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Comment by nickchmura | Hacker News Reader

What's support like for this plan? I previously worked at an analytics startup in a support role and there were always tons of questions. It got expensive to provide excessive support to free plan customers; they were often the least savvy ones and had the most questions! I always wanted to error on the side of helping out the customers, but there's a point where your employer is losing serious money. For your system to not have a ton of questions during onboarding and throughout to the average user, would be amazing. Or is this an expense you plan to eat for now as you grow?

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In theory there should be no support for most customers on the free model. Having a cost with no associated revenue is bad. This is different if you're looking to bump prices later or get a special reference, but this doesn't seem to be that kind of case.

The other strategy companies use is "Burn out the support team by starving them for resources" but I don't like that either.

One of the nice things about raising a Series A is it allows us to be more aggressive in doing things that don't have an immediate ROI- helping out people who aren't paying us is one of them. We view it as a long term marketing expense to make future potential paying customers happy.

The other way to attack it is to do things that scale better- for example better onboarding documentation or hosting webinars.

From experience testing Domo, RJ Metrics and Looker (which we ultimately went with), I know the ETL and modeling piece of integration can be extensive.

I'm curious to what degree you plan on assisting customers with that. While we have a team dedicated to working on this stuff now, initially one plus that RJ Metrics had going for them in my mind was that they had unlimited support that explicitly handled the modeling once we handled the ETL, and had dedicated analysts on our account.

Now, the obvious tradeoff there is that they don't know our data as well as we do, and all data has nuances. But for a fledgling company that can't dedicate manpower to analytics because they need to ship the product, that is a big game changer.

Ultimately we went with Looker for several other reasons, but that is an interesting factor to consider with your approach to sales/marketing.

OTOH if you can afford the time and resources, then human customer support is an excellent source of user research. If you record these customer queries you can discover what's the next bit of functionality that your users want, that your competitors don't provide. You also discover which existing functionality isn't explained well enough.

You can use the normal self-service helpdesk methods to filter out the newbie questions.

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