How you provide customer support greatly depends on the resources you can commit to it. CS is often overlooked for sexier, more obvious revenue-generating roles such as sales, product design, business development, outbound marketing, etc.

While it's important to keep in mind that Customer Support should be given as much attention as those other areas of your business, it's also sometimes the reality for a startup that three or four -- or even one or two -- people are sharing ALL those roles. If this is the case -- in other words, if you or one of your business partners will be providing customer support initially -- you need to be realistic about how you're going to make this work. That's why it's important to give this some thought now and plan accordingly.

So what kind of commitment can you make? Can you hire one full time CS employee out of the gate? Can you hire a team of two or three? A dozen? Or will it just be you, wearing all the hats? This will come up again later.