1. It's not really that hard to take time away from your business. It's a common fear but not based in actual experience, and therefore irrational.
When you have an established group of customers, yes, if you ignore support entirely for a while, you will likely lose a few. But if you have a largish group, losing a few won't matter. It's all about leverage. When you have a few customers, each one matters very much. When you have several hundred or several thousand, each one matters only a little. You have the leverage, instead of them.
That is why running a product biz is not "wage slavery" -- assuming you set it up right, which brings us to
2. If you want to be able to take lots of time off, design your business around it. Yes, if you create a mission-critical infrastructure service, you will either have to have support people in place. But you don't HAVE to create that kind of business. You can do something that's less mission-critical and with customers who are more laid-back.
3. There is a huge gulf between "totally ignoring your business" and "putting it on pause for a while." My husband and I recently took a month-long trip to NZ and we hired a very part-time support person to run interference while we were gone. She was able to answer basic questions, gather details about bugs, etc., and tell customers with harder issues that we would be back soon. I worked about an hour a day average (2-3 hours at a stretch, not every day). It worked great. Unusually, we had 1 server issue with our 2nd product. My husband took a bit of time to restart and contact our freelance sys admin, and that was that.
In the scheme of things, people will cancel for all kinds of reasons, many of which you cannot possibly control, and it's not a big deal. Commerce is a business relationship, and people end business relationships when they do not feel like they're getting a return of value for their money, and that's that.
I know some folks would consider it a deep moral failing to not do everything in one's power to deliver the world's best customer service. That kind of attitude will not make your customers any happier, but it will make you more miserable.
1. It's not really that hard to take time away from your business. It's a common fear but not based in actual experience, and therefore irrational.
When you have an established group of customers, yes, if you ignore support entirely for a while, you will likely lose a few. But if you have a largish group, losing a few won't matter. It's all about leverage. When you have a few customers, each one matters very much. When you have several hundred or several thousand, each one matters only a little. You have the leverage, instead of them.
That is why running a product biz is not "wage slavery" -- assuming you set it up right, which brings us to
2. If you want to be able to take lots of time off, design your business around it. Yes, if you create a mission-critical infrastructure service, you will either have to have support people in place. But you don't HAVE to create that kind of business. You can do something that's less mission-critical and with customers who are more laid-back.
3. There is a huge gulf between "totally ignoring your business" and "putting it on pause for a while." My husband and I recently took a month-long trip to NZ and we hired a very part-time support person to run interference while we were gone. She was able to answer basic questions, gather details about bugs, etc., and tell customers with harder issues that we would be back soon. I worked about an hour a day average (2-3 hours at a stretch, not every day). It worked great. Unusually, we had 1 server issue with our 2nd product. My husband took a bit of time to restart and contact our freelance sys admin, and that was that.
In the scheme of things, people will cancel for all kinds of reasons, many of which you cannot possibly control, and it's not a big deal. Commerce is a business relationship, and people end business relationships when they do not feel like they're getting a return of value for their money, and that's that.
I know some folks would consider it a deep moral failing to not do everything in one's power to deliver the world's best customer service. That kind of attitude will not make your customers any happier, but it will make you more miserable.