How founder-led support has supercharged Dub's growth

A few weeks ago, we had a chat with Steven Tey – Founder and CEO at Dub. Steven and the team at Dub have been using Plain to manage their customer support for a few months, and witnessing their growth since has been astounding.

Steven understands the value that founder-led support can have on customers, and we wanted to learn more about what that actually means, and looks like in action. Read our interview with Steven below to learn more about how founder-led support has had an impact on their customers.

First, a quick intro to Dub:

Links are one of the most foundational pieces of the web. Every time you go online, chances are you'll interact with hundreds, if not thousands of URLs on any given day. Dub is reimagining the role of links from being a simple "resource locator" (URL), to a full attribution engine – visualizing the user journey from the first click to the final conversion event. To do that, they’re starting with short links, QR codes and deep links, as well as their world-class analytics product. In the near future, the team at Dub are planning to extend their link infrastructure to include features like referral management, as well as link-in-bio and a creator marketplace.

When did you realize you need a support platform to manage your support requests?

We actually realized that since day one. For us, support is a combination of good documentation, help articles, and customer support (see Resend’s try/catch block analogy), and we’ve worked hard to build strong foundations for each of those. In the early days, we used a combination of Crisp chat for in-app chat widget and Google Groups for support@dub.co, but quickly realized that we needed something more deeply integrated into our platform, and scalable. That’s when Plain came in – it took us literally 10 mins to get support@dub.co set up with Plain. Although Crisp was cheaper, Plain’s superior DX (fantastic TypeScript SDK & docs), and the ability to integrate deeply into our product.

In what ways has founder-led support proven critical to your growth at Dub?

Our customers have always been pleasantly surprised that they were able to get a hold of the founder. As a founder myself, I also tend to value direct support from other founders as well (kudos to Simon and Matt for personally helping out with a few issues via Slack).

Once, we had a customer leave a 1-star review on Trustpilot due to a bug in our code, and by responding quickly via Plain and providing a complete resolution for their issue in less than 24 hours, we were able to get them back as paying customers and they were also kind enough to remove the review as well.

What’s the #1 thing you wish you’d known a year ago about scaling customer support?

Invest in more help articles and docs. Having resources available to your customers before they actually need them, means that you’ll reduce your support queue, and will allow your users to ramp up more quickly on your product.

How do you see Dub’s support scaling over the next year, and how do you see the Plain team and product supporting you?

We’re growing at a breakneck pace at the moment – in fact, we just crossed 40,000 users on Dub recently, so we definitely anticipate our support needs growing immensely in the coming year. The way we expect to scale this is by investing more into resources like our help center and docs to help users navigate our platform without needing to reach out to support directly, as well as potentially hiring a support engineer to handle the increased caseload.

We at Plain are so excited to continue supporting Dub – and more founders like Steven – in scaling their support alongside their exploding growth.