Conversations resolved
Business growth absorbed
Agent time saved per month
Jo Barrow
Chief of Staff at Granola
Granola
Email infrastructure for developers. Resend provides APIs that make it easy to build, test, and send transactional emails at scale. Over 100,000 users.
Industry
Developer Tools
Support team
5 Agents
Volume
4,000 tickets/month
website
www.granola.ai
The challenge
As Granola scaled, their reliance on Slack and email for customer support became increasingly unsustainable. Handling hundreds of messages per week, the team struggled to stay organized and provide consistent responses.
“We had a super-engaged early adopter group, and we needed a way to organize their feedback. Before Plain, we were using a shared Google inbox, which made tracking threads almost impossible.”
Jo Barrow
Chief of Staff at Granola
The challenge was exacerbated during moments of heightened visibility, such as their product launch and Series A announcement, when user queries surged dramatically. Support weeks often meant one technical and one non-technical team member on a rota, taking them away from their core work and adding to backlog pressures.
Recently, Granola brought on a dedicated Customer Experience Lead, Vicky Firth, to lead frontline support and own their newly launched Help Center – a key step in scaling operations, reducing repetitive questions, and giving customers more ways to help themselves before reaching out.
Why Plain?
Rather than evaluating multiple platforms, Granola turned to Plain based on familiarity and speed. Jo explained, “We were moving so quickly, it was very much about who we knew and what we knew. Plain was the right choice because it allowed us to get started fast while offering the flexibility and configurability our technical team needed.”
Granola saw Plain as the ideal solution for their first support platform, thanks to its:
Developer-focused design: Tailored to meet the needs of highly technical teams.
Streamlined Slack integration: Unified Slack alongside their other support channels, into one manageable platform.
Flexible setup: Provided the ability to integrate tools like Linear for ticket management.
Scalable foundation: Designed to support fast-growing companies like Granola over the long term.
The solution
Granola implemented Plain just days after their public launch, and quickly saw a transformation in how they managed support. Key benefits included:
Centralized inbox: Slack, email, in-app form submissions, and Help Center requests are all managed in Plain.
Efficient prioritization: Urgent issues, such as app-breaking bugs, are flagged and routed to the top of the inbox for swift resolution.Time-saving workflows: Features like AI-powered suggested responses and keyboard shortcuts help handle repetitive queries with speed and ease. improved collaboration: Integration with Linear enables faster collaboration between support and engineering.
Live Help Center: Built from scratch in Plain, Granola’s Help Center houses refreshed, AI-optimized articles and connects directly to their customer inbox – making it easier for customers to find answers themselves and immediately escalate to human support when needed.
Custom data in context: Granola has built their own customer cards using Plain’s API, surfacing the right information with no extra clicks.
Inbox consolidation: They’ve also directed other company inboxes (like privacy@ and security@) into Plain, making it easier to track progress and ownership across teams.
The impact
Since adopting Plain, Granola has built a strong foundation for scalable support:
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“Plain gave us the tools to handle high volumes of support during a huge growth period. It’s transformed how we manage support and set us up to scale effectively as we grow.”
Jo Barrow
Chief of Staff at Granola
Looking ahead
Granola sees Plain as a critical partner in their long-term growth. With the Help Center now live, they plan to continually refresh content, using AI to identify and generate high-value articles from past conversations. The goal is a knowledge base that stays accurate, helpful, and easy to navigate – while giving customers the choice between fast self-service and personalised human help.
