Your bookkeeper, now with superpowers. Bench.co
I’m very interested in human-powered software services. I recently signed up for bookkeeping services from Bench which replaced my frustrating experiences with purportedly easy to use bookkeeping apps like Quickbooks and LessAccounting. Which is not to say that those options are bad software options, but Bench takes a completely different approach that I like much better.
I turned 30 last week and as a birthday present to myself I paid off the last chunk of the nearly $60,000 in debt I accumulated trying to build a software startup. I thought I would write a little about what that’s like and whether I’d do it again.
In the Summer of 2011 — four and a half years ago… dang — I quit my job.
OK, I’m aware there are about 1.2 billion posts on the topic. But I’ve read a most of them and I still have a few gadgets that I haven’t seen too widely spread. Everything here are relatively cheap things I personally carry and use.
Customer support is a hard and important gig. There is a reason startups have begun upgrading the title (customer success, customer happiness guru) and trying to attract higher quality talent to these positions. Good support is critical to onboarding and retaining paying customers.
When you have launched a minimum viable product (MVP) and it is getting traction and attracting paying customers, your biggest challenge will be balancing good support with further developing the product. If you did MVP correctly, your product is horrible and currently lacks a ton of features and has more than a few bugs. You will be getting a lot of bug reports, feature requests from at times frustrated and confused customers. If you did really well, the backlog will be more than you can reasonably handle.
If you are building a Micro-SaaS product like me, then you are likely handling the support load all on your own, on top of the rest of your duties as a solo founder. Navigating support as a solo founder can be a minefield and I it’s important to have a strategy before waiting into the queue of emails and tickets. Here are a few rules that have helped me build a SaaS app on my own with happy customers and a churn rate that hovers around 1%. In a follow on blog post I’ll talk a bit about my transition from a one-man team to our first support team member, which deserves a post unto itself.
Update: Our current solution for this is working pretty well. Skip to it here.
Storemapper, like many many B2B apps, allows our users to create, edit and export records in bulk using a CSV upload file. I have spent a ton of time trying to find the best method to allow the upload and asynchronous processing of very large (10,000+ rows) CSV files. This post is a documentation of our work to date on this, a plea for collective help from the internet, and hopefully will be the public home of the best solution we can come up with.