How many users are you able to manage by yourself?
Hey everyone,
Obviously, the context of your business will play a major role in this (B2B vs B2C, etc) but I'd love to see how many users people are able to manage on their own. I haven't been able to find any data on this anywhere, surprisingly.
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For my product, ruttl.com, I have been able to manage a list of 1000 sign ups till now. I have got 250 active users that are using the product daily as well. I think its more about the way you automate theses tasks once the threshold starts hitting the roof and things start going out of control. If you use the right services to automate the process, the number of users that you can manage goes significantly hire.
Agreed.
I think the factors which can be optimised the most for maintaining the highest possible employee:customer ratio are:
Right on point.
Often ask myself this question. Hanging around to hear others answers :)
The largest ratio I've ever done was 4 million users with a 10 or so people on the project. With my latest project that I'm soloing, I'm pretty confident I can handle at least a million users in total. I'd probably start hiring at 3000 paid subscribers, which if the rate is 1% would put me at 300k users total.
Wow, that is an insanely high ratio. I presume that free users demand very little support?
We were doing mobile games so the number of paying users was really small and we only really provided support to customers. I suspect I will get more demands for a productivity app, but I also learned a lot of lessons when it comes to system stability since then. I'm hoping that results in fewer bug reports and more "I want this feature".
Ahh I see. Either way, 400,000 users per employee is a massive number. I'm also hoping that I'll be able to manage 3000-5000 users alone for something i'm currently developing. I think that it's doable for platforms which any setup and are generally not complicated to use.
Judging by the description of your project on the landing page, it seems like it would fall under the aforementioned category.
As for some unsolicited advice: I would recommend having a demo video or some screenshots of your project on the landing page. After reading it, I have a general idea of what it does but I'm a little confused as to its actual implementation.
Thanks for the advice! Makes a lot of sense. I didn't put too much effort in the homepage since I just did a silent relaunch of the app last weekend. I built it solely as a tool for myself at first, but was convinced to start commercializing it. The plan is to write a bunch of blog posts about how I use the app to help me be more productive.
I think we're in line with how many paying users we can support at ~3000. The economics also come into play. At $10/mo, you can have 3000 users and hire help. At $5/mo, 3000 users won't get you much help unless you're not taking a salary. Costs from infrastructure and licensing also goes into those numbers.
You're welcome! I, too, am building to solve my own problem. I think the blog posts are a good idea.
The other thing to consider with pricing is how much effort it took to make/takes to maintain. For example, what I'm making will end up taking me approximately 500 hours for the MVP and another ~300-500 hours to full-release. Only after this point will it become more of a 5-10 hours per week to maintain scenario. As a result, my base pricing will be slightly higher than normal. However, we will see if that works out as it's obviously always subject to what people are willing to pay.
Good luck!