How to support your software and customers in a one man shop?

Question

Background

I'm a one man shop (a micro-ISV). A week after putting my product online I get a mail from one of my customers about a bug. It was an obvious fix and I fixed it in 5 minutes but I realize that the reason why the bug was reported so late is because the only contact I have with my users is through mail.

I feel I need something more but I have difficult time finding the right solution.

I was checking out some solutions, but I would like some feedback from the community

Question

What do you use for a micro-ISV (both online and built into software) when you want to give good quality service and support to your clients?

Answer 1

You fixed it in five minutes? Sounds like you're already giving good quality service / support. But if you really want a tool, I would check out if Unfuddle.com has a public bug report feature. I love that site.

Answer 2

If you want to go beyond the "email us" link, you might consider putting up a bulletin-board or even wiki-style forum on your site for your clients to use. Make your own list of Frequently Asked Questions the first post. I'd recommend using an off-the-shelf package, instead of rolling your own. A pre-existing solution should include the spam-filtering and moderation tools that you'll need.

Another idea would be to start a company blog, and invite users to leave feedback.

Answer 3

Have an issue-tracking system that your customers can use through a web page. (You do have a web page, right?) Alternately, if your software is interactive, have a menu entry "Submit Bug Report" which will email you what the user says, and perhaps other useful things (users very frequently omit things like software versions, OS versions, that sort of thing). Or both.

Also, your customers are likely to feel happier if they have a standard way to report problems.

Answer 4

Balsamiq is a great example of an ISV that (I think) offers many lessons in exactly what you're asking. While there are multiple people at the company (currently 4) there is only 1 programmer, and the customer support is top-notch.

Answer 5

This is a subject I've thought a lot about (since I'm contemplating doing just what you're doing), and there's considerable precedent for how you could proceed.

• Set up a feedback page on your website
• Set up a dedicated email account for your website
• Set up automated opt-in bug reporting and crash reporting for your software
• Set up a twitter account; and conduct twitter searches for your software name
• Set up a Google Alert to track when a website or user references your product, and respond to them.
• Set up a Uservoice account for your software/website (it's free for a 'small' company).

Answer 6

For a start, you can ensure your website is clear, and has useful sections like FAQs and How-Tos.

Make sure your customers can get in touch with you easily, and that you respond to them in a reasonable amount of time.

Answer 7

A well designed website with a forum for news, updates, user discussions is probably a good start. It's worth paying someone to do this for you if you want to spend more time designing and coding good software. The more information you can put out there, the less time you'll spend dealing with customer issues.

Answer 8

In addition to giving your users more options on how to report a problem, your site should also be logging a fair amount of information. Such as, who, when, and what they did.

Further, ANY failure should be logged and automatically be reported back to you. Most clients simply won't say there is a problem and will just move on.

Just basic logging will also give you usability information. What pages do they use the most, which ones are used least, what is different about them. Are there features no one cares about?

Finally, engage your customers by asking them what they would like to see. Quite often their vision is different from yours.

Answer 9

If you out and don't have a Blackberry enabled phone you could have your software send you an SMS of the fault.

Answer 10

I use ontime as a customer portal and help desk / bug tracking tool. It's free for a one person license. Which is great for me since I'm a one man shop as well. I'm the only full-time employee and have one to two part-time 1099 contractors here and there as work comes and goes.

There are also lots of open source out there. However, I've found the ontime to be dead simple, free for a 1 user license and cheap for 5 user license.

Answer 11

Split your time between development and customer support. If you focus too much on support, new functionality will suffer, and if you focus on development, customers will suffer. So find a balance and plan portion of your time for development and another part to support.

Also keep in mind that solving the bug is just the first step.

• You need to test (preferablyseveral configurations)
• create a new installation
• possible update manual and help files (and don't forget the translations if it's multi lingual).
• Add a new version number (every deliverable must be identifyable).
• Update website...

So it often takes several days to ship a single bugfix.

Besides, most customers are happy with a few updates per year. And ocasionally an urgent hotfix if the customer is in serious need of a bugfix.

Answer 12

I have a few systems. My main system is through a fogbugz account with buttons built in to my application that create emails for users so that they can then submit comments / bug reports etc. I also run a wiki as the documentation for my application, although I am the main contributor to the wiki and it does take a lot of effort to keep up to date. Again, there is a menu item in my application that takes users directly to the wiki. I have a built in crash reporter using an open source framework, which again submits emails to fogbugz. Finally I do online video and text based tutorials on my applications website, although I'd like to integrate them more into the application.

Answer 13

One (free) product that I know uses Yahoo Groups (and also a Google Group).

It acts as a mailing list: so if you report a bug, that's seen by other users as well as by the group's owner/moderator (i.e. you).

It also acts as a weblog/archive: so users can search it for known issues/answers before they submit a new message.