[HN Gopher] I've built my first successful side project, and I h...
___________________________________________________________________
I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
Author : switowski
Score : 865 points
Date : 2024-08-21 09:59 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (switowski.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (switowski.com)
| tpoacher wrote:
| Reminds me of my (far less exciting) story when I opened a php
| forum for a small community I was in charge with, way back, only
| to come the next day and find it full of botspam.
|
| Forum didn't last too long after that.
| minkles wrote:
| Similar experience. I built a very small online helpdesk platform
| in the early 00s. This was to support my own business mostly. I
| had several paying customers after 6 months. They were HELL,
| particularly when it came to paying the bill. I sold the whole
| business for pocket money after a year to a small tech company
| who rewrote it into a fairly well known commercial product. I
| couldn't be bothered. I have ZERO regrets about this.
|
| I still have the source code somewhere, which was about 25,000
| lines of ASP in one file!
| jinushaun wrote:
| I've done enough freelancing and side jobs to know that I
| didn't enjoy and--most importantly--didn't care enough to get
| better at the customer service aspect of it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Possibly the primary reason that software engineers don't just go
| into business for themselves is that running a business is a very
| different problem domain with different challenges and rewards.
|
| I have never envied any CEO, VP, or manager I've worked for their
| job. The hardest part of _my_ day is crafting novel SQL queries
| or tricking C++ into compiling code that will work on all my
| target hardware in spite of an unknown number of undefined
| behaviors. I 've never had to figure out how we're going to keep
| documentation in sync on our flagship project when the head
| documentation engineer is dying of cancer (and has chosen to
| finish out the week because he knows how screwed the project will
| be without him and he believes in it), or how to make payroll
| next quarter if the next investor says no, or how to keep the
| quarterly goals met when the President has just declared that all
| of our employees working in the country on a visa may suddenly
| not return to the country.
| dtx1 wrote:
| I think certain personality types just have a really different
| view about risk than we do. I once talked to our CEO about it
| and he was like "I'd risk it all again, I like to play!". There
| are people who LIKE to take those kinds of risks, I'm certainly
| not one of them. But one must also not forget the upside: get
| really, really rich from the work of others.
| lupire wrote:
| What if you knew that the VP and CEO are dealing with those
| problems by letting the chips fall and making the ICs and
| customers work around it?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| If that bothers me I change companies.
| sklarsa wrote:
| I love the ending of this story, which isn't obvious from just
| looking at the title. The author identified key pain points
| around customer support, automated them, and went back to
| enjoying life. This is the kind of thing that gets me excited
| about the possibilities of technology and AI as a force
| multiplier, especially when working on side projects, "lifestyle"
| businesses, or even startups as a single founder.
| _se wrote:
| No one wants to talk to an AI for customer support.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Eh... I think there's a balance to be struck. You could
| leverage AI to handle the initial messages (90% of which are
| tire kickers or scammers) and funnel worthy exchanges to
| continue the conversation manually.
| 101008 wrote:
| Once people notice AI is responding they will skip it and
| will request to talk to a human. AI will look the same as
| FAQs or Chatbots, people don't want to interact with them,
| they want a human being that is able to understand their
| problem exactly as it is.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Most chatbots are both useless and tedious to interact
| with. But I've also had plenty of interactions with human
| first-level support that's just following a script
| without any actual understanding. An AI would be able to
| provide a genuine improvement over that.
|
| AI isn't an improvement for companies that already
| provide great customer support, but it has the ability to
| seriously raise the bar for companies that want to keep
| customer support costs low or that have a lot of trivial
| requests that they have to deal with cost-effectively
| reilly3000 wrote:
| That is exactly what is happening at my employer, and
| it's been really effective for trivial support,
| especially when it's empowered to make meaningful changes
| on the customer's behalf. It's got large swaths of the
| whole UX in chat, with an authenticated session. You
| could see it being better a better experience than
| clicking around anyhow. It does a great job at search
| too. Lots of room to improve but it's hitting its targets
| for reducing human support time and as a sales tool.
| zamubafoo wrote:
| The right pattern is to put them directly in a queue to
| talk to a person, but have an system (AI or otherwise) in
| the queue to gather the minimal information. Like having
| the person explain the problem (and have something
| transcribe it) and have the system transfer them to the
| appropriate team after parsing their problem.
|
| Or for really common cases (ie. turn it on and off,
| you're affected by an outage, etc), redirect them to an
| prerecorded message and then let them know that they are
| still in the queue and can wait for a person. 9/10 it'll
| solve everything, but also reduce friction of simple
| things that might be answered.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Broadly, I agree. And I am furious with Progressive insurance
| for requiring a smart phone/mobile app to file roadside
| assistance claims, and my inability to get someone real on a
| call.
|
| But,
|
| In this particular story, the people were asking questions
| that were answered in the instructions.
|
| No one wants to waste their time answering stupid questions,
| particularly if they are a solo small shop who gets entitled
| people asking questions around the clock.
| parpfish wrote:
| i've gone back and forth on this over the last few months.
|
| I started out thinking that we've all been conditioned by bad
| customer support chatbots whose only purpose is to look up
| facts from the FAQ and then tell you to call the real
| customer support line to actually handle your problem. the
| problem was that the chatbots weren't granted hee ability and
| authority to _actually do things_. wouldn 't it be great if
| you could aks a bot to cancel your account or change your
| billing info and it would actually do it?
|
| but then i realized... anything with a clearly defined
| process or workflow like that would be even better if it were
| just a form on an account settings page. why bother with a
| chatbot?
|
| customer support lines run by humans exist for two reasons: -
| increase friction for things you don't want your user to do
| (like cancel their account without first hearing a bunch of
| sales pitches) - handle unanticipated problems that don't fit
| into the happy-path you've set up on the settings page
|
| My worry is that business dudes will get excited about making
| chatbots that can do the former and they'll never trust an AI
| to be able to handle the later. So I'm now of the opinion
| that having AI customer support will only be used to make
| things worse.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Customer support isn't paid well, so they often aren't
| motivated to become very skilled beyond the level of a
| chatbot before they move on to other things. So the
| interface to bad docs doesn't matter much. And good docs
| are very hard to produce. AI magnifies problems when good
| docs are lacking.
| Aachen wrote:
| > aren't motivated to become very skilled beyond the
| level of a chatbot
|
| Everyone has some amount of common sense. The current
| state of the art does not, so it cannot make decisions.
| This is why these things can't currently replace real
| support beyond being a search function exceedingly
| capable of interpreting natural language queries and,
| optionally, rephrasing what the found document says to
| fit onto the query better
|
| You can't even have these systems as first line support,
| verifiying whether the person has searched the docs
| because you can't trust it with a decision about whether
| the docs' solutions are exhausted and human escalation is
| needed. There currently simply needs to be a way to reach
| a human. I'm as happy as the next person to find that a
| no-queue computer system could solve my problem so I use
| it when my inquiry is a question and not a request, but a
| search function is all they are
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Chatbots are loaded with issues. But I have also had a
| lot of issues with humans.
|
| By the time I have an issue, I have usually covered basic
| ideas and FAQs already. Currently, I tend to use
| perplexity supported by ChatGPT before engaging online
| tech support, and I create a document for them before
| beginning.
| t-writescode wrote:
| > Customer support isn't paid well
|
| "We choose not to pay customer support well".
|
| I've worked at companies where customer support was both
| strongly supported, paid well and given the tools to do
| their jobs well.
|
| They were incredible.
| foobazgt wrote:
| There's a third case: dealing with folks who just aren't
| technically savvy enough to figure some things out on there
| own, no matter how intuitive, well documented, or fully
| featured your product is.
|
| I think I'd rather troubleshoot with a well-scripted AI
| chatbot, than a human being who's forced into the role of
| an automaton - executing directly from a script. Just, FFS,
| let me escalate to an actual competently trained human
| being once I've been through the troubleshooting.
| conradfr wrote:
| No one needs to know it's one ;)
| whiterknight wrote:
| Would you like to work with a business that treats your
| time and problems this way?
| taberiand wrote:
| The only thing I care about is are my problems solved for
| minimal effort and time invested on my part. Whether it's
| AI or human doing the solving, I don't care.
| bluedino wrote:
| I usually agree, but Lemonade (insurance) has an amazing
| support bot.
| lbotos wrote:
| uh, I beg to differ. I felt like an autocomplete with a
| knowledge base and "direct links to the right email forms"
| would have been faster than the fake chat interface that
| the "bot" uses.
|
| (Also, if you own a home in NY and use lemondade -- do know
| that they don't cover cast iron piping (extremely popular
| in NYC). I found that out at renewal...)
| pc86 wrote:
| People want their support solved as quickly as possible. They
| don't want to talk to AI support bots because it's just an
| inefficient, error-prone wrapper over the documentation,
| which if you have an actual support need (as opposed to "I
| just haven't read any of the documentation") that kind of AI
| support isn't going to be helpful.
|
| If you have an AI customer support that can actually support
| customer service requests and provide resolution, people will
| use it and be happy about it, or at least indifferent.
| lupire wrote:
| People who can understand what the AI is saying don't need
| the AI have problems the AI is too dumb and powerless to
| solve.
|
| People who can't read the documentation aren't going to
| understand the AI's bad or even good summary of the
| documentation
| berkes wrote:
| Maybe not.
|
| But there are many ways in which AI can improve or help
| support. So even if "AI chat support" turns out to not work,
| AI can still be very helpful in automating support.
|
| Like detecting duplicates, preparing standard answers,
| grouping similar requests, assigning messages to priorities
| and/or people and so on.
| lupire wrote:
| That's not what "AI" means now. "AI" now means LLM babble
| berkes wrote:
| Even LLMs can do many of what I mention. Categorizing,
| grouping, assigning prios etc. maybe not as good as
| dedicated AI trained for this purpose only (I guess many
| could be "simple" bayesian filters even) but good enough
| and readily available.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Doesn't need to be AI, most customer support was already
| automated before ChatGPT rose to prominence. Hell, I
| developed a mobile website once for a power company that was
| basically a wizard / checklist of "Have you checked for known
| outages? Have you checked your breakers? Have you checked if
| your neighbours have issues too?" before they were shown the
| customer service number.
|
| Human contact doesn't scale, or is prohibitively expensive. I
| sat with customer support a while ago (again energy sector,
| but different company) to observe, and every phone call was
| at least ten minutes, often 20-30, plus some aftercare in the
| form of logging the call or sending out a follow-up email.
|
| They also did chat at the time, where a chatbot (which wasn't
| ChatGPT / AI based yet but they're working on it) would do
| the initial contact, give low-hanging fruit suggestions based
| on their input, and ask for their information like their
| address before connecting to a real human. The operator was
| only allowed to handle two chats at a time, and each chat
| session took about half an hour - with some ending because
| the person on the other side idled too long. I mean granted,
| the UI wasn't great and the customer service guy wasn't a
| fast typer, but even then it was time-consuming and did not
| scale. They had two dozen people clocked in, if they were all
| as fast as this one person, they can handle 50 support calls
| an hour at most.
|
| It does not scale. This was for a company with about 2.5
| million users who rarely need customer support. Compare with
| companies like Google or Facebook that have billion(s) of
| users. They automated and obfuscated their customer support
| ages ago.
| Aachen wrote:
| 24 people on 2.5 million users and you say it _doesn 't
| scale_?
| gknoy wrote:
| 2.5 million users : 24 support staff 1 billion
| users : 9600 support staff
|
| If it scales linearly, that's about 10k support per
| billion users. I was going to say that a 10,000 person
| department for handling customer support sounds like it
| doesn't scale, but maybe I'm wrong, given that that is
| only about 5% of google's headcount.
| Aachen wrote:
| Also in terms of costs: if those support staff cost 100
| grand a year in salary and other costs, staffing the
| 2.5M-user company with those 24 support crew 24/7 (3
| shifts, let's pretend it's equally busy at 3AM) results
| in some 25 cents per month per user that need to be
| priced into the product. The transaction fees on a
| monthly billing system are likely higher than that of a
| skilled support team if this is a representative scale
| for the industry
|
| I frankly doubt the numbers, surely it costs more than
| this for an average company?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Actually, I do.
