[HN Gopher] Serving 250k Developers with One Support Engineer
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Serving 250k Developers with One Support Engineer
Author : dban
Score : 60 points
Date : 2023-02-24 20:22 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.railway.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.railway.app)
| fuddle wrote:
| I was impressed by their pricing, how do they keep costs so low?
| paxys wrote:
| I have spent the last 10 minutes on their site and am unable to
| figure out what the pricing even is.
|
| Going by the top of their pricing page
| (https://railway.app/pricing): $10/GB per month RAM & $20/vCPU
| per month is actually pretty expensive when compared to stuff
| like fly.io and even EC2/Azure.
|
| Apart from that, what vCPUs are these exactly? What are the
| bandwidth costs? Custom domains? Certificates? Load balancing?
| Disks? Databases?
|
| Clicking "Choose Plan" takes you to a login page, but then if
| you log in the pricing page disappears altogether.
| revskill wrote:
| With bad documentation on buildpack, it's hard for me to go on
| with Railway. (For example, there's no sample or docs at all for
| how to build image with multiple buildpacks like in heroku).
|
| And these days, good documentation is 1st criteria to trust a
| platform / framework / library.
| justjake wrote:
| Railway team member here:
|
| So there is one but, if you can't find it, it's as good as
| there not being one!
|
| It's currently located at
| https://nixpacks.com/docs/guides/configuring-builds#change-w...
|
| Is there some place you'd expect it to be instead? All ears on
| feedback!
| swatcoder wrote:
| Congratulations on achieving this milestone and probably keeping
| your customers very satisfied along the way, but I eagerly look
| forward to the future where everyone is so sick of virtual
| assistants, bots, and knowledge bases that a _low_ ratio is what
| gets celebrated as a growth milestone rather than a high ratio.
|
| Automated triage is great for digital companies that want to
| scale cheaply, but not so great for the people who need to figure
| out how to usefully navigate them, with the brick wall support
| experience of Google/Facebook/etc being the already vivid
| example. It helped those companies grow and court techno-optimist
| investors, but nobody outside of their enterprise customers is
| _happy_ about the customer service experience. Eventually, that
| becomes dirt on their reputation and works against their
| continued growth and success.
| ndneighbor wrote:
| Honestly, you hit the nail on the head on what drives me.
| Before this I was a PM, and way even before that- I was an
| Infra Engineer. I think that brick-wall of contact when working
| on some Enterprise tool was what got me. ESPECIALLY so when
| there was a bug blocking my company and it felt like no one
| cared.
|
| When I first joined- this is why I would take great pains to
| respond to everyone extremely quickly. When I realized that was
| not sustainable, the focus then shifted to really making sure
| that our users are heard and their concerns are acted upon.
| Sure first contact SLA of 30 mins is great but- doesn't mean
| shit if we don't solve your problem.
|
| So I think yes, tooling should be first. I think there is just
| a way for that tooling to serve the developer, not some OKR.
| nbrempel wrote:
| Very impressive!
|
| That growth curve is amazing.
| trynewideas wrote:
| > As a team of one, we were able to support 250k users, and now
| that we've crossed that bridge, our goal is to support two
| million users with our 2-person team for a 1M-to-1 ratio.
|
| Is it weird then that they have an open req for a support
| engineer: https://railway.app/careers/support-engineer
| ndneighbor wrote:
| heyo Angelo (author) here-
|
| This is actually the original blogpost that we used to make our
| first hire!
|
| > You will be working with our existing Support Engineer,
| Angelo - to build out processes, formalize policies, and build
| out integrations between systems to make it so that we can
| track and record issues.
|
| I accidentally left that one open... but the Ashby interface is
| so confusing I don't know where to toggle the visibility. I
| will remove that and then wait for our jobs page to rebuild.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| FYI, not disclosing at least minimum pay means applicants
| should assume pay will be below average. Also, it says
| "remote - anywhere" at the top, and if you are hiring remote
| in California, Colorado, New York City, or Washington state,
| employers are legally required to advertise pay range on job
| listings and possibly other compensation details.
|
| > At Railway, we provide best in class benefits. Great
| salary, full health benefits including dependents, strong
| equity grants, equipment stipend, and much more. For more
| details, check back on the main careers page.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| Seems like good tips for any support org trying to keep a handle
| on load:
|
| 1. Get a support tool (or in this case, roll your own, then buy
| one when you outgrow that)
|
| 2. Build/buy tooling to direct users to existing documentation
| that might answer their questions
|
| 3. Move any routine tasks that require a human to automated self-
| serve tools.
|
| 4. Rope your community into answering eachother's questions.
| swyx wrote:
| extremely impressive, love the chart showing the major
| developments. congrats Railway!
|
| (disclosure: am small angel)
| mkl95 wrote:
| Any SLAs worth mentioning? Did you ever struggle with them?
| ndneighbor wrote:
| One thing that didn't make it into the article (I ramble and
| rant) is how I set it so at one point that Teams were entitled
| to a reply from me or the founder 24/7. This broke nearly
| instantly after 50 Teams.
|
| At the moment we don't but I spoke to the fmr. Head of Support
| at Stripe and he told me we should think about our product
| coverage like an API, some parts of the product (builds for
| example) should be more critical on response times than others.
| My main goal this year is to publish an SLA table so that we
| can work with ever larger customers setting the right
| expectation.
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(page generated 2023-02-24 23:00 UTC)