Nearly six months ago, I joined Polar, a company building a Merchant of Record platform with focus on developers. I had seen firsthand at Lemon Squeezy the benefits of such a MoR, and I also knew how hard it is to manage the expectations of such a wide customer-base (indie hackers, startups, enterprises, etc.) with the growing developments of the product.
My impression of Polar is that it has a very developer friendly outlook (the socials) and concepts for payments (such as event ingestion and cost insights) which gives it quite an edge over the competitors, since it goes beyond just acting as the gateway of payments.
But to be honest, while I continue to admire the product, what really drives me at the end of the day is working with great people and seeing the positive impact it brings for the merchants and the end customers of Polar. What got me to join Polar is the CEO, Birk who sold his company to Shopify and was patient enough during the entire interview and onboarding process. I started chatting with him during Polar's early days, when they were making accepting money easier for open source developers.
So, despite every career decision like this coming with some risk, I left Databricks knowing that I will be in good hands.
Now, there's a lot to talk about that has been happening, so I'll cover that in few sections:
- Owning the communications
- Merchant Tiering
- Hiring
- Bounties
- Documentation
- Demos
- To be addressed
- Community Love
Owning the communications
Before we get to it, here's what Plain could summarize about my work at Polar in 2025 ☺️
Response times
Birk hired me with the biggest goal at the time to take off his load from the busy support queue. He was doing great but as the CEO, he should be able to spend more time and be able to join in other efforts (vs always being bottlenecked in support).
Reflecting back, the team was certainly able to improve the response times, specially the first response times across the last 6 months. The resolution time did take a bump up but looking at the growth of the company, being out for 2 weeks near the new year, and that we are out on the weekends, I'd say we managed that well for now. Definitely, we've started to implement AI solutions with human-in-the-loop approach so that we can cater and respond faster.
Before
(source)
After
Auto Responses
With enabled auto-responses, I made sure that we are now able to reply with an instant email to any inbound email acknowledging that they have emailed to the right destination, i.e. Polar and that we'll be assigning someone to get back as soon as possible. Initially, this was sufficient, but then I started to notice that people were not happy with not receiving a response over the weekend even though we sent that email first. So, I tweaked the workflow a bit so that we now have defined business hours, and all inbound emails outside that, receive the auto-response that we'll get back to you once the next week starts. This allows us to set right expectations to any inbound email.
Canned responses
After a day or two, I found myself writing the same thing repeatedly for certain set of actions. Since such patterns were easy to identify, we improved our Plain blocks to have certain defined responses that can be copy-pasted in an event of pattern match. This has been helpful in improving the response time when end-user requests for their subscription cancellation or ask for refunds.
Social Media Signals
In my initial days, I knew how good of an impression it will be if I was able to maintain positive sentiment or over-turn few negative ones on X (formerly Twitter) about Polar. To do that, I used to search the following on X:
@polar_sh -is:reply
This allowed me to find all the posts where Polar was being tagged and was not a reply. While this worked great (and I still use it sometimes), it interfered with my Slack & Plain workflow. This is why I started search for a tool that automated collection of posts regrading a certain brand name ("Polar" & "@polar_sh") and classified them as negative and positive. Thanks to Jacob, we set up Octolens and it works like a charm in notifying us whenever there's a negative sentiment post about Polar on X:
Merchant Tiering
As the business keeps growing, the attention (first) is naturally given to those who bring the most immediate value on the table, and hence I experimented with some internal merchant tiering. This allowed us to prioritize responses to the merchants who where making it big (or were estimated to be).
I went ahead with creating two tiers, Premium & VIP but I feel the names could be to better denoted, and this tiering needs a re-visit.
For the VIP merchants, I aimed at having them receiving their first reply to any inbound ticket in the first 30 minutes. This is largely being met and has allowed us to keep the big merchants quite happy.
For the Premium merchants, I aimed at having them receive a reply under an hour (experimental) and we've been mostly keeping up to this (wish I could share more details!) and indeed has allowed us to give the attention in the right areas.
