Issue No.7

Richard Huffaker

In our last newsletter, I talked about hitting a wall at website builder Weebly, where I was an early employee. When I started, we were getting about 600 to 800 support emails a week. Within a few months, it was over 2,000. At our peak, it was 20,000.

I was drowning. We had eight people handling 8,000 emails a week at one point. Seeking advice, I got on a call with the support lead at Mailchimp. He sounded so incredibly calm. I thought, "How is this man so relaxed right now? All I do is work." It sounded like he was swaying in a hammock. It turned out they had the exact same email volume as we did, but they had a team of 35 people. That one conversation broke the spell and finally got me permission to hire more folks.

But finding the right people is hard. I wasn't looking to open a massive call center, or to hire reps who relied on a script. I wanted people technical enough to wrap their heads around complex website issues, but friendly and engaging in writing. Most importantly, I wanted their own voice to come through. I wanted customers to be able to tell an email from Jennifer apart from an email from Kenny.

I ended up finding amazing, overqualified talent in unexpected places, like hiremymom.com. Keep in mind, this was 2010, well before remote work was standard. I found a technical writer in Georgia who used to write documentation for archaic phone systems. I hired a college kid in Canada studying software engineering. They were brilliant. (Fun fact: because my remote support team was the only group not in the San Francisco office, and we were using AIM to chat, I ended up introducing this new thing called Slack to the company.)

I also learned that knowing what you're doing matters more than pleasantries. I had a phone on my desk, and sometimes it would ring and disrupt my flow. I'd pick it up and just say, "Weebly, what do you want?" The customer would be completely taken aback — they expected a robot or a highly polished greeting. But while they were stammering, I'd already used their caller ID to pull up their account, issue a refund, and add six free months to their plan. They loved it. They were calling for a solution, and I gave it to them immediately.

But the real secret to scaling our support was a chain of trust. Early on, our co-founder Dan sent automated plain-text emails to new users, and I sent a second blast. Because they looked like real emails, people replied directly to them.

Once we hit scale, neither of us could keep up. So, I started answering Dan's emails as Dan. And my two most trusted hires — the technical writer in Georgia, and the engineering student in Canada — started answering my emails as me. I more or less became Dan. They became me.

That's the lesson. When you bring someone on, don't try to forcefully scale yourself. Don't try to clone yourself. Trust them enough to let them take over, and bring other people's humanity into your org.

Justine and Kat explain Quo

You made the hire. Now let them in.

Justine Delgadillo

Kat Buffington

Your new hire doesn't need to become you. They do need access to your history with the customer: the conversations, the context.

That's why Quo has shared numbers.

With a shared number, your new hire can call and text from the same number your customers already know — and they'll have the full conversation history in front of them. No one has to start from scratch.

Here's how to set it up:

Add your new hire to your shared number: Go to Settings, Phone numbers, select the number you wish to share, then go to Users, Add users. They'll immediately see the full conversation history.
Coach behind the scenes: If a new hire gets stuck on a call, message, or voicemail, they don't need to forward it to you. They can just click the chat icon from the popup menu to start an internal thread. Right beneath the customer's text, they can tag you with an @mention to ask, "Hey, how should we handle this refund?" You'll get a notification in your Activity feed; you can reply internally. Then they can respond to the customer with confidence.
Track action items: Once the customer is taken care of, you can click the three dots (…) above any internal comment and select "Mark as resolved" to complete the action item.

You can stay in the loop without being in the way, and they have what they need to run with it. Richard didn't have any of this in his AIM days!

Watch this quick video to see how easy it is to set up shared numbers for your business:

Founders Corner

How to make your next hire count

Daryna Kulya

At some point, every founder has to answer the same tough question: who do you trust to take a critical part of your business and run with it?

Richard talked about building that chain of trust. But before you can hand anything off, you have to find the right person.

Over the years, I've tracked every hire I've made at Quo. Here are two lessons I wish I'd learned earlier.

1. Identify the candidate's 'major' and 'minor.' The key isn't knowing every aspect of the role. It's identifying the two or three things that are truly critical for the next 18 months — and building your search around those. I think of it as a major and a minor. Say you need a Head of Marketing, but you're really creating a new category and need tons of market education. That's probably someone with a major in product marketing and a minor in growth. That's a much sharper profile than "marketing leader," and it dramatically improves your odds.

2. Ditch the 30-60-90 day plan. I used to ask every leadership candidate for one. The answers were always too vague, and candidates were missing the context to say anything meaningful. What works better: pick one specific, real challenge the role will face and ask how they'd approach it. Something like: how would you handle a customer who's threatening to leave over a price increase? Or what would your first 30 days of outreach look like for our core customer? You'll learn exactly how someone thinks, without any of the fluff.

And speaking of finding the right people, we're hiring at Quo. If you're someone who cares about helping small businesses win, or you know someone who might be, check out our open roles.