Things that don't scale

There’s a saying in the start-up world that to get your new business off the ground, you’ve gotta do a lot of things that don’t scale.

Finding the first 20-30-50 customers, one by one, using DMs, cold emails, calling people you know, etc.

White-glove onboarding for every early customer, screen-sharing, setting things up for them.

Manually migrating data for customers switching from competitors.

Answering every support ticket yourself. Being reachable on personal channels.

Calling customers just to ask “what’s annoying you” instead of relying on a feedback form.

And the list goes on and on.

Most of these things can and should be either automated or delegated to team members as the business grows, but some are still worth doing. At least occasionally.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve done in-person onboarding for some of our new customers. I got in the car and drove to their offices to help them set up and configure Herodesk and ensure everything is running smoothly.

Obviously, that doesn’t scale… Me spending a whole day visiting one customer and setting up their account. It should either be delegated to our Customer Success team members or automated using AI and various guides.

But, nevertheless…

There’s a saying in Denmark that Jutland is further away from Copenhagen than Copenhagen is from Jutland (I live in Aarhus, Jutland). Well, last Friday it was the opposite, as I spent 2hrs 30min driving to Køge near Copenhagen and 3hrs and 30mins driving back.

Friday afternoon traffic across Sealand is a bitch…

Anyway, I made my way to our new customer, designbysi.dk, to help Magnus, Maja and the team set it all up and get started.

As many others joining Herodesk, they were migrating off a shared inbox in Outlook (Yikes!). It was a blast seeing their faces light up when I showed them feature after feature in Herodesk that’ll make their everyday lives so much easier.

Small things like how they can now see what each other is working on, so they avoid replying to the same customer email at the same time.

And big things, like how we can do two-way auto-translation of incoming and outgoing messages in all languages, and how we can integrate with their more than 30 apps and systems easily, showing customer data when and where needed.

And finally, of course: Our AI agents!

Setting up AI agents in Herodesk to automatically respond to customer questions via live chat and email 24/7. The agent is trained on their website data (fully scraped), Google Product Feed and has a webshop API integration, so it knows everything about all customers, all products and all orders. In addition, Custom Prompts instruct it on exactly how to handle various scenarios, such as returns, claims, and other scenarios specific to Design by Si.

We spent 3-4 hours together getting it all up and running, talking about "the good old days” (we know each other from my old job, too), and I got a tour of the location to better understand how they operate.

Slam dunk!

Next up: Holstebro (easy 1 hr 15 min drive) and Mayafreya.dk

This is one of my favourite customer cases!

MayaFreya.dk was one of our first customers. After a year or so, they left. They went with another tool that had some features we didn’t at the time.

Another year went by, and then I got an email from Jonas (the CEO) asking if they could get an update on what’s new at Herodesk, because they missed many of the things we did really well.

Turns out, in the meantime, we built what they were missing (plus some more), so 4 months ago they came back to Herodesk 🙏

As with pretty much all of our other customers, MayaFreya wanted to jump on the AI train, too! They asked if we could help set it up, and I offered to drive to their offices and do it in-person.

Same procedure as with DesignbySi: going through the various scenarios the AI agent should handle autonomously, ensuring it has the right knowledge and integrations, creating custom prompts that instruct it on how to work, and then running a lot of testing and fine-tuning.

Before I left, the agent had already helped the first customers via email and chat with both product and order questions.

And that’s the key with AI agents and AI automations: it’s not a turn-key solution where you simply click a button and “everything just works”. If someone tells you that, they’re lying. Reality is that every business operates in its own way and wants things customised.

That’s also why I spent two full days driving to our customers’ offices and helping them set it up.

There’s another saying in business: “You should work ON your business, not IN your business”. Meaning, don’t do trivial operational stuff; make sure you’re in the helicopter working on projects that are developing your business.

You can argue that me doing in-person onboarding is very much working IN the business. Something that should be delegated to a team member.

But I look at it differently. I see it as an outstanding opportunity to learn and see with my own eyes how our product is working for our customers. Something I can use to DEVELOP our product and business.

And yes, from both meetings, I came home with a full page of notes with things we can improve.

That’s the thing with “doing things that don’t scale”. Sometimes, it’s just necessary to get shit done and move the needle. Other times, it can be an opportunity to learn something that actually helps you develop the business.

I won’t be doing in-person onboarding for all our new customers (not enough days in the week for that), but I will continue to go to our customers’ offices once in a while for onboarding meetings, feedback sessions, or whatever is needed to learn!

And I will also continue to do our recurring email to all customers, asking: “What’s the one thing we could do better that would have the biggest impact for you?” and receiving, reading and replying to all the feedback we get (and implementing as much of it as possible afterwards!).

So continue doing things that don’t scale and see them as opportunities to learn and develop the business.