CoSupport: Outsourced customer support by former 37signals-er Sarah Hatter | Hacker News Reader

CoSupport: Outsourced customer support by former 37signals-er Sarah Hatter

cosupport.us

82 pointstptacek38 comments

Fascinating. Don't dig for gold, sell pickaxes.

Congratulations, I have no idea if this will work out longterm, but I find it to be a creative idea. Reminds me of the Heroku/AWS/GAE play on hosting apps, but applied to the customer support market.

Sarah, a quick question ( I noticed you're listening out there) . . .

Some years ago, before I became a corporate SQL grunt, I worked in an actual, honest-to-goodness telephone support center (non-technical in nature). Is your "scalability plan" to somehow identify those patterns of support for apps that require the most hand-holding (e.g., live person-to-person contact) and automate/FAQ/build some software to somehow win the 80/20 support race? Just curious, since there such a huge range of customer tech savy out there . . .

"Get 37signals style customer support for $3k/month" is a pretty compelling pitch. This type of service seems like the perfect fit for a growing startup. The founders and early hires can focus on building product value and don't need to get too bogged down in setting up quality support systems that ensure customers are taken care of and retained. If you get too big for CoSupport they have a training option that could help you move the support in house.

Isn't 3k/month too much for a startup?

and (sort of related) what would be the cost of one full time customer support rep? It doesn't have to be the most technical person with a CS degree from MIT, mind you...

It costs significantly more than $36,000/yr for most companies to maintain a full-time CSR headcount, and that's without factoring in the cost of recruiting and turnover.

At the stated quality level, Sarah has priced this pretty aggressively.

To answer your question, it might be too much for some startups to afford–but if that's the case, you simply don't have enough paying customers yet or (dare I say) you're doing it wrong.

Thomas is right, the cost is fair. We support several thousand paying customers with 3 full-time CSRs. They all take home more than $3k/month ... let alone taxes, health insurance, and other costs.

What I think a lot of startups don't understand is that good or great support isn't just a cost center–it's marketing. We get a lot of business just based on referrals and our reputation.

Small nit re the landing page:

I started reading the three columns "Copy", "Support", and "Blog", and by the time I got to "Blog", I expected it to be another service that you'd offer (i.e. writing blog posts about the supported service). It took me a second to realize I was reading about your own blog posts.

Maybe it's just me, but I think I would relocate the blog section somewhere else.

Cool site, otherwise!

I like the idea. I have two quick questions:

- what happens when my site is experiencing issues and you receive massive volumes of complaint/problem emails

- how do I continue to integrate support in our product/feature management workflow, to ensure that the voice of the customer is heard?

- are you hoping to introduce phone calls and other support methods?

Thanks!

Haha. Make that three.

I thought this goes against 37signals advice to get actual real people doing customer support?

(a) Pretty sure there really is a Sarah Hatter.

(b) 37signals has a support team consisting of at least four actual real people: http://smiley.37signals.com/ (I'm not sure DHH counts as actual real people).

(c) Sarah Hatter can do whatever she wants without somehow contradicting 37signals. She's ventured off into her own thing. She can even write --- gasp --- Python code if she likes.

There really is a Sarah Hatter! I'm her! 37signals is 200% supportive of me and I can't thank them enough for letting me venture out on my own.

Maybe one day you will look back at this and be surprised how you ended up acquiring 37signals to complement your business. :)

While we are talking about outsourced app support just wanted to mention http://aptfolk.com/.

While they don't have much info on their site, I've heard from friends who use them that they are pretty good. Apparently they charge somewhere around $25/hour so they are a little easier to get started with if you have a smaller budget.

I'll bump the Aptfolk mention as well.

I work on http://tenderapp.com, a customer support system that Aptfolk uses with a lot of their clients.

Ash Ponders, the founder of Aptfolk, was doing support for Atebits Tweetie back when I first heard about them, as well as a number of other higher profile Mac and web apps.

They've done a great job with everything I've seen and are working on extending out a number of of services like high-end screencasts and video work, as well as documentation writing (something EVERY developer hates to do).

I've been doing professional customer support for web applications for over 6 years now, not to mentions the countless moderator rolls and communities I've been involved with over the years. This is definitely a market that's been long overdue. It's probably one of the most difficult roles we have to hire for here at http://entp.com as a small company with a tech savvy user base. Not only do you have to talk the talk and be fairly tech savvy, you have to understand and adapt to different types of users and cultures.