|
| There's no wait in line. There's no waiting 2 min for each
| response in chat, or waiting 5 min on hold while the rep
| figures out what to do. And I've, shockingly, gotten issues
| resolved faster and better.
|
| Using one semi-popular consumer app -- once it pointed me to
| docs on their site that Google wasn't finding because I
| didn't know what keywords to use. And twice it escalated me
| to send a message to the relevant team, where I got a
| response that addressed my problem -- and where escalation
| would have been necessary with a human call-center rep
| anyways.
|
| The point is that it was far, far faster than any chat rep OR
| phone rep. And it's far faster to escalate too.
|
| I'm sure this experience isn't universal, but I've been truly
| shocked at how it's turned what are otherwise 15-20 minute
| interactions into 3 minute interactions. At the same level of
| quality or better.
| razakel wrote:
| I've recently encountered one that just sends you in a
| loop, and there is literally no way to actually speak to a
| real person. Unless you want to give them more money;
| they're very responsive in that case.
|
| This is a billion-dollar company you have definitely heard
| of.
| hkxer wrote:
| Why don't you just name the company?
| teqsun wrote:
| I'm guessing Amazon?
| ant6n wrote:
| Definitely Amazon
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Then you get situations like this one where the AI invented
| a non existent policy (which the airline did not want to
| honor)
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-
| must-...
| shawnz wrote:
| There's a non-zero chance that real humans working as
| customer service agents will invent facts, too (whether
| to try and be helpful about something they're not
| completely sure, or just to get a problematic customer to
| leave them alone)
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Humans get things wrong, but are less likely to generate
| novel facts.
| brnt wrote:
| There's also no useful output whatsoever if you actually
| tried any troubleshooting yourself.
|
| Never has a chatbot been of help to me.
| burnte wrote:
| I've had exactly one AI chatbot point me to the right
| documents. All the other interactions were exercises in
| frustration, and I've canceled more than one product due to
| shitty AI support. When I have a question, if an automated
| system could handle it, I wouldn't have a question.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Much better than an unengaged, unempowered exploited human.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| No one wants to perform customer support either. Generally,
| people who are smart and capable of offering good support
| will stop doing it because there are more fruitful and
| enjoyable things for them to do.
| authorfly wrote:
| Yes it's great writing. But it's not really about automating I
| feel (please chime in author OP?). To me he wanted to get away
| from customer email ghosting and disputes. He chose to change
| the customer support approach and create customer service tools
| to manage the common requests programmatically. I feel from the
| writing that his original vision, or continuing to extend the
| product and scale it, has now changed to maintaining it as is.
| He realizes customer requests and the time/disappointment of
| all that grows linear to revenue and does not want to do that
| any more.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Sure, write an FAQ and usability test your software. But I'm
| not convinced that you can automated/AI away your support
| burden in any meaningful way that isn't going to piss off your
| customers.
| leapis wrote:
| _> Why on earth would you bet your money on some random tool you
| don 't even understand? ... I built a tool for people who knew
| what harmonic patterns were._
|
| The tool is for drawing "technical analysis indicators", one of
| the most convoluted ways to ascribe meaning to a random process
| and something that will only ever be true in the self-fulfilling
| sense. I don't think it's a surprise that some users are willing
| to blindly trust the tool, when all users of it are blindly
| trusting concepts that are built on sand.
|
| Although I'm sure the author is burnt out from the experience
| now, I'd be interested in hearing how their next side project
| venture goes- is the experience more enjoyable when you're
| dealing with a user base that self-selects differently? Or do all
| users suck equally, just in different ways?
| Lutger wrote:
| At least half of the interactions that are presented as
| terrible, I feel are actually quite normal and potentially even
| pleasant. If you don't actually enjoy talking about your
| product with 'beginners' or even just normal people, then maybe
| reconsider the customer support role?
|
| For me this reads as 'I don't enjoy voluntary customer support'
| rather than my customers suck.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I see only one single sentence - "others had very basic
| questions, answers to which were given in the description of
| each script" - that _might_ be referring to situations where
| people were seeking either clarification (including cases
| where the answer was in the documentation, but not obviously
| so) or advice on how to use the tool more effectively, (I
| exclude bald requests for 'hot tips' or source code from
| those categories.)
|
| For all I know, the author might have both received and
| responded substantively (with more than RTFM) to many such
| requests, but has not mentioned them here because they were
| not part of the problem.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Others had very basic questions, answers to which were given
| in the description of each script._
|
| Oh, I feel that from DayJob. If it wasn't for the possible
| arguments is might cause about professionalism, my standard
| response to a client question in DayJob would be a gif from
| TaskMaster, looping through instances of Alex Horne saying "all
| the information is on the task".
|
| _> Somehow all those claims from 'people with large
| communities' never materialized beyond testing the trial._
|
| Very few people ask for something for themselves, they think
| they'll get a better response if they can convince you they are
| part of a larger interested group, or by suggesting what they are
| asking for would benefit "the community".
|
| Neither of these things is new: I had some software out there in
| the late 90s1 and it was much the same back then, just perhaps
| less intense.
|
| --------
|
| [1] initially shareware-ish, then when the amount I made wasn't
| worth the faf of dealing with people (and payment processors),
| and talks with the couple of people who were interested in buying
| ownership/copyright annoyed me by going round in circles, it
| became open source so others could build take it on (no one did,
| they just all wanted me to continue to add features they wanted),
| then when I got _more_ sick of dealing with people I buried the
| thing.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Side projects have always been the most exciting banes of my
| existence.
|
| I LOVE the initial rush of building and launching something. Even
| maintaining it is SUPER exciting for the first few months. The
| first customers are a rush of endorphins.
|
| Then the shine wears off. Life can't be kept on pause. Your
| partner wants a date night, but you have a backlog to work
| though. You got a frantic email from a customer that they
| accidentally deleted something and you currently have no way to
| recover that data. So now you have to add more resiliency to the
| application. In the middle of the night, your cron server dies,
| backups stop, emails stop, customers on the other side of the
| world can't log in.
|
| All for a few dollars a day in revenue. Then after a year of
| that, you get burnt on the project. Then after another year, you
| stop working on it as much, the bug reports build up until you
| are scared to even look at your reports.
|
| Your partner goes away for the weekend to visit their family, you
| get a renewed sense of pride in this project that has been
| limping alone. You fire up your code editor, you pull the last
| commit down. You start to re-familiarize yourself with the code
| base. Day 1 was wasted with remembering how you did things. Day 2
| starts with a coffee after only sleeping a few hours. You begin
| to work through the small tasks on your list, because you feel
| the snowball will work. About 8 hours in, you've made a SERIOUS
| dent in the backlog. You are feeling good and decide you should
| eat something finally. Your partner comes home while you are
| eating your breakfast at 4pm. They start to tell you about their
| family drama. You start to fade. You walk back to your office and
| try to get back into the groove. You can't. The weekend is over.
| Work starts again in 10 hours. You now feel angry that you wasted
| your weekend, and have to do real work in the morning.
|
| And the cycle repeats.
| 2cynykyl wrote:
| I recently read an HN post where a LOT of people reported
| having the same rather specific dream that I have had many
| times (about being enrolled in a class they forgot about only
| to remember on the day of the final exam). It literally rocked
| my world to see evidence of how similar all of our 'wetware'
| is. And now I'm reading you describing a scenario I have
| experienced so many times, right down to 4pm breakfast and
| distracting stories of family drama. I am now pretty much
| convinced we live in a simulation and we're all subclasses of
| each other.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| I have done this loop dozens of times, sometimes for pleasure
| projects that are released for free, sometimes for projects
| that make $100/week. It's hard to maintain motivation when
| you are working for less nothing.
|
| I've actually stopped launching software now. I devote my
| passion projects to things where the customer is a one-time
| interaction. No support, no emails, no late nights working
| out why there is a 500 that only happens on this ONE user at
| 1:16AM.
|
| Now, I make rolling trays, refinish antique furniture, and
| garden. In the new year, I will be converting half of my
| workshop into a CBD/hemp farm to grow my own hemp to make my
| CBD tinctures and oils (currently I buy CBD flower from
| Oregon).
|
| Software has stopped being my only source of joy and income.
| After 2 decades of programming almost every single day, my
| brain is tired, and I don't even know what it was all for.
|
| My garden provides nectar for bees, vitamins and minerals,
| for myself and my family, sunshine for my body. My
| woodworking provides that sense of pride that I had with
| software without all the bugs (well sometimes there are grubs
| in the wood). My CBD is "medicine", and it helps my dad with
| his phantom limb pain, me with my Hashimoto's flareups, and
| other's with their anxiety and stress.
|
| My software made people money...
| authorfly wrote:
| Wow I can really relate.
|
| The customer support efforts when you don't feel like it, being
| ghosted after helping a customer, the random or fraud disputes.
|
| It's really tricky at that stage between hiring help and having
| the time/motivation to maintain those very non-tech parts while
| trying to continue doing other core parts of the side project /
| startup.
|
| The first sale feels great, as does first showing the prototype.
|
| By comparison, extra $100 MRR milestones don't feel so great, nor
| does dealing with customers/disputes eventually (it's a lot of
| negativity in general - pleased customers just leave reviews
| occasionally, negative ones email you). And a down negative month
| or two always feels like a stabbing and like it's all over.
|
| Really don't know how to avoid this. Scaling quickly? Via
| investment in most cases? Maybe.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I wonder if there's often a mismatch between what one thinks a
| business is going to be like, and what a business is actually
| like.
|
| One of the things that keeps me away from doing stuff like this
| is that I _hate_ every part that isn't the engineering part,
| and the engineering part is a minority share of what it takes
| to run a business.
| zerkten wrote:
| We know the answer to this even before modern tech businesses
| existed: running a business is a very different experience
| from what people expect. This is exacerbated with certain
| experiences that create worldviews which are closer to the
| opposite of running a business.
|
| This is why startup people straight out of school are often
| unencumbered with ideas that impact their mission. If you go
| into a large organization, you are exposed to a reality that
| can distort your perspective. It's a myth that people can't
| move between large and small organizations, but the
| differentiator is their awareness of and desire to embrace
| the current circumstances. Many end up preferring the luxury
| and ease of large organizations and fail because they don't
| make the switch. Many startup people don't make the move in
| the other direction (even if they are exceedingly successful
| and it might be practical move.)
|
| Similarly, a desire to only focus on engineering is something
| you feel will inhibit your ability to run a business. Over
| time you might be able to discover ways to reduce your hate
| for the other work. People here love to prescribe advice for
| situations like this, but it's really hard to give good
| advice without knowing a lot more about you.
| datavirtue wrote:
| The paycheck mentality. It depresses economic output and
| productivity across the board by keeping people unengaged
| and dependent.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I don't think that 'everyone an entrepreneur' would
| increase economic output and productivity, and the fact
| is that some people just want a paycheck because they
| don't really care about making more money than the
| paycheck gives them, and the work is fine.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Indeed. I love that my career is a minor sideshow of my
| life. I love the stability of working about 40 hours a
| week and then doing what I really want to be doing with
| life.
|
| It's a bonus that those 40 hours don't feel like work.
| detourdog wrote:
| In old world Egypt they kept the creative class in a
| seperate village. I believe this was needed to keep group
| harmony and focus.
| fragmede wrote:
| was the separate village to keep the creatives in by
| themselves, or to keep them away from everybody else.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| Can't it be both?
| detourdog wrote:
| They had a god of "Art & Design" Ptah.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptah
|
| I imagine that the creative class was revered and feared.
| Potters had very low status making a commodity product
| that everyone needed. Hard to say what was going on.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| My solution largely came out of recognizing this reality.
| So I just don't do side gigs. I channel that energy into
| little tech projects that do not seek to be a salable
| product. So I make my living 40 hours per week, and then do
| the rest on my terms.
| lbotos wrote:
| A trite phrase that stuck with me: "The hardest part of
| business is everything you are not good at."
