I think I speak for a bunch of us HN readers when I say I'm happy for the guy. These are great problems to have and it's cool he's cataloged his journey/success on his blog.
The same way you deal with every other repetitive task which scales linearly with number of customers: some combination of "automate, outsource, and eliminate".
I get less than 10% of the number of emails per sale that I did two years ago, which lets me keep up with the business despite it expanding over the years. This is mainly because I tracked what was causing the support emails and started to provide solutions which did not require marginal effort from me. Exactly what approach is appropriate depends on the particular problem.
Take my personal bugbear, license key delivery. It sucks but you have to do it, and huge numbers of customers will fail at it because either they don't understand the concept or their email provider redirects your license email to /dev/null. So you put it on the confirmation page. Solves the problem for some people, but not all. So you put a self-help license key lookup on your website. Solves the problem for some people, but not all. So you adjust your app's purchasing logic to include a random number as a parameter to the purchasing page, which you associate with the license key, and then you have the app poll the server for recently completed sales matching that random number when its license key entry screen is open. etc, etc
Other problems could be addressed by program patches, changes in written documentation, changes in business processes, etc etc.
If you consistently improve on that, support scales pretty impressively. (I support in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand trials a year and about 1700 customers, answering all queries by myself.)
Hi hbien, Peldi from Balsamiq here. We use GetSatisfaction, a FAQ on our site and an extensive help page, but I'd have to say that our secret weapon is Typinator, check it out: http://www.macility.com/products/typinator/ It's a great time saver for answering the same questions over and over [I learned about it from Guy Kawasaki].
But even with all these tools, taking the time to read each email and reply with a personal and thoughtful message takes some serious time, and time is an un-shrinkable and limited dimension unfortunately.
That's fine as long as you spend the time and actually read the whole message first. I've emailed so many companies which send me a fully canned response copied from their help section, but even worse they base that response on the first line of my message! Talk about frustrating, especially when you've waited x hours/days for that response.
If you get so many emails you're not taking enough care, it's probably time to hire somebody to do support...
Not while you're growing. FAQs, knowledge base and a ticket system should be in place in any software shop. But while you're still hungry, all these support resources stay behind the fence, and used by you and your support staff. Users get friendly, personalized emails or even phone calls, even if the body of that email text (or the phone script) has to come out of a SQL database.
1. Create signatures in Mac Mail with answers to common email questions.
2. Use a help ticket system. Ours is simple and works great. It includes an FAQ system. FAQs are displayed when the customer chooses the category of their help ticket (in an effort to answer common questions in that category).
Knowledge base, issue management, development ticket tracker integration, auto-replies, templated responses, etc. We had/have a lot of the same issues I know other small businesses have, so we built a tool to fix it.
Feedback welcome, of course. We eat our own dog food, so file anything you find/any suggestions on http://help.tenderapp.com/
I'd drop you a line but your profile doesn't have contact info in it. My email is idoh@idoh.com if you want to ping me, I'd love to see what can be done to address this problem.
From the interview he linked to:
"Here’s the data that I do have: as of today (April 12, 2009) I have sold to 3798 customers for a total of $469,048 in sales. Sales keep growing steadily: the last 7 weeks have all been over $20,000, with a record $35k week for the first week of April. We are averaging around 200 new customers per week right now"
He says he's making enough to pay a year's salary to everyone in the company each month.
3 employees, let's say 30,000 euros (40,000 USD) per employee per year (data from http://www.payscale.com/research/IT/Country=Italy/Salary/sho... assuming he pays everyone as Project Manager, could be lower). That would be over 100,000 USD per month in revenues.
