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Under the Radar

231: Support Expectations

 

00:00:00   Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development. I'm Mark O'Arment.

00:00:05   And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is never longer than 30 minutes. So let's get started.

00:00:09   So today I wanted to talk, or I guess a little bit of sort of checking in as well as discussing

00:00:14   some recent things I've been doing around customer support and around a sort of evolving philosophy

00:00:22   that I've been developing for customer support. So when I first started with most of my apps,

00:00:28   I did what I think most sort of indie developers do is that in the settings area of your app,

00:00:33   there is a button that you push that button and it sends an email to you. And that was how I

00:00:38   started off doing support. And you very quickly realized that, originally that goes just to like,

00:00:45   you know, my email. And that was first very deeply problematic, because then suddenly customer

00:00:50   support is being intermixed with your, you know, your work email, which is not a good idea. So then

00:00:55   you create a separate email account, you start going there, and then you start running into the

00:00:59   issues of like, well, this isn't works well to manage inside as mail, because support is a

00:01:04   different thing. And so you move it on to something. So ultimately, I moved it on to Help Scout.

00:01:08   And that's what I did for a long time as my customer support system for the most part.

00:01:14   And it works all right, generates a reasonable amount of emails every day. But in general,

00:01:22   that's scaled all right. And I've had people help me with it, especially because it's honestly,

00:01:27   especially around launching a new product, I tend to get a lot of negativity in the feedback you get

00:01:34   there. And that can be incredibly discouraging and incredibly, just emotionally difficult. And so

00:01:39   over the years, I've hired people to help me with that, to shield me from that as well as to make

00:01:45   it so it's not taking up too much of my time. And then all went well until Widgetsmith launched.

00:01:51   And Widgetsmith's launch was like, there's just a button in there. It's like, you know, email,

00:01:55   and it went to our Help Scout email. And it completely fell over as a method once,

00:02:01   because Widgetsmith's scale was just something that I'd never run into. And this is, you know,

00:02:05   I think I've mentioned a few times, but, you know, when Widgetsmith was having its crazy

00:02:09   first couple of weeks, I would get multiple emails per second into that system, which is completely

00:02:17   impossible to keep up with and to manage. And it just was a bit of a nightmare. And so at that

00:02:24   point, I replaced the kind of expectation in my mind that I was going to respond or read

00:02:30   all of the emails with instead I was putting a sort of an autoresponder to that. And the way

00:02:36   the system worked is if you emailed, you've got an autoresponse that had kind of a frequently asked

00:02:41   questions in it. And if the person responded to the frequently asked questions email, so essentially,

00:02:48   they've emailed us twice, then that would kind of get percolated into something that would actually

00:02:53   be seen by a person. And that worked reasonably well, or at least it made the problem invisible

00:03:00   to me, to a large degree, because suddenly my customer support queue is very small. And it seems

00:03:08   like people are getting, you know, it's like, well, there's not a lot of people who are emailing

00:03:13   back a second time, so things must be okay. One of the things I've been wanting to do for my updates

00:03:19   this fall was I was trying to revisit this and I was trying to understand what is the best way that

00:03:24   I can provide useful customer support to people. And kind of starting from the beginning of like,

00:03:30   why is this, why does this exist? Why am I providing customer support? What is its purpose?

00:03:35   What am I trying to do there? And it's funny, I was starting to think about it from a perspective,

00:03:39   in some ways of like the way that most games in the App Store don't have support,

00:03:44   generally, like it's not the kind of thing that you have like this concept of sort of this help desk

00:03:49   or this thing that you need to do, but it is certainly something that is part and parcel with

00:03:53   having, you know, an indie app, I think we've developed an expectation, this is what you do.

