We faced this problem at my last startup, and I think we handled it reasonably well.<p>The team remained 3 founders until Mar 2012 (1 year after launch) when customer support and other operational tasks started <i>significantly</i> distracting us from more critical things like building product and growing the userbase. At that point we hired a community manager to handle support / ops. We were profitable by then.<p>There were a few major advantages in delaying this long:<p>- Doing support ourselves helped us achieve product-market fit. It's critical to be in contact with as many users as possible in the early days.<p>- Saved money. Early on, a community manager would have had 2 hours of real work per day, and would have cost us $50K / year. Didn't make sense unless there were 6+ hours of work to do per day.<p>- Kept us from building support tools. Since we were all technical, we just ran everything from the command line. And when we hired our first community manager, we hired someone with immense coding aptitude. They handled support from the command line for nearly a year when we finally built out enough tools for a nontechnical person to do the job.