That was one of the points of the article. At first, that fear dominated my life. As time has gone on, and a few things went wrong here and there, I've learned it's not quite that bad.
Also, we have a very different view on customer service. I strive to respond to all customers immediately. We could reply within a day, but going above and beyond for customers is important to me. The support requests in the middle of the night aren't even a problem. It's just part of the gig.
Also, we have a very different view on customer service
Indeed. Though going above and beyond is important to me as well. We just seem to have different ideas about what that means too.
I think patio11 says it best:
"I appreciate that you'd feel safer going with Brand Name X, and Brand Name X will indeed have someone around to answer your phone call at 2 AM. Unfortunately, they won't be able to do anything for you. Their only job is getting you off the phone before you can speak to someone capable of resolving your problem, because those people cost money. And you know what happens if you call at 2 PM? You get the same guy."
As in, you might not get a response for 16 hours, but when you do it will be from me, the guy who built the thing. And it'll be to tell you that your problem has been solved and no further action is required on your part.
Incidentally, I don't have email on my phone. Nor do I carry my phone around most days. I sometimes go a few days without checking email while on vacation, and I'm on vacation a lot. If I could give you one piece of advice, one solo-founder to another, it would be to figure out what you can change about your product so that you can do the same. It's entirely your gig, so it's up to you to choose whether anything unpleasant is part of it.
I hadn't heard it put that way, but that's definitely a good point. My view on all of this is still evolving, and we're getting to a point where it's not going to make sense for me to the primary person on support. As far as above and beyond, you're definitely right. It's all relative. If that part of it bothered me anymore, I'd probably look to make some changes, but oddly enough, I enjoy it, so it's not too big of a deal to maintain that kind of turnaround time.
For us, the biggest change was adding an awesome system admin to the mix on retainer. He's been a huge help and we now have a much more resilient architecture. It's all evolving though as I find time to streamline the processes as needed.
All definitely some good food for thought. Thanks!
One thing I have noticed is that immediately replying to customers causes some of them to contact you for very mundane things ("can you tell me where that setting for X is again?"), which increases the time needed from you (I solve that by increasing the time I take to reply to those customers).
As a single founder with a web app, it's amazing how closely the experience in your blog mirrors mine. However, I haven't yet gotten used to that nagging feeling when you're on holiday and you know you would really be in trouble if the system were to go down right now and you had to debug something on a laptop with a flaky internet connection. In reality, nothing more serious than 30 minute downtime ever happened to me. The site is doing really well so I don't have a money issue since, but that also means the financial impact of any serious problem is magnified as well. For me, that has made stress levels go up rather than down, I hope you can keep your cool if your site takes off. Hopefully, I can get to the point that there's so much coming in that I can hire someone, but if I look at the few service-threathening issues we've had so far I really can't see how anyone could have solved those except the person who built the system. Me.
Also, we have a very different view on customer service. I strive to respond to all customers immediately. We could reply within a day, but going above and beyond for customers is important to me. The support requests in the middle of the night aren't even a problem. It's just part of the gig.