To extend on this, you should separate yourself from the routine customer service as much as possible. Automate the first tier with extensive FAQs, screencasts and self-help resources. Train up a good outsource worker to respond to first- and second-tier support requests, elevating to you only when it is outside of their capabilities.
This is something that Rob Walling talks about extensively. He personally deals with customer support for the first several months of his app, so he can understand the pain points and what needs to be added to self-help resources. Then he writes up an extensive training manual for outsourced workers and begins to train them.
Eventually, he stops dealing with "OMG I lost my password and don't know where the reset is?!" questions...and only deals with customer support that is actually worth his time.
That could probably be a post by itself. The way we've evolved to add additional layers of automation and support, adding an FAQ, and other related improvements have definitely helped. However, when you're building an app by yourself, everything takes time, and it's not quite so easy to make time to perfect a support system overnight. So, in our case, it's simply just evolved as we've grown.
Yeah, that's an excellent point. Everything takes time, and time is your single most important commodity as a solo-founder.
Do I push out a new fix that stops some bugs, upgrade a feature that customers have been haranguing me about, do some marketing to get new customers or work on support so I can devote more time to <everything else> in the future?
As with most things in startup land, it's all about compromise, which I'm sure you already know =) Loved the post btw, looking forward to more posts coming from you
This is something that Rob Walling talks about extensively. He personally deals with customer support for the first several months of his app, so he can understand the pain points and what needs to be added to self-help resources. Then he writes up an extensive training manual for outsourced workers and begins to train them.
Eventually, he stops dealing with "OMG I lost my password and don't know where the reset is?!" questions...and only deals with customer support that is actually worth his time.