Bootstrapped founder? Don’t do your own support

I agree that you should not do you own customer support forever. However, in the beginning it's a good idea, to get a better feeling for customers and their pains with your product.

With https://www.daito.io/ I started the same way, but, not wanting to spend money on customer support, I did my best to make the product self explanatory. This removed the need to reach out to customer support and enabled us to even get rid of helpdesk software, since the amount of support tickets drastically went down the further we optimized the product.

IMO if your product needs (lots of) customer support you are doing something wrong.

"Resolving customer issues is an easy dopamine hit that makes you avoid harder problems" that's actually good tip, I'll try to remember that 👍

80/20, don't ever forget!

"Always-on customer support makes deep work impossible" -- This really resonated, I was just talking with another founder and they said almost this exact thing

There are ways to work around it so you don't need to be "always on" e.g. timeboxing but it is hard to stick with it

I did customer support via whatsapp of my own eCommerce (very first online biz) , it was hactic but at the same time I learnt a lot and got to know my customer directly ! So at beginning, it may not hurt but should not be continued !

Interesting! Why a few months? Was there a milestone — MRR, # of support tickets, etc. — that told you it was time to outsource it?

Seems like a good idea to me, particularly for those who are building side-projects alongside their full-time work, as those people have some cash but not a lot of time.

As a founder it's good to be directly involved in all aspects. You can get direct feedback on your product. When you scale, however, you should hire people to take care of customer support. But not at the early stage.

"Reading every single request makes you build the wrong things"

a very curious insight I've never heard spoken so directly. The bootstrapped startup team I'm on takes the all hands approach for now, but as we grow, I can see a founder making the mistake of getting too involved in customer support and building something that doesn't need to exist because of one or two persuasive users for a nice problem that doesn't need to be covered.

I fully agree with that, founders should always go and interact with their customers through the whole journey "not only at the beginning", where it is a two side win-win scenario... the founders feel and learn directly from the customer, where the customers feel that special treatment and builds stronger customer attachment to the product/service.

I guess the overall exercise will be to get first-hand on everything as a founder or product manager, be it like doing marketing, design, testing, and testing to get the first few customers on board.

Once you get the volume or get few customers and you seen your self being overwhelmed of work then you can hire someone to your part of work

Wow Laura I remember meeting you at an internet marketing event in 2009 or 2010! (my branding was "the French marketer" back then)

I was amazed at your energy, and I listened several times to your many interviews about launching MeetEdgar as I was in the process of building Nuro. Congratulations for a successful exit!

It's shocking to me how many Indie founders would spend money on getting a SaaS app developed but would not hire out something like customer service. CS is literally the first thing I ever delegated (I haven't been the person to answer emails since 2008) because I hate email so much!

I think for someone who self-funds their startup (meaning, you have to pay for at least one developer) it just makes sense to invest 5-10% of the dev cost to also delegate CS. And you can still be close to customers (I do a live Zoom demo+updates+Q&A session every two weeks with paid users), but without the stress :-)

Thanks for the article!
Sébastien Night

""When you have a very emotional, strong-willed customer who insists that something is a disaster and they will be taking their business elsewhere it is VERY hard to resist the urge to build what they’re asking for. ""

I think the real problem here is in prioritizing and not wasting time on support.

As some people have already mentioned it's a good way to be in the know of everything in the first couple of months of traction.

Without it you just won't be competent enough to make product decisions.

Another thing is you can actually combine the two, meaning the founder doesn't have to be on it all the time but set 1-2 hours 3 times a week for it just to be up to the sentiment:)

I think at start of launch and without any funding, it is great to have customer support by founder. I saw different blog where found talk about support and for almost 1 year they do that. I am also doing same for my micro saas product which Shopify App name Bagify(https://apps.shopify.com/bagify). I handle tickets as it is start so there are less tickets to resolve but later I need to hire someone to handle it :)

https://sosialbooster.com/

But how do you engage in a dialogue then? I find it helpful to engage with my frustrated customers and then get in a meaningful conversation about all the other stuff (after they vented)

When you have a very emotional, strong-willed customer who insists that something is a disaster and they will be taking their business elsewhere it is VERY hard to resist the urge to build what they’re asking for.

This right here. Thanks for calling out the emotions. Emotions play a big role as a founder - necessarily as it is an emotional process building a startup. But being aware of emotional pulls goes a long ways to making smarter decisions.

Good post! With my first successful startup, Easy EMDR (https://www.easy-emdr.com/), support was the first thing that I invested in. I tend you be with you on this one — plus having help with support allows the founder to focus more on the actual project. It was definitely a good move for my purposes, although talking with support is still important so that you are hearing from your users!

Great post, congrats!

I think that especially in the beginning you need to handle customer support on your behalf. Interactions with your clients are crucial and you have to treat it as your life's on the line. It's very hard to find someone you can delegate this task to and expect them as if their lives are on the line.

It's a great point you made about trying to please everyone. That's why you need to quantify the feedback. While it's important that you try to care for your clients, you obviously can't make changes based on every feedback. When you have 10 clients and 1 out of them suggests something, you tell them appreciate the feedback, explain the situation and that you'll see how you can improve that. When you have 10 clients and 7 of them tells you the same thing you react because clearly there's something that bothers 70% of your customers.

I think you only reach the point of delegating support when you got something working, got traction and create revenue. Mainly due to financial reasons, and also because once you get a hang of what your audience likes, support won't be able to bs you.

Again, congrats for the blog post and thank you for it!

Great points, I think it is really hard to balance this point, as you want to have the best customer support, so you want to be nice, but at the same time, you can't build all the features single people want. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Nice article!
It's very true to say "it's possible and don't take much time to implement it" when talking to customers. However, this just deviates us from the core.
I'm already in this trap and only solution until I get the customer support resource is to have self-help service and visiting the tickets once in two days rather than being online 24/7

++

interesting

How do you find customer service people?
How much should I expect to pay?
What if people want to speak with you personally? It seems like a trade-off of your time or connection with your customers.

I run an online fiddle/violin course called FiddleHed. A lot of customers just have specialized questions about what they're learning. Or they just want to say hello and make a connection.

But I'd looooove to do less customer service.

Thanks for your feedback!

I am agree👍

I do my own support, but I use a conversational support funnel. Essentially, it's three layers of support that reduce the load: Proactive support (FAQs, tooltips, etc.) > self-serve support (chatbots for common questions) > human support.

By the time it gets down the funnel to me, there isn't a whole lot of work for me to do.

Brilliant! Love this take @Laura. I especially appreciate you pointing out that reading every single request makes you build the wrong things.
“The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” And your point about the addictive dopamine hit of helping your customers and how easy it is to get lost in that and not prioritize other higher value tasks. So good! Thank you.

I was skeptical, but your reasoning is compelling! Any services you can recommend?

Thanks for your post. Agree that the time to bring on customer service help is sooner than most of us realise. However, for some products, the costs associated with training the support and making them answer correctly are way too high to bring them on within the first few months...