You probably think of "tech support" as the bottom of the food chain. "Shit flows downhill" and all that. After all:

Tech support deals with insane customers. Tech support answers the phone; a job even salesmen don't want. Tech support keeps angry customers at bay while having no power to effect change.

Yep, that sounds lowly. Dismal too — how would you like to deal with an irate voice screaming at you when you know how to fix the problem but lack the authority to do it? This is a masochistic job for a poor slob with no other job prospects, right? If this is your attitude, your conception of tech support is completely backwards and you're missing out on important channels for marketing, product development, and sales. The unexpected face of your company We've all been jarred by someone's voice not matching their picture. Take English footballer David Beckham, the quintessential picture of manly sportif — washboard abs, ex-captain of the English national team, and married to Posh Spice. But then he opens his mouth. It's like Kermit the Frog got kicked in the balls. (Oh, sorry UK folk, I mean kicked in the bollocks.) It's so unexpected it's the only thing you remember. Of the 3,204,523 pub conversations where someone said "Have you heard him speak?" maybe only 17 could tell you what he actually said. You assume your home page is the public face of your company, but what happens when you open your mouth? What happens when your bullet points collide with your behavior? For most of your customers, tech support is the only human interaction they'll have with you. Are you really going to leave that up to your worst-treated, least-paid, least-qualified employees? Tech support is sales At Smart Bear we made millions of dollars in both individual and enterprise sales without "sales." Well, at least without the usual definition of "sales" — a collection of processes, personalities, and management single-mindedly focussed on hauling in revenue on a quarterly schedule. How did we get six-figure deals without playing golf or using Salesforce? Simple: Our tech support was sales. You could say the purpose of tech support is to answer questions or to unstick people who are confused, but I say the purpose of tech support is to make your customers fantastic at their jobs, which happen to involve your product. (Yes, I'm flagrantly paraphrasing the legendary Kathy Sierra, but the idea applies as much to tech support as to product development.) So this means you don't just help them locate a command in the menubar, you find out what they're trying to accomplish and help them do that. You don't just explain a feature but help them use the result to impress their boss. You don't just apologize because you don't have the feature they want, you help them work around it and be successful anyway. You know your product and problem-space better than your customers, so it's not that hard to make them far more successful than they would be stumbling around without calling tech support. Enabling your customers isn't just about your product, but rather your entire company. Make your customer awesome and she'll give you money so she can keep being awesome. That's sales. A pleasant surprise Everyone's stereotype of tech support is negative. Oh the tales:

Ask tech support how to change the font and they'll tell you to reboot your laptop. Ask tech support to change your billing address and they up-sell you on three things you don't want. Calling tech support requires a GPS to navigate the labyrinth of menu options (which may have changed), wait-queues, and typing in your account number 3 times "for security purposes," as if someone who stole your account number is incapable of typing it more than once.

When your customers expect a turd sandwich and you deliver a turkey club with chipotle mayonnaise, you earn major bonus points, like users twittering about your service, people switching to your service because of tech support, or customers not only following your Tweets but instructing their followers to do the same. Oh look! Apparently tech support is a better "social media outreach" program than hiring interns to spray comments on random blogs. Are you surprised? They say "under-promise, over-deliver," and tech support has "under-promise" built in! Sure super-fantastic tech support is best, but even if you merely act like a human being you're already ahead. If you just answer email with a non-automated response you're killing it. Why pass up such an easy opportunity to thrill a customer? Isn't "a pleasant surprise" too rare in business, and don't you want to be known as the company where it happens every day? The closest thing to getting "outside the building" while staying inside the building The Internet is abuzz with Steve Blank's phrase that everything you need to know about your customers is "outside the building," meaning that real customer development means talking to folks face to face, seeing their problems in the wild, and watching their faces react to your pitch, not brainstorming around a whiteboard and twiddling the font size in your PowerPoints. And I agree! Still, for the Work-a-preneur or the bootstrapper with no travel budget it's hard to get outside the building. Yes you should try as much as you can — it's worth it — but what about the other 94% of the time that you're at your desk, by which I mean the coffeeshop table closest to the power outlet that isn't loose? Tech support is the next-best thing. Tech support is where people complain about what's not working, what's missing, and what's confusing. But it's not enough to just catalog problems! The insights lurk in the meta-questions. If someone's confused, for example, the immediate task is to set them straight, but there's valuable product development to be had:

What caused the confusion in the first place? Is my customer's world-view different from mine? Is our terminology wrong? Are we using the wrong metaphors? Do I need to optimize the new-user experience instead of the expert-user experience?

