Bootstrapped Founder? Don’t Do Your Own Support.
As a bootstrapped founder, doing your own customer service comes with the territory. When you first launch you just have to, and then it often just continues on by default. I’ve met $1m+ ARR founders who still do their own support.
Doing your own support is also part of the cannon of Known Startup Wisdom. It’s supposed to keep you close to customer requests and ensure you build what customers are looking for.
I’m now on my second successful bootstrapped startup (exited MeetEdgar, now growing Paperbell) and both times I’ve brought on customer service help within the first few months. Here’s why.
Reading every single request makes you build the wrong things
The squeaky wheel gets the grease. When you have a very emotional, strong-willed customer who insists that something is a disaster and they will be taking their business elsewhere it is VERY hard to resist the urge to build what they’re asking for. Even if they’re not even your ideal customer, no one else has brought this up, and you’re pretty sure no one else cares. (Sometimes the customer insisting upon it doesn’t actually care either! You just caught them on a bad day.)
It’s too easy to tell yourself it will “just take a sec” and that in these early days it’s worth keeping their business. This could be true if you have a big whale client, but my businesses are self-serve, “prosumer” businesses where you need volume. Every minute we spend building something that only benefits one person is a minute we spend NOT building something that would improve our core feature set for everyone else.
Always-on customer support makes deep work impossible
I have seen so many early founders brag about being on live chat all day — an instant, “always on” availability for their customers.
It’s too easy to spend all day on piddly conversations with customers that hit the chat button right away because it’s easier than looking around in the software or support docs. These conversations are not a good use of your time, and you either can literally spend all day on them OR be constantly interrupted from your flow state of all the other dev/marketing/sales work you need to do.
Even if you don’t use a live chat tool, it’s really hard to mentally tune out the support inbox and go into deep work mode for three hours when you know that customer requests are rolling in. You know you shouldn’t check, but who can resist?
Resolving customer issues is an easy dopamine hit that makes you avoid harder problems
As a small business, sometimes I need to take support back over myself when we’re in between people or training someone new. I’ve noticed that answering tickets can be addictive — it’s a tidy little problem that you can completely resolve. As a marketing-focused founder, almost none of my other work is like this. I’m doing things like trudging away at long-term content marketing plays that will sloooowly grow our search traffic a few months from now.
So I find myself constantly checking the support inbox in order to get that hit — it’s the kind of work where I can feel like I’ve resolved something, even if the business would be much better served with my time on higher-priority projects. Who has the willpower to force yourself to do something “hard” when you can answer tickets all day?
If you find yourself continuously “busy” but not accomplishing projects that move the needle forward, the first change I would make is getting someone else to do customer service.
Support help is “cheap”
Yes, I know you aren’t supposed to say it that way. But when you look at all the hats you need to wear as a bootstrapped founder, support is the one where there is LOT of talent out there.
So let’s do the math here — even if you have a very low support load (I’m looking at you, dev tools) the mental overhead and task-switching cost is still extremely high. Why would you not hire that out to focus your time on other things? As a bootstrapper, you likely can’t afford an experienced marketer or developer in your first year, but you likely CAN afford a freelancer for an hour or two a day who can handle 99% of your support tickets.
. . . And you can still stay in tune with customers
The core argument for doing your own support is to stay connected to customers. Guess what? You can do that much more efficiently by READING the messages instead of answering them.
You can have your CS team put information in a feature tool, a spreadsheet, or you can simply take 15 minutes a day to skim through the previous day’s tickets.
And don’t worry, as a small team you will still have plenty of opportunities to get stuck in! Speaking of, before I finished this article god smited me and I received a message that our freelance support person (currently there’s only one) will be off for a week soon, so the load will be back on me. Plenty of opportunity for that good ‘ol customer connection!
