I was a guest on The Supportive, a podcast from Help Scout hosted by Mat Patterson. The episode is about customer support, small business, and figuring out what matters when you’re a one-person operation.

When Mat first reached out, I wasn’t sure an interview made sense. What I do is small. I make video tutorials and run a website. I’m not managing a support team or fielding thousands of tickets a day. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I actually care a lot about customer support. Maybe more than I’d admitted to myself.

We ended up going deep on some things I don’t usually talk about in public. My early days working at RadioShack. The values my dad taught me over lunch when I told him I wanted to be a lawyer. Why I chose a small law firm over the big ones. And how all of that shaped the way I run MacSparky today.

The part of the conversation I keep coming back to is about kindness as a business strategy. Not in a soft, abstract way. In a practical way. If you solve for kindness in your customer interactions, you end up attracting the kind of audience you want. The aggressive people filter themselves out. That’s been my experience for twenty years now.

We also talked about the tension between growth and staying hands-on. Mat did a great job of getting me to talk about things I don’t usually discuss.