chase. Oh, I want to have influence. It really any like real world reach or influence usually is a reflection of what you are actually about, of walking the walk. It's easy to talk, but once you walk the walk, once your real life actions match your words over an extended period of time, people take notice. That's like a natural thing that just happens. And maybe that notice does not come to dollar terms. Maybe that notice is competitors taking notice.

Erez Zukerman: Fine. I think, I think that the determination to make tons of money is really ego. Once you pay the bills, once you pay the team, once you pay the people who make the keyboards, you know, and everybody's taking care of. Okay, why like, why do we need to like 10x what's the point? Other than ego, of course.

Mat Patterson: This is where the decision to self fund comes in. ZSA is not under any obligation to chase fast growth to provide investors with a high rate of return. There are other costs to remaining a small organization. It does limit you from doing things that you might otherwise like to do.

Erez Zukerman: A really interesting and fun company making keyboards is Keychron. I like their keyboards. They make cool keyboards. They make many of them. If you look at Keychron like they launch a new hardware product, I don't know, every month. Like, okay, so they're those products that are like incrementally different. It's like slightly whatever. They're not like all super different.

Erez Zukerman: But still it's a new model, new model, new model. And when you buy a Keychron keyboard, it Is really nice. Like you unbox this thing. Well built, pleasant to type on, just very nice. Wow. I look at that, I go like, oh wow. You know, when we have an idea for a keyboard or any hardware product, our timeline is like what, two and a half years of dedicated work. Just there's this one product we've been working on now for maybe five and a half, almost six years working away, chipping away at it.

Erez Zukerman: Eventually we'll get it. You know, it's an ambitious product eventually because. So yes, absolutely, that's, that's a big, a big thing. But I also see the positive there, right? I'm. Because one thing that, that is super common in the industry is pre announcements. The extreme example is Apple hyping AI features on their phone. And a year later they're still not here. And it's so embarrassing they have to actually take it off the webpage.

Erez Zukerman: Hyping stuff that doesn't exist yet. So one thing we do is we release, we announce something when you can actually buy it. Very consistently we've been doing that. I always say this is not a pre order. Here's a new thing, we have them waiting, just order and you'll get like pay and get the thing. No waiting, no like hoping, no whatever. So there are advantages to that as well. But for sure, scale.

Erez Zukerman: It's never like if it wouldn't be good to be big, then nobody would want to be big. Scale unlocks a lot of things. You get velocity, you get to iterate, you get a much bigger sample size, you get access to people you wouldn't otherwise maybe be able to reach out to and talk to or institutions or whatever. Of course to me the trade offs are worth it. And I will say like some elements, for example, access, by access I mean either being able to raise capital if needed or being able to talk to important people. I find that you don't necessarily have to be huge for that. Like, you know, I, I got to have a call with Pixar right when, when you know, interested in what we do and all that, that's, that is access, that is reach. So again, it's not necessarily your dollar scale.

Erez Zukerman: But that said, of course, of course being objectively huge unlocks a bunch of things and adds a bunch of risks. But you do unlock many things.

Mat Patterson: There is a cost, obviously there's the big cost to scale, which is you have to sell to lots of different types of people. And I feel like maybe what I'm seeing from ZSA over all the years is, and it probably comes at least in part from you, is like, you have your opinion about how things should be and you want to make things that fit within that kind of worldview that you have. You can see it in the marketing website and in the blog there and the newsletter. Yeah, we have this opinion about how this thing should be done. And here it is.

Erez Zukerman: It's not for everyone. It's not for everyone. The company is not for everyone. The products are not for everyone. The people whom it is for, they get it. They appreciate it in a special way. But again, in order to resonate like that, you truly have to be specific. You have to.

Erez Zukerman: You can't hit home with every random person because people are different. You. Yeah. So absolutely. Being opinionated is a big part of that.

Mat Patterson: In the previous episode of this podcast, available right now in your podcast app with Help Scout's founders, Jared talked about the difficult transition from really building everything for Help Scout's own direct needs to also building things for people who have other use cases. He finds it a trickier thing to do. Erez has faced similar issues.

