32 people is not a small company any more, and if every engineer you've got is also a support person on call for your customers you can't really say you don't have support staff, just that you don't have dedicated customer support employees.
The article does make a very good point though, the best way to reduce customer support is to improve product quality.
Customer support is one of the few areas in a virtual enterprise that does not scale, the costs can very quickly eat up your revenues.
So was I. But technically "No Support Staff" means no one, on staff, doing any support. Thus the customers would have to use a stack exchange or some other type of self-sufficient system.
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32 people is not a small company any more, and if every engineer you've got is also a support person on call for your customers you can't really say you don't have support staff, just that you don't have dedicated customer support employees.
The article does make a very good point though, the best way to reduce customer support is to improve product quality.
Customer support is one of the few areas in a virtual enterprise that does not scale, the costs can very quickly eat up your revenues.
This model also works because their customers (developers) are very technical so having a non-technical customer support would be very frustrating.
i came here to say basically the same thing. "no support staff" is not the same as using engineers as support staff.
i was expecting more of an article on a startup of 2 cofounders who are managing things themselves.
So was I. But technically "No Support Staff" means no one, on staff, doing any support. Thus the customers would have to use a stack exchange or some other type of self-sufficient system.
Because of its searchable Knowledge Base for customer self-help, we also chose to use Tender (the SaaS platform used by New Relic).