| fragmede wrote:
| If we're being trite, the best part about business is you
| can pay someone to deal with the stuff you don't want to.
| Sometimes the two overlap.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| One thing most programmers need to painfully have beaten into
| them is that the software itself is a minor part of a
| successful software business.
|
| It's a _necessary_ part, but without marketing
| /sales/support/etc, very few projects work as a business.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Yeah a supported 60% solution is better than an unsupported
| 90% solution that you can figure out how to make it work
| hermitcrab wrote:
| True. If you want to spend all day programming, be a
| contract programmer. Don't start a software business -
| you'll spend a lot of your timing doing admin,
| documentation, websites, newsletters, accounts, support
| etc.
| nashashmi wrote:
| > being ghosted after helping a customer
|
| I am one of those people. Gotta keep in mind to let people know
| that the solution worked
| lukas099 wrote:
| Usually if something isn't working it becomes a bottleneck so
| a lot gets built up behind it. Once the 'dam breaks' so to
| speak you're playing catch up plus you probably don't want to
| think about the problem anymore. This is also a reason things
| don't get documented.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Also its easy to verify that it doesn't work but hard to
| verify that it does. So often it might take time to verify
| that and when you're confident about it you've lost the
| chat session or closed the browser, restarted the computer,
| went home already etc.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Me too but I only ever do this unintentionally, and it
| usually corresponds with a delay in the reply from support
| coming back to me. (Ie I'm now focused on other things or
| have solved the problem a different way).
|
| Whenever I'm conscious enough of it I do try to thank people
| - trying to remember how hard it must be on the other end!
| federalfarmer wrote:
| > The customer support efforts when you don't feel like it,
| being ghosted after helping a customer, the random or fraud
| disputes.
|
| These three challenges + context-switching between marketing
| and product are really tough at the early stage.
|
| I've found that growing a business from 0-1 is very formulaic -
| not easy but the roadmap is clear. Scaling one is much harder,
| especially without outside capital. There's a huge gulf between
| earning enough to replace your salary vs. hiring good people to
| take over lower-level tasks early on. And marketing usually
| ends up being too critical to outsource at first.
|
| At least with digital products, customer disputes can always be
| settled with refunds, even when the claim is dubious. Eat the
| loss and move on. Physical product disputes really sting when
| you're out the cost of inventory + labor.
| perlgeek wrote:
| > being ghosted after helping a customer
|
| I guess that's a matter of expectation.
|
| A ticket system I've worked with in the past had an "autoclose"
| state where you could set the ticket to automatically close
| after a set date if no reply comes in until then.
|
| If a reply comes with the info that it worked, I get a smile
| and close the ticket. If not, I never see the ticket again, no
| hard feelings.
| jakey_bakey wrote:
| You haven't built a side project, you've built yourself a job.
|
| This is why I've always been scared to make any commitments to
| paid subs other than "I'll send you all my blogs early"
| parpfish wrote:
| agreed. this isn't a "side project", this is a "side business".
| steve1977 wrote:
| And this is why I would make to sure to log all the time that I
| spend on that side job, so that I can make some estimate about
| what my hourly rate would be with the earnings I make.
|
| This might then allow a better decision on whether it is a
| worthwhile endeavor or not.
| Y_Y wrote:
| It sounds to me like the really valuable product here isn't the
| harmonic charts but the little automation platform (based on
| n8n?). I can imagine there are plenty of devs with even less
| tolerance for customer service and actually running a business,
| but are happy to build software and sell it to people.
| fasteo wrote:
| Over the years I have had some good (to me) ideas for side
| projects, but I have always hesitated to build them rationalizing
| that the potential market was way too small (a fraction of a
| fraction of a fraction of developers).
|
| If anything, this post shows how wide - or deep - any internet
| niche is.
|
| Silly me.
| rockbruno wrote:
| Well, this is interesting because what you described is the
| best way to start a project. Trying to build something too
| broad from the get-go is very likely to fail, starting
| small/specific and expanding from there usually works
| considerably better. If you research famous large companies
| you'll find that almost all of them did precisely this.
| shash7 wrote:
| Very candid experience - I love it.
|
| I've been in a similar boat running a small B2B Saas over the
| last 2 years. Over the years I've learnt a lot of tricks in this
| area.
|
| - You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for
| customer support.
|
| - Once your core product is built, its worthwhile spending some
| time automating the heck out of everything. This will save a TON
| of time in the near future.
|
| - Invest in good docs, even if you're not running a api saas.
| Good docs + consistent ux + rock solid support will solve most of
| your support issues.
|
| I think a lot of literature around running a online biz has been
| boiled down to rather basic advice and its hard to find anything
| solid in this area. I've been running a small blog where I
| document these issues(operational.co) if anyone wants to check it
| out.
| btbuildem wrote:
| This was a fascinating read, really.
|
| The potential customer base being basically suckers waving wads
| of cash to be taken from them. The wild contrast of how nice the
| author tries to be to every single person that interacts with the
| project -- despite majority being the equivalent of single-celled
| organisms poking the fb markeplace "is it available" button.
|
| Reading some of the messages from potential users is so eye-
| opening. I don't know if there's a sane way to deal with the
| entitlement, other than just plain ignoring those interactions.
|
| How would one handle this type of project in 2024? Route most of
| the rote communication via an LLM, automate as much as possible,
| ignore all feature requests, dogfood everything as you continue
| to use the project yourself?
|
| I really like the learnings the autor took from this experience.
| Seems like most of them came from adopting "I give up" attitude
| when flirting with burnout -- which inadvertently seems to follow
| the 80/20 rule.
| pc86 wrote:
| I've done exactly one legit "SaaS startup" type venture around
| 2012-2015. I still think about the absolutely insane customer
| service requests we'd get. It was a very niched down Eventbrite
| competitor, so we did things like PDF ticket generation, QR
| code generation, attendance tracking, there was a big
| fundraising component as well so lots of payment
| infrastructure. We charged a percentage of ticket sales so any
| one event or even customer was not worth very much (a positive
| IMO). I still remember someone emailing me directly with the
| "oh we'd love to give you money but you have to add these
| features for us first" so they could use this event ticketing
| and fundraising platform to ... run their dog grooming
| business.
|
| As many have learned, the people actually paying you money are
| usually pretty reasonable. It's the people who haven't paid you
| a cent who have all these crazy demands.
| authorfly wrote:
| Yup yup yup. Big reason for avoiding free users is avoiding
| those requests.
|
| This is the kind of thing no startup puts in their year one
| budget and (alongside supplier cashflow issues) is why those
| projections don't work for
| conductr wrote:
| Idk. It's totally ok to just ignore those types of
| requests. Even a lot of the requests the author was
| getting. They're just fishing and there's Practically zero
| chance they'll even ever follow up to see why you never
| responded.
|
| Mega corporations get away with awful support of paying
| customers, people don't actually expect you to jump at
| their command as a startup or even as a toy side project.
| If you're able to ignore a beggar on the street, you should
| be able to ignore a lot of these emails. Stop guilting
| yourself into a heavy administrative burden and don't avoid
| consumer apps because of that fear.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I reply to every support request that isn't an obvious
| scam. It feels rude not to.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| A collected a few crazy support requests here:
|
| https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/11/21/problem-exists-
| bet...
| djeastm wrote:
| > How would one handle this type of project in 2024? Route most
| of the rote communication via an LLM, automate as much as
| possible, ignore all feature requests, dogfood everything as
| you continue to use the project yourself?
|
| As someone else on the thread said, you start charging more.
| The large swathes of people looking for freebies will fade away
| and your customers, fewer in number perhaps, will be higher
| quality (or at least a bit more serious).
| creesch wrote:
| Interesting article to read. Part of the issues also seem to come
| from a few contributing factors like the unusual platform and
| expanding from this platform including whatever limitations come
| with it. Meaning you implemented things in a reverse order than
| people might otherwise do as they don't start out with a product
| on a platform trying to make it fit a subscription model.
|
| I can imagine the specific type of user base also increasing
| specific types of annoying support requests. Although customer
| support almost always ends up being one of the things that at
| some point will annoy the hell out of you. Even on open source
| projects, the entitlement can be incredible. Although there you
| can get away with a remark like "You are free to uninstall <open
| source product>, we will give you a full refund!".
|
| Automating a lot of that certainly was the right call, as well as
| filtering out all the low hanging fruits of bullshit requests. If
| people can't be bothered to read instructions (assuming they are
| clear instructions) then they certainly will also run into
| various other issues making them not worth the effort.
|
| The one thing I don't entirely disagree with is "Be nice" which I
| personally have replaced with "Be civil" over the years. It still
| means listening to peoples requests, helping them where
| reasonable, even be courteous where applicable. To be fair, there
| might also be a cultural aspect involved here. In communication
| with US companies the "being nice" mantra often seems to be taken
| to such a degree where I am less wishing for someone sane to just
| help me swiftly with my support ticket and be done with it.
|
| Overall, nice write up of the experience though!
| rockbruno wrote:
| This is a perfect example of how attaching money to a hobby is
| guaranteed to ruin it. Dealing with customers is a gigantic pain
| in the ass, it doesn't matter if it's a large product or some
| niche esoteric project.
|
| I have the exact same issue regarding support with a simple app I
| have on the App Store, I can perfectly relate. Despite being a
| really simple app and extremely cheap, every once in a while I
| have to wake up to angry e-mails from disgruntled users.
| tmaly wrote:
| Is it me or are there a lot more posts on HN where people are
| just complaining in the title?
| smokel wrote:
| No. I just checked the front page [1] for each August 21 from
| 2014 to 2024, and there is typically no or one complaint in the
| title. Some lamenting here and there, an uplifting tone every
| now and then, but most of it is neutral.
|
| Perhaps you are running into some negativity bias? [2]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-08-21
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias
| a13o wrote:
| The wording in the fraud cancellation emails gave me a good
| laugh.
|
| "My payment provider said you used a stolen credit card. Why did
| you do that? I've revoked your access."
| pc86 wrote:
| That gave me a chuckle too. The list of "reasons someone would
| use a stolen credit card" is what, 2 options?
| justin_oaks wrote:
| There are 2 options? I can only think of "I'm a person with
| poor ethics who wants to get something without paying for
| it".
| pc86 wrote:
| The other actually happened to me recently, my wife
| answered one of those automated bank texts checking on a
| transaction with no, which cancelled the card (and marked
| it stolen), and I tried to use it before she told me about
| it.
|
| But yeah those are the only two I can think of and yours is
| the case 99.99% of the time.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I feel this should be shortened into a haiku.
| gizmo wrote:
| Not all B2C is the same. If you make a product for professionals
| you won't get random chargebacks, incoherent emails, or general
| rudeness. One great way to filter for professionalism is by
| simply charging more. Another strategy is making it harder to
| purchase the product. For example by disabling the checkout
| process until people have completed the tutorial, or only
| allowing purchases after the free trial has expired.
|
| These strategies don't maximize revenue, but you don't have to
| maximize revenue. You can optimize for revenue/agony instead.
| asplake wrote:
| Agree with all of those, and such a business has B2B potential
| also. That describes mine pretty well. And while I'd love to
| make more B2B sales, I hate dealing with purchasing
| departments. Dealing mainly with professionals definitely has
| its upsides.
| commodoreboxer wrote:
| > You can optimize for revenue/agony instead.
|
| That's a great way to put it. I'm going to start using that
| one.
|
| Tangent: I'm a programmer at a small company, which has three
| programmers total. I make a decent wage, but one that's
| significantly smaller than I could make at a larger company. I
| often get questions from people who can't believe that I'm not
| jumping at these other opportunities, but I make nearly six
| figures, my team and bosses trust me, I have nearly unlimited
| flexibility to choose what I work on and shape my software the
| way I feel is best, and I get to work full remote and basically
| make my own hours, giving me all the time I want with my
| family. It would take an incredible raise to give this up just
| for better pay.
