Support-Rotation Content Backlog
Mine support tickets for recurring confusion, then rank-order self-serve landing pages that answer them
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
A method for deciding which educational marketing content to build: do a customer-support rotation, notice the themes that keep recurring, and turn each into a landing page that lets prospects serve themselves. It uses the exact language customers use as a cheat code for messaging, and works especially well when you have strong top-of-funnel demand but don't want to scale sales headcount linearly.
Origin
Krithika Shankarraman's practice at Stripe, built on a pre-existing Stripe tradition where every new hire did a support rotation to build customer empathy (a 'users first' operating principle; ~20% of collective time spent talking to users and non-users).
Core principles
- 01The language customers use to describe their problems is a shortcut to great product marketing and messaging
- 02You want prospects nodding along as they read your landing pages
- 03A great marketing funnel often never looks like talking to sales — it looks like a self-directed educational experience
- 04Especially with developers, self-serve education outperforms a sales-led motion
- 05If the capability exists but you never tell anyone, customers have no reason to know it
How to run it
- 1
Do a support rotation
Spend real time on the customer-support frontline to build empathy and hear unfiltered pain points, gripes, and confusion directly from users.
Pro tip Make support rotations a tradition for all new hires so customer empathy is institutional, not personal.
- 2
Spot the recurring themes
Watch for the questions that keep coming up — e.g. 'Do you process subscription/recurring payments?' or 'Can I pay people out?' These recurring confusions map directly to gaps in your public education.
Pro tip Capture the customer's own phrasing verbatim; it becomes your landing-page copy.
- 3
Build a stack-ranked backlog of educational landing pages
Turn each recurring theme into a prioritized landing page that educates prospects on that capability or use case, so they can self-serve the answer instead of contacting sales.
Pro tip Prioritize by frequency of the question in support — highest-recurring confusions become the top of the backlog.
Watch out Works best when you already have strong top-of-funnel demand and are deliberately not scaling teams linearly.
In the wild
During her support rotation, the guest kept hearing users ask whether Stripe could do subscription/recurring payments or pay people out. The features existed, but nothing on the site told customers so. Each recurring question became a landing page in a stack-ranked backlog.
→ A set of educational landing pages that let prospects self-serve — converting strong latent demand without scaling the sales team linearly.
Common mistakes
Ending the launch at 'code complete'
At Stripe, features were shipped but never communicated — a secret backlog of launched-but-unannounced products existed. A launch isn't done until the customer is made aware and using it.
Is it for you?
Best for
An early marketer at a developer or product-led company with strong inbound demand who needs to decide what educational content to build first
Not ideal for
Low-volume or purely sales-led enterprise motions where recurring self-serve questions are rare and a consultative human touch is the point
From the transcript
“all new hires would do a support rotation just to build empathy with our customers”
“using the language that they use to describe their problems as a shortcut to fantastic product marketing”
“there were thematic things that kept coming up”
“that ended up being a stacked rank backlog of landing pages that we produced that just educated people”
“a fantastic marketing funnel sometimes doesn't look like talking to sales”
From the episode
Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer
Krithika Shankarraman