253 karma · joined July 22, 2016
So if we get paid out a USD payment, into a USD account. We get charged just because we're registered in the UK? That's a huge impact on our business.
Then the invoice itself (containing your name/address/payment method) will need to be stored by the company in some form for accounting regulations.
Listen to your customers here.
If there are people that want a call, offer the option, but please don't force it. And don't do sneaky updates to your terms which make this a requirement.
The result? A swell of employees who want to leave/move on but can't afford to buy their shares and leave. It's lead to a number of people just hanging around, even when their enthusiasm and passion is waining.
Not what options are designed for!
In hindsight should have done it sooner, a year on we've grown so much more by taking it seriously as a business. We value our time more and as such charge more, yet growth has only accelerated.
Support was a little bit more tricky, however. The only solution we found here, other than outsourcing to an Upworker, was to try to minimise support. Make your help docs as useful as possible and spend time on improving error messages.
I would also advise you to switch to working on the project full-time as soon as you can afford to. Our growth went through the roof (we'd spent around 3 years getting to £1k MRR and tripled that in the first full-time month). Some reasons why? We could spend time with our customers and focus on improving our metrics, the stuff that you just can't automate away. We also began treating it more as a business and valued our own time spent on the project more, which resulted in increasing our prices and getting across our value proposition better.
If you're already using AWS then I'd definitely look at SES. I appreciate the price may seem too cheap, but the service is now used by huge companies for their transactional emails, the likes of Netflix rely heavily on it. As long as you configure your set-up correctly with DKIM/SPF I'd be surprised if you ran into too many delivery problems. Also worth noting they now offer dedicated IPs, for a not too costly monthly fee.