Erez Zukerman: So we've had kind of five major products that I can think of, major keywords over the years, and three are successful. We've sold tens of thousands and, like, we are selling them and all that. Two did not succeed. And it's kind of interesting because the two that did not really work out in the real world are. Both of them are not products that I could daily drive. And I myself, right, I did not take that as like an important signal at the time because first of all, it was a small sample size, and second, it felt like ego. So what if it's like, not a product that I would use? I'm sure other people would like it, right? I think it's a quality product. It does what we said it would do. Erez Zukerman: So this is a very weird one. I still don't know how to think about it, but I can't say that these days I do daily drive anything we release and for an extended period of time, long, long before anybody else knows about it, like outside the company. And I think that's very important. I guess, like, it feels weird to say, but I think it's actually meaningful for, you know, to make a product that actually sells. I think it helps if it's a product that I personally, myself, I actually use in my day to day. I don't know why that is, but.

Mat Patterson: Yeah, yeah, well, you can do that. Of course, if you are keychron, there's no risk to releasing 20 different products. I mean, There is some risk, but there's no big risk. You'll find some people who buy it and some people who won't, and then you can make another one. Whereas if it's taking you two and a half years, yeah, you do need to get that right. Otherwise it's a much more costly problem. But that it comes down to knowing who your customers are and as you say, to listening to them and to staying on top of that sense of this is what's going to resonate with those people and obviously mostly getting it right, which is.

Erez Zukerman: I wish I could say, oh, I know how to do this. I don't. Every new product is a gamble. The again, the important thing is to be very clear about what it is so that I never want, you know, when you get the box, your only surprises have to be good ones. Take a look inside. You know, I don't want you to be surprised by thinking, oh, I thought it would do this out of the box. I thought it would do that. This doesn't work.

Erez Zukerman: There mustn't be any. So I. It's on me to communicate and disclaim and like, really explain things right down to. Okay, so how do returns work? I don't know if you looked at our returns page, but you got to be really clear about those things. But I don't have a recipe for releasing a product that's a sure shot. It's very possible that the stuff we've been working on for years now, we release it and it's like a flop. And so where I find meaning is I release stuff like I said earlier, right? I make plastic for a living. I add plastic to the world.

Erez Zukerman: Okay? So that has to matter. So whatever we release, I can't control whether or not it's a success. What I can control is, is it meaningful to me? Do I feel like this product makes a real difference? Do I feel like it really adds something? Do I feel like it's well made? So that's kind of my compass and my lens.

Mat Patterson: And of course, with such a small team, it's easier to include everybody in those decisions.

Erez Zukerman: So I talk a lot internally. I share a lot of stuff, and people have many opinions and I do tend to listen. Maybe too much. I don't know. Like, I'm not. Yeah, I'm not like this Steve Jobs character. Like, oh, screw you all. I know what's right.

Erez Zukerman: Everybody says I'm no, like, actually in the team. It's a super collaborative process where people have opinions and like, that have a very big impact. On what we end up doing or not doing. I think they're super smart.

Mat Patterson: Basically, you can see that communication is really important to the team. You can see that in the customer reviews, the marketing website, the newsletter, the support emails. That opinionated perspective that he mentioned comes through, but it's backed up with clarity and reasoning. Why, for example, should a customer of ZSA pay hundreds of dollars for a keyboard that uses cables when even the $20 cheapo ones use Bluetooth?

Erez Zukerman: None of our keyboards is wireless. Why is it too complicated for us to make a wireless keyboard? Can we not, like, handle the. The tick? No, that's not it. It's because it would have a battery inside, and that battery would degrade, and then the whole thing would usually get chucked away. So, of course there needs to be a page explaining that. And at the same time, we must be dogmatic. You know, maybe tomorrow, suddenly, there is a great way to make our keyboards wireless. Okay? And that's something that is aligned with our values and doesn't cause a ton of e waste and plant obsolescence.

Erez Zukerman: Okay, great. Right. So, yes, I find that, of course you have to actually write. You have to communicate what you are about. You have to actually be about that thing. But also a big part of communication is that you have to actually listen. Meaning, you know, don't. Don't be dogmatic.

Erez Zukerman: Right? I mean, stay. Stay awake, stay flexible, stay nimble, don't, like, get too fixated on, oh, this is how we do things.

Mat Patterson: The other side of communication is listening. And I asked Erez how he listens to customers today. Erez Zukerman: One book I read that I really enjoyed is Competing against Luck. And that book presents something known as.

Mat Patterson: Jobs Theory, not Steve Jobs theory, which would probably be your keyboard should have no keys at all.