00:03:59   And in some ways, it's maybe to avoid getting bad reviews that you're providing an outlet for

00:04:05   people who are upset or confused or have issues with your app to funnel that into a way that is

00:04:12   not public facing, but it was also kind of like, why is this there? When and honestly, too, I also

00:04:18   wanted to understand, am I missing things in the way that I'm handling support right now? Are there

00:04:24   issues that are just sort of simmering under the surface that are slowly making the app worse over

00:04:30   time? And so the system that I've been working towards, and this is something that I've been

00:04:36   rolled out for a couple of weeks now, so I have some feedback on, is I moved to a system in

00:04:42   Widgetsmith now where in the settings area, there's a help button and you push on that. And right now,

00:04:47   what it's doing is it opens a website that is just the frequently asked questions in this kind of

00:04:53   more... I'm terrible at JavaScript and CSS, but it's designed to look a little bit more interactive.

00:05:00   So it just has the questions and you tap on a question and it expands and it collapses. And

00:05:05   I'm right at the bottom, it says, if you still have a question, you can still email me. And I've

00:05:09   separated those emails out to a different place so I can get a sense of people are emailing from the

00:05:15   old just sort of like the button that would just send an email and people who have gone to this

00:05:19   frequently asked questions area and then said they still had a question. And it's been very

00:05:25   interesting because as far as I can tell, it's like the majority of the people who were emailing

00:05:30   before, their question was one of the frequently asked questions and very few people are now going

00:05:37   all the way down to the bottom to tap that. And the people who are, the signal to noise there is

00:05:44   much higher, that the people who are going to this page, going to the bottom and hitting

00:05:49   are both motivated that they've done something that is a little bit more difficult than just,

00:05:53   you know, tapping and then starting to type their thing. I've had to be a bit more thoughtful about

00:05:57   it. And so I'm getting good suggestions or genuine bugs that are things that I need to be aware of

00:06:03   at a much higher rate than before where I feel like I would get a lot of support that was very

00:06:09   repetitive and very similar questions or things that are just, they're not really helping anything

00:06:16   or someone's just emailing to say they don't like it or it's confusing or things that are very

00:06:20   general and vague. But it's something that I've changed. And I thought that was, it's like,

00:06:25   I've been very impressed and pleased by the response of how simple of a change this is.

00:06:29   And it reminds me a little bit of a, at least I haven't looked at Overcast's help recently,

00:06:34   but I remember you had a similar thing where to get to the link to send you an email, you had to

00:06:40   do a little bit of work as a user. And I imagine that had a similar effect to put just enough of

00:06:46   a barrier to make the quality you get at the end is a bit higher. You know, I saw with previous

00:06:52   stuff, like with Instapaper, I forget exactly how it was in Instapaper, but it basically just had,

00:06:57   you know, like a support link in the setting screen somewhere. And it would just fire off

00:07:01   an email to me, you know, it would just bring up an email compose sheet. And I got so much support

00:07:07   email for Instapaper. It was, it was overwhelming. And I ended up, you know, trying to hire various

00:07:13   people to answer it for me. I had mixed success with that. I had some good experiences, some bad

00:07:19   experiences. And it just, it wasn't, it wasn't very good for anybody involved, honestly. People

00:07:26   weren't really getting, you know, they weren't getting access to me because I had to hire someone

00:07:31   and that's, it's different when you're doing it yourself. I'll get to that in a minute. But,

00:07:35   but yeah, it just, it wasn't, people really didn't get a lot of value out of that system basically.

00:07:40   And I didn't either. And I was, I was paying people and then I was disconnected from,

00:07:46   from what people were saying. And it was, it was kind of a weird situation. Whereas in Overcast,

00:07:51   Overcast has more users than Instapaper did, but I get way less email from it because what I did in

00:07:58   the, from the, from day one, you know, learning, you know, Overcast in many ways is like lessons I

00:08:04   learned from Instapaper implemented in, you know, in my next app, right? And this is one of those

00:08:09   lessons where I had this screen, this feedback screen, and I, and nowhere in the app does it say

00:08:15   support. It says feedback. And that's very intentional because support is subtly different

00:08:22   than feedback. Now, many people will email the feedback address with what is basically a support

