Why I Read and Reply to Every Email Myself

Every so often someone writes back to one of my replies to ask whether I am a real person. They expected an automated answer or none at all. My reply carried my name and sounded human. Every email that comes into GazeSite lands in my inbox, and I type the answer myself. There is no ticketing system in between and no model drafting a version for me to approve.

This is my second company. The lesson I kept from the first one was to stay close to the people who write to me. They know things about the product that I cannot learn any other way, and they tell me for free, at the moment the problem is fresh. So when I started GazeSite I decided to answer support email myself for as long as I could. The about page says GazeSite is a solo product right now, paired with carefully prompted AI reviewers, and that we will not pretend to be a team of ten when we aren’t. The AI reviewers produce the reports. I answer the email. Putting that on a website is the easy half. Honoring it on a night when I would rather be writing code is the half that counts.

I answer it for the feedback, and I will admit the motive is partly selfish, because hearing from the people who use GazeSite is the part of this I enjoy most. I treat every email as a user interview. People tell me where the report was wrong or incomplete, and when the website promised something the report did not deliver. Those messages point at bugs, at missing features, and at sentences on the site I need to change. Reading them myself, I see what to fix, and I go fix it.

I also reply to give something back. Once I understand what someone was trying to do, I can offer more than they asked for. I can point to the part of the report they missed, or answer the question they meant to ask. My rule is that nobody leaves a conversation with GazeSite without something useful. I follow it for free scans and paid reports alike. Anyone who tries the product is giving me their time, and I want that time to have been well spent even if they never buy anything.

The guarantee follows from the same idea. Every purchase comes with my support, and with a promise written into the terms: a 100% money-back guarantee if your report does not contain at least one actionable improvement suggestion, issued to the original payment method. The terms spell out how and when to ask. I wrote that condition because it is a test I can apply honestly to a report and be held to. If you are simply unhappy, write to me anyway. An unhappy email tells me where GazeSite failed to meet someone’s needs, and those are the emails I most want to read.

I expected answering email myself to be a cost I paid for the feedback. It became my second favorite part of running this company, after the feedback itself. When people learn that a human answered, they write back longer and explain what they were actually trying to do. Someone who expected to be ignored ends up discussing their homepage with the person who built the tool that graded it. “I thought you were a bot” has become one of my favorite messages to receive, and I get a small kick out of writing back to confirm that I am not.

Gartner surveyed 5,728 customers in December 2023 and found that 64 percent would prefer companies not use AI in their customer service, and that 53 percent would consider switching to a competitor if they learned a company planned to. The main concern was that AI would make reaching a person harder. I sell an AI product, and I still agree with them. The models do good work reviewing a website. When something goes wrong, you reach me. Use AI for the work that scales, and handle support yourself.

Paul Graham argues for this kind of care in “Do Things that Don’t Scale”. Wufoo sent each new user a hand-written thank you note for as long as they could, which he notes turned out to be surprisingly long. He writes that you should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users but to make them happy, and that your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made. Answering my own email is the smallest way I know to do that. I also know I cannot keep it up once too many arrive. When I need help I will say so here, rather than quietly swapping in a bot and hoping nobody notices.