Those are tactical questions stemming from the immediate problem, but then there's even more interesting strategic questions:

Does this hiccup belie a customer pain-point I didn't know existed but I can solve? Is there enough evidence of a conceptual mis-match that I should pivot? Is there a new product idea here? If they're abusing my product to get what they really want, can I provide what they really want from the start?

This last line of questioning is exactly how Smart Bear came to be a company about peer code review and not "version control data mining." If I hadn't paid attention attention to these meta-questions, you wouldn't be reading this right now. Yes, it's that critical. To answer these you have to go back and forth with customers to hack into the root cause. You have to see hundreds of emails so you get a gut-feel for what customers are experiencing — something you can't get from a Incident Summary Report or somesuch automation. Tech support is the closest, most honest chance for product development — certainly more straightforward than squeezing it through traditional "sales." Here's where real users discover and report on your product. Are you listening, or just throwing it away? What else? What else can tech support do if you're willing to give it the attention and power it deserves? Or do you think I'm wrong and it really is better to have $1/hour people protect you from those inane customers? Leave a comment and join the conversation.

I remember "disruptive" when it was called "paradigm shift." That phrase died during the tech-bubble along with "portal" and "think outside the box," yet the concept has returned. Don't follow along.

When I get pitched — usually by someone raising money — that they "have something disruptive," a little part of me dies. You should be worrying about making something useful, not how disruptive you can be. "Disruptive" is the in-vogue word for the opposite of "incremental improvement." A disruptive product causes such a large market shift that entire companies collapse (the ones who don't "get it") and new markets appear. Disruptive is fascinating, disruptive changes the world, disruptive makes us think. Disruptive also sometimes generates billions of dollars, which is why venture capitalists have always loved it and always will. But disruptive is rare and usually expensive. It's hard to think of disruptive technologies or products that didn't take many millions of dollars to implement. Most of us don't have access to those resources, and many of us don't care, because we'd rather work on an idea we actually understand and can build ourselves, an idea that might make us a living and be useful to people. There's nothing wrong with incremental improvement. What's wrong with doing something interesting, useful, new, but not transcendental? What's wrong with taking a known problem with a known market and just doing it better or with a fresh perspective or with a modern approach? Do you have you create a new market and turn everyone's assumptions upside down to be successful? Should you? I'm not so sure. Here's my argument: 1.  It's hard to explain the benefits of disruption. Have you tried to explain Twitter someone? Not the "140 characters" part — the part about why it's a fundamental shift in how you meet and interact with people? Hasn't the listener always responded by saying, "I don't need to know what everyone had for lunch. Who cares? What's next, 'I'm taking a dump?'" They don't get it, right? But it's hard to explain. There are ways to elucidate the utility of Twitter, but even the good ones are lengthy and require listeners with patience and open minds — two attributes in short supply. "It's hard to explain" should not be a standard part of your sales pitch. "You just need to try it" and "trust me" don't cut it. That may be OK for Twitter — today — but what about the 100 other social-networking-slash-link-sharing networks that didn't survive? Ask them about selling intangible benefits. 2.  It's hard to sell disruption, because people don't want to be disrupted. If you're reading this you're probably more open to new ideas and new products than most, because you're inventing a new product, starting a company, or you're just ruffled because I'm pissing on "disruptive" and you're looking for nit-picky things to argue with me about. But most people are creatures of habit. They don't want their lives turned upside down. They launch into a tirade of obscenities if you just rearrange their toolbar. When they hear about a new social media craze they cringe in agony, desperately hoping it's a passing fad and not another new goddamn thing they'll be aimlessly paddling around in for the next decade. Change is hard, so a person has to be experiencing real pain to want change. Selling a point-solution for a point-problem is easier than getting people to change how they live their lives. Identifying specific pain points and explaining how your software addresses those is easier than trying to tap into a general malaise and promising a better world. 