How I manage customer feedback for my bootstrapped SaaS
Published in 2019, this chronicle by @tnolet details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 252 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 35 comments
I've found a chat widget really helpful for my own product (https://www.checkbot.io/) - I find the reduced lag of the chat format means problems get resolved quicker on both ends and the style of replying (e.g. maybe 16 short messages back and forth with chat via 4 longer ones with email) results in you getting more information and making more of a connection with your users.
I use the free tier of https://crisp.chat but most of them are fairly similar for basic usage. I would say avoid using one that has that annoying "Hey! You! How can I help?" automatic pop-up feature though.
We have a chat widget for our product aimed at elemantary school teachers and they absolutely love it.
We get everything from random praise, to sales inquiries, to technical support questions, questions about the resources themselves, pedagogical questions.
We use slaask.com (which incidently I first saw on HN) so each incoming chat request is just a new channel on slack, super easy to use and a huge feature for us. In fact it's one of the most often commented on part of the presentation where we ask prospective clients to say hi and they get an answer back from a real person within seconds, it's really helped our conversion rates.
We built our entire sales inquiry, customer support, and help system around intercom.io. It cost $50/mo for the first year (their startup introductory plan) but we never would have gotten off the ground without it. At launch our product was pretty raw and the documentation was thin; we got through that period by being constantly on top of customer support.
Customers are incredibly forgiving when they feel that they're being listened to. This kind of support is one of those "things that don't scale" that you can do in the early stage to build a foothold while you refine your product.
I'm considering adding a chat option to my site but am wondering how to decide when to make myself available as a solo founder. That is, I don't want my phone buzzing at me whenever I'm awake, as that would drive me (and more importantly, my wife) crazy.
How do folks decide when to have these chat options available, to balance growth/customer support with having a life?
Nice work, Tim! Glad to see you’re still doing well, hoping the best for you and ChecklyHQ.
I’ve also thought and noticed similar results with the on-site chat UIs. I really don’t like them from a consumer perspective, but they sure do get used a lot. We went with small.chat since I practically live in Slack anymore. We’ll see how that plays out.
Thanks for the write up!