Solopreneurs, how many customers are you providing support for?
If you are running your business solo, how many customers are you providing support for?
Also, what type of business is this for? What is your strategy? What software are you using? How many requests per day?
I’ve talked to some people who are still supporting 1000s of customers while others have outsourced simple support. Some people have raised prices to keep customer count lower. I’m curious to see what this community is doing.
I'm providing support for close to 1000 users, all through email and all by myself. In a given week I send and receive anywhere between 100 - 400 emails, and it's quite sustainable actually! Recently, I wrote a bit about how I optimized my customer support flow as a company of one here, which may be of interest: https://lunchbag.ca/company-of-one/ (under "Optimizing Customer Support")
At the moment I have around 13 customers that pay on a monthly basis.
Support was only needed in the beginning when they started using my service (I provide transactional email service for online stores, WooCommerce shops)
Once it was setup, they didn't need any support.
So if they need any support, they send me an email, and I respond/check what the problem is.
I suppose if I had 1000 customers, I would have to find a way to scale this in a way...
I currently have 5 recurring customers for SEO and content marketing and then a bunch of one-off, project based customers for translation and copywriting work. I don't get many requests per day...sales cycles are bit long, especially for retainer work. But I have a dream team that helps with it all!