Jean Dupont

When I started my bootstrapped business I wanted to act like a CEO right away. I hired a freelance agency to handle all customer support emails so I could focus on product strategy.

I thought I was buying back my time to work on high-value tasks. Instead I spent three hours every day correcting the agencys mistakes and apologizing to users.

When outsourcing a process before you fully understand it yourself outsourcing cannot train someone to do it right. The freelancers had no operating procedures because I had not built any yet.

I fired the agency. Took back the support inbox for the next three months. I wrote down the answer, to every common question and created a detailed manual.

I found out that while solving the bug, I could introduce another one elsewhere. The original feature was fine, but an existing feature was somehow affected.

From now on, after each big change, I check if the original feature is OK, if the other related features are working as expected, and if the input data is being checked correctly.

It takes a little bit of time, but it is far better than finding it out from the user.

What do you do when building with AI to ensure that you won't create a new issue while fixing one?

I used to put a confirmation popup before every delete action in our dashboard. I thought I was protecting our customers from making mistakes and ruining their own data.

I watched session recordings. Realized people blindly click the confirmation without reading the warning text. The confirmation became muscle memory so they were still accidentally deleting projects and flooding our support inbox. The friction annoyed users while completely failing to protect the distracted ones.

We completely removed the confirmation boxes. Built a soft-delete system instead. Now when someone clicks delete the item instantly vanishes from their view. A small toast notification appears with an undo button.

Our accidental deletion tickets dropped to near zero within a week. Users get a smoother interface without annoying popups and they have a five-second window to fix a mistake when they actually make one.