|
| An agony-per-dollar ratio is a perfect way to frame the
| calculation, and it factors into so many places in life. Many
| forget that it's not just optimizing for the most revenue
| possible, but a balance of maximizing revenue and quality of
| life, and often getting diminishing returns when pushing hard
| on the former.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Sounds great. Also, if you went to work for BigCo and got a
| big pay rise, you would probably very soon get use to it and
| it wouldn't make you much happier. I wrote a bit more about
| this topic at:
| https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/11/06/lifestyle-
| programm...
| authorfly wrote:
| It's better but this is not uniformly true. For one, people use
| random sites to test cards to see if they can get away with
| using stolen CC details at every stripe-integrated company I've
| seen, target audience irrelevant.
|
| The proportion of negative/wild interactions with support and
| chargebacks is always going to be in an uphill battle with
| positive correspondance unless you are selling multi-seat deals
| with support as part of it. I speak a little out of my area of
| expertise here but from my friends experience, the downside to
| professional services is that a small proportion of people, or
| people on bad days, see it as a service, not a SaaS, and will
| willingly throw threats, insults, etc at you. A small error on
| your service can stop their whole business which is different
| for B2C - it's the difference between fear and frustration.
| gizmo wrote:
| > people use random sites to test cards to see if they can
| get away with using stolen CC details
|
| I already addressed this. By forcing people to use the
| product before allowing them to purchase you make drive-by
| fraud impossible. We use stripe and we have 0 fraud to deal
| with.
| j45 wrote:
| A business can be worse than a job because there's even more
| required things to be done that can't be ignored.
|
| the way to get the doge project to not take your time is learning
| to hire for existing tasks while you figure out new ones.
|
| Also if you can use some of the funds towards a required like a
| vacation that you and your partner can enjoy guilt free
| shash7 wrote:
| Can relate, I've been in a similar boat running a small B2B Saas
| over the last 2 years. It does get easier over time.
|
| I've learnt a few tricks for managing early stage pain points.
|
| - You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for
| customer support.
|
| - Once your core product is built, its worthwhile spending some
| time automating the heck out of everything. This will save a TON
| of time in the near future.
|
| - Invest in good docs, even if you're not running a api saas.
| Good docs + consistent ux + rock solid support will solve most of
| your support issues.
|
| I think a lot of literature around running a online biz has been
| boiled down to rather basic advice and its hard to find anything
| solid in this area. I've been running a small blog where I
| document these issues(operational.co) if anyone wants to check it
| out.
| thehappyfellow wrote:
| Do you have an example of "polite but curt" tone? I'm
| struggling to see what you mean.
| xyproto wrote:
| Thanks for reaching out. The issue you've described seems to
| be on your end. Please check your settings or consult our
| docs for further guidance. If the problem persists, feel free
| to get in touch.
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| Would it be worth putting a price to investigating? Message
| like:
|
| "Our premium support can investigate this for $XYhr. If the
| fault is at our end we will waive any fees. Please let us
| know if you wish to proceed."
| filoleg wrote:
| Take my advice with a grain of salt, as I am a customer
| rather than someone running a product with customer
| support.
|
| I would say this would only feel justified if the product
| pricing page already had clear tiers outlined for paid
| support. Putting a price per hour on customer support
| otherwise would make me feel like I am just being milked
| behind closer doors for more money, and non-paying
| customers are getting shafted. If a paid customer support
| tier is something you offer, imo it should be clearly
| outlined on publicly available pages with explicit
| explanation about the differences between free vs paid
| customer support. You suggesting it in private
| communications only would feel suspicious and shady to me
| as a customer.
|
| However, if the customer themselves suggested to pay you
| extra for that personal support, that's a different
| story.
| zie wrote:
| Oooh, the Microsoft approach! :)
| Aachen wrote:
| I'd 100% expect that to be a template from someone who
| either has no clue and can't investigate, or has 200 other
| tickets to get to and couldn't be bothered to look into a
| case that isn't in the FAQ. It also does not say what makes
| you have this assumption and so it works only as a brick
| wall to alienate any customer goodwill you may have built
| up. Please never write this unless it's self evident why
| it's on the customer's side and you have good reason to
| think they're just trying to annoy you by reaching out
| despite that
| blantonl wrote:
| "Check yourself before you wreck yourself"
| shash7 wrote:
| Both xyproto and Gustomaximus have solid examples.
|
| Here's more:
|
| - Be direct, Hi, the xyz feature is available on the PRO
| plan. You can upgrade to the PRO plan at app.saas.com/billing
|
| - Be brutal, Hi xyz, your card couldn't be charged for your
| Saas subscription, and hence your subscription has been
| deactivated. To reactivate, enter your card details app
| app.saas.com/billing
|
| - Be honest, Hello xyz, thanks for the feature request. We'll
| put it in our wish list but can't guarantee it will make the
| cut.
|
| - Be generous, Hey xyz, thanks for pointing that out. We have
| identified that as a bug and have pushed a fix for it. In the
| meanwhile, I've extended your trial by 7 days, on the house.
|
| Couple of other tips:
|
| - Dumb down your reply as much as possible. If you can't,
| throw your reply through chatgpt and make it dumb down.
|
| - Unless a support issue is very basic, reply after a few
| minutes if you're near your computer. Usually users figure
| out things on their own if given some time.
|
| - But don't allow issues to go stale. To really wow customer
| service, reply as humanely quick as possible, especially for
| existing customers.
|
| - Make your support timelines clear somewhere in your
| product, eg: Our support will respond within max 48 hours,
| but most responses take 2-3 hours.
|
| - Make your terms and privacy policy pages clear. People do
| read this. getharvest.com is a gold standard in this area.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Just wanted to say thanks, I think you've given great
| advice. In particular this bullet point:
|
| > But don't allow issues to go stale. To really wow
| customer service, reply as humanely quick as possible,
| especially for existing customers.
|
| As a customer, the absolute _worst_ possible thing for me
| is to be left in limbo, not knowing if my problem will be
| fixed in the next minute, hour, day, or never. While I may
| not be thrilled if the answer is "never", at least at that
| point I can move on and know that I'll need to solve the
| problem some other way.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| But if you respond consistently quickly, then some lazy
| customers will email you rather than bothering to look in
| the documentation. So there can be a downside to being
| too responsive.
| ipsento606 wrote:
| > Make your support timelines clear somewhere in your
| product, eg: Our support will respond within max 48 hours,
| but most responses take 2-3 hours.
|
| This is the biggest thing I struggle with. I have a couple
| of semi-successful side projects. They bring in some money,
| but not enough to hire someone to help with support. I have
| never been at a place in my life where something like "I
| will response to all support requests within 48 hours" is
| remotely realistic for me. I'm lucky if I get to a support
| request within a week or two.
|
| I don't know what the answer is beyond just "don't sell
| products", because I hate dealing with support more than I
| enjoy making stuff to sell.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Sometimes it's valuable to receive a (clearly non-
| automated) support response indicating that the message
| was received and a proper response is in the works, just
| to confirm that the support channel is actually still
| functional.
|
| Even just confirmation that the website form isn't a
| black hole and that support tickets aren't now
| exclusively accepted through Twitter, Instagram, or a
| secret discord server can be very reassuring.
| mezzie2 wrote:
| A large part of my job is end user support in a corporate
| environment. I always do this - even if I know an issue
| is going to take a while due to me having to reach out to
| other departments/a vendor, wait for an answer, and
| potentially go back and forth, I always reach out to let
| people know I got the email, that I'm working on it, and
| that I'll reach back out when I know more. If possible, I
| also suggest workarounds/alternatives for them to use/do
| in the time while I'm working on the problem.
| attentive wrote:
| > - Dumb down your reply as much as possible. If you can't,
| throw your reply through chatgpt and make it dumb down.
|
| or just pass all support responses through "business
| support LLM" for uniform "polite but curt" tone
| benatkin wrote:
| From the sound of it, the politeness is the shallow
| politeness that you can easily get with ChatGPT. The curtness
| is defending from the users expecting _too much_ , which can
| include delaying handling issues before properly checking if
| they're real. I experienced this with Vercel and it probably
| makes economic sense for them. (BTW I really should cancel my
| Vercel account but haven't decided to take the time to
| migrate yet.) https://x.com/search?q=vercel%20benjaminatkin_&
| src=typed_que...
|
| The reason it can be framed as curtness is because they're
| being curt about the expectations, and the real expectations
| are pretty low. "Sure, I can delay _really_ addressing the
| issue for a couple weeks. You 're only paying me 40 bucks a
| month, why would you expect more? The goal of responding
| within two days is just for a canned response." See, they
| were curt and didn't let me demand something more than I
| deserved, like being able to use the product I'm paying for
| in the next several days!
| duxup wrote:
| >You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for
| customer support.
|
| And very focused responses in terms of action items.
|
| You might think of 3 things to say, check, but sadly 90% of the
| people you respond to with a list will behave like they read
| just one of them. Sadly this also leads to dragging things out
| for everyone who can handle more than one thing at a time :(
| wruza wrote:
| I'm observing this for many years and it feels like there are
| two types of people. Those who perceive lists as a whole and
| those who list.shuffle().pop(). Try asking your
| colleagues/etc three semi-related questions in one message
| and you'll get only a partial answer in a significant number
| of cases. When confronted (constructively, much later) they
| usually get evasive and can't explain. I could theorize it's
| a learned behavior to avoid threaded pedantry or something,
| but my messages aren't even long and other people share my
| frustration too (we communicate 10x faster and clearer
| between us). I'd write it off to attention capacity issues,
| but these people often aren't even busy at all.
| rodrigodlu wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's because they're not paying full
| attention, even worse, sometimes already building an
| intense narrative with only few items internalized inside
| their brains.
|
| I also feel that this is happening more and more, since
| there's more rewards for giving very small pieces of
| attention and energy to a bigger pool of people, instead
| giving extra energy or attention to a smaller pool of
| people seeking for one's help.
|
| I'm just facing this with a contractor doing repairs in my
| house, a month ago was finding a decent mechanic to fix
| just 2 issues on my car.
|
| The first promptly finds energy to discuss things it
| receives through social networks or messages, but can't
| provide a decent list of things that I need to provide him
| to finish his work faster.
|
| The second case took a lot of time and discussing with 6
| different mechanics, until th car broke and it was towed.
|
| I'm seeing this more and more, unfortunately.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Or simply their priorities are not your priorities. They
| have encountered a problem, they asked for help, but they
| have 10 other things going on. By the time you answer,
| they have forgotten half the context of the issue. They
| try one thing, it doesn't work, they don't have more time
| right now so they answer that thing 1 didn't work.
| Repeat.
| kmoser wrote:
| I find most people suffer from at least one (and more
| commonly two) of the following: insufficient attention to
| detail; poor time management; and bad organization
| skills.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > their priorities are not your priorities.
|
| > insufficient attention to detail
|
| I believe there's a cause effect scenario here.
| switchbak wrote:
| This is especially true in the trades. If you're able to:
|
| - be on time
|
| - respond to emails/texts, and especially: phone calls
|
| - give quotes
|
| Then if you're even halfway competent, the world is your
| oyster. Please come do work for me!
|
| If you can manage people and budgets, you can have more
| work than you'll know what to do with (assuming there's
| work available).
|
| The inability of many people to focus their attention and
| prioritize their work is shocking to me. This isn't just
| for the stereotypical "younger adult" either, this seems
| to apply across the board (and especially to boomer-aged
| adults!).
| beefnugs wrote:
| That actually sounds like a good idea for a technical
| support app:
|
| The only interaction possible is they can tell you the
| problem, then you can give them a list of things to try,
| and they can do nothing but give feedback on each step,
| in order, and you arent bothered until they at least
| respond something for each step
| philsnow wrote:
| > I'm just facing this with a contractor doing repairs in
| my house
|
| Are you saying that you give your contractor a list of
| seven things to address, and find that they only address
| two and say they're done?
|
| I can't remember where I heard of using painter's tape
| for this, but it's used as a metaphor in this article
| https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-blue-tape-list/
|
| .... I also found this link while looking for the above
| article,
| https://www.quantumbalancing.com/news/bluetape.htm .
