The Support Lead problem

At Zeffy, every engineer takes a turn being Support Lead. One week on, many weeks off. While you're on rotation, you own everything "support": triaging incoming tickets, investigating bugs, shipping fixes, and running the release process.

For years, this worked. Ten engineers, a manageable ticket flow, rotation done.

Then Zeffy grew up.

Every day we now serve:

And the product surface kept widening underneath that traffic: donation forms, events & ticketing, CRM, memberships, e-commerce, peer-to-peer fundraising, finance, integrations… Each surface has its own edge cases. Each country has its own tax and payment rules.

More users on a bigger product means more tickets — and our engineering philosophy makes that especially uncomfortable. At Zeffy, every engineer should be able to fix any bug. No dedicated support squad, no "ask the one person who knows the finance module". That shared ownership is what keeps us fast and keeps knowledge spread.

But it's also what gets harder as the product grows. A bug in the auctions module looks nothing like a bug in our CRM. Expecting every engineer to carry every surface in their head stops being realistic past a certain size.

Two things started to break:

  1. Productivity tax on the rest of the team. The Support Lead kept interrupting whichever engineer built the feature: "Quick question — how does this flow work?" Those "quick questions" compound.
  2. The backlog. Whatever the Support Lead couldn't finish in the week got pushed to next week. And the next. We watched the support backlog grow every Friday.

We wanted a world where one engineer handles the whole week, no ticket leaks to the backlog, and no one else gets pulled off their roadmap.

So we built Frerot.

What is Frerot?

Frerot (🇫🇷 "little brother") is an AI bug-investigator that lives in our repo as a single Cursor/Claude command: /frerot 🧞‍♂️.

You give it a HubSpot ticket URL:

/frerot <https://app.hubspot.com/contacts/.../tickets/123456>