>I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation.
I run an app with 16,000 users and receive 2–5 support tickets per week. I read every one of them.
Around 20% of my app has been built based on user suggestions.
People are generally kind and promote my app across multiple platforms for free. I don't have any budget for marketing.
Users don't always show their appreciation with words. Instead, they show it by eagerly helping resolve issues providing clear steps to reproduce bugs, sending screenshots or videos, and responding quickly to follow up questions. I also regularly come across people recommending my app on Reddit or in YouTube comment sections, which often surprises me. :)
If you're supporting your users well, they're probably giving back in their own way too. :)
This is poster’s last show HN; homepage features some 16,000 user claim. App appears to be free, which I suspect will rather drastically change the composition of incoming support messages.
Bodybuilders, well they immediately understand the app on first impression.
One user told me he has kidney disease and asked if I could add a “low protein” diet mode, so he could reduce protein intake below standard recommendations. I had never faced this requirement before, but after hearing him out, I decided to add it. This is just one of the many interactions.
Then there is another group, people who have spent a long time being underweight or overweight and have started attributing it to genetics. I often see posts like “I am genetically fat” or “I am an ectomorph / hardgainer"; "I can’t gain weight no matter how much I eat” in subreddits and fitness groups. Don't you dare to call them out of anything, they'll get mad! but are willing to give app try especially if they hear about it from someone else.
They typically use it for 2–5 weeks, and then they start gaining or losing weight depending on their goal. They are genuinely surprised that it’s possible.
Once they start seeing results, they usually just keep going.
I am not particularly good at communication, nor a guy with social skill.
What you neglected to mention is that your app is free.
If this is something you’re able to do and people like it, I think that’s great.
However, the post is about a paid app and that’s going to have a significant influence on the type of support requests you get, and whether or not it makes financial sense to develop according to those requests.
A lot of people in the comments are saying he did it for "likes" - that's a pretty harsh reading of the article.
What I think a lot of people are missing is that the difference between supporting corporates who spend up to millions per year on your product and supporting end-users who are literlly counting every cent they spend is a huge gulf in terms of expectations, technical ability, professionalism.... the list goes on. It's a completely different game.
I thought the article was a brilliant summary of why you simply can't help all the users all the time. It's a hard lesson to learn in the world of Tech Support. We all want to be the knight is shining armour solving customer problems, but the skill to be able to say "no" in the right way is not universal.
To those ragging on the author - there are huge numbers of people who, even if you paid them to use your software, they would still complain and swear at you. It's just life. And dealing with the competing interests of customers, time pressures, personal sanity and many more is almost exactly the job description of Tech Support.
Thanks. I'm not really understanding the likes comment. What are likes in this context? I was very explicit in the post I thought providing better support would build customer relationships and improve retention, and I learned that really isn't true. Also I wrote this a couple days ago so the blog would have content and only submitted on a whim, had I known I'd get 10K views and 100 comments I would've written it more carefully
Thanks for posting this. I have experienced similar. I have found that nasty bug reports are most effective. Good data, and the people are too cheesed off/embarrassed, to follow up, after you address it. Occasionally, it can actually be turned around, and they can become evangelists.
I have integrated a simple feedback form into the app, with the option to send anonymously. That seems to help.
> had I known I'd get 10K views and 100 comments
Is that still the case, after being frontpaged on HN (but most comments are probably here)?
This was also my thought! OP is going to get a lot of arrows for this article, but it's a genuinely great write up that matches a lot of my experience with mass-market products.
It's a great account for people to reflect on. I've immediately sent this article to several early-stage founders who are burning astounding amounts of time on undesirable customers.
Everybody on HN knows better than OP how to run their own business and could absolutely please 100% of customers or potential customers 100% of the time. Apparently.
I’m a bit doubtful with this conclusion, as apparently in many cases humans will rather refute reality is meaningful if it fails to pass their idealistic proof-test.
Thinking about customer support as a ‘differentiator’ or a way to drive profit is depressing. You should simply strive to do what’s best for your customers. The sort of feedback you’re getting is golden and in the right hands can be put to use rather than be dismissed. Assuming that people who disagree with your pricing model just don’t understand how business works is really telling. You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.
Your support strategy is missing an outlet for needy users to ask questions, effectively blaming customers for a structural flaw in your own setup. You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other and devs can occasionally jump in to help or note pain points. Furthermore, your development and QA processes clearly need scrutiny. The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.
It’s completely okay to define your product however you want and to reject feature requests, but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.
> You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.
And for some subscription situations, you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you.
There's a 'PhotoSync' app that offers a premium option for either $1/month or $24 for life. Presumably because they looked at the average subscription duration and found it was in the region of 2 years. Modulo the time value of money and per-transaction processing costs.
Personally I much preferred the one-off purchase, even though it's not clear I'll be using the app in 24 months, because it fits a lot better with my (somewhat chaotic) way of managing my money.
> you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you
There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions. You can't go to a local bakery and pay $24 for life to get fresh rolls every day.
Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.
> there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions
This is clearly incorrect given that there are plenty of software developers who offer lifetime purchases. In fact there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of.
On a lower level, all that matters is the numbers. If your average customer stays subscribed for 24 months, then charging a lifetime fee equal to 24 months is equivalent to a subscription model. At that point it's irrelevant what's "sustainable" since 24 months is the max you can expect to charge on average anyway.
If I buy version 2 then it's mine and I can continue to use it for as long as I want, if I'm happy with the feature set. I can ignore version 3 or choose to buy it. If I buy it then I now own two products instead of one. Sometimes the older version might even be better (e.g. features I like have been removed or made worse).
With a subscription model I'm forced to pay again and again even if I'm perfectly happy with version 2.
This is betraying a way of thinking that suggests what's normal now is the way it's always been.
Given "there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of", it's safe to assume we're talking about more than a couple of years ago. To talk as if most users always used to upgrade, suggests you might be young enough not to remember the software industry before a decade or two ago.
In general, users very much didn't upgrade. That's exactly why the industry forced subscriptions on us. They weren't getting income anymore, when the older version of their software did the job perfectly well.
I'm old enough to remember that time. People did up grade. Some of them rushed out to buy the latest version when it was released. Some of them waited until they got a new computer. Many of them tried to not upgrade until someone using the new version sent them a file and then they couldn't open it thus forcing an upgrade. A few only upgraded every other version.
I wasn't an automatic everybody upgraded on day one like subscriptions are, but it amounted to similar: regular upgrades over time.
The difference is without subscription, I can be pretty sure the next major version will benefit me.
With subscription,the only thing certain is that the seller wants to do as little as possible to keep taking my money. This tends to result on product updates that benefit them.
Except in the case of a natural monopoly (which doesn't apply to software) you can always switch to something else. Which means the seller needs to remain better than the alternatives.
I remember an article in Byte magazine circa 1982 or so which talked about how the software business sucks because it goes like
(1) Raise capital and spend a year developing a product
(2) Release the product, make a certain amount of money, then revenue dries up
(3) Pay yourself a bit and feed the rest of the money into develop version 2.0
(4) A year later it is struggle to sell version 2.0 because you're not just competing with applications from other people you are competing with your old 1.0, your most satisfied customers might be the least likely to upgrade
And that assumes development for 2.0 goes according to plan! As a software developer who gets a paycheck my life is easier working on a subscription based project my life is easier because management is not facing a financial crisis because a project is running a few months late.
As a customer though I often like paying ahead and I've been through a few cycles like this with Plex. Like I see the lifetime offering from Plex and I have the money now and it looks like a good deal... Then two years later they come up with something that really alienates me (that FAST service) and I hate being pushed into something I want nothing to deal with. So I go to Jellyfin and it is a godawful mess that I never get working quite right, just watching a movie with family and friends becomes an exercise in humiliation.
