Readable

One of my biggest challenges is that my customers are mostly (85%) in North America. I, however, am in the UK, as is my awesome first employee, who handles customer success and copywriting at the moment.

So we can have a situation where someone on the west coast of the USA reaches out for help, and we don't even see the query for 16 hours. We can respond to a ticket immediately upon seeing it, and so can the customer, and yet a conversation can feel stilted, slow and the customer can be left feeling like we don't care.

The other big challenge we have is ensuring that we listen to the customers and are including customer feedback in our planning and product development processes. We don't have a lot of time in the day to do the kind of proactive outreach I'd like, and I struggle to look at things from the customers' perspective often enough.

The solution to both of these problems was obvious - we needed another person, working North American time, dedicated to customer success and becoming the voice of the customer in the business.

And as of this week, we have found that person - a thoroughly delightful, enthusiastic, experienced, spreadsheet-obsessed Canadian. We couldn't be more excited, this opens up so many opportunities and should make a huge difference to how our customers see us in future.

Hiring our first fully remote person has been, and continues to be, a complicated process. How do you advertise a job where the potential pool of people spans two continents and 35 or so countries? How do you pick a salary range? How do you bring them on board, logistically? How do you ensure they don't lose out on national employee rights and benefits by working for an overseas company? How do you cover yourself when your new employee is based thousands of miles away? How do you manage them, when your work days only overlap for an hour?

Some of these are questions we've already managed to answer. Some we are working on now. And there will be more to come in the coming months. When our new team member has settled down, I'll write about the process and the pitfalls so everyone else can avoid repeating my mistakes!

Anyway, this felt like a big enough deal to mark as a major milestone. What started in 2012 as a few lines of PHP I wrote while learning to code is now a fully-fledged and growing business with employees in multiple countries.

In 2017 we moved from readability-score.com to readable.io. I told myself we wouldn't move again, unless it was somewhere much, much better. We were happy, we were contented, we had a nice short domain name. But then, opportunity struck.

I'd been trying to buy readable.com for about a decade when I emailed the owners in late 2018. I had been emailing or calling every six months or so, hoping that eventually there would be an opportunity to make an offer. They were always "about to use it", but never did. I can sympathise - never enough time to get everything done!

It wasn't that I disliked our dot-eye-oh, far from it. It was a nice short name, easy to remember, and the .io namespace had a certain cachet among tech circles. But it had some issues too. Most were minor, but two were causing headaches.

The first was that people were assuming we were at something dotcom, so would add that to the end of our address. Or would try something like readabledotio.com.

The second, which was more serious, was with email deliverability. Despite .io being perfectly legitimate and respectable, we found a whole bunch of companies would reject any and all email sent from .io domains. We wouldn't find out about this when it happened, of course, so it generally just left us looking bad. We ended up sending email from another domain just to make sure deliverability was passable, and that in turn caused its own problems.

Back to my November email. This time was different. Rather than a polite brush-off, I was given the chance to make an offer. And with a little back and forth, by December we were the proud owners of a brand new dotcom.

So in February 2019 we moved to readable.com - nice, short, memorable, appropriate and a dotcom. It should be the last time we move, but the lesson I've learned from this is that you never know what might happen, so keep your options open!

Readability-Score.com wasn't a great name. So we moved to Readable.io! Much better.

The site had lots of traffic but wasn't making any real revenue. I decided to give it the attention it had long deserved. I rewrote everything, from the ground up, including new pricing and payment handling, new (and improved) tools, a decent new website and brand.

The tool was free, but getting a lot of attention. I added a "pay-what-you-want" subscription system with some simple premium tools. The minimum fee was $1 per year, and the fourth person to sign up paid $100.

First founded readability-score.com as a place to host a basic tool I'd written.