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Key Takeaways Direct customer support involvement led to vital product improvements and business scalability.
Personalized customer service built trust and earned word-of-mouth referrals, establishing a strong user base.
Regular user interaction ensures the company stays grounded and responsive to actual customer needs.
In Jotform’s early days, the entire customer support team consisted of just one very busy, tired and overworked person: me.
One evening as I was preparing to leave, I got a support ticket from a small ecommerce founder in Canada whose online form wasn’t behaving the way it should. Her payment form wasn’t connecting to the payment processor, and every attempt ended in an error message that made no sense.
I understood her frustration. As a founder myself, I was acutely aware of the pain of trying to run a business and feeling like nothing was going your way. When I dug into her form, I found the problem a few minutes later: a mismatch between test mode and live credentials. It wasn’t her mistake — the toggle between the two modes was buried deep in the settings, and even I, the person who literally built the product, almost missed it.
That support ticket successfully solved one customer’s problem. But far more importantly, it forced me to redesign that part of the product that wasn’t cutting it with users.
As my business began to scale, I eventually hired full-time customer support staff to handle the many inquiries we were being flooded with daily. Was I relieved not to be fielding these requests all day, every day? Yes. But I also wouldn’t trade that experience for the world. Here’s why.
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