Depot, a YC-backed platform that accelerates software builds for engineering teams, has experienced massive growth: leading to a surge in customer requests. Their customer base ranges from small startups to large enterprises, many of whom expect real-time, high-touch support.

With no dedicated support team, founders Jacob Gillespie and Kyle Galbraith split responsibilities across engineering, marketing, and sales. Support requests primarily came through hundreds of customer Slack Connect channels, making it nearly impossible to track and manage inquiries effectively.

“The number of Slack Connect channels we have is unmanageable without something like Plain. Beyond speeding things up, it’s enabled us to actually give our customers really solid support.” — Jacob Gillespie, Co-founder & CTO, Depot

With support requests scattered across multiple channels, it became clear that Depot needed a centralized system to avoid critical messages slipping through the cracks.

The solution: centralizing Slack support with Plain

Depot implemented Plain to consolidate all their Slack Connect conversations into one structured inbox. Instead of monitoring dozens of Slack threads daily, their team could now triage and respond to all support inquiries from a single interface.

They also leveraged Plain’s AI-powered suggested responses, allowing them to quickly handle common questions, reducing response times and freeing up engineers for more complex issues.

“For the easy-win support cases, being able to click an AI generated response and move on is a game-changer.” — Kyle Galbraith, Co-founder & CEO, Depot

Additionally, Depot built an in-app help widget, making it easier for customers to log requests directly from the product instead of relying on Slack or email.

The impact: faster response times, better workflow, and scalable support

By integrating Plain, Depot has been able to:

✅ Improve response times by ensuring all customer inquiries are tracked and prioritized.
✅ Handle a rapidly growing customer base without needing a dedicated support team.
✅ Use AI-assisted responses to cut down their queue and free up engineering time.
✅ Reduce context-switching by managing all support from one place instead of jumping across Slack and email.
✅ Stay on top of SLAs with automatic triage of support requests 

“One of our biggest differentiators is our level of support. We go deep into debugging customer builds, and the only way we can maintain that level of service is with tools that give us visibility and a structured workflow. Plain makes that possible.” — Kyle Galbraith, Depot

As Depot continues to scale, they plan to expand their use of automation and AI-driven workflows in Plain to further streamline support and improve internal SLAs.

Depot is part of our startup program – which gives early-stage teams access to enterprise-grade support tooling at a startup friendly price.