3.  Most technology we now consider "disruptive" wasn't conceived that way. Google was the 11th major search engine, not the first. Their technology proved superior, but "a better search engine" was hardly a new idea. In retrospect we say that Google transformed how people find information, and further, how advertising works on the Internet. Disruptive in hindsight, sure, but the genesis was just "incrementally better" than the 10 search engines that came before.  (Or 18.) Scott Berkun gives several other examples in a recent BusinessWeek article. He highlights the iPod — an awesome device, but not the first of its kind. Rather, there were a bunch of crappy devices that sold well enough to prove there was a market, but no clear winners. Here an innovation in design alone was enough to win the market. Not inventing new markets, not innovative features, not even improving on existing features like sound quality or battery life — just a better design, unconcerned about "disrupting" anything else. Setting your sights on being disruptive isn't how quality, sustainable companies are built. Disruption, like expertise, is a side-effect of great success, not a goal unto itself. 4.  The disruptors often don't make the money. The construction of high-speed Internet fiber backbones and extravagant data centers fundamentally changed how business is conducted world-wide both between businesses and consumers, but many of the companies who built that system went bankrupt during the 2000 tech bubble, and those who managed to survive have still not recovered the cost of that infrastructure. They were the disruptors, but they didn't profit from the disruption. Disruptive technology often comes from research groups commissioned to produce innovative ideas but unable to capitalize on them. Xerox PARC invented the fax machine, the mouse, Ethernet, laser printers, and the concept of a "windowing" user interface, but made no money on the inventions. AT&T Bell Labs invented Unix, the C programming language, wireless Ethernet, and the laser, but made no money on the inventions. Is it because disruptors are "before their time," able to create but not able to hold out long enough for others to appreciate the innovation? Is it because innovation and business sense are decoupled? Is it because "version 1" of anything is inferior to "version 3," and by the time the innovator makes it to version 2 there are new competitors — competitors who don't bare the expense of having invented version 1, who have silently observed the failures of version 1, and can now jump right to version 3? "Why" is an interesting question, but the bottom line is clear: Disruption is rarely profitable. 5.  Simple, modest goals are most likely to succeed, and most likely to make us happy. It's not "aiming low" to attempt modest success. It's not failure if you "just" make a nice living for yourself. Changing the world is noble, but you're more likely to change it if you don't try to change everything at once. I made millions of dollars at Smart Bear with a product that took an existing practice (peer code review) and solved five specific pain points (annoyances and time-wasters). Sure it wasn't worth a hundred million dollars, and it didn't turn anyone's world inside-out, but it enjoys a nice place in the world and it is incredibly fulfilling to see people happier to do their jobs with our product than without it. Had I tried to fundamentally change how everyone writes software, I'm sure I would have failed. I made less money personally at ITWatchDogs, but the company was profitable and sold for millions of dollars. We took a simple problem (when server rooms get hot, the gear fails) and provided a simple solution (thermometer with a web page that emails/pages you if it's too hot). There were many competitors, both huge (APC with $1.5 billion market cap), mid-sized (NetBotz with millions in revenue and funding), and small (sub-$1m operations like us). We had something unique — an inexpensive product that still had 80% of the features of the big boys — but nothing disruptive. Had we tried to fundamentally change how IT departments monitor server rooms, I'm sure we would have failed. There's nothing wrong with modesty. Modest in what you consider "success," and modest in what you're trying to achieve every day: My daughter convinced me that insisting something be Deeply Meaningful With Purpose can sometimes suck the joy from it.  --Kathy Sierra Of course it's wonderful that disruptive products exist, improving life in quantum leaps. And it's not wrong to pursue such things! But neither is it wrong to have more modest goals, and modest goals are much more likely to be achieved. You must have your own thoughts on this subject! Leave a comment and let's continue the conversation.

