So, here’s the thing: we screwed up. I’ll be more specific: I screwed up.
This post isn’t like the others before it. This is a personal post (in both authorship and content) from me (Brian) because I think you guys—my customers—deserve nothing less. So:
Support has almost always been a problem for Extendmac and our customers. “A problem,” I think, is too generous. It sucks, and it’s sucked for way too long.
In fact, the only time support was ever great was when I was doing it myself. This was a few months after Flow first shipped—almost two years ago now. After I’d come home from a day in high school, and after I’d spent an evening doing development work, I’d take an hour or two each night to help you guys work through issues you were having, or work together to corner, and soon-after, smash, a bug. They were crazy hours, and I wasn’t particularly fond of writing e-mails for hours before going to sleep, but we had some kick-ass support.
I’m a perfectionist, and like most perfectionists, this makes me extraordinarily controlling. I’d rather do it all myself—the right way—than have someone do a half-assed job in the name of a more convenient schedule for me.
The trouble is, that level of control doesn’t scale very well. As Flow and thus Extendmac grew and grew, it became impossible to do it all myself. There just aren’t enough hours in the day (or whatever units attention is measured in) for me to do it all. Something had to give. And what gave was our support.
After a long deliberation, I hired someone to do support. It killed me that I couldn’t control every aspect of the company, and here’s where my first huge mistake happened. In relinquishing control of support, I also mentally relinquished responsibility for it because I assumed it wouldn’t be up to my standards. I stopped managing our support practices, image, responsiveness, quality, etc.
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A few months back, in March, I hired Extendmac’s second software engineer. His name is Irving Ruan. He’s extremely passionate, design-driven, and most importantly, he has taste. He lives and breathes the ethos of simplicity, perfectionism, and obsession that’s at the core of my work and the company I’ve built around it. He’s here to build great products, and he’s here for the long-haul.
Right now, he’s helping me make support awesome again while we look for a long-term replacement for support. We’re not asking for support-liaison applications here, unless you happen to go to UCSD. Working and communicating in person is too valuable to go without.
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Long-term success in running a business, like anything in life, is all about how well your learn from your mistakes. It’s taken me far too long to fix our poorly run support, but I’m enormously happy that I avoided the same mistake again by holding out for my standards while passively searching for another engineer to run the show with.
Thanks so much for your loyalty and attention,
Brian.