| That's. ... just... well. Not what I was looking for, but
| was so remarkable that I thought I would link to it here.
| I suppose they have probably sold some of their devices.
| I'm curious to know what the insides are like, but not
| curious enough to spend $1k+.
| neutronicus wrote:
| > list.shuffle().pop()
|
| Oh, no. It's not a shuffle. They unerringly identify the
| _least_ important possible action item. Sometimes just a
| single clause of a single sentence in a list item.
|
| You have to scour your communication of anything that can
| _possibly_ be interpreted as an easy request. It has to be
| a curt, imperative, isolated, request to do something hard
| or it will be ignored.
| generic92034 wrote:
| In written communication it often works for me to create an
| explicit numbered list with indentations and plenty of
| white space between the items. It also makes it easier to
| refer to the items in the following communication.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| I have to be really careful to never write a paragraph to
| a colleague or vendor dev under any circumstances. (God
| forbid a run-on sentence..)
|
| I have to give every idea it's own sentence, and every
| sentence must be separated by double space at minimum.
|
| And then I can't offer more than maybe four complete
| ideas, no more than one of which can demand a response.
| duxup wrote:
| I really wish there was a reliable way to ask people.
|
| "I need your engagement level to be set to 10 for this
| communication. It's ok if you can't do that, but then just
| say you can't do that. I'm already set to 10 and rando
| guesswork / tidbits are only going to cause problems."
|
| Even just "nope can't do it" responses would save me time.
|
| I just got off a critical call with folks pulling stuff out
| of their ... and it was a nightmare / complete waste of my
| time.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think that's unreasonable to ask for just about anyone.
| The only time that's going to work is if you're helping
| them with an issue that's critical to _them_. Otherwise
| you are never going to get their full attention, it even
| close.
|
| Much easier and safer is to drill into your own head that
| your own engagement level may be at 10, but the other
| person's is probably going to be more like 2. And that's
| fine.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I think that's unreasonable to ask for just about
| anyone.
|
| Notice your parent _doesn 't_ say "you must be at 10,"
| but rather "let me know if you can't be at 10." I think
| that's perfectly reasonable, as long as you're willing to
| accept almost always getting "no."
|
| > Much easier and safer is to drill into your own head
| that your own engagement level may be at 10, but the
| other person's is probably going to be more like 2. And
| that's fine.
|
| But sometimes that's not fine! For example, if you're
| giving a list of instructions for some safety-critical
| procedure, it's not fine to find out later that the
| nodding "uh-huh, uh-huh" actually meant "I'll do what I
| remember and what sounds easy," and it's much better to
| do nothing than to proceed with partial information.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't think it is unreasonable, if they can't for
| whatever reason their answer is "I can't." that's 100%
| fine.
|
| I'm not asking them to be at 10, I'm asking they not
| engage unless they are.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| I think this issue is a lot of why ChatGPT feels smart to
| me. It actually parses all the parts of what I say and
| tries to respond to it comprehensively. It doesn't always
| succeed, but it's usually better than my experience asking
| a multi-part question to a random real-life person in a
| support role.
| hluska wrote:
| Would you care for a counterpoint?
|
| This comment should be three paragraphs. As written, it's
| very hard to read and I get lost.
|
| If this was a professional communication and you had asked
| three questions, I might understand one or might not. Now I
| have no issues saying "dude, your writing is very hard to
| follow." But what if your colleagues are nicer than I am?
|
| Or just spitballing. You've admitted that you're the kind
| of person who will set traps for your colleagues. What if
| they're just sick of your shit but are too conflict
| avoidant to say that?
| creesch wrote:
| Okay, different person as the one you responded to. Your
| entire comment was reasonable up until the last line.
|
| What is that even based on? Where did they admit to
| setting up traps? Is that your take on their comment
| about trying to ask three questions in one message?
|
| Because, even without them creating paragraphs, it is
| abundantly clear they just mean that as something from
| experience. Not something they do as something to spring
| a trap on people.
| hluska wrote:
| This is a good example. They wrote:
|
| "When confronted (constructively, much later) they
| usually get evasive and can't explain."
|
| Confronted is a big word with a hostile intent. They're
| incredibly measured in their language and use precise
| language. That sounds like a trap to me - it's:
|
| A.) Asking three questions and only get 1/3 answered.
|
| B.) Waiting for a suitable period of time to elapse.
|
| C.) Confronting them while expecting an explanation.
|
| Letting time go by, "confronting them" and expecting an
| explanation is a trap. It assumes that they can even
| remember the conversation! Why not send a follow up email
| immediately and politely ask again? Heck, that's a good
| excuse to use "circle back" in conversation. :)
|
| If you missed that first read, no worries because so did
| I. I had to read the comment three times and then I kind
| of shaked my head because they are so measured and
| precise, and that's an awfully big statement to make
| about colleagues.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| There is a Youtuber and AI safety researcher that I support
| on Patreon's "poor person tier" and they were gonna do a
| Q&A video so asked us to offer questions for the video, so
| I offered five in one post as a list.
|
| They wound up answering every question in my list of five,
| spent enough time on some of them that I think that may
| have been part of the motivation for them to break it up
| into two videos, and even emailed me the answer to the one
| out of five points they didn't address in the video.
|
| In contrast if I render a list at any of my colleagues or
| vendor dev teams there is a <20% chance that they will
| address or even acknowledge 2 whole separate items out of
| the list, so the points they don't address get frequently
| brought back up again and dropped again. :(
|
| So AI researcher has.. ..list comprehension. (YEAAAH!!)
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Same conclusion here.
|
| At my last job we had a customer who was famous for doing
| this. Since he generated a significant amount of sales, we
| couldn't just sideline him, so I learned to only ask one
| question at a time on email. Otherwise, if you asked e.g.,
| three questions, it was a complete tossup as to which one
| he would decide to answer, all the while reminding you that
| this was a "hair on fire" issue for him.
|
| Compounded with the fact that he was on another continent,
| multiple time zones away, this made debugging anything a
| difficult proposition.
|
| We had another customer for the same product in the same
| country who had absolutely no problem answering whatever
| questions you asked him, in as much detail as he could
| supply. It has to be a personality thing.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Yep. All the time when I worked in IT:
|
| Me: Please try these 3 things and let me know how it goes:
| (list of 3 things with instructions)
|
| Them: I tried (thing #1) and it didn't work.
|
| Me: Thank you, please try these 2 things and let me know how
| it goes
|
| Them: I tried (thing #2) and it didn't work.
|
| Me: Thank you, please try this thing and let me know how it
| goes
|
| Them: (no response)
|
| Me: Just checking in to see if this is resolved?
|
| Them: (no response)
|
| Me: I'm closing this ticket as I haven't heard back, let me
| know if this is still a problem and I can reopen it
|
| Them: Don't close the ticket, I'm still having this issue
|
| Me: No problem, can you try this thing and let me know how it
| goes?
|
| Them: (no response)
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| And sometimes the last one becomes: Them:
| Don't close the ticket, I hadn't had a chance to check that
| yet.
|
| Life gets in between and this one library or project is
| usually hardly the only thing that person juggles. We need
| to accept, that sometimes issues remain open for an
| extended duration. The worst is, when you have the same
| error or issue someone else had already, but their issue
| got closed by an effin github bot, that automatically
| closes issues, because someone hasn't replied for a day or
| two. Like, you are not the center of the other person's
| life. Just like no one forces you to work at no cost for
| others and help them, they should not be forced to give
| undivided focus to your project's issues.
|
| Having bots close issues, accompanied by a rude automated
| message is often contra-productive. It would be fine to
| instead post a reminder in the issue, asking for an update
| like shown in the example: Me: Just
| checking in to see if this is resolved?
|
| This is actually a very polite form of handling it.
| ecnahc515 wrote:
| I almost never see bots close issues that are less than
| 30 days old. Many projects can change a lot in 30-90 days
| and the bug may no longer exist, keeping issues open when
| they may no longer be relevant isn't helping anyone
| either. If it is still relevant, it can simply be re-
| opened. I don't see any downside to semi-aggressively
| closing stale issues. If it's easily reproduced then most
| good projects will mark it so that it won't be auto-
| closed.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I encounter prematurely closed tickets all the time,
| practically every day.
|
| So many software projects close bugs with bots, and they
| have an unrealistically rosy picture of how bug-free
| their software is.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Usually it can't be reopened because you can't even
| really get someone to look at it, because issues are
| wrongfully closed so frequently that they don't pay
| attention to complaints about the closures.
|
| Take a look at this issue to see what it takes to keep
| something open: https://github.com/oobabooga/text-
| generation-webui/issues/41...
|
| (not especially proud of my reactions there, but I hate
| being abused, even by robots.)
| ipaddr wrote:
| When I see some bug like this I do wonder why don't more
| people fix the issue themselves or think that it might be
| specific to their setup or accept a little random lag.
|
| If I received a bug like that I would immediately think
| why are you telling me this... just fix it yourself and
| share your fix if you want. I probably have higher
| expectations from my users. You give the software away
| now they want you to fix it for them.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _keeping issues open when they may no longer be
| relevant isn 't helping anyone either._
|
| If you're moving fast enough that you don't have time to
| close them manually, you're moving too fast (and breaking
| too much).
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > If it is still relevant, it can simply be re-opened.
|
| I've seen places where tickets were not allowed to be re-
| opened. If a ticket was closed for any reason at all
| besides a misclick, a new ticket had to be opened with a
| link to the old ticket if necessary.
| eek2121 wrote:
| This. Usually if you are looking at tickets closed, that
| means you are using that as a metric, which is a BAD
| idea. Ticket lifetimes and movement are more appropriate
| metrics.
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| The user will have found another solution that's more
| intuitive after trying thing #1 and failing.
| tda wrote:
| Me: This very specific thing is broken in general for your
| product when I do a and b. Just like users x,y and z report
| on <random forum>.
|
| (Siemens) Support: Before I can help you, please find the
| serial number via <tedious procedure>, and the exact
| version of subsystems <x, y and z>.
|
| Me: Here you go, though I fail to see how my specific setup
| is relevant as the problem has been reported on forums for
| years, and it is easily reproducible
|
| Support: Please update to latest version x.
|
| Me: Version x has known regression which will break the
| machine for the customer. I did the 1 hour procedure anyway
| but the issue is still present.
|
| Support: Please execute this <obtuse command that runs a
| trace> and download the log from <airgapped machine> with
| SCP
|
| Me: O well, did that here is the file. Don't understand why
| you can't run it on your machine
|
| Support: Please try <irrelevant thing>, reboot (wait 5
| minutes) and run the trace again
|
| Me: (Gives up)
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I wonder how flows like that happen.
|
| Is Support just completely disconnected from Engineering?
| Do they not have a way to report issues and indicate that
| many customers are having a specific issue?
|
| Does the company believe that giving a customer a
| runaround will make them less upset than saying "Sorry,
| this is a known issue. We're working on it but do not
| have a timeline"?
|
| Certainly at some point, some support person is going to
| be like "Huh, we have a lot of customers complaining
| about an issue, and our usual flowchart script doesn't
| seem to resolve it" and try to work it up the chain,
| right? Or does it get to their manager who says "Meh,
| that's an engineering problem, not a support problem. Get
| back to your tickets!" and never pass it up?
| teractiveodular wrote:
| If you're working with a large company, Support is
| outsourced to a bunch of people reading scripts in
| Manila/Bangalore, and the external company employing them
| is actively incentivized to never resolve the root cause
| of any issue, because doing so would mean less tickets
| and less billable hours.
| btilly wrote:
| Yes. Engineering time is expensive. Support exists to
| resolve problems without needing engineer time except
| when the company thinks that the problem is worthy of
| being addressed.
|
| The tendency to wall off engineers is often taken to a
| counterproductive level.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I think sometimes the company doesn't know what to do or
| doesn't care. But they have to make some response. So
| they just ask you to do a load of busywork, to keep you
| out of their hair for a while.
| adamc wrote:
| I have had that experience. Or variations of it.
