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Inspiring! How do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations? (In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make su

Inspiring! How do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations? (In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?)

taxman22 2y ago
If you’re not pushing code/changes the likelihood of incidents is significantly less. Also, not having a few enterprise contracts that make up most of the revenue, helps ease customer support load.
- mickael-kerjean 2y ago
  Do you know what a typical enterprise contract for a nice tool like this could go for? I have an open source saas tool in a different niche but so far the biggest contract I have is 500$ per month and that's for companies who need a lot of customisations, a very white glove service and a few days o work to morph the tool onto exactly what it is they want (typically via plugin so changes are easily manageable). One one hand it feels great to charge 500$ per month but then you sometime see numbers from companies like gitlab who are able to charge 100x that or even more, it's very hard to know how much to charge for something in the b2b sass space and I have that feeling that 1 large enterprise customer is the only thing you need in some spaces to sustain a company of 1 or even 2 that are not aiming for unicorn level
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    For any enterprise customer, I would recommend to increase their annual fees by two times the rate of inflation (or more if you like). Also: Ask yourself if you can afford to lose some customers during this process.
  - dflock 2y ago
    GitLabs pricing is hilariously, insanely, astronomically high. I'd love to move our org off BitBucket the GitLab, but it's just absolutely not possible, given their pricing.
xyst 2y ago
Probably just uses some on call pager support (PagerDuty, xMatters, …) and configure it to alert if infra goes down. Then just remote into systems, and fix issues. He’s pretty much “on call” 24/7/365
selcuka 2y ago
> if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved? They probably set up a HealthChecks.io alert.
ramraj07 2y ago
One man army apps are generally dead simple to maintain and bug-fix. You write all the code, so when someone pings you with a problem you know exactly what caused it without any need to check for anything. I’ve maintained apps like that for years and have sometimes pushed a code change directly on the GitHub app on the phone and just checking if the site is fixed after. Another point is if you’re also your own product manager and you designed every feature yourself, I think there’s a tendency to think about all the eventualities for each feature more thoroughly, so your code and product is kind of complete - thus you actually get fewer bugs. In my experience most issues in software come because the engineer misunderstood the requirements that someone else wrote anyway.
- xiaoape 2y ago
  > Another point is if you’re also your own product manager and you designed every feature yourself, I think there’s a tendency to think about all the eventualities for each feature more thoroughly, so your code and product is kind of complete This is so true. To me, finishing writing the code means releasable code. I have done the testing along the way.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  That is not answering the question. How do you do to get alerted of your service going down when: - you are in the wilderness, ouside or with little cell coverage - drunk and dancing in a wedding with music at full blast These are just 2 small examples out of many others. Also it means you need to stay connected when taking a plane, be able to stop and/or swap drivers if your are in a long driving trip so that you can fix your service in a rest area or while your partner is driving, etc. I am pretty sure outages are very rare but if that happens the day your are out of cell coverage and unable to react, you might lose a lot of trust from your customers. I am also suprised he relies on only one hosting service. I would have thought you might not want to have everything in the same basket.
  - _xnmw 2y ago
    Even Google has outages sometimes. The chances of an outage happening at that exact moment when you are "drunk and dancing at a wedding" are probably lower than "catastrophic deployment failure at FAANG, multi-hour outage", especially because you are certainly not deploying any changes at that time. And if the outage is due to a third-party dependency failing then you can blame it on them and there's not much you could do even if you were online anyway.
talldatethrow 2y ago
I also have a one man show Saas with 34 companies paying that pays my bills. It runs on namecheap shared hosting. If it goes down, I trust namecheap to fix it asap. If it goes down and someone called me, I don't really know what I would do anyway.... In 6 years it has never been a problem. PHP and jQuery. I use phpmyadmin via cpanel to manage the database.
- arrowsmith 2y ago
  Care to share the product here?
  - talldatethrow 2y ago
    Not really, Id open myself up to countless nerds testing and poking.
- southwesterly 2y ago
  I swear to god that this is the future.
  - fm2606 2y ago
    Here's my upvote!
reassess_blind 2y ago
Not OP, but it is something that I've had to deal with. I essentially need to be within X hours of my laptop and a solid internet connection, where X is the maximum acceptable downtime. I'd love to travel to a remote island, or do a 2 week hike out of cell service but it's difficult. The odds are incredibly low that downtime occurs in that window, but Murphy's Law and my anxiety won't allow it. The pros greatly outweigh the cons though. While I can't do those remote trips, I can still travel wherever else and just ignore things unless there's a downtime alert or an urgent support ticket.
WA 2y ago
Not OP, but this works for me: - No phone number for support - Extensive FAQs to let people help themselves first - Vacation: take laptop along, check emails every couple days (but I haven’t tried remote vacation without internet ever) Generally speaking: outsiders vastly overestimate the support burden of a one-man business. Maybe I’m lucky, but I only receive 2-3 emails per day with 25k active users.
- ozim 2y ago
  People who don't have experience running servers imagine that you have to baby sit the servers like every 5 mins something happens. In reality if you don't deploy new version or don't change config or don't post your product to HN server will be there simply running. In big companies you might have bunch of people doing config changes all the time on different levels and you might never know when someone will break something you rely on.
cuu508 2y ago
That's the trade-off of going alone – laptop travels with me, and I cannot leave cell-phone coverage area for too long. Also there have been times when monitoring alerts start blaring at 3AM, and there's no more sleep that night. Thankfully does not happen very often :-)

