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Comment by bootstrapper101 | Hacker News Reader

I don't spend the money I already make. Not sure what I would do with 10x money.

1% ungrateful complaining consumer out of 1 million users are 10k users. I don't like dealing with them. At 10x the business they might become 100k or more. I would rather have 10k high paying Saas customers and weed out the ungrateful ones there but to their face.

Currently we are working above the board with no dark patterns. We have one of the best customer service and refund policies across possibly all consumer internet companies. Our competitors have lot of dark patterns. To grow 10k, we might need to do shittier things which I don't want to.

I know there are lot of founders and executives out there who would be fine doing dark patterns for growth. But I am not and maybe that is my shortcoming and which is why I didn't want to grow in the Corporate ladder. If I own the company, I can have final say on these things.

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Can I ask how you're handling customer service? I'm a one-man company and it's the most draining part of my business. It's so tempting to outsource first line support but I also feel there's some value in answering all the emails yourself because you know your customers' needs.

And I'm not sure how to even outsource support. Do I just hire someone part-time from some gig website and pay them for X hours/week? I think one dedicated customer support person would do wonders for my business but it would require about ~5-10 hours of work per week. And customer support is something you get better at the longer you do it, so I don't want to constantly hire replacements, especially if it's going to be just one person doing support.

Do you have an FAQ that is part of your first auto-reply when somebody contacts support?

Do you have helpdesk software?

Are you using an answering service/receptionist to answer calls and then send the support issue to your support email or software?

Make as much as you can self-service for your users.

Have brief videos explaining your solution, so you can easily reply with a link to the video and ask them to follow up with you if they have more questions.

Keep track of both issue count and resolution time.

You may find it better to automate something you only do 4 times a month, but takes 8 hours, versus something you do 8 times per day, but only takes 5 seconds.

Finally, keep track of support issues by type, so you can see emerging trends and find your biggest pain points (# of tickets with a particular issue * median resolution time of particular issue).

These are great tips. We do most of these.

Automate everything possible.

If you still can't manage and need human support, hire someone in India/Philippines part time, treat them like a valued employee, build a relationship.

We've had good luck at Eureka Surveys with hiring in the Philippines. Check out my thread on it here: https://twitter.com/t0mstah/status/1356296043009253382

Congratulations for the integrity. Hard to find online businesses totally honest without dark patterns

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