And I'm thinking... I don't have the option of exit [1] because I can't cancel my Plex pass! If on the other hand I was paying for a monthly subscription they are motivated to care what I think [2]
Now funny I had this summer when I was trying to gentle a stray cat [3] in a room in the other house and wound up watching a lot of Tubi, came to the conclusion FAST wasn't so bad, switched back to Plex, got a monthly subscription, and I am highly satisfied.
[2] I hate to be this way but when I have trouble w/ amazon I write to jeff@amazon.com and point out that it makes no sense to screw me for $20 because I have a say in at least $2M NPV of AWS cloud spending, when you consider a Prime subscription and how much an ordinary person could buy from AMZN in a lifetime, AMZN has a tremendous amount to lose from "exit"
We like to think of physical products as one offs where what you buy tomorrow is the same as what you buy today.
But I have run a bakery for 5 years, and you get better day by day, you introduce new techniques, find different flours, optimize bake times for fluffiness, crispiness, and taste. The croissants we make today are much better than what we made during our first month.
We improved our product just like how software improves, but we did it without a croissant subscription, but by selling its own version as its own thing day by day.
What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited. In the physical world, we have wear and tear, or in the case of croissants, decomposition or consumption which limit customers from using the same product forever.
Can the same not be found for many software products?
To use iOS as an example, the OPs app Castro charges for night mode, but night mode via OS controls didn’t always exist in iOS so a theoretical Castro v1 could have been released without before it, and v2 would include that new feature. Or when inevitably, v1 no longer works on new iOS versions, people would have to upgrade.
We don't charge for night mode. I don't really think versioning would work very well for us, many have tried, but I do agree Apple should facilitate other business models like this in a better way.
> Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.
The gambling goes both ways. Your $1 subscription price is betting that you can convince each user to keep on paying that subscription forever, their $24 lifetime price is betting that customers are going to churn after a year on average.
Your gamble is perhaps slightly safer, in the sense that if subscriptions fall so too do the ongoing costs. But there is a floor to costs (i.e. you need to keep paying your team), so both approaches are pretty dependent on the sales funnel bringing in new subscribers
It’s sustainable at $1/month at current costs, but those costs will go up over time. The subscription price could be raised accordingly but they can’t go back and ask for an inflation adjustment from people who bought it.
Depends though what you pay for the one-time price. You can pay an offline version of the application (no extra costs afterwards), or a limited period of SaaS application updates (let's say 3 years).
I agree that paying a one time price and expecting continuos updates and new features is not reasonable.
For the majority of software I use, I don't really care about continuous upgrades and new features, as long as it works with the feature set I signed up for.
A great example for me is the Xodo app on Android. It's by far the best PDF editor that I've found on Android, particularly for annotating with a digital pen. Some features are locked. If I want to unlock them, it's $5 a month. I get nothing out of that which isn't already in the app. I'm happy to pay a one-off fee for the work the developers have done up to that point. I'm definitely not happy to add another $5 a month to my pile of subscriptions.
For me the boundary is this: (1) If I get something of value every month (e.g. use of a cloud server, or something which obviously needs regular updating like Netflix) -> subscription justified; (2) If I just want to use what I can already see in the app -> very unlikely I'll ever subscribe unless the product is absolutely essential to me and there are no competitors.
A good example of the latter is Skritter. I don't care about new functionality, but there literally isn't another app which can do what it does, so I pay the subscription.
As you have demonstrated with this comment, customers don’t really understand that there’s no such thing as “the product is done and costs are no longer incurred” even if the product is 100% done, and this is especially true on commercial app stores.
It costs $99/year to keep your app on the Apple App Store. Stop paying and all apps are delisted.
It costs $5/month to maintain a business phone line (Apple needs a phone number)
It costs $10/month for a mail forwarding service (or else Apple will publish your home address)
It costs ~$100/year to maintain an LLC.
A developer must buy a new Mac every 10-12 years or so just to maintain basic OS support (we can call that ~$50 a year for a MacBook Neo, but if you want your code compile to not be painful you’ll probably grab a MacBook Pro).
The biggest tension between software and one-off purchases is related to bugfixing, and especially security. It makes sense that you don't expect new features for a product that you paid for once. But, what is the case with bugs? If the product mostly does what it promised to do, but sometimes crashes, do you expect those crashes to be fixed for your version, or not? What it you're using a 10-year old version and a new critical (say, unauthenticated remote execution) vulnerability is found in it? Do you expect to get it resolved as part of the price you originally paid, or would you be ok with being told you have to buy a new version if you want this ?
There's some merit to your arguments, but not enough to justify a subscription:
- Subscriptions are marketed as being a lot more than just bugfixes - new features being the big one. But there's usually no cheaper "bugfix-only" subscription, which means that someone who doesn't care about new features has to pay for them anyway.
- To be honest - yes, I do expect bugfixes for free if I've paid to buy the product. After all, a bug is a defect, and products are usually sold with the expectation that they will be fit for purpose. That's the principle which applies to physical consumer products, so why should it be any different for software? If I bought software that calculates my taxes for me, and it turns out a bug means that it applies the wrong tax rules, then I haven't got what I paid for. Why am I expected to pay every month just to make my software do what it was supposed to do in the first place?
- The developer is still incentivised to fix bugs in order to attract new purchasers.
- Subscriptions aren't a magic solution financially anyway, because there's an average limit to how long a customer stays subscribed for.
Heck, I'd pay to explicitly not get the new features and only get the security and bug fixes in several cases. The "new" features is in some cases just a reshuffling of the UI and removal of features I actually do use.
How do manufacturers of physical products handle defects? Aren't they obligated to correct defects through recalls and similar mechanisms? I don't see why software wouldn't work similarly.
A good chunk of the software on my device doesn't need to access the internet, another big chunk does so using standard mechanisms (i.e. libcurl) that could be security patched out of band by the OS.
The only reason I routinely need to update most software, is that Apple/Google keep changing device screen resolutions/cutouts and they keep killing off old APIs
$1/day forever is around $9125 using the safe drawdown rate of 4% per year.
So if you’re a bakery and a customer offers $9000+ for a fresh roll every day forever, you should almost certainly take them up on that offer. A smart baker could probably get that number sub-$5000, but you’ll always come out okay around 25x the yearly cost (in this case, $365).
Similarly, if the amortized yearly cost of a customer is $12 (ie, $1 per month), then a $300 forever price is financially indistinguishable from a permanent subscription. (Actually, better: time value of money, they can’t cancel the annuity you buy, etc.)
So there always is a price where that is financially viable.
> but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.
Somehow incredibly ironic when applied to you comment itself...
The comment is basically doing exactly what it accused OP of doing: behaving as if the commenter has "singularly thought through every problem in an armchair" and knows better than OP who actually tried doing it.
Could be an armchair, could be a toilet, either seems a reasonable standard for a commenter on a messageboard, are we expecting a focus group or something?
None of these categories seem to build any meaningful rapport. Any honest answer I give is deeply unsatisfying to both parties, and we typically have better data from telemetry or crash logs than the emails provide. It’s certainly useful for us to receive them, but there’s not a helpful response I can give.
I don't know how you read the blog post but it seems your interpretation is uncharitable to say the least.
He wrote he already has good enough telemetry, there is just not much he can write in an e-mail to customer, besides generic "we know the issue thank you for the report" that would be useful for the customer and for themselves.
> You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.
I think the article was very clear that they had already accepted that, and had already decided it was worth never getting their money.
> The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.
Yes and no.
You want enough logging and telemetry that you can roll out an update to 2% of users and know if something is terribly wrong before you roll it out to the other 98%.
On the other hand, you probably don't want enough telemetry to detect that customer Jim Smith has trouble with WebRTC when joining calls without a microphone while using Firefox and Cloudflare Warp with split tunnels enabled.
