40 paying accounts and 14 tickets a month - is that ratio normal or is my product broken

Going to argue the other side. At 40 accounts, 14 tickets is a gift and you should not be trying to reduce it yet.

Those fourteen conversations are the only unfiltered access you have to why people struggle, and every one of them is with someone who cared enough to write instead of leaving quietly. The ones you should worry about are the accounts you never hear from at all.

Deflection is a tool for when volume threatens the product. Right now the volume is the product research. Build the deflection machinery at 200 accounts, when you actually have the pattern to build it against.

The number I track is tickets per hundred accounts per month. Yours is 35. Mine sat around 40 in the first year and is about 12 now at a bigger account count, and it came down mostly because of two features, not because of docs.

But the ratio matters less than the mix. Look at yours: 5 import failures and 3 how-do-I-invite. That is 8 of 14, over half, and neither is support in any real sense. One is a bug with a polite face on it and the other is a UI that does not say what it does. Two of your fourteen were actual support, which is a fine number.

So the answer is not more efficient answering. Fix the importer and rename the button.

Tag every ticket for one month with a single word. No workflow, no helpdesk, just a tag. Then write one doc a week for the top tag until the tags flatten out.

The part people miss is where the doc lives. A help centre nobody visits deflects nothing. The link has to be at the moment of failure - in the error message itself, in the empty state, in the email that gets sent when the import fails. My import failure tickets dropped by about two thirds when the failure email started saying which row broke and linking to the page explaining the three common causes.

Receipts and invoices should be zero. Turn on the billing portal, put a link to it in the footer of every receipt email, and that whole category disappears.

Fix the importer. Rename the invite button. Turn on the billing portal. That is 11 of your 14 and about a weekend of work.

One thing to sort out before you need it: what happens the week you are away. An autoresponder that says I am away until the 14th, urgent issues go to this address, everything else gets answered on the 15th is fine. People are remarkably relaxed about a one person company being one person, as long as they know it in advance rather than after four days of silence.

The other half is a status page you can update from your phone. When something breaks while you are on a train, one line there is worth twenty individual replies you cannot write.

Set up canned replies a month ago and it took the sting out more than I expected, mostly by removing the dread of opening the inbox.

Three that cover most of it. One for the import failure that asks for the file and the row number and links to the format page. One for billing that links straight to the portal and offers to send a PDF invoice if their accounts team needs specific fields. One for a feature request that thanks them, says honestly whether it is planned, and asks what they do today instead - that last question has turned three brush-offs into useful conversations.

I still edit the first line of every one so it does not read like a machine. That takes ten seconds and it is the difference between a canned reply and a bad canned reply.