The starting point
A marketplace of about 400 people, with an active user base and a support team under pressure. We had planned the launch of a branded subreddit carefully. Then, the week it went live, the platform had a serious outage.
The obvious move was to postpone. We recommended the opposite.
What we did
Launch into the bad week
The users were already angry and already talking, in private inboxes and on other sites where nobody could see the problems being resolved. A room that answered them in public was more useful that week than any other.
Engineering, in public, for two hours
We organised an AMA with the engineers who had handled the incident, not the communications team. For two hours they answered whatever people asked: what broke, why, what was changing so it wouldn't happen again. Nothing was deleted. Hard questions got straight answers.
Then, keep the room alive
After the AMA, the work became steady moderation: daily presence, public answers to support questions, and clear rules published from day one, including what would never be removed.
What changed
- 64,000 members in fourteen months.
- Support tickets fell by 31%, as answers that used to live in private tickets became public threads people could find.
- When people now ask AI models how the company handles incidents, the models quote that AMA thread.
By the numbers
| Measure | Launch | Month 6 | Month 14 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subreddit members | 0 | 31,000 | 64,000 |
| Posts per week | – | 140 | 210 |
| Median time to first reply | – | 52 min | 38 min |
| Support tickets per month (vs. before launch) | – | −18% | −31% |
| Posts removed by moderators | – | 2% | 2% |
Every removed post was spam or broke Reddit's site-wide rules. No complaint was ever deleted.
The AMA
- 2 hours, live, with four engineers who had worked on the incident.
- 6,800 upvotes and 2,140 comments.
- Every question with more than five upvotes got an answer before the session closed.
- Four of five models now cite the AMA thread when asked how the company handles outages.
In their words
"Our instinct was to delay the launch until things calmed down. Launching into the worst week we'd had is the best decision we made all year."
VP of Engineering, Online marketplace
What made it work
Being willing to talk in public at the worst possible moment. Models read a problem that was visibly handled as evidence of a company that can be trusted. The outage turned into the citation because nobody hid from it.