
As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support - NonUmemoto
http://plumshell.com/2017/11/30/as-a-solo-app-developer-i-decided-to-offer-phone-support-and-this-is-what-happened/
======
cyberferret
I did it for 10 years, but more recently have moved away from phone support as
much as possible (or delegated to others to do).

The main reason - I am a solo developer. And the brain mode for 'developer' is
VERY different from the brain mode for 'support agent'.

It was basically impossible for me to get into 'flow' state during a normal
working day. Even one phone call during the day took me away from my creative,
programming mindset and into an empathetic, listening mindset. And the
transition between the two were very different. It's like asking a racing
driver to knit a scarf each time he came into the pits, before he could go out
on the track to drive at high speed again.

It also made it hard to plan blocks of work. Most times it was OK, but there
were days where I would plan to do about 5 or 6 bug fixes, but I would get a
slew of phone calls that meant I got 0 programming done that day, and would
have to move other plans.

I actually enjoyed support, but in the end I had to decide which of the two
parts of the job was moving the business ahead more than the other, and pure
development work won out.

~~~
kqr
> And the brain mode for 'developer' is VERY different from the brain mode for
> 'support agent'.

This is something I can have trouble with even personally. I have noticed that
when I get home from a long day of cold, analytical problem-solving, I mbrain
bad at shifting my brain to empathetically listen and provide emotional
support for my wifes problems.

~~~
crispyambulance
The daily transition from work to home is difficult for many couples and this
problem has existed since forever, but it has _nothing_ to do with "being
analytical" at work and then having to "be empathetic" at home.

It doesn't matter what your job is or if you're a husband or a wife, there's a
period of time after coming home from work that is beset with opportunities
for arguments. Lots of people experience this, not just rocket-scientists and
developers :-)

There's no sure-fire solution, but a little bit of buffer time seems to work,
followed by deliberate accommodation for the needs of the other.

~~~
dangerlibrary
> "it has _nothing_ to do with "being analytical" at work and then having to
> "be empathetic" at home."

[citation needed]

I doubt you (or anyone, for that matter) can make such a claim with scientific
rigor. You are responding to a statement of someone's personal experience -
for them, it very well may have something to do with switching from an
analytical, critical state to a more empathetic one.

~~~
fapjacks
For my part, I recognized after I got married that I was coming home and
applying the same mental model I used at work in conversations with my wife: I
was there exclusively to solve problems. My wife just wanted me to listen
while she told me about her day. This _definitely_ increased the surface area
for arguments, because in my years I've found that generally, wives want you
to shut up and listen and empathize with what they're complaining about, and
not rattling off "answers" to the problems. I did have to train myself to
adapt to the transition. It _did_ cause problems specifically because of the
mental model I brought home from work.

~~~
dhimes
It took me a long time to get this right too. I came across this amusing page
and realized I wasn't a bad person, because there is a lot of truth to this.

specifically, #39:

[http://showcase.netins.net/web/tash/rules/rules.html](http://showcase.netins.net/web/tash/rules/rules.html)

~~~
wickawic
This page is very silly, it basically says 'men get to do what they want when
they want'. I like how the longest rule is about being 'single-minded', which
is basically just an excuse for not taking part in all facets of your
relationship.

Here is another perspective which you may find equally dumb:

[https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-
asked/](https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/)

Note that this comic is coming from a totally female perspective (scary!) but
it really applies either way. For instance, in my marriage I am the one who
feels like the chore-czar, while my wife is the one who tends to feel like the
planning-czar. If we both realize this and try to meet in the middle it makes
things go a lot more smoothly.

~~~
wonton2
This is assuming they both want the same thing. Society pushes us into
marriage and getting kids, not just into gender roles. I think greater
equality will lead to more single people, not more men doing house work.
Because people will realize they actually have a choice. Most people don’t
want to clean and administer the same stuff every day. And although nobody
would prefer that thir kids were never born, people would not feel like they
are losing out if they never get kids. Developed countries have people get
fewer kids later in their lives. Maybe it is because of the economy, but kids
could help their parents with money, so i dont think so, i think it is by
choice. You could call it people getting more selfish, i say it is people
getting more rational, or «analytical» if you will.

------
whalesalad
Working at the Apple Store as a sales person has helped me IMMENSELY in my
career, not only in terms of understanding how human beings approach
technology but from a sales standpoint as well. In the first startup I was a
part of, every single member of the 3 person team did email support for our
school teacher userbase. Do it. Everyone needs to do it. Doing this kind of
work is very grounding and humbling.

When you box yourself into the "But, I'm an engineer" corner and decide it's
beneath you to talk to customers, you limit yourself. Don't do that. Become a
more well-rounded person. Talk to your users. Understand them. Empathize with
them. It will make you a better engineer. And if you're a solo founder or part
of a small team, it's even more critical that you do this.

