[michaelbuckbee]

We do a substantial amount of support at ExpeditedSSL [1] via email for precisely the reasons the author mentions.

It's asynchronous but lets you respond quickly and for startups will likely be sufficiently organized to keep things moving without a full blown helpdesk application.

Secondly, it lets you be extremely precise and copy & paste friendly in a way that phone calls can't match. Ex: we often have to help people set their DNS entries and it's much easier to email someone the following than explain it.

    Please set your www CNAME to fugu-1111.herokussl.com

Email is in fact so predominant as a support tool that you can actually go quite far with managing support requests in your email client before you need a dedicated support app/service. Modern email clients that nicely group emails into threads are more than adequate to get started.

1 - https://www.expeditedssl.com/pages/how-we-grew-our-startup-b...