Customer support matters.

Hey everyone. I wanted to share some details about a project I started, brought to MVP, and abandoned earlier this year.

If you read nothing else, here's the takeaway: customer support matters. Try to estimate how much support your users will need, and put a dollar value on that support. How much will you need to charge in order to cover your customer support? Is it realistic to charge that much?

So here's the story. It was Spring 2020, and the world was panicking about COVID. Lockdowns were in progress, and businesses were struggling to figure out how they would survive.

One of my clients (I'm a software development consultant) puts on a bunch of running events (think 5km fundraisers, marathons, etc.). All of his races were going to be cancelled due to COVID19 restrictions.

After a bit of brainstorming, I decided that we could host some "virtual races". Runners would use their fitness watches (Garmin, Polar, Fitbit Apple Watch, etc.) to track their races. The virtual race application would integrate with those watch providers to determine if the runners actually completed the course, and what time they achieved.

I was excited to do some new integrations and thought that afterwards I might be able to sell the application to others.

So I built it out.

Building and testing the application was fun. The application worked well. It integrated with Garmin & Polar watches to start. It also allowed users to enter their times manually or use Polar's "Polar Beat" app for iOS / Android to track their run if they didn't have a fitness watch.

We successfully ran an event in June that had around 150 participants. Many of the runners managed well. They connected their Garmin or Polar watches to the application, ran the event, and their times showed up in the leaderboard. Easy. But, a large portion of the runners (maybe 50 of the participants) had difficulty adding their times, and this is ultimately what made me throw the idea out.

The participants encountered different problems. Most were UX issues that I assume could be solved with a few more "beta tests". Things like buttons not being obvious enough, wording not leading the users in the right direction. A couple of issues were technical, and were easy to solve because of error reporting (thank you sentry.io).

I was optimistic.

But slowly, the bigger problem dawned on me: the customer support costs here were huge.

The client of an app like this is the event organizer. But each event organizer brings a huge number of app users (all of the event participants).

For each paying user (event organizer) I would have many application users. And the cost of customer support for those app users wasn't small.

In the end, even if I put in a lot of work to minimize customer support, and offloaded a lot of the support role onto the event organizers, I would have to charge a huge monthly fee to the event organizers to make this app profitable.

The equation just didn't make sense. I decided the large fee I would have to charge the organizers would make selling the application difficult.

In the end, I've decided to abandon the project (though it will still serve as a case study for my consulting business, and a learning experience for my endeavors as an Indie Hacker).