00:08:26   request, but it's so few of them. And what, and I say in that screen, basically like, I'm one person,

00:08:34   I won't be able to answer most emails. And if you still want to send feedback, I'd love to hear it,

00:08:39   you know, I'll read it, but I won't reply. And that does put off some people, you know, I will

00:08:45   occasionally get a nasty review from somebody in the app store saying this developer doesn't provide

00:08:50   any support. But you know, in many ways, like you kind of are better off without a lot of those

00:08:56   very support needy people, because the, the value of putting a lot of your time into pleasing one

00:09:04   customer, when you're selling an app for a few dollars, or for free with ads or something,

00:09:09   the value of one customer is pretty quickly negated by you having to write more than like one or two

00:09:17   emails to them. So, so basically, like, you know, it's, it's, you're better off not having people

00:09:23   who need a lot of support as your customers, in most cases. Now, this is very different in

00:09:28   different contexts. So for instance, people who use my app, just as customers, that there's a

00:09:35   certain value of that to me. But people who, for instance, buy ads for their podcast, well, they're

00:09:41   giving me like hundreds of dollars. And so if they needed an answer to an email, I'm going to try

00:09:47   harder to answer that one, compared to, you know, somebody who is using a free app and is having

00:09:52   trouble, you know, deleting a podcast or something like that's, that's a more basic need that I feel

00:09:57   more comfortable just, you know, letting those go, or not responding to most of them. And, and that's

00:10:05   fine. But, you know, I think a lot of this comes down to setting expectations with your customers

00:10:12   or users in right in the app. As you said, most apps don't provide technical support. And people

00:10:20   get by, you know, people will respond differently. But I think largely, if you tell people right up

00:10:30   front, what to expect, good or bad, they will take it better than if their expectations are not

00:10:37   matched with the reality. So by me telling people right up front, I'm probably not going to respond

00:10:42   to your email, if you email me, most people are okay with that, you know, most people,

00:10:47   if you ask them, like, do you expect any a support email response from from an app that you use,

00:10:52   most people might say yes. But if you tell them right up front, this is not available here,

00:10:58   you know, I'll help you if I can, but this is mostly not not an available service that I provide.

00:11:02   Most people then will be like, Oh, all right. And they'll proceed with their day. So I find a lot of

00:11:09   people's reactions to whether you offer good or any support really comes down to just expectation

00:11:14   management. And if there's a mismatch, they'll be upset. But if you if you're very clear about what

00:11:20   you're capable of, and what you're not what you offer, and what you don't offer, I find that

00:11:24   actually goes a lot of the way towards pleasing people. Absolutely. It's about managing expectations,

00:11:29   I think both for your customer as well as for yourself. Like, I think I very easily can fall

00:11:35   into this trap of, yeah, it's like over overvaluing each individual interaction, because, I mean, the

00:11:42   nature of email is like, it's personal, like, this is I'm having a one on one interaction with a

00:11:47   particular person who is using something that I made, and they're confused, they're having a

00:11:52   problem, it isn't working right. It, you know, in the worst case, they've they've lost something

00:11:57   that they've worked hard on, you know, like, I even out then I'll get an email that someone who's,

00:12:01   they set up a widget the way that they liked it, and then for some reason, it's gone, or it isn't,

00:12:05   you know, some something happened that has caused them some harm. And that is difficult because it,

00:12:11   you know, it's like that's a personal reaction. And you're interacting one on one with someone

00:12:15   and that can be impactful, it can be hurtful, it can be difficult. But also, it's like, it can be

00:12:21   potentially productive. But I think, but I've definitely found for setting expectations for

00:12:25   myself is like, not that I want to be totally selfish about support, but it's like, I want to

00:12:30   structure my support system so that my expectation is that it is benefiting the overall app eco,

00:12:36   like the overall app itself, way more than it is benefiting any individual user. And it's like,

00:12:43   I want to use support as a way to make the experience better for everyone, not to

00:12:50   necessarily make the experience of that one person better, which is kind of a weird thing. But it's

