About
Built by people who worked the queue
Six of us answered support tickets for a living. The rest have spent four years watching teams do it.
How it started
Five tabs, twelve people, and nothing between them.
In 2021 two of us were running support for a hardware company. Twelve people answered on five tabs — a shared mailbox, a chat widget, two social accounts and a phone that took messages — and none of the five knew what the other four had already said. The same customer got three different answers in a morning, and the fix was always another rule nobody read.
We tried the helpdesks. Each one asked us to describe the work as tickets, statuses and queues, and every week somebody spent an afternoon maintaining that description instead of answering anybody. Pulse that was meant to save the team time had become the second job.
So we built the thing we actually wanted: one list, in arrival order, that the whole team can see, with the history attached to the message and the reply already drafted underneath it. Four years later the shape has not changed. Most of what we have added since is history import, more channels, and taking things out.
We run our own support on it, and we answer our own queue. That is not a slogan — it is why the archive search got rewritten twice.
What we hold to
Three decisions we have not reversed.
Each of them costs us something, which is how we know they are decisions and not preferences.
The queue is one list
Not a board, not swimlanes, not a status somebody has to update. One list in arrival order, filtered to what you are responsible for. Every request to add a stage has been turned down.
The history comes with you
Your past threads import with their tags, search works on day one, and if you leave you export everything. Nothing about the archive is a reason to stay.
A seat is a person who answers
Per seat, per month, and that is the whole model. Viewers, managers reading reports and anyone in the archive are free, because charging for a manager reading a number is how pricing stops being honest.
The team
Nineteen people, and one queue between us.
There is no floor to walk across. We work from eleven places, in four languages, for teams in thirty-one countries, and what holds it together is the same list we sell: one queue, in arrival order, that everyone can see. The picture beside this is not a group photograph — it is the shape of the thing, points connected to points, which is a more honest portrait of how the company runs than a room would be.
Answering
Six people who answer our own queue every day, on the same list a customer’s team opens.
Building
Engineers who take a week on the shift with support before they are allowed near the inbox code.
Onboarding
The people on the call while your history imports, from forwarding the address to the third rule.
Reliability
Whoever is on call when a channel provider has a bad night, which is most of what reliability is.
2021
the year we stopped answering on five tabs
19
people, in eleven places
2,400+
teams answering on Pulse
31
countries their customers write from
Easier to show you than to describe.
Thirty minutes on your real queue, or 14 days on it without talking to anyone. Both end the same way — you keep the data.
No card, and live in an afternoon.