My favorite way for massaging the issue is: "Yep, at present I'm the only person working on this full-time. There are plusses and minuses to this. For example, we can't offer round-the-clock phone support standard with our plans. That's a minus. On the plus side, any time you have a problem, it gets dealt with by me, who built the software and has all necessary authority to fix your problem, rather than somebody reading from a script in a call center somewhere. Your call on who you want to rely on when it's something critical to your business." (I stole this line from Jason Cohen and oh boy does it work.)
I would encourage you, if you deal with larger companies, to be able to walk the professionalism walk while you're talking the professionalism talk. When I started by business ~8 years ago I was a kid with a web app. These days, I might think of myself like that, but when I'm talking to the IT department at a hospital words like "designated HIPAA compliance officer" and "errors & omissions insurance policy" and "LLC" come up a lot.
This is excellent advice. I am going to use this on my bootstrapped SAAS from now on. thx :)
With over 100,000 accounts across 3 SaaS businesses, maybe a dozen people have ever asked, or clued themselves in after realizing I personally responded to all their support requests for years. I don't know of any paying customers I've lost over it. If the product works and they get good support, they're happy.
I'd love to hear others opinions on how to approach the press as a one-man bootstrapped SAAS startup?
My customers tend to be small too, so it has been much more of a positive if they find that I'm similar to them. I can't always respond to email within a day in which case I'm up-front about my limitations.
And who likes the copy/paste responses you get from many SaaS, especially the likes of PayPal/eBay/Amazon/Google et al? You have a massive advantage to build loyalty and relationships by stamping your personality and approachableness on your comms.
That said, maybe if you're shooting for monthly subscriptions from enterprise clients $1k+ it can hobble you. Patrick at Kalzumeus seems to know that area well.
- Never use the "royal we"
- Always sign emails personally from me - No making up fake employee names or 'BugMuncher Team' sign offs
- If someone asks then I'll tell them.
So far I've not had any issues because of my one-man-band status.
If you do need to disclose, I found some solid responses to "It's just you?" are at https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...
Corporate clients like working with bigger companies. Why? Because the person making the decision doesn't want to have to justify the decision to use a startup. Even thought the payoff might be greater to go with the startup, it's the _easy_ decision to justify by going with a large, established company.
Would you care if the owner of a restaurant showed you to your table, took your order, cooked the meal and then cleaned the table after you left? Probably not.....as long as the quality is high.
Personally, I prefer to be visible as an opinionated single founder from the start because it attracts customers who want me to 'win' along with them. I like the model of Brennan Dunn's Planscope in this respect.