I sold my company, Smart Bear, in December of 2007. I haven't talked about it at all on this blog, and it's time I spill my guts about the whole affair. You'd think selling a company would be a glamorous, exuberant experience, but I was surprised at the reactions I got. These are actual quotes:

"How could you sell your baby? I'm shocked." "I thought you said things were going well. Hmm." "You're such a sell-out! You used to be one of the few cool people I knew."

Interestingly, 100% of the negative reactions were from people who had never started their own company. But that doesn't make them wrong, and it doesn't make their words sting less, especially when they're your friends. Now that almost two years have passed, I can relate exactly why "selling my baby" was right for me. Hopefully this thought process is interesting to you and possibly useful in the happy event that you're faced with the same choice, but the truth is I just need to get this off my chest. I need to explain to those who still consider me a sell-out. You've probably heard about Noam Wasserman's "Rich or King" choice: Company founders are either in it for the money ("Rich") or in it to build a lifestyle and personal identity ("King"). FogCreek and 37signals are built to be "King;" all venture-funded companies are built to be "Rich." Noam says that successful founders make the "Rich or King" decision up front, and that though it doesn't matter which path you take, you must be consistent in your actions. You can't mix "be king" tactics with "get rich" end goals. Except I did mix "Rich" and "King," and it worked. See, it's good to be "King," but what do you do when you're at Trudy's "North Star" Tex-Mex Restaurant tucking into a chile relleno (with salsa verde, black beans, and the ground beef filling), and the guy across the table looks you in the eye and offers you enough money that you never have to work again? I was always in it for the money, especially in the form of acquisition. Everyone who came to work at Smart Bear was indoctrinated with this attitude in no uncertain terms; on more than one occasion I had put it: "We're simple country whores — we'll do anything for money." Profit was the rule behind every choice we made. Although the end goal was always acquisition, my attitude was (and still is) that the best way to get yourself acquired is to be profitable. Profits prove the business is operating well. Profits validate the market. Profits make minimum valuation easy. Profits mean the buyer converts balance-sheet money into bottom-line profit-and-loss money — a trade every large company wants to make. Most of all, profits mean you don't need to sell, which gives you the ability to walk away from a deal. You have little negotiating power in any deal unless you can happily walk away. On the other hand, I knew I would only be happy building a genuine, great company, where the product solves a real pain, where customers are given white-glove service, where "tech support" is the only sales force, where we leave the world a little better than we found it, and where every employee is smart and gets things done and is trusted with any decision. And I wanted the ego-inflating trappings of running a company. It's cool at parties to say "I run my own company." I wrote a book that got so popular (in my little corner of the world) that people would bring it up to me to sign. (We gave the books away for free so the joke was that by signing I doubled its value.) When I walked onto a tradeshow floor it was like Norm on Cheers — I knew everyone and they knew me. I got to present at cool venues like Joel and Neil's Business of Software Conference. And I write this blog, shamelessly exploiting the fact that Smart Bear (and two other companies) were successful to convince you that I'm worth reading. In short, although the goal was "Rich," I achieved it by behaving like the goal was "King." I don't know why people find this contradictory; after all, acting like "King" means building a long-term, sustainable business, and that's exactly the kind of business that gets acquired. Still, because "King" was enjoyable and Smart Bear was profitable, I still need to explain why becoming a "sell-out" was the right choice. The first thing to understand is the non-linear relationship between "cash in personal savings" and "financial freedom":

There's a line you cross where your savings alone will fund a reasonably lavish lifestyle. At the risk of sounding like George Bush, this is a Freedom Line — freedom from restrictions about what you can do with your life, family, and career. My observations:

A movement from left of the line to right of the line changes your life fundamentally, giving you the freedom to do whatever makes you happy, forever. If you're crossing from left to right, it doesn't matter how far to the right you go. (Sure, $100m is a different lifestyle than $10m, but it's not as critical to lifestyle or happiness as just crossing the line.)

1 is what was offered to me at Trudy's Tex-Mex. #2 means it almost didn't matter what the offer was, so long as it was big enough.

Some people gave me a hard time about #2. The typical argument was: Your company is growing 100% year over year. It's profitable and throwing off cash. Why not wait another year and let revenues double again, which will make the company six times more valuable (assuming 3x revenue valuation, a reasonable ballpark for a growing software company). Here's the best analogy I've come up with to describe why this is flawed logic. It's called the Box Game: Imagine I have two opaque boxes. Box A contains $10. Box B has a 50% chance of containing $20, and a 50% chance of containing nothing at all. You pick either box and take whatever's inside. Which box do you pick? Of course statistically there's no difference, so this isn't a question of math or economics or intelligence; it's a measure of your attitude towards risk. Most people pick box B. After all, the difference between $10 and $20 is trivial and it's more fun and exciting to pick B. But what if the numbers were different? Now box A holds $5,000,000. Box B either holds $10,000,000 or nothing, 50/50 chance. Which do you pick? You pick box A. Of course! Because it moves you from the left of the line to the right. And because a "chance of moving even further" isn't worth giving up the certainy of that life-altering event. This is my argument in favor of #2 and against "wait and see." This is why I sold. In my case, the correctness of my choice was made painfully clear by the economic crash in 2008. Had I held out for "another year and far more money" — box B — I would have found an empty box. I know this for a fact — another company (can't say who, sorry!) was offered a deal at the same time I was. This founder wanted to roll the dice (box B) and delayed the buyer. Two quarters passed and revenue failed to grow; the buyer nixed the deal. Months later with the recession in sight, the founder approached the buyer again, this time willing to accept a low offer. The buyer refused; that ship had sailed. There are those for whom this calculus doesn't apply because they want to be "King" no matter what. I'll bet Jason Fried wouldn't sell 37signals for $100,000,000; neither would Joel Spolsky sell FogCreek. Are Joel and Jason being irrational? Of course not. But neither was I. As of December 2007, I have the freedom to work on any project I want for the rest of my life while simultaneously providing for my family, never again worrying about bills, debt, having a place to sleep, or sending our daughter to any college she wants. I can stay home with my wife and new baby girl for as long as I want, having all the precious time and experiences and memories that they say money can't buy. But, in the sense of securing that freedom, it can. And by crossing the line, I did. Are you disappointed? Am I a sell-out? Comments welcome.

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