| latentsea wrote:
| >Me: Please try these 3 things and let me know how it goes:
| (list of 3 things with instructions) Them: I tried (thing
| #1) and it didn't work.
|
| I noticed I do exactly this when troubling shooting
| problems with LLMs!
| suprjami wrote:
| Giving people a bullet point action plan at the end of an
| update helps with this.
|
| ## Action Plan
|
| - Read my comment
|
| - Try it
|
| - Comment on your experience
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Make sure not to apply this polite but curt tone to consumer
| apps.
| remoquete wrote:
| Docs... And a technical writer that'll tend to them.
|
| https://passo.uno/signs-need-tech-writer/
| withinboredom wrote:
| Spending some time to learn technical writing (if you want to
| bootstrap a saas) is worth its weight in gold (same with
| marketing, business admin, accounting).
| lostemptations5 wrote:
| Wow! This is a great blog. Thanks for putting it out :)
| guzik wrote:
| > - Once your core product is built, its worthwhile spending
| some time automating the heck out of everything. This will save
| a TON of time in the near future.
|
| Interesting. Anything you've automated successfully that you
| can share? I've heard so many times that you should hold off on
| automating too early because constant pivoting and refining can
| end up making you spend more time fixing the automation than
| actually doing the work itself, so I kinda paused on it. I can
| see how it would make a big impact on my marketing outreach,
| which I'm doing manually right now with not much success.
| philsnow wrote:
| > You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for
| customer support
|
| If this makes you uneasy, it can be easier if you sign initial
| support replies under another name. Hey, this
| is John, I'll be happy to help you with that.
| <Blah blah blah.> Let me know if that helps.
| --John
| whatshisface wrote:
| "I'm escalating you to tier seven..."
| Terr_ wrote:
| Or in some cases, be "Ed Chambers" from Silicon Valley.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y-CA2EW4Z_U
| eps wrote:
| - Hey, this is John, I'll be happy to help you with that.
| + Hello Xxx,
|
| No need to fake being happy (or sorry). Just provide an
| actual answer.
| amerkhalid wrote:
| Recently, I canceled a subscription for a newspaper, they
| make you go through chat to cancel. The agent was so nice
| that it was annoying.
|
| I don't mind waiting in silence, but when they keep asking
| about weather, vacation plans, etc, I find it hard to not
| respond. This might part retention technique though.
| samstave wrote:
| Ive had tremendous success submitting files to AI and just
| having it produce a structured readme.md for the logic within
| the code, I'll do a thing where I say Give me a readme, include
| description of functions, logic, how its invoked, dependencies,
| monitoring and give me a mermaid and swim diagram of the
| workflow.
|
| Its great.
|
| Another thing I do with an AI helper is when I have it write
| out a function for me I have it write out the descriptor that
| can go in the readme for that function. I also have it write a
| header with version description path etc.
|
| It was an experiment which started with the goal is to have all
| the code for a simple project with its associated readme
| functions loaded into a textai workflow and postgres DB and I
| can dynamically call the readme functions for everything by
| having a bot yank all the MD table for all the functions and
| just put together a real-time readme. As I add txtAI workflow
| scripts, they put their MDs into the DB, I try having it spit a
| JSON of its MD to a mongo?
|
| The point is playing with ways to have the system self document
| as I/it develops.
|
| Because one of the ways I have been using Claude to learn is
| through a F-ton of iterating on an initial thought and bird-
| walking through implementing a tool wrapped around it.
|
| This way, as I iterate through many many version of a concept
| or script/function/api/crawler - it keeps a reminder readme for
| when I want to know what the heck was I thinking (I have had
| super awesome moments of brilliance, and then after a sleep or
| lengthy distraction - totally loose the Mode and have no idea
| what I was doing, or how I came up with BrilliantIdea(TM)
|
| ADHD is a helluva drug :-(
| anticorporate wrote:
| Some advice: If you're going to monetize a side project, and you
| do it in a way where you're providing direct support, be sure the
| customer base it targets are people you actually want to deal
| with. Whatever the niche, imagine the worst people you've
| encountered on it, and be sure you want to use your spare time
| talking to them. Otherwise, the juice is likely not worth the
| squeeze.
| danenania wrote:
| That's good advice. Unfortunately though I think the nature of
| support is that on average it selects for the more difficult
| people in your customer base, for the same reason that doctors
| spend a lot of their time with hypochondriacs (despite
| hypochondriacs making up a small percentage of the population).
|
| Something that helps to offset this psychologically, and is
| also a good thing to do anyway, is to proactively reach out
| more frequently to all your users. It can be the case that 95%
| of your users are happily chugging along, while 5% are unhappy
| and complaining frequently for whatever reason. If you rarely
| hear from that 95%, it can start to irrationally feel like _no
| one_ is happy with your product, since that 's the message
| coming from most of your support interactions.
| crtified wrote:
| I guess the old 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle somewhat
| applies to the support distribution for many products. That
| is, 80% of the support resources are taken up by 20% of the
| clients. (incredibly-vaguely-speaking, naturally)
|
| The variable is "20% _of what type of client_? ". 20% of
| Taylor Swift concert attendees, or 20% of assembly coders?
| Each comes with its own unique challenges!
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I'm sure there are good and bad people in all walks of life.
| But, yes, people in some markets are definitely (on average)
| less pleasant to deal with than others.
| malwrar wrote:
| > When I get an email, I try to answer it as best as I can. Years
| of working with clients taught me to explain things in a simple
| and easy-to-understand way. So, I spent hours patiently answering
| questions from potential customers only to never hear back from
| them.
|
| I'm a big believer in choosing your battles when communicating
| online. I've found bad grammar, lack of focus, confusing content,
| etc are all signals that the sender didn't put much effort into
| their communication, and _if_ I respond to those at all I usually
| put in proportional effort. Rarely have I experienced low-effort
| comms leading to high-reward outcomes, and I found my mental
| health benefits from the "justice" of proportional response. I'm
| curious though, the writer seems to imply that lack of active
| communication led to a decrease in sales. I wonder if /how my
| approach could be sabotaging me.
| lupire wrote:
| Also, shipping a broken product is a signal that you didn't put
| much effort into your development.
| pc86 wrote:
| What is the name for the economic fallacy or paradox where I see
| an article like this and thing "$15k over 4 years is not worth my
| time" but if you were to ask me if I wanted $15k or a small
| fraction of that right now with no recurring aspect I'd take it
| in a heartbeat? That's how I feel reading any of these side
| project pieces. I look at the total revenue and how long it took
| them to get there and I groan thinking how I'd hate to do that.
| Maybe I'm just too focused on hourly rate?
| lupire wrote:
| That's called rationality. The paradox is thinking it's
| worthwhile to squander the few free hours you have to make a
| number go up.
|
| OP made $15K selling snake oil of a specific nature that, if it
| were a legitimate product, would have made far more than $15K
| if he simply _used his tool himself_ instead of productizing it
| and selling it to rubes and crooks.
| password4321 wrote:
| Appreciate OP's post and the other anecdotes shared here.
|
| This side of things doesn't get much coverage since it doesn't
| sell books or increase subscriber counts!
| kebman wrote:
| I think in terms of official correspondence, I don't think it's a
| good idea to ask criminals _why_ they did a certain thing, ref
| the reply to the scammer about his access being revoked. Yes, it
| might feel good to berate him and ask "Why did you do that?" But
| what if he answers? Would you really entertain valuable business
| time arguing with a fraudster?
|
| In general, I also think it's a bad idea to entertain feature
| requests, unless the person is showing willingness to pay hourly
| for that extra bespoke service. I personally prepare for
| eventualities like that, so I can answer in a polite and
| productive way. "No, sorry we don't offer that feature, but if
| you want to enter the Bespoke Service Subscription for $10000 a
| month, then I can do everything you wish _and_ mow your lawn! "
| authorfly wrote:
| In payment disputes bank dispute resolution often requires a
| response of any kind from the customer to consider rejecting
| the dispute. In addition, the submitted forms/disputes often
| have nonsensical or no information on why the dispute occurred
| so you truly have no background. Lastly, disputes can be
| initiated by people without emails or just different emails so
| you have no chance to connect it to relevant support cases.
|
| That's why he's curtly asking why the dispute was raised - yes
| in part to pressure the guy directly on his BS knowing he
| responds, but also because you need any kind of response to win
| disputes.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >In general, I also think it's a bad idea to entertain feature
| requests
|
| A lot of the best features in my products originate with
| feature requests from customers.
| calibas wrote:
| When you're going into business for yourself, you're no longer a
| programmer. You are the head of customer support, you are the
| president, you are sales, advertising, and accounting too.
|
| It requires a large set of skills that you either have to learn,
| or you'll struggle.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I can relate to so much of this! I've had a couple of relatively
| successful B2C products take off as side products in my time, and
| it is very hard not to develop a personal involvement in the
| support requests; whereas the detached, time-boxed, semi-
| automated approach is by far the best way to prevent it from
| taking over your life. Ultimately you're not a charity (unless
| you are) and, unless you specify an SLA, you owe these people
| almost nothing: I tend to suggest offering an automatic refund to
| anybody dissatisfied for this reason: then invest 95% of your
| time in whatever makes 95% of the profits.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| > Fighting disgruntled customers over $20 is not a good way to
| spend time.
|
| Absolutely. The advice I'd give for anyone in these situations is
| that if someone is stressing you out, tell them no, give them a
| refund, and move on. Always be nice about it (well explained in
| the post). You don't have to answer every question either.
|
| It might not be the best way to do customer support, and it may
| feel like you're failing, but you have to protect yourself. You
| can spend your whole life attempting to appease overly needy
| customers, it will never end and they'll never be happy.
|
| It's ok to care more about your project than its customers.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I never considered Gumroad because of their high prices, but I
| must say that chargeback and fraud interaction seemed pretty
| painless which is nice.
| blantonl wrote:
| I do all the direct customer support for my 2 businesses
| (radioreference and broadcastify) which typically equates to
| 20-30 Zendesk tickets a day addressing login/password issues,
| payment issues, technical support etc.
|
| Boy can I relate to burn out and frustration. It's shocking to me
| how many times I have to deal with things like customer mental
| health issues, extremely disrespectful customer behavior, some of
| the wild ways in which customers will try to get out of payments
| that they directly authorized, and of course the occasional edge
| cases that customers can get themselves into which will really
| have you as a developer questioning your sanity.
|
| But the truly perplexing situations are folks that will click
| through and pay for a product, such as your most expensive
| subscription plan, and then instantly have buyers remorse and
| just go off the deep end demanding refunds, implementing
| chargebacks, blaming you for being misleading, and dishing out
| wildly disrespectful behavior. "I didn't know what I was
| purchasing" is a common support ticket.
|
| ... and my business _does not_ do recurring billing or automated
| subscription renewals. You literally have to renew any
| subscription you have with us when it comes due.
|
| I actually had a customer file a class action lawsuit against my
| business because we sent him a reminder that his subscription was
| about to expire and if he wanted to renew it he could, and he
| subsequently filed this lawsuit claiming we were violating a
| Florida consumer protection law which doesn't allow _debt
| collectors_ to contact people during certain hours. That cost me
| a cool chunk of change to get dismissed.
|
| A lot of it is enough to give a sane person PTSD and to drive the
| most patient personality to throw a chair through a window in
| frustration.
| cyral wrote:
| I'm actually surprised he didn't include any screenshots about
| "I never authorized this payment" or "You charged me even
| though I cancelled!!". I see these a lot and it's on the
| customer 100% of the time. People will be so rude even when
| they know they are lying, maybe because they think it's the
| only way they will get a refund, when if they just asked nicely
| and said they forgot about the subscription, I always refund
| it. Lot's of people also end up with two accounts somehow and
| then think we are maliciously double charging them.
