Forgive me! Whenever I write internally or externally, it's usually a super long rambling piece and then we cut it down. The hardest part about writing for me m

Forgive me! Whenever I write internally or externally, it's usually a super long rambling piece and then we cut it down. The hardest part about writing for me making sure that everyone can have something to take away from it. I'll zoom out- Railway got its first users from a Twitter post from the founder asking people to try the product. The founder then sat in a Discord voice channel during the winter break just answering mundane questions from people. Railway (like many DevTools at the time in 2021) was significantly more free than what it was today. When I joined, we made the determination that Support Engineering, for the sake of our customers (staying sharp) and mental stimulation (we're not just help desk) - build our own automations to help users. (Blog post here: https://blog.railway.com/p/support-engineering-is-engineering https://blog.railway.com/p/support-engineering-is-engineerin...) (Railway also, intentionally, keeps our team small. Not out of elitism but out of alignment. The hardest part of working remote is making sure that people are on the same page. The tradeoff is that we are busier and need to be mindful about what work we take on. I, however, take it all on!) Around 18 months ago or so- I started getting pulled into more revenue conversations as we moved upmarket. Railway moved into it's first proper plans. A lot of the prevailing advice we were getting was to start gating the product and start booking demos. So we did that for a bit much to the annoyance to developers. Then we started emailing them to see if they wanted to chat- I can't speak for you, but a lot of people in our book didn't reply. (Blog post: https://blog.railway.com/p/scale-not-sales https://blog.railway.com/p/scale-not-sales) In Railway's eyes- we think that Support/Sales is just the same thing just at different points of the developer's journey. A lot of engagements begin with a question. The channel that did work was Slack Connect. After answering a question or two with companies on there- their usage would grow a lot. So we scaled that out! Again, sorry if it read like an ad- not my intent.