For your small business to survive, you need customers. Not just to buy once. You need them to come back, tell their friends, and trust you over time. And yet, too many small businesses make it weirdly hard to talk to them. Well, duh, right? I agree, yet I see small businesses fumbling this over and over. All the attention when discussing business is about giant corporations. Whether they’re selling servers or vehicles or every product under the sun, millions of dollars pass through their doors every day. Yet it is folly to apply the methodologies of giant companies to our small businesses. It sounds obvious, but I constantly see small businesses making it hard for customers to get in touch. If a customer does get through the “contact us” gauntlet, that small business often uses needlessly complicated enterprise software to talk with customers. Small businesses don’t get the spotlight, but they are the engine of the economy. To wit, in the United States: 99.9% of businesses are small Nearly half the private workforce is employed by small businesses They generate over 43% of the country’s GDP And beyond the stats, small businesses are who we turn to every day: your corner coffee shop, your local cleaner, your neighborhood software team. And don’t forget that every big business started small. Small businesses are the genesis of innovation. We all need small businesses to succeed. Most small teams aren’t trying to become giant corporations. They want to make a living doing work for a fair return. Many of them work hard in hopes of moving the needle from a fair return to a comfortable life, and maybe even some riches down the road. Yet it’s amazing how often it’s forgotten: you need customers to succeed. Success in small business starts with human conversation. While talking effectively with your customers does not guarantee success, it is certainly a requirement. Here’s what that looks like: a customer has a question and your team responds kindly, clearly, and quickly. Or sometimes your team wants to reach out with a question for a customer. It’s a simple, human interaction that cannot be done effectively by automation or AI. It’s the air your small business is breathing. Starve that air, and everything else suffers. Your product or service is almost secondary to building a healthy relationship with each of your customers. Big business doesn’t operate this way. We shouldn’t expect it to show us how to build real relationships. We’re doing our best here at Good Enough to build healthy, happy customer relationships. Whenever you write to us about any of our products, someone on the team is going to reply to offer help or an explanation or an alternative. Fact is, if you write to us about anything, we’re going to reply to offer help or an explanation or an alternative. As an online business, we’re talking with customers primarily over email. For us, Jelly makes those conversations easy to have—human, not hectic. Actual customer support is remarkable. Actual, healthy human relationships are important. Actual customer conversations are a key to small business success. Choose your actions and tools accordingly. If you liked this post, maybe you’ll like Jelly, our new email collaboration app for small teams!

We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re continuing our Q&A column to introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time. Today, we’re meeting the biggest Pika fan, Barry Hess… Who are you? (Who, who, who, who?) My name is Barry Hess. I grew up in a rural part of Minnesota where the population of the entire county is less than 10,000 people. After getting a college degree in Computer Science, I moved to a metropolis of 25,000 people in southern Minnesota. I live here with my wife and three daughters, though our children are actively growing and slowly moving out into the world to create their own lives. 😭 I’ve been coding off and on for nearly thirty years now, though there was a bit of a dalliance in management for a while. What do you do at Good Enough? I started Good Enough with Shawn. For the past year my primary work has been Pika, which is near and dear to my heart. An illustration of me even sits on the Pika homepage, yet somehow Pika still keeps attracting new customers. Baffling! To accomplish my work, I mostly code Ruby on Rails while sometimes talking to AIs to help me write JavaScript. I also try to do some marketing work as best I can, write a bit, and help out with our other products. What are the tools of your trade? Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, repeat. I’ve been using RubyMine as my editor for the past year, along with Cody as my AI assistant. I’m thinking of taking a month to try using Cursor as a more integrated AI partner. While AI is more of a sounding board for my Rails work, it has become key for me to be able to accomplish anything at all in the JavaScript world. Aside from that, it’s my trusty MacBook Pro, a browser, Terminal, and reading the docs. What’s your origin story? I entered college as a Physics major, but knew enough about myself to take a Computer Science class in my first semester. I think I changed my major within a week. Though I loved computers, there wasn’t much programming in my life before college. My coding through college was primarily C++ for class, and I loved iterating on the little projects