Why exactly? "Error logging" is mentioned there as an alternative. I would have thought that if you can do telemetry you ought to be able to generate a local log file that is readable enough for the customer to feel confident about sending part of it back to you without breaking the law or their contracts with other parties.
Why would customers want great support on a podcast app? Who is choosing a podcast app based on their customer support? How many problems can you possibly have?
US Mobile, TJ's, Amazon, Apple, Mullvad, HN come to mind when I think of companies with great support and I recommend them because of it.
All of these are closer to essential services with competition and frequent problems so I appreciate and interact with the support frequently.
When I was in college, I worked at a bakery and actually made some long-term friends by talking to customers that came into the store. I later used this job experience to get an email support job, answering questions that users had about our software plugin. Never made any long-term friends with customers there, even if they emailed us once a month.
The difference is that email / online support has no “human downtime moments.” At the bakery, I usually would talk to people while we were waiting for their order to be finished heating up / cooking / etc. So there was a moment or two people standing around waiting, which naturally leads to a conversation. Or at least it did a decade ago when cellphones weren’t quite as omnipresent.
I wonder if having a monthly Zoom “open office hours” type thing would replicate some of this feeling in a software context. Probably not, but it might be better than just answering emails.
There's also the fact that, email / online support leave records. You really don't want to leave a written record of you asking someone about their life, as when/if it gets audited - you can possibly get into trouble.
Who said anything about GDPR? If someone reveals to you that they are in some kind of protected class, then there’s a risk that anything you do they don’t like could see you tagged for discrimination even if it’s how you’d treat any customer in the same situation.
If you have evidence it's the usual approach (e.g. written policy documents, aggregate statistics), then it should be fine. If it's a situation that only comes up for certain demographics, and you handle it poorly such that members of those demographics consistently have a worse time than everyone else, then that might be a legitimate discrimination issue even if there's no malice intended.
> 99% of the time, no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email.
When I was in a product leadership position I liked to spend time doing some of the customer support work. This is a common experience. Customers who write angry emails do not care about your reasons. They want something from you (cheaper rates, a specific feature they need, a discount, a freebie) and they do not care about anything else. It’s the digital version of the “I’d like to speak to your manager” customer who thinks that if there’s a 10% chance of getting what they want by being a jerk then it’s worth pushing as hard as they can.
Some times you’d get a little satisfaction from someone who realized there was a person who cared on the receiving end of that email address. Made it feel worthwhile.
Most of them are just doing some transactional game where they think that they can exercise some power over the company if they complain loudly enough.
This also has a lot of cultural differences. Some of the customer contact we’d get from one of the countries we served were out of control mean. There were casual threats of violence from time to time and 90% of them came from one country, which I’m not going to name but I’ve added it to my mental list of places not to visit. It was weird that it was so consistent.
> “I’d like to speak to your manager” customer who thinks that if there’s a 10% chance of getting what they want by being a jerk then it’s worth pushing as hard as they can.
Throw those people out immediately. Not only are they bad customers themselves, they also drive away the good ones.
The author hired
someone with technical knowledge, but that's not enough.
Technical knowledge and people skills are different things.
If someone has taken the effort to contact you, they likely already have a bad first impression of you. If your response is focused on "educating the customer" or is too conscious of what's fair for the business itself, it will probably not
impress.
Great customer support is the kind that might result in a customer sharing their interaction with friends or social media. The support the author mentions in this post isn't likely to do that.
Too late to edit my comment, but here is one example of going above and beyond for this business:
Uncommon Apps should create and maintain a pdf document with fair, useful information about competing podcast apps that do not use the subscription business model.
When someone complains to Uncommon Apps about the subscription model, if Uncommon Apps cannot change the person's mind (which will be the usual case), then Uncommon Apps can offer to forward a list of alternatives.
This would allow Castro support tickets to end with something useful. Uncommon Apps is losing this sale regardless, but at least there is some reputational gain.
Thank you, @dabluck, for sharing what failed. I think stories of failure are incredibly valuable, and more useful than stories of success, which are often post-hoc rationalizations.
I’m sorry all the airchair geniuses in this thread feel compelled to express how they’re so much smarter than you and would never fail… or at least, never admit it.
Lots of worthwhile observations in the article, but I think the framing is a bit off. It sounds transactional and by the numbers.
I think it's fairly well understood that vocal users aren't necessarily representative. The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.
You need to build your own model of who your users are to provide a basis for interpreting user requests: is the support request signal or noise? if the request is coming from someone in your target market, and expressing a pain point, that's potentially an important signal. If the request is to charge only 20% of your current price, that's only useful if you're prepared to consider restructuring your offering (receiving many such emails might signal an opportunity for a budget product with specific feature subset) -- otherwise: "Thanks for your email, we don't have any plans to change our price right now." move on.
By the way, I'm impressed that this is even a conversation for a developer selling through the App Store. I always felt that Apple killed the ability to maintain customer relationships by injecting themselves into the process. Never published on the Mac App store myself.
> I think the framing is a bit off. It sounds transactional and by the numbers.
It's really not possible to avoid that when, at the end of the day, you're doing it to make a living for yourself and your employees, not doing charity work in your free time because you enjoy it.
> The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.
Yep, but that's then called market research, not customer support.
> We have never heard this before. User can provide details for us, but if others aren’t experiencing it, it’s unlikely to be prioritized. Still, useful signal for us.
That's a common mistake. Since the support is of the level you've experienced yourself
> I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use.
You should realize that many people don't contact support with their issues, so the fact that you haven't heard about it before doesn't mean much
> putting too much time into support isn’t a differentiator
> It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request. If I did, by catering more to persnickety power users
Sure, why would a user care about how much time you put into declining to improve the app for them? How is that a differentiator, almost every single app doesn't cater much to power users
The CEO/founder as the L1 support is not the flex it may appear to be.
As a user, if the CEO/founder is answering my questions, I honestly will wonder if this is a one man fly by night operation that will be gone next week.
Also, a satisfactory support experience may not be the fastest one. If I ask for something, L1 says "no", but then escalates to sales, sales say "no", but escalate to the founder, the founder says "yes", the user may feel more "heard" and has a better sense of achievement than if the founder is the L1 who says "yes" immediately. The outcome is the same, but one will feel "earned".
I work partly supporting users. It's been very frustrating and this interesting post has helped me to put the finger on the reason.
It only works when you have a path to not only listen but also improve the situation. If 10% of calls or emails are related to X and you can solve X, then you can reduce 10% of calls or emails. Otherwise is just fixing problems manually but not going to the root cause.
> While in theory building rapport and loyalty sounds nice, what you actually end up doing is spending a lot of time on the people who ask the most of you, but their subscription dollars aren’t worth more, and they’re rarely satisfied. You end up feeling taken advantage of.
This seems an incorrect assumption, or at least a conclusion built on incomplete information and consideration of additional factors. The first one that comes to mind is that these customers will on average be the heaviest users. That doesn’t make them less valuable, that makes them the exact ones most like to be willing to refer others to your product and the most able to do so with specifics on their recommendations and, hopefully, a positive endorsement of the service received, not just the product features.
This implies another aspect as well: even if good support weren’t to get you wider positive awareness, poor customer service and even average service that nonetheless has more negative recommendations to other can lose you business, and that too can have a compounding effect.
In general there’s also no getting around the fact that a smaller number of people will (or should) have disproportionate support requests, unless you’ve got a very homogeneous user base with homogenized use patterns. Or your products &/or documentation are of poor quality.
It’s probably not a bad idea also to take most support requests that aren’t inherently specific to a customer and require intervention as an opportunity & need to review your documentation, perhaps auto surface the most relevant bits it when a person submits a request with a an option “if this answered your question click here and we’ll mark your message as resolved, otherwise we have it, and will be in contact with”.
