Hey indies! How much of your time is spent on maintenance?

Question

I would like to know, for those of you who are one-man bands especially, how much of your time is spent maintaining or supporting your programs, as it compares to everything else you do in your day to day business. I worked in telephone-based tech support for a large ISP for two years, and I still have nightmares about that. I can get my head around bootstrapping, using Web 2.0, marketing even, but the after sale support of Windows especially is something that I am not looking forward to... so how bad is it, really ? I hope to take the pulse of others who have gone the indie/ISV/MicroISV path before me and get a sense of what I can expect there. I thank you for any answers in advance.

Answer 1

While I haven't gone the independent route, very few people seem to take phone support (unless you do work for the enterprise) since it is too expensive, doesn't scale and makes it impossible to concentrate.

Yes not taking phone calls might cost you some sales, but unless you take more than 200$ a sale, two phone calls means that you have spent all the money you made on the sale to pay for the salary that you could have made by selling you time. This is properly not why you went independent.

Answer 2

I've run two mISVs for 10 years and can say that support is directly related to several things:

1. Medium: Desktop apps have more things that can go wrong (os versions, dll conflicts, security software, etc) while web apps are often times limited to browser issues. A customer is more likely to use an online medium for contacting for support if they are already in their browser, so the edge goes to web apps again
2. Complexity: Obviously the more complex and the more moving parts, the more questions it will generate.
3. Documentation: Do you have a useful FAQ and support knowledgebase? Many support problems arise from lack of documentation. Write a help article or FAQ once or deal with answering the same questions over and over.
4. Ease of use: Is your product easy to use? Is it consistent with other applications your customers have used? Often times we see support questions arise due to lack of confidence ("I think this is the answer but I wanted to check with you guys first"). If your customers feel confident about your software because it "does what they think it should do", you will have happier customers and less support.
5. Communication medium: The key to managing support in any mISV that focuses on selling products and services (as opposed to consulting, support plans, etc) is to utilize asynchronous communications like help desks and emails over synchronous like phone and live chat. When you use asynchronous methods, it's easier to queue issues up.

Answer 3

From my day job I can say that it is possible to sell a successful Windows application that requires minimal support & maintenance. The software we sell hasn't seen any revisions whatsoever in the past 12 months. So it's extremely stable. And support is quite easy as well, only requiring maybe a 2-3 hours a week of customer support. That level of low maintenance is rare, and it required a lot of ground work to get it that way. Ever since I first started working on it, I was determined to eliminate every problem I could in the software and website to reduce support costs as much as possible. It turns out that all my effort was worth it.

My other job is a micro-ISV night & weekend thing. It's just starting out, so I'm still pretty new to this. I have two products out there right now and I have very few support requests. I mostly just spend time making improvements (the fun stuff). I foresee the products I'm focusing on now to stay pretty low-maintenance throughout their life.

But I also have some half-completed native client/server software that has the potential to become very popular. It scares me though. Its potential is so great that I question if I'll be able to support it. The inherent nature of client/server applications adds to the complexity of support & maintenance. There are bound to be problems with set up involving firewalls, connectivity issues, etc, etc. The infinitely complex variables involved in network & server configurations just adds to this.

Answer 4

I'm coming from the micro web-dev background. A few thoughts:

Like everything else support has to be regulated.

Define clearly for what cases you provide support to what rates. You will also find that you can delegate some levels of the support pyramid if you work with partners. You can create some helper tools that provide meta-support for a lower level support person inside the company you're providing with your product.

If your project/software reaches a certain size, you should never sell it without a support contract included, where support (levels, rates, special high tarif hours, etc.) are clearly regulated.