~~~
SyneRyder
To emphasize "don't think it's beneath you to talk to customers", there's the
story of when William from Microsoft took a phone support call:

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=15943)

~~~
amelius
It's easy to have a good attitude when it's not your main line of work.

------
oblib
I've been doing this for over 15 years with an invoicing app I have and I've
got to know a lot users pretty well over that time.

My app is simple and easy to use, and I've made "Training Videos" for just
about everything you can do with, and I've had years to work out any bugs that
have popped up, so I don't get a lot of calls anymore. But every call is a
chance to learn something and improve the app and I pay very close attention
to those who call.

My approach is that it's never the user's fault, and I tell them that. I work
click by click with them to show them how to do something and I tell them if
something doesn't work it's my fault and I will fix it. And I also ask them
how they think it should work.

Before I made my first app back in the `90s I read a book Apple put out called
something like "Apple Human Interface Guidelines". At first glance I thought
it was a waste of money, but since I'd spent it I decided to read it all.

It explained some of the history of the Apple GUI and how and why things were
designed the way they were, which was basically on things people were familiar
with, like "Radio Buttons" and "Checkboxes", etc.

By the time I was done I realized the genius in the approach. I'm still
impressed with it. My goal has been to make web apps that the user doesn't
have to learn anything to use. That it all works like they expect it should.
After 15+ years I've got pretty close now. I rarely get any calls or emails.

Kind of feel like the "Maytag Man" now.

~~~
CardenB
How do you deal with conflicting ideas of how something should work?

I'm sure there are a set of users who wish your app worked in one way, while
another set of users feel strongly that it works in an opposing way. How do
you reconcile that?

~~~
oblib
If it's something that most users would find handy I will implement it.

------
doomlaser
I created a shareware Tetris clone for OS X in the mid 2000s and provided my
cell number in the readme. I'd get a trickle of calls from all over the world
at all times of day. That's where I learned never to have a serial number
generator that included the number 0 since it looks so close to the letter 0.

It was weird to be out and about and suddenly get a tech support call, but
people were usually really nice.

~~~
Terr_
> the number 0 since it looks so close to the letter 0.

Just throwing this out there in case the problem comes up again:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base58](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base58)

~~~
SyneRyder
It's also worth skipping out the letters S and number 5, the letter G and
number 6, and the letter B and number 8. I also omit vowels to avoid
accidentally creating words in serial codes.

~~~
bonesss
I autogenerate passwords exclusively using lower case 'L's, the letter i in
both cases, the number 1, and pipe characters.

~~~
gspetr
There's room for improvement. What about the "!"? Gotta catch those folks with
poor eyesight.

------
patio11
It is very, very difficult to offer phone support as a solo developer,
particularly at low price points (below e.g. $5k per year) and for low tech-
literacy customers. You can still _do_ it, if you need someone to talk to, you
want to do customer development, or you have a customer who strikes your fancy
for non-market reasons, but you probably should not message the expectation
that you're available.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I always found that my most needy and difficult customers were
disproportionate phone users. They also tended to be the lowest value ones so
stopping phone support was an easy decision.

------
fivre
My experience with doing phone support for applications is that it is
_excellent_ if well-augmented, and absolute garbage otherwise.

Due to a variety of factors, my previous employer provided about 50-50 phone
and email support, often with phone as the first point of contact. That worked
because phone calls came in with proper context (essentially providing
information about who is calling and information about their account status)
and I had tools to guide callers when something wasn't extremely basic: most
applications are primarily visually- or textually-rich environments, and
verbal descriptions require a high degree shared context on both sides (e.g.
you are a competent CCNA contacting Cisco TAC, and both parties share a common
verbal language to describe non-verbal tools). Absent that, screen-sharing
capability is critical, as otherwise phone support is endless dead air of "I'm
looking at things you can't see while you describe things I can't see and have
no context for, let's both black box everything and pray for telepathy." My
current employer doesn't provide that, so phone support devolves into a push
button for customers to say, "this issue is urgent!" while support says
"probably, but we can't send you screenshots over the phone, so please go away
while we write a response that actually provides useful information--you can
remain on the phone if you want, but it's going to just be dead air or us
talking you down from panic mode while not actually doing anything to address
the problem."