00:12:55   increasingly where my mind is going to this, that what I'm trying to do is use support as a way for

00:13:01   me to identify what's confusing, identify where the problems are, that it's a, you know, a early

00:13:07   warning system if there are bugs or issues or problems. But beyond that, I don't want it to be

00:13:13   something that I'm creating an expectation. I think the way you handle it is great in terms

00:13:17   of just telling people straight up, "Hey, this is unlikely to be, you know, this is not going to be

00:13:25   a conversation we're going to have, this is likely just going to be something that you can let me

00:13:28   know about, and I will may or may not get back to you, but don't have a great expectation there."

00:13:33   But I think what I've really found interesting, and it's not like frequently asked questions is a

00:13:38   novel concept, but it's been really interesting to me how changing the expectation. So like, I

00:13:44   capture a question, I write a good answer to it once. And in some ways, what I'm saying is,

00:13:48   that's the only time I'm ever going to answer that question. I don't know if you ask that

00:13:53   same question again, in the email that you send me, it's like, I'm going to ignore you. That's

00:13:57   not helpful to me. But if it isn't one of those things that was captured, then that's good for

00:14:02   me to know. And also something that I think we'll get into after the break, I've also found really

00:14:07   interesting is, I can use the way people interact with the frequently asked questions as a means to

00:14:14   really quantitatively and qualitatively improve my app.

00:14:18   Yeah, and that to me, that is one of the big benefits of running your own support. You know,

00:14:25   I mentioned before, I've used people, I've hired people to do it for me, and I've done it myself,

00:14:29   I've spent more time doing it myself, you know, support, whatever I actually offer. But I spent

00:14:35   most of the time doing it myself, because I have found, something that Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater

00:14:41   Software told me years and years ago that kind of stuck with me, is that he answers all of his

00:14:46   own support email, as far as I know, I'm still today. But he said that one of the reasons he did

00:14:50   it was that, like, the burden of support email is its own motivation to him to minimize crashes and

00:14:59   bugs and the need for support in his apps. So it's like, it's a feedback mechanism, like, if he

00:15:04   doesn't want to get more email, or if he keeps getting the same emails over and over again about

00:15:08   some problem, then he's very motivated to then go fix that problem to then minimize all those

00:15:13   emails, you know. And this is one of the great things that indies have the ability to do this,

00:15:18   where most people don't. You know, most people who are working on multi-person teams or bigger

00:15:22   companies, you know, whatever the support volume is being generated, they're separated from that

00:15:29   in some way. So they might not realize that, oh, wow, we had like a 20% uptick this week in,

00:15:35   you know, people who can't find their account, maybe there's something wrong with that system,

00:15:40   or maybe there's a way that UI could be better. Or, you know, it's even in some ways like an

00:15:46   excuse. Like if you know that you have a support team to clean up your mess, you're more likely to

00:15:51   let a mess go, you know. So, so it's, when you do it all yourself, that's, it's such a closed,

00:15:59   tight feedback system. You not only see it all, but you also then have a feeling for what's normal

00:16:04   and what's not. And so for instance, if I start getting way more emails than usual about a certain

00:16:10   topic, then I know something has changed, something is going wrong in this area, and then I can go

00:16:15   look at it. And maybe, maybe I already know what it is. But maybe I don't. If I know like, you know,

00:16:18   the servers really haven't had any changes in the last two weeks. And the last three days, a bunch

00:16:23   of people are reporting problems that sound like server problems. And then I know I should probably

00:16:27   go investigate something there. And as one person running the whole operation, you have all that

00:16:31   stuff in your head, you're familiar with the whole system, you're seeing all the inputs. So you are

00:16:35   way more effective at responding to that kind of stuff. You just have to be super careful to not

00:16:40   end up chasing your tail as a result of this. It was the thing that I ran into many times when I do

00:16:46   my own support. And as part of this exercise, I have taken over like really answering and doing a

00:16:52   bunch of this myself just to make sure that I'm in that loop. And I think what's interesting is that

