Ask HN: How much customer support time would 100,000 users take?
Let's say I can bootstrap a SaaS web app that would attract 100,000 active users. I have no problem with the technical part of managing that traffic, but what about the customer support part? How much time should I expect to spend in answering user emails? Obviously it depends on the nature of the web app, so let's say for the sake of discussion that a user would use the web app once a week, its complexity would be similar to meetup.com, and if the web app doesn't do its job the user is significantly inconvenienced.
7 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 24.1 ms ] threadThe great thing about words like "active user" is that they mean whatever you want them to mean. For certain definitions of active user such as "Has downloaded the trial version of my software recently", I have a hundred thousand of them. (For very strict definitions of active user, ~2,000 or so.)
My support burden averages out to well under an hour a week.
On a very bad day, it is four emails, three of which will be about transactional issues ("I paid but didn't get my software!" "Begging your pardon, ma'am, but the payment processor doesn't tell me about it if you don't hit the confirm button on your confirmation page." "Oh thx!"), forgotten passwords, and lost Registration Keys, and that will take twenty minutes. An average day sees checks stats 1.2 emails. Many days have no emails at all.
It has not been my experience that support scales linearly with user count. It is closer to logarithmic but with major decreases when you take affirmative steps to resolve the 20% of the issues that take 80% of your time.
Why would this be?
You really need to sit your Mom, Dad, wife, golfing buddy, whoever else is close to your target market and get them to interact with your app to find the inherent flaws.
As about customer support scaling at that volume, it is a good problem to have when you do hit that milestone :-) Having said that, do reverse customer support, i.e. preempt their questions by educating your customers. Better yet, get your users to write some of your FAQ's for you and delegate support to your nicer members via some sort of forum.