~~~
megaman22
Screensharing is absolutely essential. In these days, it should be table
stakes. Much as I sometimes hate it in general, it's a huge point in favor of
Skype for Business; being able to step into a screenshare or a whiteboard is
invaluable.

I cringe when I have to dial into a regular phone bridge. And as much as
possible, I try to keep my landline in non-operable condition, so that support
requests come in on a more useful channel.

------
cpncrunch
I offer phone, email and skype support (as a solo developer). Ratio of support
queries I receive is roughly:

90% email 8% skype 2% phone

On my website's contact page I have a few sentences beside the email address
saying that you should give as much information as possible about the problem,
and that we reply within 1 business day but normally sooner. I think that
implies two things: [1] we do actually reply to emails quickly, and [2] email
is preferred for support.

Some people just prefer to talk to a human being, at least the first time they
contact you. This is either due to them checking to make sure you are
responsive and can be contacted, or they are frightened of technology and need
a little hand-holding. If I didn't put my phone number of the website I might
lose these customers. It doesn't really take much time to deal with, overall.

The only minor issue is that some people (mostly other developers, usually
from India) seem to want submit all support requests via skype, and I have to
push back at that because [1] it's intrusive and [2] it means I don't have a
record of their previous support queries in my email. Unless it's a quick
question, I usually email them back. Of course you have to balance the need to
provide the support in the way the customer wants to make them happy vs not
letting them suck up too much of your time.

------
emodendroket
Man, I did a job that was nothing but phone support for 8 months, and while I
think it was great training for designing UIs that won't confuse people you'd
have to pay me a lot to go back to doing that. Many people are _not_ kind,
patient, or understanding, and they assume you're unintelligent and uneducated
(or else why would you be answering phones for a living?). The misery of that
experience was the spur that made me abandon plans for a career in Japanese
translation and learn IT (and eventually programming) in the first place.

------
Slamchunk
Support person (at least for the last few years) here, context switching and
the issues it creates is a real thing for other roles - not just developers.
Everyone needs headphone DND time, both in and outside for the technology
sector - it's called concentration time.

A support agent at most tech companies will have to support multiple products
in multiple languages and platforms and be ready to provide a useful response
to a customer at any time, these responses could be:

Diagnosing code issues, Diagnosing product issues (internal or external)
Writing code for the customer, Developing the customer use case, Working with
Engineering, Finding some free time to learn new products, Training new agents

etc etc.

This is no easy task and shifting mindsets is sometimes tough.

