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I might be abusing the term here, but Plausible seems like the best example of a mittelstand[1] that sells SaaS. They are not beholden to VC investors and can

I might be abusing the term here, but Plausible seems like the best example of a mittelstand[1] that sells SaaS. They are not beholden to VC investors and can grow slowly, organically. According to this article, they were able to cover their costs by January 2021. By keeping their team small, they can remain sustainable for a long time and refine their product. The biggest challenge for growth right now seems to be that customer support costs will scale linearly with growth. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31327219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31327219

rozenmd 4y ago
I believe the existing term of art is "bootstrapped business"
- hodgesrm 4y ago
  That's the current term of art. It used to be "lifestyle business," which has a more passive-aggressive feel to it.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    Or ‘mom and pop’, which is even more derogatory (at least here in Silicon Valley).
WA 4y ago
Scaling customer support is the biggest fear, but I think it isn’t as bad as people think it is. 1. You can get a long way with extensive FAQ and give people ways to help themselves. 2. Existing customers don’t need the same kind of handholding as new customers, because they know the software pretty well. 3. It is up to you how much actual support you provide. 4. Customer support heavily depends on the kind of customers you have/want. If you provide something for free, you get a lot more stupid support requests than if you charge a modest fee.
- mritchie712 4y ago
  this is right. I ran a fairly technical b2b SaaS product with hundreds of paid users and we had ~10 hours of support a month, most of which was driven by new features. If you keep the product simple and build your docs into the product, you can get by with a few hours of support a week.
- jorts 4y ago
  You can also charge for different levels of support.
ramraj07 4y ago
Customer support can definitely be handled or “minimized” by what I’d call “extreme thoughtfulness”. Design your application with the correct abstractions, be ready to redesign everything from the ground up every two years as requirements change, and constantly try to create tooling that will help customers and CSMs serve as much as possible themselves.
anyfactor 4y ago
I usually apply to customer support/success role. My strategy to build a solid customer support system - - Always incorporate gifs with documentation and guidelines - Create video and step by step tutorials unconditionally - Convert every customer interaction to an FAQ segment or a microblog - Avoid writing books as documentation blogs. Adopt w3school like writing habits. - Post your FAQs to stackoverflow. Two dummy accounts. One to post the questions, one to answer the question - Add every meta information and phrasing variations possible to commonly asked questions - Support/success staff should also be a part of the dev team so they can understand the product philoshophy and not just be a liaison of the dev. TLDR: Make customer interaction as google-able as you can.
SilverBirch 4y ago
I suspect that support costs are actually sub-linear, as you scale you don't just add support staff, you start putting in extra stages to redirect support - better documentation, UX designers, community support. Support requests are a mix of unique challenges and common challenges, the common challenges can always be pushed towards a fixed support cost.

rozenmd 4y ago

I believe the existing term of art is "bootstrapped business"

hodgesrm 4y ago
That's the current term of art. It used to be "lifestyle business," which has a more passive-aggressive feel to it.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Or ‘mom and pop’, which is even more derogatory (at least here in Silicon Valley).

WA 4y ago

Scaling customer support is the biggest fear, but I think it isn’t as bad as people think it is. 1. You can get a long way with extensive FAQ and give people ways to help themselves. 2. Existing customers don’t need the same kind of handholding as new customers, because they know the software pretty well. 3. It is up to you how much actual support you provide. 4. Customer support heavily depends on the kind of customers you have/want. If you provide something for free, you get a lot more stupid support requests than if you charge a modest fee.

mritchie712 4y ago
this is right. I ran a fairly technical b2b SaaS product with hundreds of paid users and we had ~10 hours of support a month, most of which was driven by new features. If you keep the product simple and build your docs into the product, you can get by with a few hours of support a week.
jorts 4y ago
You can also charge for different levels of support.

ramraj07 4y ago

Customer support can definitely be handled or “minimized” by what I’d call “extreme thoughtfulness”. Design your application with the correct abstractions, be ready to redesign everything from the ground up every two years as requirements change, and constantly try to create tooling that will help customers and CSMs serve as much as possible themselves.

anyfactor 4y ago

I usually apply to customer support/success role. My strategy to build a solid customer support system - - Always incorporate gifs with documentation and guidelines - Create video and step by step tutorials unconditionally - Convert every customer interaction to an FAQ segment or a microblog - Avoid writing books as documentation blogs. Adopt w3school like writing habits. - Post your FAQs to stackoverflow. Two dummy accounts. One to post the questions, one to answer the question - Add every meta information and phrasing variations possible to commonly asked questions - Support/success staff should also be a part of the dev team so they can understand the product philoshophy and not just be a liaison of the dev. TLDR: Make customer interaction as google-able as you can.

SilverBirch 4y ago

I suspect that support costs are actually sub-linear, as you scale you don't just add support staff, you start putting in extra stages to redirect support - better documentation, UX designers, community support. Support requests are a mix of unique challenges and common challenges, the common challenges can always be pushed towards a fixed support cost.