There’s no getting around the need to provide support and it’s possible for some businesses there could be an ideal global min/max that provides least effort & service cost for then elasticity of price & quality and customer tolerance, but I think if you find yourself in the mindset of “what’s the worst I can get away with” instead of “most I can afford to optimize long term contentment and good will referrals, you could be looking at things wrong. I’m not sure what “relationship” should mean in any case, if not something like what I’ve described.
Hmm fair comment I guess I could've elaborated. I've definitely done a lot of this, but you would be surprised how often you don't build goodwill even when you do resolve the problem.
I am well aware customer support can be hell, and the most vocal customers are not necessarily the most relevant ones. What I’m reading here though, is:
- we don’t care about your pricing feedback. We’ve thought a lot and won’t change our minds
- we don’t care about your vaguely described bug unless it’s been reported multiple times (go use something else, I guess?)
- we don’t care about your easily reproducible bug either, unless it affects a significant % of users
- we don’t care about feature requests, we already know what’s best
This would be a standard approach for an enterprise product, but for a small independent app it’s not surprising it would fail to build rapport with their user base.
(note: I am not a user of this or any other podcast app)
Pretty fair comment RE pricing feedback, I thought I was pretty clear I do care about your bugs quite a bit, but you're not necessarily going to have a good experience reporting it, and it's just not going to build rapport despite my best efforts. Though I guess I wasn't clear enough, tbh I just didn't expect so many people to read it
Sometimes I write angrily to companies. Usually not on the first email (though it can be incredibly formal).
The cases I can remember is bike rental company that didn't want to provide a receipt, airline that didn't want to accept a complaint (by making impossible to understand complaint flows), company that didn't stop stop marketing email after several reports.
So many companies are treating their customers incredibly badly.
This becomes a tax on the companies that does not treat their customers badly.
Bad customer behavior is a cost of doing business - and I honestly understand why customers are coming out hard.
Common wisdom is often common for a reason. Its good to try new things but expect 9/10 experiments that goes against common wisdom to come up with negative results, it's not that you are not smart, its just 1,000,000 hours of cumulative experience vs your personal 1,000.
From my experience building rapport only makes sense with your most valuable users in terms of revene. Everything else is noise. Non-paying users are most demanding. Its great to talk to lots of people in mvp or ppmf stage, after that once you nail your icp and start charging, you should make the human support a paid feature.
I’ll tell you even more, in enterprise b2b saas, usually the company paying few thousand per month would have less questions and requests than the one paying few hundreds.
I built and ran a couple of large games and sites for which I was the sole coder, the daily show runner, and the buck-stops-here responder to support requests for everything from bugs to feature requests to fan mail to "my computer crashed and I got kicked out of the game".
Building rapport is not the reason for doing this. Being liked by everyone is an impossible goal. And yes, there is a class of customers who are power users who think their input should dictate the development roadmap. And yes, there are users who become psychologically reliant on you as their personal Geek Squad. And yes, there are non-technical people who encounter hard to reproduce bugs, who it's worth taking the time to work with if they can help you isolate the problem.
But doing it for "likes" is a terrible idea. I was once put out as a coder to be a public face of a big AAA game, on their dev forum, to interact with fan requests, and I think that was catastrophic both for my own sanity and for the company that chose to field fan mail that way.
With your big fans, you see what you can do about their feature requests. Never promise anything. With people who encounter real bugs or otherwise provide signal, try to turn them into sleuths and get them to beta test your next release. Draw boundaries. Letting your users be your testers is enormously valuable, so respect them and don't stop listening to their feedback. But the overarching goal here is to get value out of the process. Explicitly not to waste your time on being "liked". Because the kind of people who become obsessive over your CS responses are actually the worst customers who don't want to pay for anything anyway, and expect everything to be free.
What I'm saying does not mean to pull back on customer service, at all! It means that the goal is to improve your product, not to suck up to all those categories of customers in the hopes they'll like you more. They will or they won't like your product, and in the end, whether they personally feel that affinity for it is based on their enjoyment of it. If it's based on their sense of importance at being able to order you around, they're not your real customers anyway.
Interesting post. I was a bit confused why they were seeking to build rapport with their users. These people pay a few bucks a month. What's the upside to a close, cosy relationship?
The answer might often be to understand the users' needs better in order to design for it. But OP seems to have a clear idea of how the app should work already. So...unclear.
I wouldn't use the word cozy but in theory loyalty, evangelism, retention, word of mouth would all improve if people had great experiences and felt like I was accessible and responsive, and this might be transferable to other projects, etc. And of course I talk to users to understand their needs, just doesn't mean I implement all their ideas.
Sure, people want a personal human answer. But not as much as they want the correct answer.
Also, I think that we want to communicate with a company (Human or AI), and not a person, quite often. As you’re supporting a business transaction, not making friends. There’s a certain anonymity that comes with the business transaction. I wouldn’t ask for a refund from a friend.
This is a good point and was a good learning for me. Sometimes people just want to vent or whatever to a corporate email, then they actually aren't delighted at all when a person answers addressing their concern.
Porkbun is an interesting case study for this support model. They reply to everything personally, and for me the important thing is not that I'm talking to a human, but that I'm not hearing corporatespeak.
I would even be happy to talk to a bot if it was fine-tuned to speak like a regular person instead of a corporate drone.
> When emails overwhelmed me, I asked a thoughtful user who emailed frequently and seemed to know as much about the product as I did if he’d help answer the emails, so I paid him to do that. And he did a great job, especially in terms of directly solving user problems.
Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!
Let's review some common areas.
- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.
- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.
- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.
- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.
- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.
While working for a telecom operator, I tested the idea of having people paying more for dedicated support. We did a market study.
I turned out that customers are not ready to pay for support. Cognitively, paying for a service and paying on top for this service to work well is not consistent.
As a result, people have minimal support and complain. But they don't value good support either.
NB: companies do pay for (insurance) support, especially for swift resolution. But consumers or small businesses don't want it.
> I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator. I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation.
This is the opening paragraph. I think a lot of the disagreement or criticism here in HN is from people who recognise the author went into this assuming they know better than basically anyone who's ever done anything in customer service before.
They don't say it, but the author seem to start with the assumption that nobody knows or cares about customer support so they do a rubbish job, and all the author needs to do is go in and try and be a decent human and they'll fix customer support.
And the result was what anyone who's ever done any customer support for even half a day would know: it's not that easy, it's generally infuriatingly hard and demoralising to keep all customers happy, and 10% will take 90% of the time/effort until it drains you. This is customer support 101.
I hope this has waved in the author's face the value of having decent conversations with people they trust in the domain first, as they could have saved themselves a lot of time and effort here. I think the article would benefit and get less flack from acknowledging this is the authors learnings, not some new insight into customers.
People keep talking about how much flack I got but I don't think I've ever written anything that has resonated more with people. I'm not mad I got feedback guys I can take it. As for your comment, the title of the piece includes "what I got wrong" so I think it's pretty clear where the learnings were.
I'd like to respectfully disagree with it being clear what the learnings are. Your conclusion says:
> In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do.
The failure here, based on the article, is you had an idea about customer support, and you bought a company to test it. Personally, before getting that far I would expect someone to do some googling or research or conversations with people in the area and they would have told you what they do and why, and why your idea would not work.
What happened? How did you get this far? Did you ignore people, or not talk to people? What was it you had or thought you knew about your idea that lead you to believe it would result in something different?
Another learning from your conclusion:
> Because building loyalty or rapport at the moment something isn’t working and the user is frustrated hasn’t worked. The real positive experience comes when you actually improve the product, so that’s where we’re spending our time.
Again, this is common sense! I refuse to believe this is new to you or anyone else!
I appreciate the response, sorry for the harsh feedback, and thanks for taking to time to actually try and improve customer support. I think you sincerely have some great learnings and experiences from what you've been through here, I just don't think you've really got to the bottom of them with what you've written here yet.
