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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You learn who your users are — and what they value

When you’re running a business, it’s hard to overstate the importance of having your ear to the ground. In the same way that politicians are always trying to take the pulse of the common man and woman, leaders have to have a handle on how customers are actually using their products.

Even nearly 20 years after launching Jotform, I still spend at least an hour each day sifting through our support forum. I get so much data from these forums — what are the common complaints? What features would be helpful? Because I make it a point to stay on top of what our users are saying, patterns become evident that I wouldn’t otherwise know about.

It’s easy to assume you understand your users when you’re building a product. After all, you’re solving a problem you care about — maybe even one you’ve personally experienced. But building for yourself is very different from building for thousands (or millions) of people. When you’re not interacting with users regularly, it’s easy to project your own preferences onto them.

During those early years answering support emails myself, I realized that people don’t actually care about impressive-sounding integrations or tech-heavy features. They care about outcomes, plain and simple. Doing support helps you continue seeing your product through their eyes — as a tool that either simplifies their life, or doesn’t.

You build trust

Back in 2006, it was clear there was a market for a drag-and-drop form builder, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Several other formidable competitors — including Google — entered the form-building arena around the same time I did. It would have been very easy for me, a bootstrapper with no outside funding, to have been wiped clean off the map before I even released my first MVP.

That didn’t happen. One reason for our continued survival was because it was very obvious to my users that I took my business seriously. When I talked with customers about their issues, I really listened. I took feedback to heart and worked tirelessly to make my product better. That sort of commitment didn’t go unrecognized, and Jotform quickly developed a reputation for having excellent, personalized customer service.

Word-of-mouth referrals are worth so much more than a pricey ad spend, and a significant portion of our business in those nascent days came to us in exactly that way. When users know they can count on you to answer their questions and fix their problems, they stick around. They also tell other people.

It keeps your ego in check

Don’t get me wrong — it’s not always easy to hear honest feedback. As anyone who has spent time online knows, people can be blunt, if not downright mean. It’s hard not to take criticism personally, and even harder not to get defensive.

This is part of why I continue to spend time in our support forums, even as I’ve transitioned from a founder to a CEO and our user count has grown to 24 million: It keeps me grounded. Support conversations are honest — really honest. Users don’t sugarcoat things. They tell you exactly what’s broken, why they’re frustrated and what they wish your product could do. When you willingly step into that feedback loop, you’re getting the unfiltered real deal. It can hurt, but it also forces you to make better decisions based on lived user experience.

Spending time in customer support made Jotform better. It also made me better at my job. I’m incredibly glad I was able to hire a support team to handle all those tickets, but no founder should ever fully leave the trenches behind.

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