I always see a potential relationship there and you know what? People reciprocate. I once got a call and the customer was telling me her company was unsubscribing. She didn't have to tell me. Can you imagine waking up and telling a Mailchimp that you are unsubscribing?
Long story short, support is one of the infinity stones. If you do nothing else --- do that!
Customers who require instant support at whatever hours will likely find some dissatisfaction in working with your bootstrapped solo founder company now or in the near future. Best to offload them to companies who are ready and structured to help them.
Those conversations, beyond just delighting your customers, are where you really learn the most about them and their needs. It’s where you get to live their pain and understand what you can do to build a better product. I’d recommend being ready to jump on the phone with someone the moment they reach out for help.
Also, you can be honest about out of hours times - people understand that you can’t be there at 1am (though, lord knows I’ve done plenty of support with customers on the other side of the world at that time). But if you’re a tiny company getting established, you’ll be on hand at all hours, even if it’s a bit antisocial. Nobody is as loyal a customer as someone you’ve bent over backwards to help late at night or on a Sunday afternoon.
That is the most pleasure I take. Underpromising, yet answering tickets or taking a call at midnight. It happens once or twice a month. For the call, she told me she was stuck with a customer demo, in exchange I made clear that I wasn’t « in a work environment » and all went well.
Those customers seem to get emotionally attached to us. In fact, they’re the only kind who give reviews on the Atlassian Marketplace (either those for positive reviews or the occasional disappointed person). They are a bit idealists though, and I don’t see them after two years, whereas corporate customers stay for much longer.
In my experience, customers who sign up, demand immediate customer support, then cancel a few hours later because they didn't get it, are doing you a favor - imagine what a drag on your customer support efforts they'd be if they stayed!
My rule of thumb is customer support thru email should aim for 24h turnaround, except if they're paying for "premium support". Great if you answer in 5min because you were just at the helm, but you shouldn't set unreasonable expectations.
Live support is murkier - if you do have set it up and are offline, falling back to email that gets answered tomorrow does seem slow, just by the fact you've just anchored me to "live". In my opinion, don't do it (or hide the widget!) unless you can really provide near-realtime response (even if via outsourced 1st level support agents).