How to Create a Smart Phone Support in a Virtual Business?

I've helped lots of SaaS companies improve their onboarding processes over the years, but I just published my best (high-level) piece on doing this right: http://sixteenventures.com/customer-onboarding The bottom line is (though I suggest reading the entire article) you need to know what success looks like for your customer - what their Desired Outcome is - and then reverse engineer the steps necessary to get there. Going through that process will reveal the steps necessary to get them to that Desired Outcome outside of the product; we're not talking about functional steps within the product yet. Map this out using flow charts, line lists, mind map, white board, etc. The tool isn't important as much as doing this right. Now, once you understand the process required to move them from Step 0 - deciding to take action to reach their desired outcome to Step z - achieving their (at least initial) Desired Outcome, you can start laying out, designing, and building the in-product processes necessary to achieve those success milestones and ultimately, their Desired Outcome. You should then peg your email (or other lifecycle messaging) flow to those success milestones (rather than doing a timed follow-up), where each message is sent like this: "have they done this milestone? yes, then send this message to get them to the next one." Since each user and customer will achieve success on their own cadence, it's best to not have a timed autoresponder sequence but to actually trigger based on milestones reached. The good news is that this is relatively easy to do given the availability of lifecycle messaging services. See this post for more on this topic: http://sixteenventures.com/email-follow-up-sequence Hopefully this helps, but if you want more details or - more importantly - want to figure out how to apply this thinking directly to your situation, request at least a 15-minute call with me.

The best way would be to hire an expert on oDesk, etc. which is fairly cheap and also reliable. But It sounds like you want to go even cheaper than that. Try posting on StackExchange, which is free. Another cheap option is to check local Meetup.com tech gatherings in your area and ask some experts directly for free advice. Good luck!

The best avenue for funding would likely be Kickstarter, but that presumes that the idea of a gesture-reading device is likely to have broad-enough appeal, which I'm not sure of based on the one line description. When I think about reading gestures, I think about a market primarily aimed at people with vision impairments. If that's the case, you might even want to look at foundations or organizations who might fund some of the research, but that will almost inevitably slow your pace of innovation. You might want to setup a call with Clay Hebert if you decide to go the Kickstarter route. https://clarity.fm/clayhebert Best of luck. Curious to hear more.

There are two sides to that question. One is the mobile app itself and the other is the backend. If I misunderstood in any way and you didn't mean "native" app I apologize in advance. On the backend, there is no clear cut answer to which is the "best". It depends solely on the developers you are able to get. We for example use Node.js , mongoDB, redis, elasticsearch and a couple of proprietary tools in the backend. But you have your pick of the litter now both on the backend api and the datastore with the myriad of options available and touted as the "best" currently on the market. Now on the app side again it solely depends on what you need your mobile app to do. Experiencing first-hand "develop once, run anywhere" I can say it's more like "develop once, debug everywhere" to quote a Java saying. We have tried Phonegap and Titanium Appcelerator and we have switched to native (ObjC and Java) after a couple of months of trying to go the hybrid route. The reasons behind the choice are as follows: - anything that breaks the pattern of how those frameworks NEED to operate is just a huge technical debt that keeps accruing a huge interest. - anything that uses css3 accelerated animations on Android is buggy at best and slow as hell at worst on any lower (< 4.1 I think) versions of Android I hope this gives you some insight. If you need/want to ask me anything feel free to contact me. Mihai

You need to be able to get feedback on your product as quickly as possible, so my advice is to choose the technology stack that will allow you to build a prototype efficiently. There's no right answer here: for some people it's LAMP, for others it's node, for others it's a Windows stack. Worrying about the technology at the stage you're at is a red herring: worry about the product, the problem it solves and the user experience of your solution, and get feedback you can iterate on as quickly as possible. I'm a serial startup CTO who's now a startup founder and CEO. Let me know if I can help.