to make them more and more user friendly. From there I got into web development of the basic sort: HTML, CSS, SSI, and eventually PHP. My career started at an insurance company, which onboarded new employees with an intensive, three-month COBOL training class. So, yes, I spent a couple of years being paid to code COBOL before transitioning to a Java team. After about six years, I had an early-life crisis and left that job for parts unknown. (Literally, I had no new job lined up, and my wife was pregnant with our second child. Do not try this at home!) I was very fortunate to run into the Harvest founders, and was able to start working with them from (nearly) the beginning of that product. It was there that I was able to experience the tiny, scrappy startup; the growing, scrappy startup; and eventually the medium-sized company, established in its niche. I went from coding many of the original features to helping build a team to managing the entire technical team. Eventually, it was time to move on to a new experience, and here I am at Good Enough, trying something rather different! Me and my family overlooking Florence What’s new? How are things going? Oh, you know, life keeps barreling on! As I mentioned above, our children continue to grow. We have a tight-knit family and love to hang out together. We also love to travel together! We just got back from visiting our oldest while she was studying abroad in Florence, Italy. It was fantastic. Our middle child is heading to college in the fall, and we’ll continue to adapt. As you can imagine, this is all bittersweet, but we are doing our best to cherish the moments and enjoy watching our children grow into lovely adults. What’s your drink of choice? In the past few years, I’ve gotten into making cocktails. I don’t make a cocktail often, but I really enjoy the variety of flavors that exist out there—I had no idea until I started making them! I love a good Negroni. Paper Planes are awesome, as are Last Words and Enzonis. If I’m being honest, though, the most frequently drunk cocktail in the Hess household is the Gin & Tonic. Any parting words of wisdom for our dear readers? It’s okay to be mildly addicted to Fortnite if you take care to play with family and friends. It’s a fun game that’s always changing. The fun is enhanced by planning together and succeeding (or more likely failing) together. When you play too much alone, and spend all of your “content viewing time” watching YouTube videos about how to play better (even though you never really get that good because you can’t put that much time into training), then perhaps you’ve went too far. I may or may not be giving this speech to myself. Don’t worry, I have a totally balanced Fortnite life these days! Where can you be found on the internet? This blog, Pika’s blog, and my blog on Pika. I’m also haltingly involved in various social sites @bjhess: Want to know other things about our team? Let us know what really interests you!

The second half of 2024 was definitely an inflection point in the world of software. Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI started to permeate products everywhere, from chatbots to operating systems, and at times it felt like everyone was taking part in a race to integrate some AI feature or other into their product. This seems to have been particularly true in the world of customer support. Whole businesses seem to have pivoted, turning AI into their central feature as if their very lives depended on it. Some taglines from well-known companies leave no doubt: The best AI Agent and AI-first Customer Service Platform Try our new AI integration! AI-first service. ... and I can see the appeal for some businesses. But personally, I hate talking to bot or AI customer service tools. Is there anything more frustrating than carefully explaining your issue, then inexplicably being railroaded through some set of pointless questions or regurgitated knowledge-base articles, desperately hoping that if you can only jump through all these hoops like a good little boy, you might be able to eventually get in touch with an actual person who can actually read and understand your question and actually help you at the end of the tortuous process? It makes my blood boil! And as these big players double down on AI, it feels clearer than ever that they are really only focussed on customers who are so big that they don’t need to care how frustrating their support processes are. Companies for whom support is a cost centre they are trying to minimise. Jelly takes a different position. Jelly is about connecting actual people having actual conversations — support requests, questions, and all other kinds of collaboration. We're a small company, too. We know that the communication between us and our customers, existing or potential, will be one of the biggest factors in our success. There's no way we want an AI agent representing us in those vital conversations. Our bet is that there are thousands of other small companies and groups who neither need nor want an AI agent sitting between them and the people they want to communicate with. If you've been looking for a way for your team to share an inbox and work together to talk to your users, customers, clients, collaborators, and anyone else -- try Jelly. It's the simplest, most elegant, most humane way to work on email as a team.

