Are there standard ratios that are used to calculate first level support staff needed for a SAAS product that is a non-technical product?

You are facing a classic chicken and egg problem. You want premium projects but cannot get them because you haven't done any yet. To solve this, you need to think from your target customers standpoint. Why would a customer buy from you? What do you offer that others don't have? Once you define that, the second thing you need to understand is how companies acquire their services. The buying process in a company is different from consumer buying cycle. So you need to figure out how you will play this dance. Lastly, to acquire customers, you will need to do some marketing and network. LinkedIn would be a good starting point. Another option would be to start out small and bid for projects on oDesk, Guru or other similar sites All the best.... Happy to talk if you have more questions.

There is no valuation until you sell something. An idea or a company is only worth what its sales are. Once you have your initials sales, sales strategy and forecasting length (ie 9 months from first customer lead to close) then you have a formula for valuation. Valuation for start-ups is generally 3.5 x last years sales model should be the growth factor. When you are looking for investors, you will want to have atleast 9-18 months of SALES, not just pipeline and they will be looking at 5x revenue for a 3-5 year payback.

In my experience, the longer sales cycle requires more attention. The metrics will be unique to your business, but you can't go wrong with these: Marketing & Sales Metrics Look at metrics that will help you scale and project growth, and then accelerate opportunity to close velocity #s and conversion rates of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) #s, time, and conversion rates of MQLs to sales qualified leads (SQLs) #s, time, and conversion rates of SQLs to opportunities #s, time, and conversion rates of opportunities to sales Customer Success Metrics An ARR SaaS business may have a guaranteed 12 month customer lifespan, but that doesn't guarantee the customer actually uses the product and won't churn at renewal time. Measuring product usage will help you discover patterns that cause churn, increase the perceived value of the product, and improve the customer experience. Financial Metrics Each Reporting Period (I'd recommend monthly) look at Values & Rate of Change Customer Acquisition Cost Average Value of a Customer look at Values, % of total, & Rate of Change Revenue from New Subscriptions Revenue from Renewal Subscriptions At the early stage, businesses will see new Subscriptions significantly outpace renewals. As the business matures, the % of total ARR from New Subscriptions will begin to decline, assuming churn rates are good.

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.

Because the startup costs to get a lot of their customers actually set up on their platform are too high, so free trials for say, 14 days, are out of the question. For example, take a look at http://www.curalate.com/ which uses some really amazing technology to track a customer's brand imagery across (almost) the entire web. Naturally, most of these types of services are usually $300++/month, so again, it's all just about mitigating setup costs for the provider. Hope this helps :)