00:16:57   you just have to be so careful that you don't end up like chasing down the one problem that's

00:17:04   happening to like one person out of all of your users and spend a disproportionate amount of time

00:17:09   or energy or effort into something or being sort of trapped into the vocal minority kind of problem

00:17:17   where there's a few handful of people to keep asking you for a feature, but it's actually not

00:17:24   that it can make it feel like, "Oh, this is so in demand. This is so important. Lots of people

00:17:30   care about it." You build that feature and no one can, you know, it's like the five people who

00:17:34   emailed you were the five people who actually care about that. And everyone else doesn't. And so you

00:17:38   just have to be really on guard, I think, for if you're doing it yourself, I think what you're

00:17:43   saying, there's definitely a lot of benefits to that. There's a lot of improvements that can happen

00:17:46   to there. There's a lot of motivation, but just be really careful that you don't let it drive your

00:17:52   roadmap too much, that ultimately you should be in control of that and be doing things and deciding

00:17:58   on features that you think are going to impact the broad swath of your users, not just the five

00:18:03   people who keep emailing you asking for whatever their pet feature is. Right. But on the other

00:18:07   hand, like that is, it's one input of many, you know, like it, like there's, I think 37 signals

00:18:12   back forever now called Basecamp. But I think back when they were called 37 signals, they made,

00:18:16   they wrote something about feature requests. And the gist of it, if I remember correctly, is

00:18:20   that they don't like keep a document of feature requests. They just watch their customer feedback.

00:18:26   And if people keep requesting the same feature over and over again, that's a pretty good

00:18:32   indication they should probably do it. You know, going back to Daniel Jockett's thing about support

00:18:35   email, you know, kind of optimizing for less email. If people are asking for the same things over and

00:18:40   over again, you won't need to write them down in a document. You'll know because you'll be seeing

00:18:43   those emails all the time. And that is very different from like two people asking for it ever.

00:18:48   You know, like that I can classify like, you know, my Apple TV app in the latter category,

00:18:52   for sure. Nobody is asking for Apple TV app. Whereas there are certain features or behaviors

00:18:57   that people are asking for. Like every single week, I see new people asking for these same

00:19:02   things. So I just I know that those are features that are probably worth doing. Whereas the thing

00:19:07   someone asked for twice is probably not. We are sponsored this week by the Intrazone from

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00:20:32   Jared Ranerelle And so I think something that I've been doing that I think is really

00:20:36   interesting to this point of like using support as a way to understand how to improve your app

00:20:42   is the way that I structured my FAQs where it's right now it's just a webpage. You know,

00:20:48   if you open WidgetSmith, if you hit the support button, you'll see this. It just has a collection

00:20:53   of questions that are just and then if you tap on it, you tap on one, it expands out and shows you

00:20:58   the answer I wrote. I instrumented that with it just used the main WidgetSmith analytics thing

00:21:04   that I wrote, whatever months and months ago, which is a very basic private ultra private

00:21:10   analytics system that I wrote for WidgetSmith. And I instrumented it such that anytime someone taps

00:21:15   on one of the questions to get the answer, I get a essentially a counter that gets incremented inside

00:21:22   of my analytics system. And what's interesting about that is that now I have a sense of what

00:21:29   questions people are getting answered, or at least we're interested in asking when they went to the

00:21:36   frequently asked questions. And it's been really fascinating to me. It's like, I think intuitively,

00:21:43   I had a sense of some of the things, but having it in actual like tabular data form has been really

00:21:48   helpful. So for example, the second most popular question that's tapped on is how do I remove

00:21:54   widgets I no longer need? Which immediately jumps out to me, it's like, my UI is broken.

00:22:01   If that's the second most popular thing that people are curious about is how do I delete a widget?

