Support — Help Desk & Community

How a Cohort 001 beta tester gets help, and how we as a team triage it. Designed to scale from 5 users to 500 without changing tools — and to be ripped out and replaced with a real help desk only when volume forces it.

The promise to a beta user

Every bug report gets a human reply. Every time. Within 48 hours.

This is the only SLA we make in beta. It is more important than uptime. A 100-person cohort that feels heard generates better signal than a 10,000-person cohort that gets a ticket auto-close.

Channels (in order of preference)

1. In-app feedback (primary)

A persistent "Send feedback" link in the app footer + Settings. Pre-fills:

• App version
• User's @handle (so we don't need to ask)
• Last route visited
• Anonymous device profile (UA, viewport)

Submits to a dedicated feedback table behind RLS — only the user and admins can read their own rows. Never includes message content, ciphertext, or keys.

2. Email — support@kimosabe.ai

For users who prefer email or who are locked out and can't use the in-app form. Routed to a shared inbox the founders both watch.

For security disclosures only: security@kimosabe.ai (separate, see SECURITY.md).

3. Discord — invite-only Cohort 001 server

Lightweight community channel for beta testers. Structure:

Kimosabe Cohort 001
├── #welcome                ← intro, code of conduct, Founders' badge claim
├── #announcements          ← ship notes, downtime, weekly digest (read-only)
├── #help                   ← user-to-user + team triage
├── #bugs                   ← issues with repro steps; triaged into GitHub
├── #feature-wishes         ← dot-vote weekly; top items get a ROADMAP entry
├── #show-and-tell          ← screenshots, use cases, wins
└── #the-honest-channel     ← anything that doesn't fit elsewhere

Discord is never the system of record. Anything actionable is mirrored into a GitHub issue or a feedback row within 24h. If Discord disappeared tomorrow, no information would be lost.

Why not Slack/Telegram? Discord has the best free tier for small communities, threading, and voice — and a meaningful fraction of our target audience is already there. We will not put community on a server we don't trust to operate; treat Discord as ephemeral marketing/community space, not private messaging.

Triage workflow (founders, daily)

in-app feedback ─┐
email           ─┼──▶ shared queue ──▶ triage (label + reply within 48h)
discord #bugs   ─┘                          │
                                            ▼
                          ┌──────────────────┴──────────────────┐
                          │                                     │
                       bug? ────▶ GitHub issue                wish? ────▶ #feature-wishes
                                  + label severity                       (weekly dot-vote)
                                  + assign owner
                                  + reply with issue link

Severity ladder:

Self-serve docs (the cheapest support there is)

Before any of the above, the user should be able to find answers in:

1. The Manual (MANUAL.md) — Part I §6 is troubleshooting.
2. The Trust page (/trust) — for "what does it protect" questions.
3. A future FAQ under /help — created when the same question shows up 3+ times in the support queue.

Rule: every time we answer a support email, we ask "does this answer belong in the docs?" If yes, it goes in before we close the ticket.

Status & incidents

• Status page: status.kimosabe.ai (Phase 1.5 — manually updated for now; no third-party uptime widgets on the privacy site).
• Incident comms: announced in #announcements and emailed to all Cohort 001 members within 1h of detection.
• Postmortems: any S0 or S1 with > 30min user impact gets a public postmortem in docs/incidents/YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md.

Code of conduct (Discord + GitHub)

Short version: be the kind of person you'd want in a small group chat. No harassment, no doxxing, no off-topic political flame wars, no piracy or illegal content asks. Keep beta builds inside the cohort. Disagreements are fine; cruelty isn't. Founders have final say and will use it sparingly.

When we outgrow this

The day we cross ~250 active beta users or ~20 support tickets/week, this stops scaling. At that point:

• Replace shared inbox with Plain or Linear Customer (both privacy-respecting, founder-friendly).
• Add a public status page on a real provider.
• Hire / appoint a Community Lead to own Discord + the Cohort program.

We are deliberately not setting that up on day one. A 5-person beta on Zendesk feels like a corporation pretending to be a startup — and it poisons the trust we're trying to build.