| What a mundane post and simplistic topics. Yet it was outstanding. How come I loved reading it? Nice work Non. One thing that wasn’t a big point, but I hope most people appreciate: Founders/developers/key employees doing some phone support is not tactical grunt work, it can be a strategic, powerful weapon. In essence, it’s white glove, world class customer service. That alone is good, but what makes it so powerful is it’s on a very small list of things that AmaFaceGoogSoft and other large companies can almost never match you at. In fact forget beating you, they often do poorly at it. Every know anyone who left angry after dealing with F500 support? In a past life I’ve used high six figure “enterprise” support agreements, w/VIP status. Yes, way better than the Windows consumer help line, but hard even then to match your service. 1MM/yr enterprise support doesn’t buy a product dev or exec. Ironically, it’s easy to lunch with them, but they’re not handling your daily tickets. Your sales person (you I guess :-) should use it as a club against big companies and do your best to beat them to death with it. Other things you touched on can also be strategic. Gaining valuable insights (admittedly not the only channels for this) that optimizes your roadmap, occasionally is the difference between staying afloat and sinking. Of course the reality check is, how much time can you allocate when not only is development a life blood role, you probably wear other hats as well? I don’t think there’s a stock answer, depends on team/company/stage/everything else in the balance. Anecdotally, I can say one customer relationship built this way turned out to be the connection that led to the acquisition of my company. However as usual, it was impossible to foresee when the contact request email came in. I mean it as a compliment that you’re post seems deceptively ordinary (speaking plainly is good), I hope people will mine the true value of it. Thanks for writing it, best of luck to you going forward. |