I strongly echo the comments that documentation is key, if the product docs
are written to be consumed by humans it's very helpful support engineers,
we're lucky to have great documentation at the company I work so it makes our
life easier.

~~~
emodendroket
When I did it your absolute maximum unavailable time between calls was
supposed to be 30 seconds and if you actually used that time you'd get scolded
(even if your stats otherwise looked great).

------
nathan_f77
I'm also a solo developer, and I take support and sales phone calls for
FormAPI [1]. I found a nice number on Twilio: (856) FORM-API

I have a license for on-site deployments, and I think every enterprise inquiry
has started with a phone call.

I also send a welcome email to new customers where I say that I'm happy to
have a call to talk about their requirements or questions. I also use Drift
[2] for live chat, and I've handled a few support cases on there.

My advice: I don't think this is an optional thing. You don't solve the
problem by removing the phone number from your site. If you're getting too
many calls, you need to improve your self-help support pages, or hire another
person to help with the phones.

[1] [https://formapi.io](https://formapi.io)

[2] [http://drift.com](http://drift.com)

------
gnicholas
Because my startup's tools are used heavily in the dyslexia and ADHD
communities, I have found that phone support is a very helpful thing to offer.
Some of our users have difficulty reading/deciphering our instructions, but
they have no problem once we provide directions verbally on the phone.

------
WhitneyLand
What a mundane post and simplistic topics. Yet it was outstanding. How come I
loved reading it? Nice work Non.

One thing that wasn’t a big point, but I hope most people appreciate:
Founders/developers/key employees doing some phone support is not tactical
grunt work, it can be a strategic, powerful weapon.

In essence, it’s white glove, world class customer service. That alone is
good, but what makes it so powerful is it’s on a very small list of things
that AmaFaceGoogSoft and other large companies can almost never match you at.
In fact forget beating you, they often do poorly at it. Every know anyone who
left angry after dealing with F500 support?

In a past life I’ve used high six figure “enterprise” support agreements,
w/VIP status. Yes, way better than the Windows consumer help line, but hard
even then to match your service. 1MM/yr enterprise support doesn’t buy a
product dev or exec. Ironically, it’s easy to lunch with them, but they’re not
handling your daily tickets.

Your sales person (you I guess :-) should use it as a club against big
companies and do your best to beat them to death with it.

Other things you touched on can also be strategic. Gaining valuable insights
(admittedly not the only channels for this) that optimizes your roadmap,
occasionally is the difference between staying afloat and sinking.

Of course the reality check is, how much time can you allocate when not only
is development a life blood role, you probably wear other hats as well? I
don’t think there’s a stock answer, depends on team/company/stage/everything
else in the balance.

Anecdotally, I can say one customer relationship built this way turned out to
be the connection that led to the acquisition of my company. However as usual,
it was impossible to foresee when the contact request email came in.

I mean it as a compliment that you’re post seems deceptively ordinary
(speaking plainly is good), I hope people will mine the true value of it.
Thanks for writing it, best of luck to you going forward.

------
jccooper
This is a really great way to understand your customer. Think of it as
analyzing product-market fit rather than support.

------
FollowSteph3
Interestingly enough I've found through my own company that it's not so much
whether or not you're solo but rather the price of your software that
determines if you can economically offer phone support or not.

I wrote about it here: [http://www.followsteph.com/2006/10/10/is-technical-
phone-sup...](http://www.followsteph.com/2006/10/10/is-technical-phone-
support-a-viable-option-for-a-software-company/)

I then followed it up with an article discussing whether or not companies
should charge for support based on my findings in the previous article:
[http://www.followsteph.com/2010/10/19/should-software-
compan...](http://www.followsteph.com/2010/10/19/should-software-companies-
charge-for-technical-support/)

The short version, under the $1000 price point it's very hard to economically
offer free phone support as part of your product. If you're product is
subscription based then the same metric applies using the total lifetime value
of your customer. Under that price it's very hard to do, whether your a solo
developer or a company without charging for support.

------
nixpulvis
Hats off for trying this, good luck in English.

------
danschumann
I'm launching an app soon, and was planning on making customer service an
available and plentiful commodity, not hiring any employees yet, so therefore
I'll be the de facto phone support guy. I hadn't considered the emotional
benefit of both urgency from the negative, and encouragement from the
positive, I was mostly thinking about hearing first-hand the bugs, use cases,
user experiences, etc, and being able to put out any fires asap. Thanks!

------
dogles
This was very well written. Effective communication with people is far more
challenging (and rewarding) than the communication with devices that we
developers do on a day to day basis. It’s easy to get lost in that cloud, and
lose touch with the people we’re building for.

In startups, this aspect can too quickly get shunted off to a QA or CS
personnel, and problems get abstracted into incident tickets (that are often
ignored in favor of the Next Big Feature). That seems to me to be giving up
one of the classic fundamental advantages of a small business: the personal
touch.

------
bpanon
Everyone should offer support every once in a while. Say one day a month. Good
managers do this themselves - I think Jeff Bezos does this.

------
foreigner
I absolutely _loved_ doing phone technical support, but I don't do it any more
because I can't afford it. I earn far more money as a developer and I can't
turn that down. I wish good support was valued more highly , and compensated
accordingly so I could afford to keep doing it.

------
partycoder
Many people admire Steve Jobs, sometimes to the point of mimicking him by
wearing jeans and black turtleneck sweaters.

Steve Jobs would sometimes answer to customer support calls. This was in order
to understand the customer, their frustrations, and how to work through them
with a better product.

------
billfeng
Great article. An effective engineer needs to know how to work with non-
engineers. Unless, you're on a team composed of purely engineers and don't
need to interact with non-engineers. But even then, it's a good skill to hone
for potential career changes in the future.

------
brudgers
This reminds me of Word Perfect's unlimited free phone support years ago.
Though the call to Orem, UT during business hours was neither free nor
inexpensive, the service was excellent and part of the reason Word Perfect was
so beloved...reveal codes being another reason.

------
mmvvaa
Thank you very much. I am very glad to see this as #1 here.

There is a typo on Voicepaper's description in iTunes. It reads "Voicepaper is
a test to speech voice reader..." instead of "Voicepaper is a text to speech
voice reader".

------
woolvalley
What I'm curious is how he markets his apps and what kind of revenue target he
goes for.

I know just posting something on the app store is not the way to go. As an iOS
developer I know it's tough to be a solo app store developer successfully.

------
tempestn
I'll be interested to read your follow-up post on the differences between
offering phone support in Japanese and English. A few of the interactions you
described here sounded distinctly Japanese to me.

