Hey Patrick--as the person who (may have) introduced you to this, I should share what we're doing. We are just about to hire another full-time person to help us with this as we scale out our consulting-as-onboarding process. I promise to write a blog post once I have more data on how well this works, but I will say this: You can get a well-qualified person in the U.S. who's smart, technically savvy (not a programmer but knows his/her way around computers), and has a bachelor's degree in a related field for $40K/year in salary--and that's a step up from where many of these folks are today.
I'm really excited to have a FT person working on this, and I think in the future we'll see the "hacker/hustler/designer" trio that Dave McClure et.al. are so fond of speaking of expand into four people, with the fourth being a customer service/customer onboarding role. In fact, this is our fourth FT person on the team (other 3 are two savvy developers plus me, the business brain.) A designer will be our fifth hire.
More data: We plan to implement consulting-as-onboarding for any plan priced over $499/mo (which is our sweet spot right now), and, in fact, "do it for them" in terms of getting all their data into our system (which is where many of our customers are struggling now.) If it works and pays off in terms of customer acquisition and retention, I have full plans to do this for EVERY customer. I learned how to do this in the hosting industry--Rackspace was my example 10 years ago, and I did this with massive success with my hosting company as well. It was also one of my top tips for WP Engine when I consulted there.
P.S. Patrick, if you're still reading, we talked about doing a podcast, and this is what we should talk about. I'm game--I'll shoot you an email.
I'm really excited to have a FT person working on this, and I think in the future we'll see the "hacker/hustler/designer" trio that Dave McClure et.al. are so fond of speaking of expand into four people, with the fourth being a customer service/customer onboarding role. In fact, this is our fourth FT person on the team (other 3 are two savvy developers plus me, the business brain.) A designer will be our fifth hire.
More data: We plan to implement consulting-as-onboarding for any plan priced over $499/mo (which is our sweet spot right now), and, in fact, "do it for them" in terms of getting all their data into our system (which is where many of our customers are struggling now.) If it works and pays off in terms of customer acquisition and retention, I have full plans to do this for EVERY customer. I learned how to do this in the hosting industry--Rackspace was my example 10 years ago, and I did this with massive success with my hosting company as well. It was also one of my top tips for WP Engine when I consulted there.
P.S. Patrick, if you're still reading, we talked about doing a podcast, and this is what we should talk about. I'm game--I'll shoot you an email.