| mandeepj wrote:
| OP had to think a bit bigger to get a great ROI. He got himself
| neck deep into performing tasks or small minuscule work items. I
| wish he had thought about evolving it into a trading platform or
| even started with that, something like Robinhood
| cyral wrote:
| I'm sure he got some emails like this, "why dont you add
| trading?" when becoming a brokerage is more like a 100 person
| project
| gnutrino wrote:
| The amount of fraud and scammers out there is insane. I worked on
| a platform that only had a few hundred in revenue a month (just
| starting out). We did many smaller transactions, and getting hit
| with disputes was a killer. If someone did 15 transactions, they
| could get hit with 15 chargebacks up to 3 months later. So for
| every transaction, even if it only generated $3 in revenue, the
| chargeback could be potentially $15. (And you lose the revenue!).
| So for one customer who only spent $45, you could lose $270.
|
| Even when we knew the person was legit, and just wanted a refund,
| they would do disputes. We only won a handful of disputes. The
| bank / credit card company will almost always side with their
| customer, even when provided receipts / terms of service /
| conversations with the customer where they admit the product met
| their needs.
| cies wrote:
| Chargebacks are a creditcard thing. In some countries people
| are willing to pay with methods that do not allow chargebacks.
|
| Also chargebacks do not work for wiretranfers. So you can ask
| them to do a wire transfer instead
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| You honestly think someone is going to set up wire transfer
| for an online subscription service?
| joshuaturner wrote:
| Before Reddit changed API access I built an iOS app called Pager
| (https://pager.app) that allowed users to set up alerts for
| content posted on Reddit. It had a lot of success but the issues
| you highlighted here kept me from monitizing the project.
|
| Users became so demanding and I felt like if I began to take
| money from them it would only get worse. Looking back on it I'm
| not sure it was the best choice, but at least at the time the
| application being free felt like an important defense against
| users that you really could never satisfy.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The usual suggestion, often given by HN's patio11, is to
| charge, and charge more. For some reason free customers are the
| most demanding, and the more you charge the more people self-
| select out of the customer base.
| 1024core wrote:
| There's this old story about an old farmer and his horse. You
| see, this old farmer had a horse that he loved dearly; took
| great care of it and pampered it. But he was getting old, and
| wanted to retire to the City, where he could not keep a
| horse.
|
| So what do I do with this horse, he wondered? He asked a wise
| friend, who told him: sell the horse for the highest amount
| of money that you can.
|
| What?!? replied the farmer; I love my horse dearly and would
| never think of selling it like some goods.
|
| The wise man replied: if you give it away, whoever gets it
| will abuse the shit out of it, and treat it like a workhorse,
| whip it every day, etc. because they got it for free, and
| won't value it. On the other hand, if you sell it for a huge
| sum, the buyer will pamper it and take good care of it,
| because it's an investment to them.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Or, give it to someone who can't afford a horse but really
| needs one, because it will be worth more to them than to
| someone who can afford to overpay for it.
| conductr wrote:
| Would they be able to afford to care for the horse? Do
| they need it because they need a workhorse? It's more of
| a gamble and if you're trying to get best odds for the
| horse you'd probably skew towards someone that's paying a
| large sum and not based on their human necessity
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| As someone who lives on a horse rescue farm, I can assure
| you that this logic does not hold!
| Aurornis wrote:
| The usual way this is presented as a free lunch has become
| disconnected from reality, IMO.
|
| Free customers are not the most demanding, in my experience,
| but they are the most _plentiful_. If you cut them out, you
| don 't lose any income (obviously) but you do cut down on
| requests by filtering out a lot of your users. A win!
|
| So some people assume this is a monotonic function, where
| charging more increases their revenue while filtering out bad
| customers even further. If you press that button too many
| times, though, you discover that the higher price comes with
| increased churn, fewer signups, new competitors appearing on
| the scene, and, surprisingly, _more demands from customers_.
|
| The last one is confusing because we were all told that
| "charge more" is a magic button you press to increase revenue
| and improve customer quality. The problem is that once your
| product becomes expensive enough, people expect it to perform
| at a certain level. If your $10/month service breaks one day,
| the number of people cancelling their subscriptions over it
| is going to be small. If your $100/month service is down for
| an entire day, people start asking themselves why they're
| paying so much for this thing anyway. The higher price gets
| more scrutiny at businesses looking to cut costs, so churn
| goes down. The higher price results it in getting recommend
| less over alternatives. It starts adding up.
|
| Ideally you find the sweet spot where revenue is maximized,
| but that's hard to do. The feedback loop on price increases
| can take a very long time to show up in customer churn and
| reduced signups.
|
| I've signed up for a number of SaaS products over the years
| that played the "raise prices" card too aggressively and then
| backtracked and cut prices.
| mkinsella wrote:
| Pager was great! Thank you for building it.
| brandon272 wrote:
| It feels like a hostage situation. Had you started to charge
| money for that app, the most demanding and unreasonable cohort
| of users would have become apoplectic and invested time into
| trashing you and the app. It's almost like that in order to
| start charging in that situation, you need to retire the app
| under that name and rebrand as a different, fee-based product.
| joshuaturner wrote:
| Especially because if I had monetized it, it likely would
| have been a subscription model because that would obviously
| be the only way to cover the continued operating costs, and
| users have such an aversion to any subscription.
| zupa-hu wrote:
| Hey, thank you so much for Pager! It helped me a lot (in
| supporting my own free users on Reddit)! I was often wondering
| how long it will remain free. Well, forever.
|
| <3
| encoderer wrote:
| Dealing with this crap and actually wanting to do this for years
| is, in part, why software is expensive.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Great article! I'd add another tip: Use marketplaces to get
| visibility and traffic. Maybe part of your success was being on
| Gumroad to begin with (which is not just a MoR)
|
| 3K MRR here after running for 5 years and the projects are on
| autopilot too. Growth is very slow, zero marketing efforts made
| on my side. I think it's hard to get more value from this product
| though, hence why I focus on other ventures.
|
| Not that many support requests.
|
| A few customers racking up bills for thousands; 3-4 never paid
| and I didn't persecute them, the rest did.
|
| You were lucky on chargebacks resolution, generally the b**rds
| always side with the scammer customers trying to get service for
| free. I've tried arguing many times but it's completely useless.
| That's also why I'm afraid of doing a project where my margins
| are smaller. Plenty of them then try to resuscribe Right now
| hosting is 50$ per month, so if someone steal access to my
| product I don't care much.
|
| Merchant of Records saved my life, F*k Europe VATMOSS, Sales
| Taxes, GST and every other crap governments add just to kill
| small businesses and make them flock to Amazon. Paddle support is
| pretty bad, I wouldn't go with them if I would do it all again.
| Probably I'd try LemonSqueezy (now acquired by Stripe).
|
| Selling the business: I was offered money for the business but I
| don't think it's worth it, given how much it's on autopilot.
| NightlyDev wrote:
| Can confirm that Paddle support is really bad. Onboarding and
| calls was very hands on(at least before they opened up for
| all), but everything after that was terrible and frankly
| idiotic. At least they can switch to using LLMs now, cause even
| those would do a better job.
|
| And yeah, VAT and GST is annoying. Terrible for small
| businesses.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I think a critical business skill is learning to communicate and
| receive communication without letting it greatly affect your
| internal mental state. Communication about your business has to
| just be information and a tool.
| ncruces wrote:
| Why I like the stuff that can support itself for free with a
| reasonable level of adds.
|
| No expectations of amazing customer support. No refunds. No I'm
| bound to keep offering the service because it's already paid for.
| kaplun wrote:
| Seb! Look at who reached the top of Hacker News today! haha!
| ruffrey wrote:
| I strongly relate to this post. Having grown mailsac.com to above
| average side project revenue, the admin overhead isn't crazy, but
| it's exceptionally repetitive and boring. So much time is spent
| on fraud and normal "running the business" really sucks the
| enjoyment out of a side project (for me as an engineer). I think
| that having a side project co-founder who is a relentless
| business operator is more important than having a decent
| technologist.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| I would personally never get into a side project for anything
| that requires decent fraud prevention (email, telecom,
| payments, etc.). I have worked at medium-sized startups in
| these areas struggle to keep their heads above water on fraud
| prevention even with well-staffed and well-paid teams of
| experts.
|
| It's a never ending battle where you cannot win, you just
| manage to not lose so badly that lawyers and federal regulators
| pound you in the behind or users abandon your platform.
| morning-coffee wrote:
| > (look, I'm sorry, I also cringe when I write those words)
|
| Just came to say I laughed and _really_ appreciate the honesty in
| that statement. :)
| edweis wrote:
| It is ok to let some fire burn.
|
| Say no more often, and focus on the core of your business.
| kebman wrote:
| I remember the the BBC would upsell on requests from artists
| visiting their studios in London.
|
| Artist management: "Hey, can you fix XYZ beverage, towels, etc,
| in the stage ante room?"
|
| BBC: "Sure! That will cost...."
|
| Most would stop pestering at that time, but ever so often you got
| artists who were willing to pay for the extra service.
|
| Conversion to the mentioned case:
|
| Individual feature request: "Hey, amazing script, I rated it 5
| stars! Can you implement the take profit levels for me?"
|
| Generic reply: "Thank you for your interest in Project X! We get
| thousands of feature requests each week so sadly we cannot cater
| to individual ones. If you need help on setting take profit
| levels, I'm afraid you'll have to revert to TradingView's
| official documentation. Sorry for the inconvenience. Hope you
| have a nice day!"
|
| Continued pestering: "Ok, but can you please put them for me? I
| follow this [insert some YouTube crypto day-trader], and he uses
| [some very specific take profit levels]. I would like the script
| to draw them for me."
|
| Up-sell: "I'm sorry, but we sadly cannot cater to individual
| requests unless you're a Diamond Member. But if you still want
| bespoke service you can sign up to the Diamond Member
| Subscription. Please bare in mind that it entails a 1000 monthly
| retainer with a 300 hourly consultation fee beginning after the
| first 15 minutes. Please inform me when you want to sign up, and
| I'll send you the details so we can get started right away!"
| sushid wrote:
| I did this very recently for a wedding vendor and it worked
| like a charm. There was no stipulation that I'd have to provide
| dinner to a vendor who would come in after the dinner ended.
| The owner insisted a few days before the wedding that the staff
| can come in earlier and would be able to eat, would be
| energized and appreciate the dinner etc.
|
| I was annoyed but said I can charge him (the owner) the exact
| cost for a plate if this would mean that much to him and he
| instantly was willing for forgo dinner for his staff, lol...
| siliconc0w wrote:
| One suggestion is simply increase the price. Price is strongly
| correlated with quality of customer. Price also acts as signaling
| that this is a tool for professionals who make actual money and
| so shouldn't be bothered coughing up something trivial like $100
| for a subscription. You end up making more with far less customer
| support.
| 7bit wrote:
| I find it hard to believe that this is true. For 100$ a month I
| expect a far more polished product than for 20$, where I can
| look over a lot of missing features.
|
| If features don't work as advertised, I will absolutely make no
| distinction between a 500$ or 1$ product, and will demand a
| fix. But I will more likely have more patient if the service is
| cheap, before migrating away.
|
| And then, if your customers are businesses, do you think the
| employees really care how much the product costs? No.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Having run my own tourism business (so dealing with consumers
| directly, rather than b2b), and having spoken to many other
| business owners, this is counterintuitively true.
|
| My worst customers were the ones that ask for discounts, or
| are otherwise looking for a deal. My theory is that people
| that happily fork out for an expensive product have already
| seen the value.
|
| There are exceptions, but a lot of business owners see the
| same pattern.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > My worst customers were the ones that ask for discounts,
| or are otherwise looking for a deal.
|
| I get where you're coming from, but it's hardly surprising
| that a business's favourite customers are those who are
| happy to get fleeced.
|
| And as a customer, if you're not already a subject-matter
| expert, you have no idea which business is trying to fleece
| you or not unless you price compare and try for discounts
| everywhere.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| If you think getting charged asking price is getting
| fleeced, then you are kind of illustrating my point. I
| don't want a customer that thinks they are getting
| fleeced by doing business with me.
|
| I don't want a customer who thinks that paying asking
| price for a product is me taking advantage of them.
|
| I don't want a customer that thinks I am starting the
| relationship as an adversary rather than a partner in a
| mutually beneficial transaction.
