The HelpDocs Blog

Why is Everyone a Wantrepreneur?

I would make a crap CEO. 🤷‍♂️ I’m not even kidding. I look at people I’ve worked for in the many jobs I’ve had and I just can’t see myself

Customer Stories

Stone Notebooks, Forest Fires and Building a Climate Positive Future: In Conversation With A Good Company

A good origin story always has an element of tragedy or disaster that leads to an epic realisation. For Anders Ankarlid and A Good Company, that moment came in the burning summer of 2018.

Announcements

June 2019 Product Updates

Has another month flown by already? Can we actually have shipped enough for another post? Is it really less than 6 months until Christmas? Yes, yes, and I'm so sorry, I don't wanna

Stories

Flying High with Thai

There’s something about traveling that makes me uneasy. I guess it’s kind of ironic for a remote worker. Someone who could literally work from anywhere with a halfway decent wifi connection.

Announcements

May 2019 Product Updates

As months go, May was relatively tame by our usual standards. Not that it felt like it, of course. The team still worked their backend off. 🥁 But instead of shipping tons of smaller

Stories

Time, Tickets and Video Games

It’s 9:07pm on a Tuesday night. I’m sat on the sofa in my living room. My wife’s gone to bed to read. It’s now my time for the

Stories

Hiring Through Exhaustion

I’m exhausted. Fatigued by a week-long deluge of “Dear Hiring Manager” and generic cover letters. In the latest entry to our epic hiring adventure, we decided to disregard our previous experiences with

Stories

Pushing the Button and Rolling With the Punches

I’m sat at my desk, an old dining table crammed into the corner of what will become my office. It’s still light outside. I can hear the birds chirping away. Going

Stories

Busking through Bureaucracy

The rock'n'roll life Seb had imagined it to be. He was a drummer struggling to make ends meet. His bank account was often full of zeroes. Unfortunately there were no other numbers on the left. 😬

Announcements

April 2019 Product Updates

The past month has been pretty intense. But in a good way 😬. Sebastian joined the Customer Education team. I went on a 10-day jolly vacation to renovate my new house 🏚. And as usual,

Stories

Plum Dumplings and Communists

Next stop, middle of nowhere. That's how I felt every time I got on the bus to my grandma's village. It's one of those teeny villages where everybody knows everyone. And everything about everyone.

Remote work

The Truth Shall Earn You Trust

Have you ever tried washing your hands in freezing cold water? It doesn’t work. They never _really_ feel clean. And after, you’re left with the slightly soapy painful chill of not-quite-clean ice-cube-fingers.

Remote work

Hire Vans and Sports Cars: The Two-Way Street of Customer Service

From the death of a loved one to losing your job, it’s fair to say Matt only wanted one of the “five most stressful life events” to happen this year. 🙈

Waiting in Rome

*VROOOOOOOOOOOOOM* Death on wheels came close to claiming me for the third time that day. 🚘💀 I didn't feel like exploring Rome anymore. I wanted to be in bed, away from careless drivers and rancid crowds. My stomach, however, was quick to remind me I was on an important mission—operation Feed Me.

A Short Guide to Deceiving Your Customers

tl;dr: Don't. 🙅‍♂️ If I had to make a list of things I hate when contacting customer support, deceiving answers would be close to the top. Recently I had the unfortunate privilege of

Remote work

How Service Saved our House Buying Dream

Somewhere between sizing up kitchen worktops and the slow queue for mid-shop IKEA meatballs, it dawned on me: We’re buying a house. Wait, let me correct that. We’ve bought a house.

Remote work

Is AI ruining the customer experience?

I’ve been seething for days. It’s made writing this post incredibly difficult as I’ve had to sift through the countless curse words to settle on the most accurate to convey my current state of mind.

Announcements

March 2019 Product Updates

It's been a big month for us at HelpDocs. We've started hiring again and already expanded the team (hey team! 👋). We've also shipped tons, as usual. And I hope you love it all as much as I do 🦄✨

Starting Up

Communicating through Emoji

If I’ve learned one thing during the 8 months I’ve spent following HelpDocs, it’s that this company is truly unique. The people here are even more so. If I was

Starting Up

Emerging From our Hiring Failures

Last time we tried to hire was a 💩show. So when Jake told me we were hiring again, I had two contradictory and gut-wrenching reactions: Excited relief, and overwhelming fear.

Remote Insights

Managing the Imposter Within

When you try to do everything, you risk achieving nothing. That's what I've learned from decades of struggling with imposter syndrome.

Remote Insights

HelpDocs Has Ruined Marketing for Me, and Here's Why I'm Grateful!

“If you ever need a marketing gig in the future you’re pretty fucked”, Jake remarked during a completely off-topic bout of lighthearted banter about work ethics. We often joke about things like

Remote Insights

My Struggles with Time Management, Education and Support

It takes 23 minutes to recover from an interruption. As I struggled with a sidestep into education, this stat proved to be way more true than I ever thought possible!

Announcements

February 2019 Product Updates

We're two months into the year already, and we're kicking off in style with some fantastic new updates to your HelpDocs knowledge base. Markdown Blocks We've been asked about writing Markdown in HelpDocs

Remote Insights

When Customer Happiness is Never a Priority, Does it Ever Become One?

For a while, I’ve been trying to reconcile the idea that many huge companies purposefully avoid placing any effort on their customer service. And worse still, that we, as consumers, kind of let them. We fail to hold them accountable or really call them out on it.