Ask HN: Support, uptime and pricing in a saas business?
I have a couple of questions regarding a saas-business. The application is a solution for companies in the real estate market which hopefully will become a full-featured business solutions for this market (for small-sized companies).
The point is: I am a student and I am afraid. Support: How can I handle support when I am alone in a company and not available for support whole days? How do you, in my situation or similar, support your customers? I think its a quite essential part in this field..
Uptime: This kind of business lies in the web and hopefully will become critial for the customers, in the way that they really rely on the application. How can I avoid getting hacked and leak information? How can I ensure that my uptime really is close to a const figure?
Pricing: Since I don't highly believe in myself regarding the support and uptime, this is the point where I doubt the most. If I lower the prices a lot, it will still be a valuable service even though the support is bad. But then again, if I lower my prices, I will never be able to get a good support either. Moment 22 :|
Now is your time to shine and help me fellas =)
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Support: Be up-front about the fact that support emails might have a 24 hour turn-around time. You could also charge more for phone support, which would make you available even when away from a computer. Or find a partner or freelancer that will be responsible for customer support.
Uptime: Pay extra for a managed hosting service that will keep your server secure. You will still have to make your application secure, which means you have to worry about XSS, SQL injections, reliable authentication and many more.
Pricing: If you can't provide support and uptime, lowering your prices is not the answer. You might be better off doing something different. Oh and it's "catch 22" not "moment 22".
Well I think you need to give great support when you're starting up because you need good feedback from your users. A good way to get feedback is through the support process.
I think a low price and not offering support is not a good way to go. I would try and find a way around not being able to offer support for whole days.