I personally know some businesses in which the key differentiator is excellent human customer support. But then again, we’re talking 5 digit software licenses where that matters a lot more then for simple SaaS subscriptions
IMO this is the problem with the standard App Store business model: free with In-App Purchase. In that situation, the vast majority of people who email you are not customers but rather freeloaders.
My own App Store apps are all upfront paid, which eliminates the freeloaders, so support emails never overwhelm me. Perhaps I'm not maximizing my potential revenue, but I'm doing fine and prefer this business model and relationship with users.
Even with regard to bug reports, paid customers are more invested in doing some "work", responding to my requests for more information about the issue, because they've already invested money into the app and want a return for their investment.
Interesting how this can be different in a B2B setting. I run a B2B SaaS and consider personal support to be very important. While I do see some of what the OP described, the overall experience is mostly very positive. I enjoy talking to customers and from what I see, most customers appreciate honest responses, even if those responses explain why something can't be done right now or is much more complex than it seems (all too often).
The difference is that my customers are mostly engineers in small to medium sized businesses. They understand that 1) ongoing development costs money, hence subscriptions, 2) there are no magic wands and things are indeed more complex than they seem.
This is one of the reasons why I don't want to get into B2C. At a first approximation, people just don't want to spend money, hate subscriptions, have zero appreciation for how much ongoing development costs, do not understand that the money has to come from somewhere and that $5 purchase 6 years ago really doesn't cover the costs, and do not understand the complexity of software and product development.
Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.
Incidentally, I thought personal support would be a competitive differentiator, but I don't think it really works that way. Yes, customers do appreciate it a lot, but so what? Business customers don't talk to each other much, you won't get "viral" recommendations. And new potential customers have no idea how your support works, they think it's the same AI chatbot and knowledge base search as anywhere else.
Having maintained and done tech support for both B2B and B2C products, as a small shop and often solo, B2B customers are far more predictable and less inclined to load you up with nonsense. And your weekends are always free. However, when they do complain, you're up at 6am on a Sunday. When you have a consumer complaint, you're welcome to sleep as long as you want.
This may seem trivial, but it's a proxy for saying that your feet are constantly to the fire with B2B deployments, in a way that you are not held accountable with B2C apps. I personally work better with the B2B stress and motivation... but it's not without its mental overhead.
I also run a B2B SaaS and I could have written this word for word.
The only exception is that I do get a decent amount of word of mouth because many of my customers are individual franchisees in national networks, so they tell their peers who they don’t compete with about me. But that’s not really so much about customer support as the product itself.
The main value I get from doing customer support myself is the same that I get from doing sales myself: learning. I have my pulse directly on what my customers need, like, and dislike about the product.
Secondarily, I do think it helps with both close rate and retention to be able to talk to the business owner, but this might be less true in other niches.
With B2B there’s also the big benefit that quite often, the person buying it and the person paying for it are two different people. That makes it easier for the one you built rapport with to still prefer your services over cheaper alternatives.
Indeed a helpful article for it's detailed insights. Once you think about alternatives, it's clear why everyone else is on the well-known path (such as unhelpful support.)
I've often heard stuff like "telecom provider support sucks" or "IKEA furniture breaks easily."
When you ask people whether they researched support quality before deciding on a provider or whether they considered a $3,000 heavy-wood furniture the boomers had, they immediately sense the accusation in the question: It was their decision to suffer these fates. They then tend to get mad fast.
People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill and to disassemble their furniture in 5 minutes. It's exactly why everyone is optimizing for it.
> People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill
It's rarely 0.03 though in my experience. More like 10 a month or even more between the cheap options with bad support and the better ones. Even if you have one issue every year (sounds high to me), that's over a hundred per support phone call. Makes you think twice about the trade-offs.
Personally I don't think hope is a good strategy. What did you hope for? What was the measurable outcome you wanted? It reads like a big investment with unclear goals.
More generally I learned that giving proper feedback is statistically worse than not doing so.
When I started doing technical interviews I wanted to be different than other companies giving canned unfortunately.
I naively thought that explaining candidates what went wrong would be appreciated, because I would've wanted to know if I was in their position.
To the guy that had 20 technologies in their CV but failed to answer on any topics I would suggest:
"Anything you put on a CV increases the risk of you being asked about it. Maybe try to move those you don't want to talk about to previous experiences instead of a "skills" section. If you list C but can't answer basic pointer or compilation questions, or you put Node.js but can't talk about eventemitters or TypeScript but can't describe a union, you are casting a giant doubt in the other 17 technologies you have listed, even though you might be great at them."
Just to be met with a 300+ likes post on LinkedIn about how my company expected the impossible, was _hiring a team instead of an individual_ and how I was the worst interviewer in the world.
I thought it was a one off, but months later I would get occasionally angry candidates emails arguing my feedback and how I didn't understand how good they are.
Then I realized why corporate bs talk it is the way it is. Genuine content and feedback, especially in the social media age is a liability, it has more cons than pros.
To the writer of the article: you missed a big opportunity with this article by not having an obvious link straight to your product, Castro, and by not telling us in a few words what it does.
It’s not too late to change the first sentence to:
> I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…
I didn't really write this to promote the product and it's not important to understand the content but it's now linked in the first sentence. But since you don't care I think we are good.
Haha, I meant it the way I said it but I see what you're getting at. Perhaps it's better to say one person was genuinely surprised we work on the product all the time and it has to maintained, etc and was happy to support it since that was the case.
Messages from price complainers should be deleted at once. Every business in the world gets this as the most common feedback and the value of that feedback is zero.
"Your product should be cheaper". That will be your most common feedback no matter what you're selling and at what price. A large percentage of the population dedicate their entire lives to complaining about prices.
I've been in a similar position. This is a transactional relationship with hard boundaries and it is good not to look for more in it. The best strategy is to be fast, professional, and to funnel them in a way where they can help themselves. Publishing roadmap and providing community forum for support works for some and others just cannot be helped. Live with that and carry on. No human connection will make them pay ten time the money, so just being responsive and reliable will make you the goto provider for the particular need.
Maybe if your product would get more valuable if you were connecting users together and you were moderator of the community, it would've been different, but it is quite different product to sell.
I started off reading this article thinking "well, anyone who has ever maintained an open source project has almost certainly experienced the unending entitlement of users even when working for free". But after reading the article, I'm not surprised your users dislike you more after communicating with them...
> I have already thought about this a great deal. I am not changing anything based on your email.
> User can provide details for us, but if others aren’t experiencing it, it’s unlikely to be prioritized.
> We know about this, but fixing it is a decent amount of work or low-priority because it’s not a big deal or few users see it.
> a human response detailing why I am unable to solve your problem today and am not even going to try is about the worst thing a user can receive!
> Good in theory, sometimes useful, but often the same small, unrepresentative segment with strong thoughts.
> Castro is an opinionated app and I’ve thought a lot about what we’re building and what we’re going to work on next. It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request.
Your support policy seems to be more along the lines of "you may e-mail me for an explanation of why I'm not interested in your thoughts" than an actual commitment to support for paid customers. You aren't interested in comments on the payment model, bugs, or feature requests.
> why software lends itself to subscription so well [...] no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email
Especially when you're using it to justify scummy practices, it's no wonder that no matter how kindly and carefully you piss on your users, they know it's not raining.
You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products. But does your user experience with other products tell you that you want to subscribe and be nickle-and-dimed for the rest of your life for every last thing? Especially when you're promising to users that while you're still working on the software and that's why they need to pay every month forever, you won't work on the bugs nor features they want? Subscription works "so well" for software because it makes you a lot of money, but it doesn't work well for the users its being forced upon who don't actually want the updates you're working on.