|
| I want customers that are happy. I can't make you happy
| if you already think what I am selling is not worth what
| I'm charging. We will both be happier if you find a
| different supplier.
|
| The kind of people that look for an angle on every
| transaction are the ones that will be the biggest pain in
| your ass while asking for more than everyone else. That's
| the generally held wisdom for a reason. It isn't always
| true, but its true often enough that it normally doesn't
| pay to play the game.
|
| > And as a customer, if you're not already a subject-
| matter expert, you have no idea which business is trying
| to fleece you or not unless you price compare and try for
| discounts everywhere.
|
| Yes, be a savvy consumer. But also realize that if you go
| around looking for the lowest price and asking for
| discounts, you will end up with the cheapest product or
| service, not necessarily the best value.
| spacephysics wrote:
| We've also seen customer support inquiries, and in general
| quality of our customers, rise with an increase in price.
|
| It doesn't make sense as an end consumer, but B2B lens it
| makes sense.
|
| If a business can afford the higher price tag, they most
| likely would rather have a hands off approach for the problem
| they're trying to solve (in a service based business)
|
| Many of our mid and lower tier customers want everything
| drawn out and explained, and give feedback at every step. Our
| higher tier customers pay faster, request minimal input
| (outside of times we ask for it), and generally much easier
| to work with
| Aurornis wrote:
| > We've also seen customer support inquiries, and in
| general quality of our customers, rise with an increase in
| price.
|
| Yes, but it should be noted that the price is acting as a
| filter to exclude a subset of customers, reducing overall
| customer count.
|
| Obviously it's easier to have 100 customers paying
| $100/month than to have 1000 customers paying $10/month,
| but finding those tradeoff points can be hard. It takes
| time for market signals to settle out and customers to
| churn away due to high prices.
|
| I've been a customer of several SaaS products that embraced
| "raise your prices" so much that they slowly became a
| second-choice option in the market. It takes a long time
| for people and websites to stop recommending a product as
| the first-choice option after a price change, so these
| signals don't appear immediately.
| spacephysics wrote:
| 100% agree, and in my case its a service-based business
| so overhead is much higher per additional client vs an
| additional SaaS signup.
|
| And 1 problem client, even if they pay 80% of our higher
| tier pricing, can lead to major headaches across the
| board.
|
| Something we learned (and are continually learning) is
| vetting clients as much as they vet us, versus just
| trying to get the sale.
|
| Funny enough, being more stern on pricing, what we offer,
| and in general our boundaries of what we cover has led to
| higher satisfaction from clients and our team.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Perhaps, but what's your idea of polish? For many developers,
| it's a shiny interface. Business users have much different
| metrics. Developers may get excited over "productivity";
| business users are more focused on ROI (ie, quantifiable
| savings or profit)
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| It's about creating a barrier to exclude unwanted
| individuals, similar to a gated community with homes priced
| higher than the average worker's budget, for instance.
| levocardia wrote:
| >For 100$ a month I expect a far more polished product than
| for 20$
|
| I hate to put you on blast but this is _exactly_ why people
| charge $100 /mo instead of $20/mo. They do not want the
| customers who feel (sorry for the term) "entitled" to a
| heroic level of features, support, polish, etc. They want
| people who have a hair-on-fire emergency that is so awful
| that they'd gladly pay $1000/mo for it, and are thankful that
| your software - klunky as it is - is giving them $900/mo of
| free value.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >the customers who feel (sorry for the term) "entitled"
|
| Why would the word/ term "entitled", need an apology?
| make3 wrote:
| because it's a subjective very negative judgement about
| another human, and in polite conversation one should
| assume baseline positive things about other humans. it's
| basically like calling someone an asshole. as HN as a
| culture of politeness, you apologize first, even if it's
| justified.
| siva7 wrote:
| Having worked in quite a few startups, parents observation is
| absolutely true.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Raising prices works wonders when a product is both underpriced
| and hard to replace.
|
| It can backfire when the new price point bumps it into a
| different category of decision making, though. For many, a
| $20/month product is an easy decision but $100/month price tag
| bumps it to a point where it becomes a more complicated
| decision making process. If you're not careful you can easily
| raise prices so much that people decide to jump to a more full-
| featured competitor product.
|
| Projects like this one that are personal/side projects have an
| additional risk of raising prices: If the product becomes
| expensive, many people are going to notice that it appears to
| be highly profitable while also being within the realm of what
| a single person or small team can produce. Competition starts
| appearing quickly and you're back to cutting prices to stay
| relevant.
|
| Finally, higher prices come with higher expectations from your
| customers. Whereas previously they might shrug off a slow
| response to a customer support request at $20/month, their
| $100/month service might lead them to expect more customer
| support, not less.
|
| There are several indie SaaS companies that get posted on HN
| from time to time that take the opposite approach: They offer a
| low price but they're up front about what to expect. They don't
| try to pretend that you're getting world-class reliability,
| uptime, or support, but they do commit to offering a good
| service at a fair price. They could raise prices to match
| competitors, but now they're playing a very different game with
| very different expectations.
| nsokolsky wrote:
| Or just give yourself permission to not reply to people. Make a
| big visible unsubscribe button and relax knowing that anyone
| can just quit if they don't like it.
| digging wrote:
| > But for now, the $200 I get every month with almost no work is
| a nice passive income.
|
| Wow, not that I wouldn't enjoy having an extra $200/mo, but it
| would be a pretty insignificant chunk of my budget. Stepping back
| from the author's initial perspective (wanting to help people and
| grow business) - was this ever worth spending more than a couple
| hours a week on?
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| I think the merchant of record bit is a bit overblown for a lot
| of side projects.
|
| Tuvalu isn't going to extradite you for not paying them their $5
| VAT.
|
| If you're frequently dealing with multiple jurisdictions
| (especially with EU) and the fees don't add up to 10% or higher
| (which MoRs can do if you're in a less popular jurisdiction), it
| can make sense to take care of admin headaches.
|
| That might be many projects, but it's certainly not all. I've
| written about this from the "third world" perspective over here:
| https://nik.software/building-global-wealth-from-south-afric...
| (and the "Accepting Payments" section above it)
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| I agree if you can guarantee your project isn't going to make
| more than X a month. But like the author said, it's painful to
| change merchants later when you start needing to care about
| tax.
| jimbokun wrote:
| This reminds me of the book 4 Hour Workweek.
|
| That book is really about Tim Ferriss figuring out how to
| automate and delegate everything in his business, until he only
| has to put in 4 hours a week to keep it going.
|
| Until you reach a similar point, as this article shows, you don't
| really have any "passive" income. You just have another job.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Does anyone really believe that Tim Ferris only works 4 hours a
| week?
| s-xyz wrote:
| Very relatable, had a similar experience.
| fsndz wrote:
| I understand the struggle. Finding and keeping customers can be a
| challenge, especially in B2C. But $15K is good, so I would
| continue fighting for it. To reduce the stress, you should
| automate everything as much as possible. I'm also currently
| learning Pine Script, so thanks for giving me a side business
| idea.
| leiaru13 wrote:
| I've heard that people have had success selling side projects
| with https://acquire.com (haven't used it myself, though) - have
| you looked into it?
| johndhi wrote:
| Tomorrow I begin teaching a college course, in addition to my
| full-time day job, that I've been creating and working on for
| months. Work has been very busy lately and I'm worried that my
| experience with the class will make my life hell. I'm having to
| approach it in a really different way -- one where rather than
| doing my usual over-preparing, I'm trying to just get confident
| that I can do my best and see how it goes.
| dartos wrote:
| I've been working in software for 15 years and have been doing it
| for fun 5 years before that.
|
| Seeing this does not make me love my job. I miss making little
| toys and learning random things.
|
| The more I work in this field, the more I realize building
| products isn't what I love, it's just what pays the bills.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| A couple of thoughts:
|
| As a customer, if I see firm boundaries set, (IE, read XXX before
| contacting me,) I usually assume that someone is under stress
| from nonsense like this. Then I try to be on my extra-best
| behavior.
|
| I know a lot of people suggested raising your price. Some
| alternatives are to:
|
| 1: Offer two price points: The $20 / month gets no support, the
| $100 / month is supported.
|
| 2: Consider some of the feature requests, but as a consulting.
| "Yes, I can make that for you. It will cost $30,000 and you will
| have exclusive access to it." Some bozos may pay it.
|
| And finally, it doesn't hurt to do one-line responses to dumb
| requests with "Please read the doc at LINK". It also doesn't hurt
| to openly state, in such a doc, things like "I am not
| implementing new features. Custom consulting is available."
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >Offer two price points: The $20 / month gets no support, the
| $100 / month is supported.
|
| Someone is paying you money and you won't help them? They are
| going to cancel and possibly badmouth you on social media.
| Also, how are you supposed to improve your product if you don't
| interact with most of the userbase?
|
| I try to help everyone who uses my software. Even if they are
| evaluating and haven't paid me a penny. Commercial issues
| aside, I feel it is the right thing to do.
| treetalker wrote:
| I just want to express my admiration and thanks for the practical
| information and advice both in the post and throughout the
| comments. Threads like this one make me happy and thankful to be
| a part of this community.
|
| I've upvoted the post and the best comments -- but threads like
| this make me wish I could upvote certain posts and comments more
| than once.
|
| Thanks again, everyone, and go HN team! :-)
| withinrafael wrote:
| Great write up and relatable. Just wanted to warn you that PayPal
| will eventually get annoyed and lock up your account for reason
| `$($RANDOM)`. I would prioritize draining the account very
| regularly, if you're not already.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| PayPal used to be famous for this, years ago. But I haven't
| heard any stories recently. Is it still a thing?
| al_borland wrote:
| This sounds about right. The ongoing support is why I don't think
| I could ever be an indie dev. If I ever do put something
| significant out publicly, it will be free and offered as-is. Not
| because of any grand philosophy on what software should be, but
| simply to avoid the support obligations without being riddled
| with guilt.
|
| Automation can help, but there are limits to what it can handle,
| not to mention something needs to happen enough times to see
| automation is needed. There is also the question of time invested
| vs time saved. It's not the silver bullet I'd need it to be.
| sylware wrote:
| In software, there is no perfection, only compromises which you
| will feel appropriate some days, and not some other days...
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| One thing I didn't see the author mention in his list of lessons
| learned: You shouldn't be surprised that you have to deal with a
| lot of idiots when you make a product for idiots. His market here
| is the bottom of the bottom of the barrel, and there's a price
| that comes with that.
| konschubert wrote:
| I have a moderately successful hardware side project (eink
| calendars) and I am constantly torn and questioning myself.
|
| Am I spending
|
| * too much time on it, given how little money it makes?
|
| * or too little time on it, given that it's already making money
| and maybe if I worked on it more, I could grow it enough so I can
| quit my day job ?
| justinl33 wrote:
| two tips that I've found that help take the load off support: -
| document everything obsessively; 80% of support tickets can be
| answered by 20% of your documentation - use subreddits and
| discords and let your users help one another
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Good write up. One of the things I have learnt from nearly 20
| years running a small software business, is to choose your market
| and customers carefully. My main product is for event planners
| and they are generally pleasant people to deal with (if not the
| most technical!). But I know other people that sell software
| products in other markets where people are (on average) less
| pleasant (e.g. real estate).
|
| Also I have found that the cheapest products get the worst
| customers.
| nurettin wrote:
| > You could even write your own scripts using an abomination of a
| scripting language called PineScript
|
| Sorry to derail from the subject, but why on earth would you call
| pinescript an abomination? It is a perfect blend of imperative
| looking syntax yielding vector based calculations similar to
| datatables. Even conditional statements are computed as a series
| acting on the underlying data stream. I'm actually jealous that
| they did this first and sad that it is proprietary to the
| platform.
| yagudaev wrote:
| Thank you for sharing that honest experience you had.
|
| Here is a link to an audio for those of us who like to listen to
| it instead of reading : https://www.audiowaveai.com/p/2310-ive-
| built-my-first-succes...
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