Erez Zukerman: And the idea is that when we buy a product, we are really hiring it to do a certain job in our life. And he defines there very clearly, what does it mean, a job in your life? Like, it's not a buzzword. He articulates that. But one of the things he gets into is analytics and how analytics create this false sense of security, this false sense of certainty. Oh, I know what I'm. I know what we're doing. Because our NPS score is such and such. Because our thread resolution time is such and such, because sales.

Erez Zukerman: No, I think this is pretty much all bs and it's quite misleading. It's easy to misconstrue. It's easy to get confirmation bias, see what I want to see in the numbers. So I don't look at numbers instead. I read emails. I just, I am in the inbox every day for. Yeah, for a nice portion of the day. I'm there, I'm reading, I'm replying, I'm talking to the team about threads.

Erez Zukerman: At the end of the day I find that it is more effective. Meaning if you actually want to help people, that's the way in my opinion. The only other thing I do sometimes and again, this is a qualitative thing. Every now and then someone would write and say, oh, I've had your keyboard for a year now when I couldn't, you know, I can't get over the hump. So randomly every now and then I just go, I say, okay, let's have a zoom call. And I go personally one on one with this person and just talk them through and like, okay, so what's your experience? Because that is so eye opening again to look at this weird looking keyboard that is such a part of my life. I don't even think it's weird anymore. But for this person, it's an alien object.

Erez Zukerman: Okay, what are they up against? So that's another form of support, but that's definitely as much for me as it is for the customer. Right. It's just super helpful to have those zoom calls every now and then.

Mat Patterson: Email only support, but in a flexible way. It's super easy to add a new support channel, but really hard to turn them off later without upsetting people. And for a small team, being email first with that ability for occasional outgoing calls or zooms is ideal. It's how our own team at HelpScout works too. Although we also offer chat support. But in both cases that is made possible partly because of who our customers are and what they need from us. I think about the kind of typical customers that you must have, which must be a lot of developers and a lot of quite techie people who probably email is also their first choice a lot of the time. And that sort of allows you to continue to grow in that way without having to.

Mat Patterson: I think if you were selling something to a lot of salespeople, you probably get a lot more requests for phone calls than you do for sure.

Erez Zukerman: It all has to be again, it all has to be aligned. It's like this is we sell a deep product. You're not going to just set the keyboard down on your desk and be off on your merry way. There's a real learning curve, so everything has to be aligned around that. We have to be really clear about what it is we're selling. And not try to dress it up as something else. It's not like three quick days and it'll be 100 words per minute. No, it's going to take longer.

Erez Zukerman: It's going to take work. But you're going to be happy that you put in the work. But we have to put in the context and the systems to support that.

Mat Patterson: And there's an alignment of... This is also a product you're going to have for years and years. So that work, you're not going to spend all that effort and then the thing doesn't stops working after a year.

Erez Zukerman: Exactly. Right down to the pricing. The keyboard costs $365, you know, $1 per day. Right. The idea is not. Don't get it. Like if you're getting the keyboard for a couple of weeks, it's very expensive. But already in the pricing, like, no, I want you to use this for a while.

Erez Zukerman: More than a year, right? Yeah. I want you to do that math and think, oh, this is going to make a big difference in my work, in my life, in my comfort. And it works out like 30 cents a day or however over its lifetime.

Mat Patterson: Great place to end it. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.

Erez Zukerman: Thank you, Mat.

Mat Patterson: Big thanks again to Erez for taking time out to share his story and his approach. The word that jumps out for me from our discussion is alignment. ZSA is an opinionated company, but these aren't opinions that are just hot takes creating drama on LinkedIn. Instead, they're expressed through all of the endless decisions that every team has to make. Who do we hire? What do we spend our limited time and money building? What do we charge for it? How do we even know what's working? For a very small company like ZSA, it is possible, although never easy, to to keep everything mostly aligned. And that can make for much better customer experiences, but also a better place to work. You can really know your team and your customers at a deeper level when you're that scale. Larger companies, they've got greater resources, more options. But that true deep alignment of this is what we are here for and this is what we're trying to do. So much harder to maintain. So if you're a small team, don't rush to be like a big company. What can look really freeing and fast moving from the outside so often feels very different on the inside. Being small is in some ways a really true advantage. Don't throw it away. Thank you for listening as always. Please rate and review the podcast email the supportive@helpscout.com if you have any thoughts. And coming up next time on The Supportive, I'm speaking to Chris Savage, CEO of video platform Wistia. Good luck in those queues.