For most tech-enabled subscription businesses, the core business is support. Your technology is easily duplicable, so your key differentiator has to be how you deal with customers, and how quickly.
Sales is core too, but sales is also a support task - you talk the customer through how you can help them and what they'll need to do in order to use your product. Educating someone into a sale is pleasant for both sides.
Doing support is time consuming, so make sure you factor that into your prices. Can you really afford to support your product for $9/month? Probably not, your time is worth more. Charge more than $9!
Re:Outsourcing Core Business
by rokhayakebe on Tuesday April 05, 2011 @09:51PM
(#2413584)
Is it then safe to say you can outsource software development and focus on customer acquisition and support?
No, only that once you have your core features in place, building more won't improve your product and won't win or keep customers. Meanwhile, as a non-tech business, your competitors can easily copy the features you built, so how do you win? In the long-term you have to beat them on sales and support, and outsourcing that to someone without a deep knowledge of the product (as in the article) makes that hard.
Most startups claim to be technology companies. I think 90% of these are tech-based companies as opposed to technology businesses. The difference being the latter kind is more like Intel or VMware. If you are tech-enabled, then what is your core business? Is it the software you write?