One of the hardest things for an ISV1 like myself and others is the balancing of roles; coder, business, marketing and product support. Support is one of the easiest areas to cut corners on because it takes place after the sale, but personal support …

Alex King, founder of King Design, who has produced Tasks (a web based task management app) and Feedlounge (a web based RSS reader) gives us his thoughts on offering support as a microISV business owner. He has made the choice to not offer free phone …

I’ve even been getting back into development on my personal time lately. My main problem is finding that nitch that no one has tackled yet. I’m pretty good with PHP/MySQL and I’ve even been getting into AJAX lately. Been building my own Backpack service so I can have the little niceties that I want in it which aren’t in 37Signal’s product. But that probably won’t see the light of day to anyone else since 37Signals is already doing a pretty good job at it. Oh well, one day I’ll find my own feedlounge

Anyhow, best of luck with the service, I’m glad things are going so well and that there’s such a huge interest. The response you got to allowing in more Alpha users was phenomonal (inal, onal? no idea).

I wouldn’t say I’m frustrated at all - on the contrary, things are going very well which is where a lot of these “problems” stem from. In large part, they are growing pains.

The vocal minority can be rather time consuming and part of my motivation for posting this is to have an in-depth explanation I can point people to if they appear to be frustrated with my support policies. Also, on the off chance I’d totally missed a better solution.

FeedLounge is really a different situation altogether. FeedLounge will grow to be larger than Tasks within months of it’s public release, but the team supporting it is already larger and we’ll be actively adding more heads and hands to deal with the growth as it comes.

The recent post about FeedLounge subscription fees was an attempt to explain the difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0 services. With web 1.0, money was free and so were the services - and most of them aren’t around anymore. We intend FeedLounge to be a pillar in the new group of web 2.0 applications and to do that, we need to make it successful financially as well as popular.

I used to be in webhosting (got out of it due to such low profit margins and constant demands on my time), and outsourcing support was getting really popular.

Personally I think it’s kind of sketchy to be honest though. Sure, you can get routeable 888 numbers for almost nothing, and $10/hr (or less) isn’t that much to pay someone if it free’s you up for development/debugging, etc. But A) You still have to recoup that cost through higher service fee’s, and B) the level of support offered by them is typically … sub-standard, and it is ESPECIALLY going to be that way in the eye’s of the person that made the software.

From your recent posts, I’m sensing frustration from you about subscription fee’s vs. the time you’re investing in your project. The only advice I can give you is to decide either A) it’s not worth it and bail (which I doubt is likely) or B) as you said, your time is valuable, your producing products people want to use, and are going to be willing to pay for.

Trust me, there are plenty of us out here willing to pay for Feedlounge, Tasks, whatever else. We … or I, have just been trying to sit back silently while you get it all worked out. From what I’ve seen/read of feedlounge I actually think $10/mo sounds pretty reasonable and I would hope would allow you a little wiggle room to continue feature development, and offer whatever level of service you are able to (email is a minimum if you ask me, and would be fine at the $10/mo pricepoint as long as it wasn’t 2+ days to get a response).

Wow … I wrote a novel, sorry about that. Just wanted to give you some reassurance that paying customers are out there. ‘Build it and they will come’.

Take care