By Rachel Andrew CHAPTER 11

Chapter eleven · by raChel andreW

SuPPoRTing YouR PRoDuCT

Most of your competition spend their days looking forward to those rare

moments when everything goes right. Imagine how much leverage you have

if you spend your time maximizing those common moments when it doesn’t.^1

— Seth Godin

never intended that technical support would become part of my job.
As one of the founders of Perch^2 (a self-hosted content management
system), however, technical support is one of the most important
parts of my day-to-day work. When I talk to other developers about our
move from being a service business, developing projects for clients, to
becoming a product company, I typically get two responses. The first is to
express how great it must be to only work on our own product; the second
is to ask whether the support is a nightmare!
Perch is self-hosted: our customers download the software and install
it on their own hosting and local development environments. Unlike a
software-as-a-service application, we have very little control over the envi-
ronment into which our software is installed, and PHP Web hosting can be
a fairly hostile environment.

1 Seth Godin, “Winning on the uphills”, http://smashed.by/winning, 21 July 2009.
2 http://grabaperch.com

I