Nick Francis

speaker

323 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Jun

Nick Francis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Startups For the Rest of Us · Episode 839 | The Journey Growing Help Scout to $35M ARR · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

I know that the technology exists so that we don't actually have to have all this system in the middle and remove the humanity.

We can make it just like every customer support email is like you're getting an email from a friend.

There doesn't need to be a ticket number.

There doesn't need to be all of this cruft.

And so we just decided to remove that and also build a product that added this really light collaborative layer on top of email.

That was the goal is like email is really not built for teams.

I think that you could add this collaborative layer on top and it would be an extraordinary tool, not just for customer support, but for all these other really interesting use cases.

And so we did design and architect it for use cases well beyond customer support, which ended up being a very good move for the business.

The way I describe our time at Techstars is that we knew how to build what we believed to be a great product, but we had no idea how to build a software business.

And so Techstars was really that process of three months grinding away learning how to build a software business.

And so what that meant for us in terms of initial traction is

One, we were obviously using the heck out of our own product, but we, Techstars actually operated in a space in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Dogpatch Labs.

And at the time, this was like a big sort of incubator space.

So there were literally like 30 ideal customers in the same space.

all these people trying to build companies.

I would literally just walk around with my laptop.

I would be that guy that sort of tapped you on the shoulder and was like, hey, what are you guys doing for customer support?

Would you be interested in answering a few questions?

Can I show you the product that we're building?

Would you be interested in trying it?

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