00:22:06   It's like, you know, it's like, I use the standard sort of like swipe from right to left along the

00:22:10   table cell to get to expose the delete button. But I, for you, you know, slightly aesthetic reasons,

00:22:16   I hadn't put the, you know, sort of like edit button in the top corner to put it at the table

00:22:20   view into editing mode. But apparently not having that is causing a significant number of people

00:22:26   to be confused. And having that as the, you know, it's like, in this, you know, this tabular list of

00:22:32   what questions are most sort of interesting to people is really interesting as a result. I don't

00:22:38   think I would have guessed that that would be the thing that was causing that much confusion. It's

00:22:42   like the number one thing, I think is something that I would have guessed where it's essentially

00:22:46   the how do I add my widget to the home screen, which is the kind of like, slightly convoluted

00:22:52   way that iOS requires you to do it where you set it up in Widgetsmith, then you go and you long

00:22:56   press on your home button on your home screen, you get the plus you search Widgetsmith, you tap it,

00:23:00   you know, it's like, that really so much I can do with that, like I could do a little bit of

00:23:03   onboarding potentially, but in general, I'm okay with that being the number one frequently asked

00:23:08   question, but the number two should definitely not be how do you how do you delete your old widgets.

00:23:15   And so instrumenting your frequently asked questions or having some kind of actual hard

00:23:19   data analytics is something that I would strongly recommend you try if you go down this road,

00:23:25   this road, because it's been really interesting to have in real like, real numbers that I can go in

00:23:31   and check regularly. And I can see trends over time of how many people were interested in that

00:23:36   question. And obviously, I'm not collecting like, did that solve their problem? That's a much more

00:23:40   nuanced thing to measure. But if you tap on a question, you probably wanted to know the answer

00:23:45   to it. So either it's a really like click baity, interesting question that people are super

00:23:49   interested in. But more likely, it's people that was the problem that they were having or something

00:23:54   that they were once they saw that they were like, Oh, I can do that. And they were interested. And

00:23:59   similarly, like the third most popular one is what do the icons on the weather widgets mean?

00:24:06   It's like, okay, I can definitely do do a bit more about that and making sure it's a bit clearer in

00:24:12   the app about you know, what we know what the different you know, weather icons mean inside

00:24:16   there, at least, you know, or surface that in a better place in the app, because that shouldn't

00:24:20   be something that causes a lot of confusion. But apparently, it does. I love the idea of clickbait

00:24:25   support. Seven shocking tips for net worth feet. Yeah, that's, this is actually it's a really good

00:24:32   idea to to instrument this like that. I never even thought about that. But I actually, you're

00:24:38   kind of convincing me I've never had like an FAQ in the app, really. Or and this is actually a

00:24:45   really good idea. I might steal this idea. By all means, it's just an HTML page. So it's pretty easy

00:24:51   to, to adapt to. Yeah, because like, you know, a lot, you know, I do get a lot of similar questions,

00:24:57   you know, over time. And, and I do interpret those usually as, as, you know, feature requests, or,

00:25:02   you know, flags of usability needs. So for instance, one of the most common questions

00:25:08   I've gotten over overcast entire run of whatever it's been seven or eight years now, is how do I

00:25:13   mark a podcast as played? Because overcast doesn't really have a way to do that without like, just

00:25:20   listening to it until the end. Because I thought since the beginning, why do you need to do that?

00:25:25   Just delete it. But really, that's something people want to do. And so I, you know, as I'm

00:25:31   reimagining parts of the parts of the UI, now, I'm going to try to fit that in somewhere in some

00:25:35   useful way. But as you said, no one finds things on swipe actions. I know that from from Instapaper,

00:25:42   even. And I know that from from many, many years of having TableView based apps, that if the only

00:25:49   way to delete something is to swipe to delete it from a TableView, nobody will ever find it,

00:25:52   because only nerds know about that. Apparently, maybe I'm sure it's different now. But there's

00:25:57   still a lot of people who don't know about that. So you know, that that's why I've had to like, add

00:26:02   delete buttons, you know, anything, anything in a UI that is only accessible via a gesture of some

00:26:08   kind, you will have a lot of people who never know that feature is there or who have trouble finding

00:26:13   it. So that's why like, there's lots of every time I get like, an unsolicited redesign for overcast,

00:26:21   which, yeah, I know your intentions are good. Thank you. But but I'm really not interested.

