Where the Plan Grew Up

The trailer home had air conditioning. In a Louisiana summer, that sometimes felt more like a theory than a fact.

My Linux desktop regularly overheated while I worked. One day, the video card finally gave up. Alexandria did not have a computer parts store then, and Amazon Prime was not a thing, so I drove to Lafayette for a replacement at Best Buy, returned to the trailer, installed it, and went back to work. Melting hardware and melting in the heat became part of the routine. I quickly learned to keep spare parts on hand.

That was where I worked on osTicket 1.6 ST, a major rewrite that I jokingly nicknamed “TP,” for Trailer Park Edition. The conditions were far from ideal, but the release felt special because the struggle left a memory inside the work. Some organizations still use that version today, and those installations can still be upgraded to the latest release. Code written in a temporary home acquired a life much longer than the conditions in which it was made.

Popularity did not immediately make open source sustainable. I added a donation button and received less than one hundred dollars over an entire summer. Most of my income came from AdSense. Consulting gradually picked up as companies offered to pay for features they needed or for commercial support they could depend on.

Consulting created a bridge between losing my job and working for myself. It kept me close to real customer problems and revealed something a download count could not: organizations were willing to pay when the software solved a painful problem and someone stood behind it.

Enhancesoft existed in my imagination long before it became a company. I registered the Enhancesoft domain in August 2003, only two months after registering the osTicket domain. Even so, osTicket became a product years before Enhancesoft became a company.

Enhancesoft is short for Enhance Software Solutions. The idea came while I was watching a BASF commercial whose message was, “We don't make the products you buy, we make the products you buy better.” I became interested in compressing that idea into a name. Enhance captured what I was trying to do with email support: improve a familiar communication tool by adding accountability, transparency, and collaboration.

It also fit the po' boy way I had learned to appreciate in New Orleans. I did not have outside funding or abundant resources. My shortcut was to begin with something people already understood, then make it more useful without demanding that they completely change their behavior.

For years, Enhancesoft remained an idea and a domain name. My nonimmigrant visa tied my work authorization to the employer sponsoring me, so building a company around the name had to wait until my immigration status changed.

By 2008 or 2009, people were regularly asking whether I could host osTicket for them. By 2010, it was clear that I needed to build a software-as-a-service version. SaaS was still a new business model to me, but once I understood it, it made immediate sense. Customers would not need to download software, install it, maintain a server, or wait for disks to ship. They could subscribe and use the service while I took responsibility for keeping it running.

That became SupportSystem. The domain was available on the aftermarket, and the name gave the hosted product room to develop a commercial identity without changing what osTicket meant as an open-source project.

The product took years to become real. Jared, my first hire, joined Enhancesoft in 2012 and became central to major improvements in osTicket and the launch of the hosted platform. He was an amazing developer, and his arrival began to change the grammar of the work from I to we.

Around 2013, the first customer subscribed to SupportSystem. It was one subscription, but we celebrated it. Recurring revenue had been an idea and a product under construction. Now someone had trusted us enough to pay for it.

That trust created responsibility. Karen joined in 2013 as our second employee and took on customer support. A developer and a support professional may not sound like a company, but together we could do something I could not do alone. We could improve the product, answer customers, and begin keeping promises as a team.

Good work can grow when ownership makes room for participation. Jared's code, Karen's care for customers, and every contribution that followed made the products stronger than any one person could have made them. The project was becoming a company, and the company was becoming an institution capable of carrying responsibility beyond its founder.

I have always loved the idea of work that speaks for itself. I am not there yet. My hope is that the work we are now doing on osTicket 2.0 will cement it as the ticketing system to use, whether someone first encounters it as open source or simply as the best tool for the problem.

Alexandria was not part of the original plan. It became the place where the plan grew up, and eventually the U.S. headquarters of Enhancesoft.