Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

I remember when Bushido made the front-page of HN a few months ago (search for details). I was pretty pumped then and am even more so now.

One thing that's been on my mind lately is help desk software. The current leaders are way overpriced IMO ($9 to $49 per month per agent–are you serious?) [1], especially when it's best for everyone at a startup to wear the support hat now and then. Not to mention the fact that some lock in your data.

We once used a home-built ticket system for support (a Rails 2.3.x app that's available at https://github.com/bigfolio/big-help). I'm seriously considering re-writing this app in Rails 3.1 and putting it up on Bushido. The biggest feature request I've seen is the ability to handle incoming emails as tickets, and that's now easy with MailGun or SendGrid.

All that to say I think Bushido could really disrupt some industries (even recent ones) that are over-priced or handcuff customers with arbitrary limits.

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[1]

http://uservoice.com/plans http://www.zendesk.com/signup http://www.assistly.com/pricing http://www.freshdesk.com/pricing.html

The current leaders are way overpriced IMO ($9 to $49 per month per agent–are you serious?)

I'm assuming these services are targeting companies with people working full time on support, where that $9 to $49 is a drop in a bucket compared to their salary.

Exactly. Does the app save an hour of an agent's time/sanity per month? If so, it's worth it.

That's the problem. Even small startups use them. Imagine a 4-person startup with 2 co-founders, another engineer and another designer. No full-time support staff, so everyone jumps in from time to time. Unless you make a generic agent account (which is lame for assignment/follow-up), you're talking $100/mo for support.

I don't discount the value extracted but to me it reeks of enterprise, per-seat licensing a bit.

I just think an OS, unlimited agent option would be nice for small startups.

Just as an additional anecdote, I've heard this sentiment repeated just about everywhere in SF, especially where companies try to involve developers in support in a rotating fashion.

Like I said, definitely contact me, I think there could be something very interesting for everyone here :)

As someone who sits on the other side of that equation, $9/month basically translates to "1 support request per month".

I've been meaning to do a blog post on such, but an average single support request costs us around $8. So if you've got a business where the average number of support requests per user are dramatically less than 1.0 per user per month, then it can work out, but I suspect there's a proportional support load to those SaaS systems that you're looking at where it's closer to, say, 0.5 per seat. If you lower the price beyond $9/month, then all of the sudden your profit evaporates.

It's non-obvious until you run the numbers, but it goes something like this:

  Support Person Salary		$60,000.00
  Fully Loaded Employee Cost	$90,000.00
  Per Hour			$46.88
  Support Requests / Hour	6
  Cost / Request		$7.81

That's actually why we removed our $9/month plan. It was just hard to get excited about helping someone out when you realized after the first mail you were going into the hole for such.

The interesting thing for where Bushido fits into that is that in some ways it'd be pushing things towards utility pricing (the same way a lot of the cloud sort of stuff has done) -- i.e. the cost of supporting a software stack would be proportional to the cost you generate further up the chain, rather than based on some metric of an "average customer".

If I built a product that allowed you to answer support requests 10% faster, then logically you'd be happy paying an additional $750/month per support person for the software?

I once worked in the customer service division of a company which had, well, let me call it a hundred CSRs. We had an internal application to do everything.

They didn't exactly show me the company budget, but I'm as capable of counting engineers as the next guy. Suffice it to say we paid way more than $75k a month for the productivity gains of that custom app. (It was my first encounter with Enterprise Software (TM) and I think I went into programming in part so that no one should ever again have to suffer like us CSRs suffered...)

• No, you can't set your pricing to capture all of the theoretical value that your product creates. Otherwise it's a wash. Also, there's friction in any system, so you not only have to create value (that I get to keep), but do so enough to justify the switching costs.

• No, not unless you have no competitors. And if you have a generic solution to lower support costs by 10%, if you don't have competitors now, you will soon.

• No, software pricing isn't rational. Oh, how I wish it were at times. But in general, unless you're an amazing salesman, your prices have to be at a level that to the customer feel "about right".

you're talking $100/mo for support

You're also talking $20,000 a month in direct costs if you're paying that engineer and designer market wages, or about $10,000 if you're paying them its-not-exploitation-if-you-have-equity-wages. If next to these numbers you think $100 for software is a lot of money, you are not a desirable client.

It's a lot of money compared to what they spend on other essential SaaS products. A GitHub account for that same team would only cost $12/mo. Bug tracking (assuming you're not using GitHub's), $29/mo. 2 1GB Linode plans, $80/mo. Email from Google Apps, $0/mo.

I think it's less about "a lot of money" and more about there being plenty of room for a competitor. Especially one with a "$49/mo for unlimited agents" model.

Hey Erik, awesome note! We actually have some crazy-awesome api's for handling incoming emails - each app has a default email address provisioned for it, and an app can add/remove email accounts programmatically. And handling incoming email is done through a very cool hook system we're really excited to share soon.

Each app that's deployed has a bunch of resources automatically provisioned for it, so as a developer, you never have to wonder if something's present - the goal is to make the developer omnipotent, so you can do whatever you're thinking of, without thinking about it too much :)

Feel free to shoot me an email at s@gobushido.com, we'd really love to talk to you about the help-desk app (even we're looking for a good one)!

Edit: Forgot to add: the incoming/outgoing email stuff is powered by Mailgun actually - those guys are so awesome. With the wrapper we add though, and because we're very language-focused right now, we can make the api's a joy to use, beyond what even they're able to do currently.

I think pricing by logins for a support tool is just dumb and prevents you from delivering great customer support. That's why we are working on SupportBee - http://blog.supportbee.com/2011/07/28/why-pricing-by-logins-...

Hey Prateek, fancy seeing you here :) We should catch up again soon, I'd love to see how SupportBee is coming along!

Sure! Congratulations on the launch. As I said in the call, I think Bushido is one of the most imaginative tech products I have checked out lately.

I don't find it dumb. Just a different pricing strategy.

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