While building Pika’s Stream of posts layout, we had need to add the capability to manage excerpts in the Pika editor. These excerpts would be used to show a small portion of your post in a post stream while offering a “continue reading” link for readers to click to read the rest of your post. To add this capability we had to dig into extending the base open source library for our editor, Tiptap. First the Tiptap part Below is the full code of the extension. Primarily the extension detects if the user types {{ excerpt }}, {{ more }}, or WordPress’s <!--more--> and replaces that text with: <div data-type="excerpt" class="post-excerpt" contenteditable="false" draggable="true">↑ Excerpt ↑</div> With that HTML, we use CSS to style things like so: This extension is smart enough to know if an excerpt already exists in the editor, in that case disallowing another excerpt being created. The extension: import { Node, InputRule, nodeInputRule, mergeAttributes } from '@tiptap/core' /** * Look for on a line by itself, with all the whitespace permutations */ export const excerptInputRegex = /^\s*{{\s*excerpt\s*}}\s*$/i /** * Look for on a line by itself, with all the whitespace permutations */ export const moreInputRegex = /^\s*{{\s*more\s*}}\s*$/i /** * Look for classic WordPress <!--more--> tag */ export const wpMoreInputRegex = /^\s*<*![-—]+\s*more\s*[-—]+>\s*$/i const excerptText = '↑ Excerpt ↑' /** * Used to detect if an excerpt already exists in the editor */ const hasExistingExcerpt = (state) => { let hasExcerpt = false state.doc.descendants(node => { if (node.type.name === 'excerpt') { hasExcerpt = true return false // stop traversing } }) return hasExcerpt } /** * Disable excerpt button in toolbar if excerpt already exists in * the editor. Note that we use Tiptap with the Rhino editor for * Rails, which explains the rhino-editor selectors. Rhino: * https://rhino-editor.vercel.app/ */ const setExcerptButtonState = (editor) => { const button = editor.view.dom.closest('rhino-editor').querySelector('rhino-editor button[data-excerpt]') if (button) { button.classList.toggle('toolbar__button--disable', hasExistingExcerpt(editor.state)) button.disabled = hasExistingExcerpt(editor.state) } } /** * This custom InputRule allows us to make a singleton excerpt node * that short-circuits if an excerpt node already exists. */ export function excerptInputRule(config) { return new InputRule({ find: config.find, handler: ({ state, range, match }) => { if (hasExistingExcerpt(state)) { return } const delegate = nodeInputRule({ find: config.find, type: config.type, }) delegate.handler({ state, range, match }) }, }) } export const Excerpt = Node.create({ name: 'excerpt', group: 'block', content: 'inline+', inline: false, isolating: true, atom: true, draggable: true, selectable: true, onCreate() { setExcerptButtonState(this.editor) }, onUpdate() { setExcerptButtonState(this.editor) }, parseHTML () { return [{ tag: 'div[data-type="excerpt"]' }] }, renderHTML ({ HTMLAttributes }) { return ['div', mergeAttributes({ 'data-type': 'excerpt', class: 'post-excerpt' }, HTMLAttributes), excerptText] }, /** * Add insertExcerpt command that we can call from our custom * toolbar buttons. This command checks for an existing excerpt * before inserting a new one. */ addCommands() { return { insertExcerpt: () => ({ state, commands }) => { if (hasExistingExcerpt(state)) { return false } return commands.insertContent({ type: this.name, content: [{ type: 'text', text: excerptText }] }) }, } }, /** * Set up various detection for {{ excerpt }} etc text. */ addInputRules() { return [ excerptInputRule({ find: excerptInputRegex, type: this.type, }), excerptInputRule({ find: moreInputRegex, type: this.type, }), excerptInputRule({ find: wpMoreInputRegex, type: this.type, }), ] }, }) Now for the Rails part This will obviously need modified depending on your Tiptap environment. In our case, using the Rhino editor with Rails, here’s what we do… app/javascript/controllers/extensions/excerpt.js is where our extensions directory lives. We use importmaps to manage our JavaScript, so we need to pin our extensions directory there: pin_all_from "app/javascript/extensions", under: "extensions" We have a Stimulus controller for all of our Rhino enhancements. We need to import our extension there: import { Excerpt } from "extensions/excerpt" To add the extension, we do this in the function that we use to do all of our Rhino initialization (we pass the Rhino editor into this function): initializeEditor(rhino) { // snip rhino.addExtensions(Excerpt) // snip } And we add one function, which we will later call with our new Rhino toolbar button. This function calls the insertExcerpt command that we defined in our extension. insertExcerpt() { this.element.editor.chain().focus().insertExcerpt().run() } And finally here’s the button we add to our Rhino toolbar. Notice the data-action="click->rhino#insertExcerpt", which is calling the function above: <button slot="after-increase-indentation-button" class="rhino-toolbar-button toolbar__button--excerpt" type="button" data-role-tooltip="rhino-insert-excerpt" data-action="click->rhino#insertExcerpt" data-excerpt data-role="toolbar-item" tabindex="-1"> <role-tooltip class="toolbar__tooltip" id="rhino-insert-excerpt" part="toolbar__tooltip toolbar__tooltip--create-excerpt" exportparts="base:toolbar__tooltip__base, arrow:toolbar__tooltip__arrow"> Create Excerpt </role-tooltip> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" aria-hidden="true" fill="currentColor" part="toolbar__icon" viewBox="0 0 24 24" width="24" height="24" style="pointer-events: none;"> <path d="SNIP"/> </svg> </button> This is by no means a drop-in extension, but hopefully it helps someone else who is wanting to add this excerpt functionality to their Tiptap editor.