Should I reply to every support email myself, or hire someone to do it?

I still answer every support email personally. Every bug report, every billing question, every "how do I do this" and every "this is broken and I'm furious." It takes hours I don't have, and some days it's the only thing I actually get done.

I do it because the signal is irreplaceable. Support emails are the most honest feedback I'll ever get — people tell me exactly where the product confuses them, exactly what broke, and exactly what they wish existed. If I hand that to someone else, I lose the pulse of my own product and start making decisions from dashboards instead of from real frustration.

But I'm also starting to wonder if personal support is becoming a crutch. It makes me feel like a good founder while quietly eating the hours I should be spending on growth, marketing, and the actual roadmap. And it doesn't scale — every new customer adds minutes I can never get back.

I've watched founders stay in the inbox forever and stay small. I've also watched founders hand support to someone else and slowly lose touch with what they built.

Do you answer your own support, or did you hand it off? And if you handed it off, how did you keep the signal without keeping the workload?