You hired someone. You stepped back. The tickets kept coming.
So you hired another person. Tickets still coming. Response times getting worse, not better. Everyone busy, nothing moving.
Welcome to the inbox that never clears.
Here's what's actually happening. You don't have a staffing problem. You have a routing problem. Every ticket lands in the same place, gets picked up by whoever's available, and handled differently every single time. No triage. No priority logic. No way to tell what's urgent from what just feels urgent.
So everything gets treated like a five-alarm fire. Which means nothing actually gets treated like one.
The other thing nobody tells you: without a triage system, your best people spend their day on the easiest tickets. Not because they're lazy — because easy tickets close fast and fast closures feel like progress. The gnarly ones, the ones that actually need attention, sit there aging quietly at the bottom of the queue.
Meanwhile, engineering starts getting pinged. Just quick questions, at first. "Hey, do you know what causes this error?" Then it's daily. Then it's a running joke that isn't really a joke. More people won't fix this. Structure will.
A basic triage system. Agreed response tiers. A clear line between what support handles and what gets escalated, and to whom. None of this needs to be complicated. It needs to exist.
Because an inbox without structure isn't a support function. It's a room where problems go to wait.
Next time: what happens when engineering gets pulled in — and why they start avoiding Slack.
Let's take a step aside and talk about something nobody thinks about until it's too late.
Somewhere right now, a founder is running their entire support operation out of a shared Gmail inbox with three unread filters and a spreadsheet their intern built in 2022.
They have no idea how many tickets came in last week. No idea how long they took to resolve. No idea which issues keep coming back. No idea which customers are quietly furious.
But they do know one thing. It feels busy.
Busy isn't a metric.
A proper ticketing system tells you what's actually happening. Volume by category. Response and resolution times. Repeat issues that should have been fixed at the source. Automation handling the obvious stuff so humans can focus on the things that actually need a human.
Without it you're not managing support. You're just reacting to it. Every single day. Indefinitely.
The good news: this isn't complicated to fix. The tools exist. They're not expensive. Setting them up properly takes days, not months.
The bad news: nobody does it until something breaks badly enough to force the conversation.
Don't wait for that conversation.
You just closed a round. Headcount is green. First thing on the list — hire someone to "handle support."
Totally reasonable. Completely normal. Almost always a mistake.
Not because hiring is wrong. Because of what you're actually handing off.
You, the founder, have been doing support for 18 months. In your head, you carry everything. Why customers get confused at step three of onboarding. Which error message is actually a billing bug in disguise. Which type of complaint means the customer is about to leave, and which one just means they're having a bad Tuesday.
None of that is written down anywhere.
So your new hire shows up, eager, ready to go. And you point them at the inbox.
That's it. That's the handoff. An inbox and a vague "you'll figure it out."
Two weeks later, tickets are taking longer to resolve than when you were doing it yourself.
Customers are getting generic answers. The same questions keep coming in and nobody's noticing the pattern. Your new hire is drowning and too afraid to say so.
And you're confused, because you hired someone good.
You did. That's not the problem.
The problem is you handed them chaos and called it a job. No playbook. No escalation path. No definition of what a good answer even looks like. Just an inbox, a password, and a ‘good luck’.
The hire didn't fail. The setup did.
This is the most common mistake I see at seed stage. Not hiring too late. Not hiring the wrong person. Hiring the right person into a system that doesn't exist yet — and then wondering why things got worse.
Before you post that job spec, write down what you know. Even badly. Even in a Google Doc at midnight. Because right now that knowledge lives only in your head, and the moment you step away from the inbox, it walks out the door with you.
Next time: what happens when the inbox never clears — and why throwing more people at it makes it worse.
Why don't we talk about the people nobody talks about. The ones keeping your precious SaaS alive at 11pm while you're off celebrating your seed round.
Customer support. The thankless engine room of every startup. They fix your mess, absorb your customers' rage, and get a 'thx' if they're lucky. Sometimes not even that.
Right. So. Let's follow a company from the very beginning and watch what actually happens — through the eyes of the people answering the tickets.
