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.