Hiring
After few months, the support backlog started to grow and it was time for a new addition (Customer Support Specialist) to the team, someone who could help me take my mind and time-off the support and had some experience in a payments company (preferably).
After helping hire a Solutions Engineer at Neon, this time I was more confident in the preparation of a relevant task that would be technical and support focused, and that the assignment would enforce the applicants to get familiar with Polar before joining the company.
After reviewing the submission and few email exchanges, I pushed for Isac and we hired him! 🎉 He naturally caught up to the ground and is a key help to the company today ✨ #HappyHiring
Bounties
With increasing focus on the support but the desire to keep working on technical things, I wanted to experiment with offloading some of the technical work via open source bounties via Algora. This was a known space to me as a contributor but I didn't know how hard things can be on the other side, i.e. explaining the exact ask to the potential contributor, make sure nobody overturns/copies an existing PR, make sure someone has actually put in the effort to make the PR (vs generate them blindly with AI), etc.
So to see how this plays out, I created the foundation of examples repository with few framework examples and then we got contributions from various folks which allowed to expand the repository to total of 32 starters demonstrating usage of Polar across various frameworks. We awarded 32 bounties for $2625 most of which came for polarsource/examples and few contributions to polar.sh/docs/guides/introduction which allowed Polar to gain from their valuable time and efforts.
Documentation
I just love technical writing and I have this inevitable urge to keep the Polar documentation latest as possible. Few highlights:
- Apart from the need to now make a big help center, I laid the foundation and grew the Guides part of the documentation which details common workflows and technical approaches that can be taken with Polar.
- I noticed that we were spreading thin across various communication channels, and so I wrote down a dedicated support doc to make sure to set right expectations with people regrading the support they'd receive from us.
- At Polar, things are being shipped everyday so developers need to keep up with that via our changelog. I've been able to maintain a fair frequency of updating the changelog but I think there's a lot of room to make sure that I get the theming right in combination to doing them every week rigourously.
- The paramount to merchants with a MoR is how they handle conflicting situations. We got threatened from few merchants about bad mouthing regarding our procedure so I went ahead and documented it publicly so that it's known before you even sign up to Polar - https://polar.sh/docs/merchant-of-record/account-reviews#operational-guidelines.
Demos
I love creating technical content, and have been writing blogs since 2020. With the rise of AI, while producing technical content is a bit easier, the video space is not yet figured out in terms of actual product demos + nice voiceover. For each change or idea that could be used immediately, I created technical demos out of my own love for learning on how to make videos:
- Using Dub to shorten Polar checkout links
- Using Polar to receive payments for Framer templates
- An overview of Subscription Trials in Polar
- Bulk discount manager for Polar
To be addressed
- The purpose of Discord as iterated in our docs is to provide a community atmosphere and not as an official channel. Well, this is not easily understandable by the merchants or the end customers when they have a pressing issue and they want to catch our attention (rightly so). I've started to make sure to set expectations while replying to the posts regarding compliance or account reviews - just so that the community overtime learns that Discord is not an official support channel but it does end up helping them in any case! Still sometimes I wonder on how to maintain a community atmosphere and separate the support entirely from it.
- I think we are superb at shipping fast as a team (one of the best things about Polar!) but have been a bit behind to keeping an updated changelog, especially one for API level changes. This gets crucial as we scale and merchants start looking at official docs to backtrace the changes in the API as we release newer versions.
- Our biggest pain point today is account reviews and compliance. For a very few percentage, failed KYC checks require manual intervention, and incorrect or too-secretive website or hiding relevant information in the merchant submission ends up in long conversations with our support delaying the time before they can withdraw their money via Polar. Consequentially, we've started to put more requirements & flags in place in addition to using AI based internal reviews at our disposal to cater to the merchants faster.
- I led the integration of support chat in the dashboard via Plain but that resulted in too much spam (people started expected AI-driven responses) and we had to take it down but I am still bullish on making reaching support easier than ever.
Community Love
It just makes my day to see that I am able to help merchants across the world while collaborating with an exceptional team and that they are genuinely happy about interactions they have had with support team at Polar 🖤
