the product came out of consulting work, it's $89/mo, and i've got 30 paying accounts. every one of them gets a 45-minute call from me where i connect their data source and set up the first three workflows, and churn is genuinely low, but it's eating two days a week and i can't sell while i'm doing it. at what point did you stop doing the calls, and did you automate them or hand them to someone?
Numbers, because the two-days-a-week framing hides something.
30 accounts at $89 is $2,670 a month. If onboarding is 45 minutes plus scheduling and follow-up, call it 90 minutes a customer, and you're adding maybe 6 new accounts a month, that's 9 hours. That's not your two days — your two days is mostly support and ad-hoc calls with existing customers, not onboarding.
Worth separating them before you fix the wrong one. When I actually logged it, my onboarding was 20% of the time and the other 80% was people asking questions the docs should have answered.
logged it for a week after reading this and you're right — 4 onboarding calls, 11 support conversations, and 3 of those support conversations were the same question about scheduled runs.
Three of eleven on one topic is a product bug wearing a support costume. Fix the scheduled runs screen and you've bought back a day a month without automating anything.
I'd argue against automating them yet, and I know that's the unpopular position at 30 customers.
Those calls are the only place you watch someone use your product without a filter. I killed mine at about 40 customers because I was busy, and my roadmap got noticeably worse within a quarter — I started building things people asked for in emails, which is a much more biased sample than watching someone get stuck in silence.
What I'd do instead: cut the call to 20 minutes by pre-doing the setup yourself before they join, and keep the watching part. Automate the clicking, not the conversation.
keeping the watching and cutting the clicking is a distinction i hadn't made — i'd been treating the whole call as overhead when the silent bit where they get stuck is the only user research i have.
Do both. Pre-do the setup, keep twenty minutes of watching, and record it. You get the research and the checklist out of the same call.
I hired too early and it cost me about £4,000 and three months. Brought in a part-time contractor to take onboarding when I had roughly 25 customers, spent six weeks training them, and then discovered the process was still changing every fortnight so the training kept going stale.
They were good. The job wasn't stable enough to hand over. I'd write the process down and follow my own document for two months first — if you can't follow it without improvising, nobody else can either.
Do the calls until you can predict what happens in them, then write the checklist, then hand it over. Two days a week is fine at 30 customers and impossible at 100, so the deadline is real but it isn't today.
@ship_it_soren · 4mo ago
Record every one of the next ten calls, with permission, and then watch them at speed with a notepad. You'll find the same four or five moments where you say the same sentence.
Mine were: which data source to pick, one confusing permission screen, a naming convention question, and "what should my first workflow be." I turned those into a five-step in-product checklist with a two-minute clip on each. The call went from 45 minutes to about 15, then to optional, then to nothing over roughly four months.
The recordings are the work. The automation is easy once you know what you're automating, and you cannot guess it accurately from memory — I tried and got two of my five wrong.
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