As far as I can tell, your software is not significantly based on ongoing maintenance costs, ergo it does not inherently justify ongoing payments to use. If you let greed stop clouding your eyes, you could adopt the approach that many ethical independent developers use: an option to pay once per major version and keep it for life, with optional subscriptions to try the waters and keep up with the latest and greatest version.
> You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products.
This was the biggest (1) complaint for me - in light of what you discovered from your actual support experience, why was your expectation so off?
Was it that you expected support to be full of "how do I do this complicated thing?" questions that can be answered by an expert? That's an unrealistic expectation, but I guess now you know.
Or was it that you really thought that customers would be happy if you just took the time to explain your pricing model to them (also unrealistic).
It is kind of obvious from the types of emails you get, and the types of responses you give that it was not going to lead to strong customer relationships. If all you're doing is writing a 100 words to say "No, I'm not going to do what you want" that's not going to make things better.
(1) Actually 2nd biggest - the biggest was talking about "buying Castro" but having no explanation/links about who the author is, what Castro is, or how/when/why it was bought.
Pricing is a bad example I guess I should've minimized that part of the post.
I guess I didn't think about it enough, but if someone emailed in with a feature request, or with an opinion that this tab should behave differently or whatever, I thought giving explanation would be helpful. "I actually tried it that way, but it didn't work because X, and Y, and I didn't even think about Z which breaks the whole concept, etc etc." As a dev, these types of explanations would seem meaningful to me. But in reality, these conversations are mostly not helpful for either party. That was the point I was trying to make in the post.
Fair point on 2, I honestly didn't expect anyone to read this tonight and had another post planned I thought might get comments on HN, but I just put this up for now until I could finish that one. I will do better at giving context next time.
I agree his responses could be more compassionate and show more effort, but i feel your characterization is over-critical. There _isnt time_ to chase bugs that aren’t reproducible. The software _cant_ have every form factor, _some things_ need to be set in stone as a North Star. These aren’t scummy practices, these are realities of a time-bounded existence.
> There _isnt time_ to chase bugs that aren’t reproducible.
There absolutely is. I fully engage with any user who is willing to put effort into helping me identify the problem, even if I can't reproduce it myself. Many users are cooperative and will go to great lengths to assist. If they don't, then sure, put it on the backburner as "I literally don't know how I can solve this". But I value my users and fix every single bug I'm capable of fixing.
Is it the most efficient use of time? No, I doubt it. I would probably make more money if I didn't do that. But that's the crux of the issue, isn't it. Software development is already extremely lucrative because the cost of reproduction and shipping is effectively zero, so you have ~infinite margin on every sale after the initial development cost is covered, with a potential market size of ~the entire connected world. Yet so many of us are always chasing more, more, more. It's not enough until you make $500k/yr or sell out for billions.
Don't say "it's not possible". Say "I don't want to do it because I can make more money by not doing it". You're allowed to make that decision. But then you're at least being honest with yourself, and you'll clearly understand why your customers are angrier after communicating with you than before. I can proudly say that my users are happier after communicating with me than before.
The customer can reproduce it, or they wouldn't be complaining about it - and if you connect with them you can get much of the detail you need; especially if they're "test-support" inclined and can help diagnose possible causes.
Even just oodles of debugging for a particular customer's build can go a long way.
Thanks for reading. I'm not sure what you think is scummy unless it's just having a subscription? If so, you are going to love my next article on how subscription apps are the best invention ever and the only business model that makes sense! Definitely subscribe so you don't miss that one.
The thing you have to remember is that there are thousands of products out there all trying to charge a subscription, and most people aren't going to justify taking on more than a very small handful of them at any time. Plus (not directed at you specifically, just in general), your product almost certainly isn't as good or as important to the customer as you think it is unless you've genuinely identified some niche nobody else is operating in, of you have an exceptionally polished product with few competitors.
People are however consistently willing to regularly make one-off purchases to get something they can "own". I've bought way more lifetime licenses for software than I've taken out subscriptions. When you consider that nobody stays subscribed for life, there's always a number that you can charge for lifetime which is in fact functionally equivalent to a subscription anyway.
It’s for these reasons LLMs are going to chip away at silly subscriptions. When many projects get 70% of what the user needs and the maintainers aren’t willing or able to address what paying customers want…why bother paying anymore when you’ll soon be able to have just those bespoke features/fixes/integrations built yourself?
It seems to often boil down to the fact that paying customers are paying to solve a problem so they don’t need to deal with it. Whereas developers are more interested in writing code than solving said problems for customers.
One suggestion — when you have an unsatisfying answer for a customer like “I can’t reproduce that”, or “I won’t build that feature”, the customer may not appreciate the amount of effort you have invested in that decision. A 30 minute phone call/video call may communicate more effectively the depth of care you have. Even if you convey the same information, people _love_ talking to the owner/founder, it is a very strong indication that you care about their thoughts.
Thanks it's hard to find time to do 30 minute calls as this is a glorified side project, but I actually had the same idea and recorded some calls with customers for public consumption as I thought might improve some of this communication, but I never got around to editing it and wasn't sure if the content would be compelling.
Definitely feels like some form of video might be superior vs email, which is easiest in some ways but also seems to be a bit of a barrier in thoughtful communication.
You know what’s also great? A five minute phone call. Cuts through endless email chains and creates an instant human connection. You don’t need 30 minutes if you have competent support personnel who know how to deal with needy customers.
Personally I'd guess this is a big part of the issue. If this is a glorified side project, you really don't / can't care _too_ much about everything. I don't mean that as a criticism, it's just if you have little time to give the product will improve little, and the customers will get a just-ok experience. It's not surprising that translates poorly to customers. People like devotion; luke-warm commitment is dissapointing.
On the contrary I care a great deal, an unreasonable amount really, but since it isn't my primary gig my time is limited and I have to try to spend it where it is most effective.
>I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation.
I run an app with 16,000 users and receive 2–5 support tickets per week. I read every one of them.
Around 20% of my app has been built based on user suggestions.
People are generally kind and promote my app across multiple platforms for free. I don't have any budget for marketing.
Users don't always show their appreciation with words. Instead, they show it by eagerly helping resolve issues providing clear steps to reproduce bugs, sending screenshots or videos, and responding quickly to follow up questions. I also regularly come across people recommending my app on Reddit or in YouTube comment sections, which often surprises me. :)
If you're supporting your users well, they're probably giving back in their own way too. :)
What app?
This is all going to hinge in a tremendous way based on what kind of app you have and who your users are.
This is poster’s last show HN; homepage features some 16,000 user claim. App appears to be free, which I suspect will rather drastically change the composition of incoming support messages.
https://macrocodex.app/
people often link to our guide, for example on this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/tirzepatidecompound/comments/1omfgx...
Sometimes people link to our "guides", like this one https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/measure/bodyfat/
my app is in fitness field https://macrocodex.app/ and the people who use it are:
1. Bodybuilders
2. Overweight / obese / skinny fat / underweight individuals
3. General gym crowd
Bodybuilders, well they immediately understand the app on first impression.
One user told me he has kidney disease and asked if I could add a “low protein” diet mode, so he could reduce protein intake below standard recommendations. I had never faced this requirement before, but after hearing him out, I decided to add it. This is just one of the many interactions.
Then there is another group, people who have spent a long time being underweight or overweight and have started attributing it to genetics. I often see posts like “I am genetically fat” or “I am an ectomorph / hardgainer"; "I can’t gain weight no matter how much I eat” in subreddits and fitness groups. Don't you dare to call them out of anything, they'll get mad! but are willing to give app try especially if they hear about it from someone else.
They typically use it for 2–5 weeks, and then they start gaining or losing weight depending on their goal. They are genuinely surprised that it’s possible.
Once they start seeing results, they usually just keep going.
I am not particularly good at communication, nor a guy with social skill.
What you neglected to mention is that your app is free.
If this is something you’re able to do and people like it, I think that’s great.