Pre-seed stage. It's 11pm. Founder's just closed the laptop. Holiday mode. Then — ping. A customer can't get the core feature to work. The core feature. Brilliant.
So they open it. Fix it. Crawl into bed at midnight telling themselves this is temporary. It isn't.
Most founders are embarrassed to admit they're doing support themselves. As if it's beneath them. As if the CEO answering tickets is somehow a sign of failure. It isn't.
Doing support yourself at pre-seed is the most useful thing you can do. Not because you're a hero. Because you're an idiot with access to information nobody else has. Every ticket is telling you something. The onboarding's broken. The feature works — just not the way any actual human being would use it. Three people hit the same wall this week and none of them knew about each other.
You don't get that from a dashboard. You get it from being in the trenches at 11pm like a muppet. The founders who figure this out fastest aren't the ones who hired someone to deal with it immediately. They're the ones who stayed uncomfortable long enough to actually learn something.
But — and here's where it gets really fun — the moment you hand it off, everything changes. If you haven't written anything down, built any kind of process, or explained what "good" even looks like... you haven't solved the problem.
You've just made it someone else's problem. Congratulations.
That's where it all starts going wrong. Not because they did it themselves for too long. But because of how they stopped.
More on that next week.
I was on a red-eye flight, 35,000 feet over the Atlantic, when my phone buzzed. A message from my kid's arts school owner. "Isn't it 2 AM her time?" I thought.
A few weeks later, my phone jolted me awake in the middle of the night. Same school. Apple's AI decided this was urgent enough to override my sleep mode.
It turns out, the school’s owner, a passionate educator, was doing her bookkeeping. "It's the only free time I have," she told me later. "I'd much rather be with the students, so the admin work gets pushed to the middle of the night."
“Challenge accepted,” I thought.
With so many business owners being forced to trade their passion for paperwork it must sound familiar to many.
We knew we could help. We used Jira Service Management to build a simple but powerful automation that gave her her nights back.
Here’s how her "midnight bookkeeping" works now:
The impact? She reclaimed her nights.
Sure, there are dozens of complex bookkeeping apps out there. But this solution lives inside the same system she uses to track teacher schedules and manage parent inquiries. It’s simple, integrated, and does exactly what she needs.
Stop letting mundane tasks steal your time and energy. It's time to automate the boring stuff so you can get back to doing what you love.
What's the one task you wish you could eliminate from your to-do list forever?
#SmallBusiness #Automation #JiraServiceManagement #Productivity #Entrepreneurship #BusinessOwner #SaveTime #WorkSmarter
Imagine you’re onboarding a new contractor, supplier, or even a student.
Now imagine doing this 10, 20, or 50 times a month — and having to manually look up business details, copy them into spreadsheets, double-check for typos, and send them off for validation.
That’s exactly what a leading national education & accreditation institution was dealing with.
Their HR and legal teams relied on Jira Service Management to manage onboarding requests — but every request meant jumping between systems, manually querying ABNs on Support for businesses in Australia | business.gov.au , and transcribing company data into spreadsheets or forms.
Pain Point:
Time-consuming, repetitive, error-prone — and completely manual.
We introduced a simple but powerful automation inside their Jira Service Management portal:
✔️ Staff now only need to enter an ABN number in the onboarding request form
✔️ Our custom automation sends an API call to the ABNLookup service
✔️ The returned business data (legal name, entity status, address, etc.) is auto-populated into a linked object in Jira Assets
✔️ Key fields are instantly visible on the issue view screen, making it easy to review or click into the full profile
What once took 10+ minutes per onboarding request now takes seconds, with zero risk of typos or outdated info.
We’re now extending this solution by integrating with Illion to automatically query and log credit risk information during the same onboarding process — a major step forward in compliance and due diligence automation.
Whether you’re in education, healthcare, or government — if your teams are still jumping between Jira and external sites to “copy-paste data,” there’s a better way!
Let automation do the boring stuff — so your people can do the valuable stuff.
Want to see how this could work in your org?.
