As CEO, I do customer support — and it's the best thing I've ever done for my business

As CEO, I do customer support. And it's the best thing I've ever done for my business.

Early on in startups, dealing with customer problems is a pain in the neck. Tickets come in at the worst possible moments. The issues are messy, the users are frustrated, and none of it feels like "real" CEO work. So most founders outsource it as soon as they can afford to.

Here's the problem.

What you lose when you outsource support

When you hand off customer support, three things quietly disappear:

1. You stop truly knowing your customers' pain points. Not the polished version in a survey — the raw version, in their own words, at 11pm when something just broke.
2. You stop showing that your company really cares. A templated reply from a support queue feels like a templated reply from a support queue. Customers can tell.
3. You stop building trust. Trust compounds through small, specific, human moments. A ticket handled personally by the founder is one of those moments. A ticket handled by a script is not.

Each of those losses seems small in isolation. Together, they're the reason "we're pivoting based on customer feedback" so often means "we're guessing, because we stopped listening."

What happens when the CEO answers

When a customer messages support and the founder replies — not with a signature block and a canned response, but with "hey, I saw this, let me fix it right now" — something shifts.

The customer feels respected. Their problem is real enough that the person running the company chose to handle it personally. That feeling is rare, and it's remembered.

Combine that with trust, and success is almost automatic. People tell their friends. They stick around through your bugs. They tolerate the things your product doesn't do yet, because they know the person who will build them is the same person they already talked to.

How I actually do it at Papermark

A few things that make this sustainable:

• One inbox, no layers. Support, sales, and bug reports all land in the same place. I triage, I reply, I escalate to engineering (also me, often).
• Reply fast, fix faster. A 15-minute reply with "I see it, looking now" beats a perfectly composed two-hour answer.
• Every ticket is a product meeting. If two people hit the same edge case in a week, it's in the next release. Support is the roadmap.
• Public by default. Most of our issues live on GitHub. Customers can watch us fix their bug in real time.

The uncomfortable truth

You will not scale this forever. At some point you'll hire the first support person. That's fine. But do it late, not early, and when you do, hire someone who genuinely cares — then keep a slice of the inbox yourself anyway.

The day you stop reading customer messages is the day you start building the wrong product. The cost of a support ticket is 10 minutes. The cost of losing touch with your users is the company.

If you're a founder reading this: open your support inbox right now. Reply to the oldest unanswered message yourself. Notice how much you learn in the next five minutes.