Inspiring! How do you handle on-call / customer support, particularly around vacations? (In other words, if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved?)

taxman22 2y ago

If you’re not pushing code/changes the likelihood of incidents is significantly less. Also, not having a few enterprise contracts that make up most of the revenue, helps ease customer support load.

mickael-kerjean 2y ago
Do you know what a typical enterprise contract for a nice tool like this could go for? I have an open source saas tool in a different niche but so far the biggest contract I have is 500$ per month and that's for companies who need a lot of customisations, a very white glove service and a few days o work to morph the tool onto exactly what it is they want (typically via plugin so changes are easily manageable). One one hand it feels great to charge 500$ per month but then you sometime see numbers from companies like gitlab who are able to charge 100x that or even more, it's very hard to know how much to charge for something in the b2b sass space and I have that feeling that 1 large enterprise customer is the only thing you need in some spaces to sustain a company of 1 or even 2 that are not aiming for unicorn level
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  For any enterprise customer, I would recommend to increase their annual fees by two times the rate of inflation (or more if you like). Also: Ask yourself if you can afford to lose some customers during this process.
- dflock 2y ago
  GitLabs pricing is hilariously, insanely, astronomically high. I'd love to move our org off BitBucket the GitLab, but it's just absolutely not possible, given their pricing.

xyst 2y ago

Probably just uses some on call pager support (PagerDuty, xMatters, …) and configure it to alert if infra goes down. Then just remote into systems, and fix issues. He’s pretty much “on call” 24/7/365

selcuka 2y ago

> if you want to go away for awhile, how do you make sure any outages get resolved? They probably set up a HealthChecks.io alert.

ramraj07 2y ago

One man army apps are generally dead simple to maintain and bug-fix. You write all the code, so when someone pings you with a problem you know exactly what caused it without any need to check for anything. I’ve maintained apps like that for years and have sometimes pushed a code change directly on the GitHub app on the phone and just checking if the site is fixed after. Another point is if you’re also your own product manager and you designed every feature yourself, I think there’s a tendency to think about all the eventualities for each feature more thoroughly, so your code and product is kind of complete - thus you actually get fewer bugs. In my experience most issues in software come because the engineer misunderstood the requirements that someone else wrote anyway.

xiaoape 2y ago
> Another point is if you’re also your own product manager and you designed every feature yourself, I think there’s a tendency to think about all the eventualities for each feature more thoroughly, so your code and product is kind of complete This is so true. To me, finishing writing the code means releasable code. I have done the testing along the way.
prmoustache 2y ago
That is not answering the question. How do you do to get alerted of your service going down when: - you are in the wilderness, ouside or with little cell coverage - drunk and dancing in a wedding with music at full blast These are just 2 small examples out of many others. Also it means you need to stay connected when taking a plane, be able to stop and/or swap drivers if your are in a long driving trip so that you can fix your service in a rest area or while your partner is driving, etc. I am pretty sure outages are very rare but if that happens the day your are out of cell coverage and unable to react, you might lose a lot of trust from your customers. I am also suprised he relies on only one hosting service. I would have thought you might not want to have everything in the same basket.
- _xnmw 2y ago
  Even Google has outages sometimes. The chances of an outage happening at that exact moment when you are "drunk and dancing at a wedding" are probably lower than "catastrophic deployment failure at FAANG, multi-hour outage", especially because you are certainly not deploying any changes at that time. And if the outage is due to a third-party dependency failing then you can blame it on them and there's not much you could do even if you were online anyway.

talldatethrow 2y ago

I also have a one man show Saas with 34 companies paying that pays my bills. It runs on namecheap shared hosting. If it goes down, I trust namecheap to fix it asap. If it goes down and someone called me, I don't really know what I would do anyway.... In 6 years it has never been a problem. PHP and jQuery. I use phpmyadmin via cpanel to manage the database.

arrowsmith 2y ago
Care to share the product here?
- talldatethrow 2y ago
  Not really, Id open myself up to countless nerds testing and poking.
southwesterly 2y ago
I swear to god that this is the future.
- fm2606 2y ago
  Here's my upvote!

reassess_blind 2y ago

Not OP, but it is something that I've had to deal with. I essentially need to be within X hours of my laptop and a solid internet connection, where X is the maximum acceptable downtime. I'd love to travel to a remote island, or do a 2 week hike out of cell service but it's difficult. The odds are incredibly low that downtime occurs in that window, but Murphy's Law and my anxiety won't allow it. The pros greatly outweigh the cons though. While I can't do those remote trips, I can still travel wherever else and just ignore things unless there's a downtime alert or an urgent support ticket.

WA 2y ago

Not OP, but this works for me: - No phone number for support - Extensive FAQs to let people help themselves first - Vacation: take laptop along, check emails every couple days (but I haven’t tried remote vacation without internet ever) Generally speaking: outsiders vastly overestimate the support burden of a one-man business. Maybe I’m lucky, but I only receive 2-3 emails per day with 25k active users.

ozim 2y ago
People who don't have experience running servers imagine that you have to baby sit the servers like every 5 mins something happens. In reality if you don't deploy new version or don't change config or don't post your product to HN server will be there simply running. In big companies you might have bunch of people doing config changes all the time on different levels and you might never know when someone will break something you rely on.

cuu508 2y ago

That's the trade-off of going alone – laptop travels with me, and I cannot leave cell-phone coverage area for too long. Also there have been times when monitoring alerts start blaring at 3AM, and there's no more sleep that night. Thankfully does not happen very often :-)