00:26:26   But every time I get one of those, they always, you know, get overly clever with, oh, I'm gonna

00:26:32   I'm gonna hide, you know, so and so behind behind a painter gesture or a mode or a swipe. And no,

00:26:36   I know I've tried things like that. Trust me, that can't work here. But anyway, now this is this is

00:26:42   good. I, yeah, I think I'm gonna steal your system. And I did want to give one little tip before we go

00:26:48   of, you know, if if you're going to have some kind of, you know, messaging or ticketing or email based

00:26:54   system, I strongly suggest just start with email if you're the only person answering it, some kind of

00:26:59   you know, web based or you know, ticket based support management system. Those are fine. In

00:27:05   certain ways, they're they're great. If you have a multiple person team answering support, maybe like

00:27:10   you and somebody else or, you know, somebody else entirely that's not you and you want to be able to

00:27:13   like check in on how they're doing. That's different. But if it's just you answering, I

00:27:17   strongly suggest start with email, because it's probably fine. And you can probably do it without,

00:27:23   you know, adding anything to your setup and without getting more complicated. And people like

00:27:27   it. I as a customer hate filling out other people's ticketing systems. Now you can do something like

00:27:31   where they email in and then the system manages it. And you know, to them, it just looks like

00:27:35   email. Even that I kind of hate you, then you get those two auto responses, please respond above this

00:27:40   line, please leave this ticket number and the ticket and all this stuff. And it's just it kind

00:27:43   of it's cumbersome. So I suggest start with email if you can, chances are you won't have the support

00:27:48   volume where you'll need more than that anyway, unless you're hiring multiple people in which case

00:27:53   yeah, there's other benefits. But I would also say that you don't have to go through too much

00:27:57   effort to set up a new email for for a business domain, depending on how your how your email is

00:28:03   hosted. Like mine's hosted at fast mail, which again, I love not a sponsor, but I love them.

00:28:07   I've been with them forever. And fast mail is a thing where on any of their paid plans,

00:28:12   you can add I think any number of domains that you own. And then you can host aliases of any email at

00:28:19   that domain that just land in your regular inbox. So this is how I have all my stuff. I have domains

00:28:24   at overcast FM, I have ATP that FM for ATM membership emails. And I have both of those

00:28:29   domains just filtering into my main fast mail email account. And then in Apple's mail app,

00:28:35   under the account settings, you can add alternative email addresses that you might be

00:28:39   sending and receiving from. And so if you add them there, then mail will do the smart thing where

00:28:44   if you get an email to one of those aliases that's in that list on mail, if you reply,

00:28:50   you'll be replying from that same alias. So it'll it'll match it up automatically for you. And you

00:28:54   can change it if you want to. But that's that's the default behavior. So it's very nice. So this

00:28:57   is a very easy way to get started. Yeah. And I think for most people, I think you're absolutely

00:29:02   right. That's and that's the right place to start. And I think structuring your support so that you

00:29:07   email is there at the end, that's the final step, putting in front of that something that is more

00:29:12   frequently asked questions based, giving you a sense just releasing that load from you. And if

00:29:17   you are going to go down that road, I will highly recommend make your frequently asked questions

00:29:20   something that you can update remotely. So like, in my case, it's just a website, I've definitely

00:29:25   gone down the road of embedding it in the app. And then that's just a nightmare. You only want to have

00:29:30   to do an app, an app update in order to change, add a new question. Like if you get a lot of

00:29:34   people asking a question, you just add it to the website. And then it's just instantly deployed to

00:29:38   everybody. So you want something like that in front, email in the back, and I think you'll be

00:29:43   all set. Business in front, party in the back. Thanks for listening, everybody. And we'll talk

00:29:50   to you in two weeks. Bye.