~~~
tempestn
Could one of the folks down-voting this please explain? Did this come across
as sarcastic, or offensive? I'm honestly curious, for example, whether most
westerners would be as courteous, or whether the taboo against asking about
proficiency would feel the same in both cases.

------
sixstringtheory
I recently thought about the idea of holding "office hours" of sorts, which
would help with the context switching I've seen mentioned.

Has anyone been able to monetize phone support as an upsell?

------
neurostimulant
Interesting. I always thought putting personal phone number in your app is a
bad idea, but you raised some good points there. I might consider to do that
if I release an app for local market.

------
thogg4
[http://jillsoffice.com](http://jillsoffice.com) is a pretty good option for
outsourced phone support.

------
tananaev
Does anyone know any good and easy to use service to provide paid phone
support? For example, I want to charge something like $1 or $2 per minute.

~~~
vbrendel
The point here is not what the advantage of phone support is but to provide
the service personally. You can outsource anything, but if you read the
article, the learnings you get from doing it yourself are invaluably useful.

~~~
smichel17
I (mis?)interpreted the GP comment to mean a service that makes it easy to
charge for the phone support they provide.

------
z3t4
If things get fixed faster when you make a phone call you will eventually end
up with more and more people calling instead of e-mailing etc.

------
pakopak
Even though I hate phone calls, I think it is a must, specially if you deal
with enterprise customers, who are used to make phone calls.

------
dosuken123
I want to know whether he offers the phone support for English customers or
Japanese customers

~~~
SyneRyder
The article says he only offers it in the Japanese version:

 _" I wrote my phone number in the help section of the Japanese version only,
since I live in Japan and it is a JP number. I might try it in English too in
the future..."_

------
maybeiambatman
Inspiring. Maybe I'll have the guts to become an indie dev someday.

------
daveheq
Phone support is what your "significant other" is for.. xD

------
asciimo
That's a pretty bad title and I'm not going to click on it on principle.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's a very accurate title. What would you prefer?

~~~
asciimo
It used to end with "... and this is what what happened." I would prefer
"...and it saved my business" or "...it made me quit." Even removing that
clickbaity suffix makes me feel better.

~~~
Dylan16807
"This is what happened" is just an inefficient use of words, not really
harmful. There's not anything meaningful you could append in five words. It
didn't save or kill his business, nothing so dramatic.

"You'll never believe what happened" is clickbait. "This is what happened" is
about on par with an extraneous comma.

