I think the key is to choose your technology and customer base carefully.
A lot of the fear I detect here is along the lines of "what if (something breaks|customer calls) at 4am on the day my wife is giving birth???" The reality for me in the last five years is that's not something you need to worry about.
My sites generally don't break, and not because I'm awesome or anything. They don't break because they're built on a stack that doesn't need any attention pretty much ever, and for the most part they don't try to do anything particularly remarkable. Reading/writing from databases and displaying the results on a web page is pretty much solved. You get four nines right out of the box unless you go out of your way to choose a flaky platform.
My customers do actually call from time to time, but it's not the sort of thing I'd consider getting out of bed to worry about. The ones that pay money generally get a response within a day, and the ones that don't pay me anything will probably get a response when I get around to it. That, also, has worked perfectly well for the last five years.
So while it did in fact turn out that I had a "crisis" at 4am while my wife was giving birth, it was in no way a priority for me to do anything about it just then. I had much more important things on my mind. Putting off the disaster recovery process possibly led to losses in the two, possibly three figure category. Fortunately as a single founder, that's the sort of decision I get to make all by myself.
To extend on this, you should separate yourself from the routine customer service as much as possible. Automate the first tier with extensive FAQs, screencasts and self-help resources. Train up a good outsource worker to respond to first- and second-tier support requests, elevating to you only when it is outside of their capabilities.
This is something that Rob Walling talks about extensively. He personally deals with customer support for the first several months of his app, so he can understand the pain points and what needs to be added to self-help resources. Then he writes up an extensive training manual for outsourced workers and begins to train them.
Eventually, he stops dealing with "OMG I lost my password and don't know where the reset is?!" questions...and only deals with customer support that is actually worth his time.
That could probably be a post by itself. The way we've evolved to add additional layers of automation and support, adding an FAQ, and other related improvements have definitely helped. However, when you're building an app by yourself, everything takes time, and it's not quite so easy to make time to perfect a support system overnight. So, in our case, it's simply just evolved as we've grown.
Yeah, that's an excellent point. Everything takes time, and time is your single most important commodity as a solo-founder.
Do I push out a new fix that stops some bugs, upgrade a feature that customers have been haranguing me about, do some marketing to get new customers or work on support so I can devote more time to <everything else> in the future?
As with most things in startup land, it's all about compromise, which I'm sure you already know =) Loved the post btw, looking forward to more posts coming from you
That was one of the points of the article. At first, that fear dominated my life. As time has gone on, and a few things went wrong here and there, I've learned it's not quite that bad.
Also, we have a very different view on customer service. I strive to respond to all customers immediately. We could reply within a day, but going above and beyond for customers is important to me. The support requests in the middle of the night aren't even a problem. It's just part of the gig.
Also, we have a very different view on customer service
Indeed. Though going above and beyond is important to me as well. We just seem to have different ideas about what that means too.
I think patio11 says it best:
"I appreciate that you'd feel safer going with Brand Name X, and Brand Name X will indeed have someone around to answer your phone call at 2 AM. Unfortunately, they won't be able to do anything for you. Their only job is getting you off the phone before you can speak to someone capable of resolving your problem, because those people cost money. And you know what happens if you call at 2 PM? You get the same guy."
As in, you might not get a response for 16 hours, but when you do it will be from me, the guy who built the thing. And it'll be to tell you that your problem has been solved and no further action is required on your part.
Incidentally, I don't have email on my phone. Nor do I carry my phone around most days. I sometimes go a few days without checking email while on vacation, and I'm on vacation a lot. If I could give you one piece of advice, one solo-founder to another, it would be to figure out what you can change about your product so that you can do the same. It's entirely your gig, so it's up to you to choose whether anything unpleasant is part of it.
I hadn't heard it put that way, but that's definitely a good point. My view on all of this is still evolving, and we're getting to a point where it's not going to make sense for me to the primary person on support. As far as above and beyond, you're definitely right. It's all relative. If that part of it bothered me anymore, I'd probably look to make some changes, but oddly enough, I enjoy it, so it's not too big of a deal to maintain that kind of turnaround time.
For us, the biggest change was adding an awesome system admin to the mix on retainer. He's been a huge help and we now have a much more resilient architecture. It's all evolving though as I find time to streamline the processes as needed.
All definitely some good food for thought. Thanks!
One thing I have noticed is that immediately replying to customers causes some of them to contact you for very mundane things ("can you tell me where that setting for X is again?"), which increases the time needed from you (I solve that by increasing the time I take to reply to those customers).
As a single founder with a web app, it's amazing how closely the experience in your blog mirrors mine. However, I haven't yet gotten used to that nagging feeling when you're on holiday and you know you would really be in trouble if the system were to go down right now and you had to debug something on a laptop with a flaky internet connection. In reality, nothing more serious than 30 minute downtime ever happened to me. The site is doing really well so I don't have a money issue since, but that also means the financial impact of any serious problem is magnified as well. For me, that has made stress levels go up rather than down, I hope you can keep your cool if your site takes off. Hopefully, I can get to the point that there's so much coming in that I can hire someone, but if I look at the few service-threathening issues we've had so far I really can't see how anyone could have solved those except the person who built the system. Me.
A lot of the fear I detect here is along the lines of "what if (something breaks|customer calls) at 4am on the day my wife is giving birth???" The reality for me in the last five years is that's not something you need to worry about.
My sites generally don't break, and not because I'm awesome or anything. They don't break because they're built on a stack that doesn't need any attention pretty much ever, and for the most part they don't try to do anything particularly remarkable. Reading/writing from databases and displaying the results on a web page is pretty much solved. You get four nines right out of the box unless you go out of your way to choose a flaky platform.
My customers do actually call from time to time, but it's not the sort of thing I'd consider getting out of bed to worry about. The ones that pay money generally get a response within a day, and the ones that don't pay me anything will probably get a response when I get around to it. That, also, has worked perfectly well for the last five years.
So while it did in fact turn out that I had a "crisis" at 4am while my wife was giving birth, it was in no way a priority for me to do anything about it just then. I had much more important things on my mind. Putting off the disaster recovery process possibly led to losses in the two, possibly three figure category. Fortunately as a single founder, that's the sort of decision I get to make all by myself.