Remote's team wrote about building a Slack knowledge bot for accounting questions and said: "for four years the answer to most of them was often me." (remote.com, blog, date not shown.) A Peerlist writer described "Three identical questions I had already answered fourteen times that week." (peerlist.io, date not verified.)
Neither is a statistic, and we do not claim they are typical. They describe a pattern many founders will recognise: the answer desk forms by accident, because asking the founder is faster than finding a document.
How the answer desk forms
- The founder knows the answer, so people ask.
- Answering takes one minute, so it never feels worth writing down.
- A new person joins and every question starts again.
Count it for one week
- Keep a note of every question you answer that you have answered before.
- At the end of the week group them. Most founders find that a handful of questions make up most of the repeats.
- Put a rough time on it with the repeat question calculator on this site. It uses your own numbers, not ours.
Hand the repeats away
- Write each repeat answer once, in your words, with the date.
- Send people to the written answer first.
- Keep a short list of what is still yours: decisions, exceptions, anything new.
Try it
AskMyStartup is an AI clone that serves your approved answers and sends everything else back to you. It is in private beta; join the waitlist from the buttons on this page.