maximgsaini

Hey Steve, This is really inspiring, man!! I know what its like. I would suggest that you keep going at it. Especially since things are finally working out.

I see you mention user support as a potential time suck in one of your comments. I founded a startup which essentially provides user support on behalf of busy founders. I'd be willing to offer free support credits to you (in addition to a helpdesk software which is free for all) if it would make life easier for you. I'm hoping it might save you some time. We love people who bootstrap and let me know if we can help in any way. My email is in my profile. You can check us at: busibud.com

I know how hard it is for a solo founder to take care of everything himself and what it feels like to put 15 hours a day without an end in sight.

Disclaimer: We run a Heldesk software, Busibud.com which maps out a company's customer support process and helps them outsource only the mapped out part. The helpdesk software is free to use.

I've been helping companies setup their customer support processes for some time now. Initially, founders/core team members must do customer support on their own. This should happen till your team has some visibility of the process (what kind of questions you get and how to reply to them).

------- What are the ways to handle customer support?

You can do it synchronously (chat or phone call) or asynchronously (email). Usually, async customer support requires lesser money/time because things can be structured. But, before you have some visibility of the process and are still finding p/m fit, I would suggest you talk to people.

------ Outsource vs do it yourself?

Before you know your process, do it yourself. No one can decide how things can be answered. Once the process has been mapped out, a lot of the startups I know of ask every team member to pitch in for customer support. This may lead to better quality but leads to huge costs as well. I've seen salesmen spending 1-2 hours everyday on customer support answering what they call "dumb questions". You can outsource it as well, which comes with problems of its own. For starters, it will be very hard to find an outsourcing partner who will be ready to deal with extremely small volumes.

Even if you do manage to outsource, your process will now be managed by someone else. Ad-Hoc changes become difficult to communicate and the people giving out support for you will also be giving out support for other companies....hence leading to quality issues. Unfortunately, most outsourcing companies still rely primarily on training to ensure quality. They don't use the technology they should be using. Thus, quality will depend on the infrastructure of the outsourcing partner (training managers, quality managers, etc).

Once you reach a decent size, hiring people and creating your own customer support team is an option but is usually more expensive (HR/payroll/training/infrastructure). But, it also leads to better quality. Do remember that customer support teams have a huge turnover rate...people keep going and coming in. Thus, training and quality monitoring costs can be huge!!

------ What is the average time to resolve queries?

I've seen a first response time of 5 minutes and also first response times of a few days. Don't know what the average is but depends on a lot of factors. The one doing it in 5 minutes usually has happier customers.

------ How much budget do you allocate for CS?

This is a tricky question. Even huge companies have a problem with this. The amount of budget to be allocated would depend on a lot of factors. What I would suggest is that your get started with a particular level of resolution time (which would determine your budget) and then try to optimize it using a series of A/B tests with retention/return being the metric being monitored (the metric too can depend on a lot of factors). Once you use these metrics, you would have a better idea of how much budget you should allocate. I might be wrong, but Busibud.com is perhaps the only customer support tool that I know of that lets you A/B test customer support strategies.

It is not only the US which abides by this culture, much of the world does. Northern Europe comes across as a stark exception, though!

> Perhaps they could have a filter based on completed courses through the various online options (Coursera, Code School, Treehouse, etc)

Couldn't agree more!!

Awesome service guys. The following criticism is not for github, but for our culture as a whole. I cannot get myself to agree with how our culture has come to describe a 'student'. An example would be the following:

"If you're a student aged 13+ and enrolled in degree or diploma granting course of study, the GitHub Student Developer Pack is for you. All you need is a school-issued email address, valid student identification card, or other official proof of enrollment"

So I need to pay money to a big institution to be considered a student? Many 'students' would probably be in a better financial situation than a non-'student' who is trying to learn. Somehow 'education' has turned into a tool for passing on privilege.

I do agree this pack is not meant for everyone. And I also agree that these guys would find it hard to differentiate between a real learner and one who is not. But I'm amazed they didn't think about linking it with a coursera course or something. Anyways, I've spent 10 minutes thinking about this and they've probably spent 10 weeks. They've done more research, I might be missing something.

Even Ritchie and McCarthy might not have been able to achieve as much without other people's contributions. Clearly they didn't start out with sticks and stones. Even Einstein could've been useless if people before him hadn't laid down the required framework. He was just standing on the top of a human pyramid. The problem is that we only look at the guy standing at the top.

The mere idea of 'hero-worship' is flawed. Leads to dangerous consequences. Why do we forget the contributions of all those who were never named?! Nobody here can go very far on his own. I think it is high time we realized that all this was not built by one man or a few 'heroes'.

PS: I don't think the article describes Jobs as a great guy.

That is the Best Part of YC!!! If Albert Einstein had not been 'rejected' for 2 years, we might not have had that revolutionary glimpse into our own world (just saying). He might've accepted those stale old ideas by joining the academia of the time. Rejections force you to improve, rejections liberate you from previously held ideas, rejections force you to jump higher.

Inside YC, you help 50 companies. Outside YC, you help 2950 companies by giving your opinion on their performance. Some of these 2950 companies will someday blow everyone away!! They will give everyone a glimpse into a new world, just like the greats of the past did. And the likes of YC will be thanked, because every rejection will have some contribution in shaping them.

Why add the complexity of a car when you can simply walk?! The car will break down, you will have to waste days taking it to the service station, you will have to get a driver's license, you will get tickets, you may kill someone and get in trouble, you can't drink if you will be driving. Why add so much complexity to your life?

The idea that complexity in itself is bad is flawed. Sometimes innovation does require complexity. Complexity for the sake of complexity is bad.

>"But [some new unproven system] is really cool! Even [some big company] uses it!"

A company I know uses a big/buggy oil pipeline leak detection software. It is very complex and very buggy. Tech support has to be called in every few months. But they still use it. Why? Because it will detect oil leaks much faster. Potentially saving them millions in case of something bad. Should we stop innovation because we are scared of 'complexity'? I wouldn't suggest using a system because it is 'really cool' and a 'big company uses it'. But why do they use it and why is it 'cool'? Can it make you more money? Those are the questions worth asking.

>"Innovate on your core product, not on your plumbing "

Every bit of complexity deployed to make more money is good. Can you tell and prove how it will make money?

Every bit of complexity added because it is 'cool' is flawed! If plumbing can make me more money, then hell yeh it requires some investment. Every situation is different.