However, the post is about a paid app and that’s going to have a significant influence on the type of support requests you get, and whether or not it makes financial sense to develop according to those requests.
I know this isn’t a very interesting comment, but just to provide some balance to the mostly negative comments I’m seeing:
It’s interesting that you did the experiment, and I appreciate you sharing your results. It all seems reasonable, even if a bit depressing.
A lot of people in the comments are saying he did it for "likes" - that's a pretty harsh reading of the article.
What I think a lot of people are missing is that the difference between supporting corporates who spend up to millions per year on your product and supporting end-users who are literlly counting every cent they spend is a huge gulf in terms of expectations, technical ability, professionalism.... the list goes on. It's a completely different game.
I thought the article was a brilliant summary of why you simply can't help all the users all the time. It's a hard lesson to learn in the world of Tech Support. We all want to be the knight is shining armour solving customer problems, but the skill to be able to say "no" in the right way is not universal.
To those ragging on the author - there are huge numbers of people who, even if you paid them to use your software, they would still complain and swear at you. It's just life. And dealing with the competing interests of customers, time pressures, personal sanity and many more is almost exactly the job description of Tech Support.
Thanks. I'm not really understanding the likes comment. What are likes in this context? I was very explicit in the post I thought providing better support would build customer relationships and improve retention, and I learned that really isn't true. Also I wrote this a couple days ago so the blog would have content and only submitted on a whim, had I known I'd get 10K views and 100 comments I would've written it more carefully
Thanks for posting this. I have experienced similar. I have found that nasty bug reports are most effective. Good data, and the people are too cheesed off/embarrassed, to follow up, after you address it. Occasionally, it can actually be turned around, and they can become evangelists.
I have integrated a simple feedback form into the app, with the option to send anonymously. That seems to help.
> had I known I'd get 10K views and 100 comments
Is that still the case, after being frontpaged on HN (but most comments are probably here)?
All comments here yeah. Almost to 11K views and there were less than 50 before I posted, with a dozen new subscribers to the blog.
I mention the value of negative feedback, here (in my own blog): https://littlegreenviper.com/the-road-most-traveled-by/#feed...
I don’t really care whether or not I get many views (spoiler: I don’t -too many words). I write for myself.
I think
> I thought ... people would appreciate this,
gets translated into "I'm only doing this so that people will star/upvote/'like and subscribe' "
"likes" -> the universal currency of internet fame
This was also my thought! OP is going to get a lot of arrows for this article, but it's a genuinely great write up that matches a lot of my experience with mass-market products.
It's a great account for people to reflect on. I've immediately sent this article to several early-stage founders who are burning astounding amounts of time on undesirable customers.
Everybody on HN knows better than OP how to run their own business and could absolutely please 100% of customers or potential customers 100% of the time. Apparently.
Idealism doesn't survive contact with reality.
I’m a bit doubtful with this conclusion, as apparently in many cases humans will rather refute reality is meaningful if it fails to pass their idealistic proof-test.
Same here. I feel it's what every software owner thinks, but no one is willing to admit because of the backlash.
Thinking about customer support as a ‘differentiator’ or a way to drive profit is depressing. You should simply strive to do what’s best for your customers. The sort of feedback you’re getting is golden and in the right hands can be put to use rather than be dismissed. Assuming that people who disagree with your pricing model just don’t understand how business works is really telling. You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.
Your support strategy is missing an outlet for needy users to ask questions, effectively blaming customers for a structural flaw in your own setup. You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other and devs can occasionally jump in to help or note pain points. Furthermore, your development and QA processes clearly need scrutiny. The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.
It’s completely okay to define your product however you want and to reject feature requests, but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.
> You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.
And for some subscription situations, you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you.
There's a 'PhotoSync' app that offers a premium option for either $1/month or $24 for life. Presumably because they looked at the average subscription duration and found it was in the region of 2 years. Modulo the time value of money and per-transaction processing costs.
Personally I much preferred the one-off purchase, even though it's not clear I'll be using the app in 24 months, because it fits a lot better with my (somewhat chaotic) way of managing my money.
> you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you
There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions. You can't go to a local bakery and pay $24 for life to get fresh rolls every day.
Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.
> there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions
This is clearly incorrect given that there are plenty of software developers who offer lifetime purchases. In fact there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of.
On a lower level, all that matters is the numbers. If your average customer stays subscribed for 24 months, then charging a lifetime fee equal to 24 months is equivalent to a subscription model. At that point it's irrelevant what's "sustainable" since 24 months is the max you can expect to charge on average anyway.
Software was always a subscription you bought version two then version three... It wasn't obviously or explicitly a subscription but it still was one.
That isn't the same thing at all.
If I buy version 2 then it's mine and I can continue to use it for as long as I want, if I'm happy with the feature set. I can ignore version 3 or choose to buy it. If I buy it then I now own two products instead of one. Sometimes the older version might even be better (e.g. features I like have been removed or made worse).
With a subscription model I'm forced to pay again and again even if I'm perfectly happy with version 2.
In theory you are correct but realistically you will upgrade.
This is betraying a way of thinking that suggests what's normal now is the way it's always been.
Given "there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of", it's safe to assume we're talking about more than a couple of years ago. To talk as if most users always used to upgrade, suggests you might be young enough not to remember the software industry before a decade or two ago.
In general, users very much didn't upgrade. That's exactly why the industry forced subscriptions on us. They weren't getting income anymore, when the older version of their software did the job perfectly well.
I'm old enough to remember that time. People did up grade. Some of them rushed out to buy the latest version when it was released. Some of them waited until they got a new computer. Many of them tried to not upgrade until someone using the new version sent them a file and then they couldn't open it thus forcing an upgrade. A few only upgraded every other version.
I wasn't an automatic everybody upgraded on day one like subscriptions are, but it amounted to similar: regular upgrades over time.
The difference is without subscription, I can be pretty sure the next major version will benefit me.
With subscription,the only thing certain is that the seller wants to do as little as possible to keep taking my money. This tends to result on product updates that benefit them.
Except in the case of a natural monopoly (which doesn't apply to software) you can always switch to something else. Which means the seller needs to remain better than the alternatives.
I remember an article in Byte magazine circa 1982 or so which talked about how the software business sucks because it goes like
(1) Raise capital and spend a year developing a product
(2) Release the product, make a certain amount of money, then revenue dries up
(3) Pay yourself a bit and feed the rest of the money into develop version 2.0
(4) A year later it is struggle to sell version 2.0 because you're not just competing with applications from other people you are competing with your old 1.0, your most satisfied customers might be the least likely to upgrade
And that assumes development for 2.0 goes according to plan! As a software developer who gets a paycheck my life is easier working on a subscription based project my life is easier because management is not facing a financial crisis because a project is running a few months late.
As a customer though I often like paying ahead and I've been through a few cycles like this with Plex. Like I see the lifetime offering from Plex and I have the money now and it looks like a good deal... Then two years later they come up with something that really alienates me (that FAST service) and I hate being pushed into something I want nothing to deal with. So I go to Jellyfin and it is a godawful mess that I never get working quite right, just watching a movie with family and friends becomes an exercise in humiliation.
And I'm thinking... I don't have the option of exit [1] because I can't cancel my Plex pass! If on the other hand I was paying for a monthly subscription they are motivated to care what I think [2]
Now funny I had this summer when I was trying to gentle a stray cat [3] in a room in the other house and wound up watching a lot of Tubi, came to the conclusion FAST wasn't so bad, switched back to Plex, got a monthly subscription, and I am highly satisfied.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model
[2] I hate to be this way but when I have trouble w/ amazon I write to jeff@amazon.com and point out that it makes no sense to screw me for $20 because I have a say in at least $2M NPV of AWS cloud spending, when you consider a Prime subscription and how much an ordinary person could buy from AMZN in a lifetime, AMZN has a tremendous amount to lose from "exit"
[3] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/bobb
We like to think of physical products as one offs where what you buy tomorrow is the same as what you buy today.
