GetHuman Founding Story

GetHuman is the leading website for getting customer service information for thousands of companies around the world, especially known for helping you get an actual human on the phone at these companies.

GetHuman was born in 2006 as the IVR Cheat Sheet on my personal blog. This blog was created out of frustration - how can a phone company - a company I pay $100/month - make it hard for me to get a human on the phone?

After my Mom had died, I helped look after my Dad when he had early stage Alzheimer's disease. It was heartbreaking when he could try to make phone calls and he thought the IVR was a human, and didn't understand why it could not understand him. :(

I also found it ludicrous that marketing departments would pay huge sums of money to talk to customers, instead of actually just answering all the incoming phone calls.

The blog started with a dozen entries and some general tips. The press got hold of it, and it started to grow like crazy. We got covered _everywhere_ including the NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Today Show and many other newspapers, magazines and TV shows. I was even featured in People Magazine :-)

I created GetHuman.com while I was busy working at Kayak as CTO. I took the GetHuman religion to heart at Kayak. For the first few years, we didn't have any customer service people, but instead, we had all the engineers take turns answering email and the phones. This was priceless research to me! If we simply fixed all the problems customers reported about Kayak, we would end up with software with no problems.

Finally, in 2012, my friend Christian Allen (who I met in Rwanda) took over GetHuman, and turned it into a real company that he runs now with Jeff Whelpley.

Today GetHuman has served customer service information to over 200 million customers. The site is ad supported so that we can deliver the information to consumers for free. The name GetHuman came from Jennifer Marotta.

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