Culture is hard to teach though, and for an independent developer to be able to offload support quickly when things grow to people who have a clue what they are doing right out of the gates, that's a huge win.

Is this another result of the random startup generator? What's with all the clouds? What's with the Apple Product Placement?

What we're seeing is the result of Sarah busting out her business with minimal overhead. Virb + Wufoo + Tumblr = She got started on almost nothing (at least as far as her web presence). She's setting a fantastic example and following the "Get something up and iterate" advice pretty well, IMO.

I like the general site design, but they could have spent more time on the blog:

http://cosupport.us/blog

YIKES.

Hey Brock, our apologies! The blog is at cosupport.tumblr.com and we're working on fixing those links!

Might want to tune up your 404 page as well :)

http://www.cosupport.us/blog

Unfortunately, Virb doesn't let you customize 404 pages very well.

http://help.virb.com/discussions/general/1970-custom-404-pag...

But I'll see what I can wrangle.

Killed. Don't launch things on too little sleep or YIKES makes its way into the public eye.

And a nitpick is that the front page has the third column not matching the other columns in height.

Fixed.

I think the site design is awful. It is completely off in its feel. It is something that would work for a slightly eccentric blog of a moderately self-pompous woman. I am getting very strong "Here I am, I like how I am, and you take it or leave it" vibe.

Grunge heading font, toy-ish and overly playful illustration and personified image of (presumably) the founder does NOT associate with a "team of support experts". It just does not. Moreover, not for $3K/mo.

edit: Oh, -1, lovely. I must be making uncivilized comments that do not contribute to the discussion. They are not loosing any customers with this website design after all.

I have to agree with the parent about parts of the site design (although not in the insulting way it was presented). The font size and color contrast (particularly black on navy green) are really difficult to read, and I find myself unable to skim over it quickly to evaluate what is being offered.

Hmm, how do you plan on getting to know the product/codebase intimately to provide support? One thing people love about historious is that simple features are added by the time I reply to their support emails and that I know the entire codebase, this is lost with this sort of support scheme.

When I started in my role at developer support at Google, I was actually a remote part-time contractor with no access to internal code, mail, or tools. But, I was still able to provide decent support by being highly communicative between the engineering team and the developer world, using emails, forum posts, and weekly phone calls.

So, I do think it's possible to outsource a certain level of support without codebase access, provided that there is a good communication line setup.

Oh, definitely, I'm just trying to see what the level of support is. Obviously it can't be as good as having the actual developers provide support, but I'd like to see how close to or far from that it is.

It's a fantastic idea! I'm curious at how the support will work though? It seems like you'll have to get the support people to learn the inside and outside of multiple systems?

Where is CoSupport for sales? This is an awesome idea.

Like SEO, sales suffers from an adverse selection problem. Effective salespeople are money generators and don't really need to market themselves. There is a good chance that any salesperson who has the time and motivation to market himself to the whole world isn't strong enough to be worth it.

Is it Co.Support, Co.Support.us, or CoSupport? I see all three variations on the company's home page.

shouldn't that be 37signaller?

Is it just me that finds the homepage sexist?

Sexist because it has a woman wearing a skirt? I really can't see how that's sexist at all. Should she be wearing slacks instead? Or maybe it should be a picture of a man? Maybe a few minorities to add diversity too.

i don't find it sexist at all. The illustration is of the founder and her cat and it could be part of a powerful branding concept ("we are just as personal and friendly as your own staff"), especially since they are name dropping 37 signals and the fact that the founder has worked there.

The design is not that corporate or web application-y and I like it as a contrast to all these bland conversion centric / landing page SEO designs.

However, I have to say that I am skeptical about outsourcing support. I consider it too core to outsource and, ideally, pretty much every person in your small startup - their ideal customer [1] - should be involved in it. Kinda funny how they reference Zappos, a company famous for their outstanding in-house support.

[1] http://cosupport.us/about

Outsourcing support isn't best for everyone, but for a 2-3 person development shop sometimes it's the best bet for them. I would never suggest a company the size of Zappos outsource their support, but they aren't our ideal customer either!

"Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm." -- Erik Naggum

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