Why we started Gruvi.

I’ve worked across a whole spectrum of industries, from government, consulting, finance and retail through to education and healthtech. And while each field is wildly different, there’s one universal truth I’ve learned: no matter what you launch, things will eventually mess up. Even if you’ve created the most perfectly usable product or the most intuitive feature, something somewhere is going to go wrong. And when it does, how you fix it is what really counts.

The Trust Bank

There’s a concept I call the "trust bank." When you launch a product, your users start you off with a certain amount of trust just for showing up with something new. Maybe that’s five dollars in the trust bank. Every success, every smooth interaction, adds a little more to that balance. Maybe you grow it to ten dollars as people see that your product works and does what it promises.

But here's the issue: when something breaks (and it will), those trust dollars start slipping away quickly. Let’s say your log-in provider fails and you’re suddenly flooded with support tickets. Now your trust bank is at zero, because each issue drains away some of that goodwill placed in you by your users.

So then what do you do? This is where having effective customer support comes in. Instead of letting those trust dollars vanish forever, you can win them back by offering support that’s not just fast, but genuinely human and empathetic. Fix your customers problems in a way that makes them feel heard and valued, and you’ll find that you’re not just restoring that five dollars of trust - now you might have ten.

The support spaghetti trap

I can’t tell you how many confused faces I’ve seen over the years when I would start setting up support processes before we were even close to launch. People would ask, "Why are you worrying about support now?" But customer support is one of the most undervalued aspects of product management: I always look at the faces of support agents to see how things are really going.

It always seems strange to me, that support teams are the first ones who deal with frustrated users when something goes down - yet they are the last ones to know about upcoming technical risks or updates, or that they are the ones who are expected to provide ‘hypercare’ without the insights that the UX team have on customer usage patterns. Why does this happen? Most AI support software is tailored to enterprise users, with complex AI workflows and automation that quickly becomes expensive. So most new product teams do things manually, which is fine in the beginning, but as those teams grow, the manual processes grow with them eventually becoming a spaghetti of workarounds that (you guessed it) enterprise software charges a heck of a lot to fix.

Before doing any of that, we want to teams to use gruvi.

We don’t think that humans should be “automated” out of support with AI. Rather, we believe in empowering customer support agents with AI powered ‘team mates’ that save them time, save them manual effort, and give them unique insights to help them support better.

In short, Gruvi was born out of the belief that great support is the secret to turning every glitch into an opportunity to earn even more trust. And that’s how you build something people love, not just in the good times, but especially when things get tough.


We’ll keep you updated on how things go, and look forward to sharing this journey with you!