But I have run a bakery for 5 years, and you get better day by day, you introduce new techniques, find different flours, optimize bake times for fluffiness, crispiness, and taste. The croissants we make today are much better than what we made during our first month.
We improved our product just like how software improves, but we did it without a croissant subscription, but by selling its own version as its own thing day by day.
What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited. In the physical world, we have wear and tear, or in the case of croissants, decomposition or consumption which limit customers from using the same product forever.
Can the same not be found for many software products?
To use iOS as an example, the OPs app Castro charges for night mode, but night mode via OS controls didn’t always exist in iOS so a theoretical Castro v1 could have been released without before it, and v2 would include that new feature. Or when inevitably, v1 no longer works on new iOS versions, people would have to upgrade.
We don't charge for night mode. I don't really think versioning would work very well for us, many have tried, but I do agree Apple should facilitate other business models like this in a better way.
> Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.
The gambling goes both ways. Your $1 subscription price is betting that you can convince each user to keep on paying that subscription forever, their $24 lifetime price is betting that customers are going to churn after a year on average.
Your gamble is perhaps slightly safer, in the sense that if subscriptions fall so too do the ongoing costs. But there is a floor to costs (i.e. you need to keep paying your team), so both approaches are pretty dependent on the sales funnel bringing in new subscribers
> There is no such price
If it’s sustainable at $1/month, and a customer is willing to prepay $1200 for a 100 year subscription, that sounds sustainable to me.
It’s sustainable at $1/month at current costs, but those costs will go up over time. The subscription price could be raised accordingly but they can’t go back and ask for an inflation adjustment from people who bought it.
Technically you could invest the money that hasn’t been used to cover the lifetime user’s costs.
Even leaving it in a the right checking account, it’ll earn interest.
Depends though what you pay for the one-time price. You can pay an offline version of the application (no extra costs afterwards), or a limited period of SaaS application updates (let's say 3 years).
I agree that paying a one time price and expecting continuos updates and new features is not reasonable.
For the majority of software I use, I don't really care about continuous upgrades and new features, as long as it works with the feature set I signed up for.
A great example for me is the Xodo app on Android. It's by far the best PDF editor that I've found on Android, particularly for annotating with a digital pen. Some features are locked. If I want to unlock them, it's $5 a month. I get nothing out of that which isn't already in the app. I'm happy to pay a one-off fee for the work the developers have done up to that point. I'm definitely not happy to add another $5 a month to my pile of subscriptions.
For me the boundary is this: (1) If I get something of value every month (e.g. use of a cloud server, or something which obviously needs regular updating like Netflix) -> subscription justified; (2) If I just want to use what I can already see in the app -> very unlikely I'll ever subscribe unless the product is absolutely essential to me and there are no competitors.
A good example of the latter is Skritter. I don't care about new functionality, but there literally isn't another app which can do what it does, so I pay the subscription.
As you have demonstrated with this comment, customers don’t really understand that there’s no such thing as “the product is done and costs are no longer incurred” even if the product is 100% done, and this is especially true on commercial app stores.
It costs $99/year to keep your app on the Apple App Store. Stop paying and all apps are delisted.
It costs $5/month to maintain a business phone line (Apple needs a phone number)
It costs $10/month for a mail forwarding service (or else Apple will publish your home address)
It costs ~$100/year to maintain an LLC.
A developer must buy a new Mac every 10-12 years or so just to maintain basic OS support (we can call that ~$50 a year for a MacBook Neo, but if you want your code compile to not be painful you’ll probably grab a MacBook Pro).
Domain name? $15/year. Business email, $10/year.
> as long as it works with the feature set I signed up for.
Yes. On the exact major OS version you signed up on.
It’s worse than that, stop paying Apple $99/year and all your apps get pulled.
The biggest tension between software and one-off purchases is related to bugfixing, and especially security. It makes sense that you don't expect new features for a product that you paid for once. But, what is the case with bugs? If the product mostly does what it promised to do, but sometimes crashes, do you expect those crashes to be fixed for your version, or not? What it you're using a 10-year old version and a new critical (say, unauthenticated remote execution) vulnerability is found in it? Do you expect to get it resolved as part of the price you originally paid, or would you be ok with being told you have to buy a new version if you want this ?
There's some merit to your arguments, but not enough to justify a subscription:
- Subscriptions are marketed as being a lot more than just bugfixes - new features being the big one. But there's usually no cheaper "bugfix-only" subscription, which means that someone who doesn't care about new features has to pay for them anyway.
- To be honest - yes, I do expect bugfixes for free if I've paid to buy the product. After all, a bug is a defect, and products are usually sold with the expectation that they will be fit for purpose. That's the principle which applies to physical consumer products, so why should it be any different for software? If I bought software that calculates my taxes for me, and it turns out a bug means that it applies the wrong tax rules, then I haven't got what I paid for. Why am I expected to pay every month just to make my software do what it was supposed to do in the first place?
- The developer is still incentivised to fix bugs in order to attract new purchasers.
- Subscriptions aren't a magic solution financially anyway, because there's an average limit to how long a customer stays subscribed for.
Heck, I'd pay to explicitly not get the new features and only get the security and bug fixes in several cases. The "new" features is in some cases just a reshuffling of the UI and removal of features I actually do use.
How do manufacturers of physical products handle defects? Aren't they obligated to correct defects through recalls and similar mechanisms? I don't see why software wouldn't work similarly.
A good chunk of the software on my device doesn't need to access the internet, another big chunk does so using standard mechanisms (i.e. libcurl) that could be security patched out of band by the OS.
The only reason I routinely need to update most software, is that Apple/Google keep changing device screen resolutions/cutouts and they keep killing off old APIs
$1/day forever is around $9125 using the safe drawdown rate of 4% per year.
So if you’re a bakery and a customer offers $9000+ for a fresh roll every day forever, you should almost certainly take them up on that offer. A smart baker could probably get that number sub-$5000, but you’ll always come out okay around 25x the yearly cost (in this case, $365).
Similarly, if the amortized yearly cost of a customer is $12 (ie, $1 per month), then a $300 forever price is financially indistinguishable from a permanent subscription. (Actually, better: time value of money, they can’t cancel the annuity you buy, etc.)
So there always is a price where that is financially viable.
I find this:
> but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.
Somehow incredibly ironic when applied to you comment itself...
How so?
I’m missing the irony.
The comment is basically doing exactly what it accused OP of doing: behaving as if the commenter has "singularly thought through every problem in an armchair" and knows better than OP who actually tried doing it.
Could be an armchair, could be a toilet, either seems a reasonable standard for a commenter on a messageboard, are we expecting a focus group or something?
No, but pointing out the irony of the situation is still helpful to anyone reading it.
None of these categories seem to build any meaningful rapport. Any honest answer I give is deeply unsatisfying to both parties, and we typically have better data from telemetry or crash logs than the emails provide. It’s certainly useful for us to receive them, but there’s not a helpful response I can give.
I don't know how you read the blog post but it seems your interpretation is uncharitable to say the least.
He wrote he already has good enough telemetry, there is just not much he can write in an e-mail to customer, besides generic "we know the issue thank you for the report" that would be useful for the customer and for themselves.
> You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other
tell me you've never run anything without telling me you've never run anything...
After a long day answering emails, I love kicking back and moderating my support forum.
> You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.
I think the article was very clear that they had already accepted that, and had already decided it was worth never getting their money.
> The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.
Yes and no.
You want enough logging and telemetry that you can roll out an update to 2% of users and know if something is terribly wrong before you roll it out to the other 98%.
On the other hand, you probably don't want enough telemetry to detect that customer Jim Smith has trouble with WebRTC when joining calls without a microphone while using Firefox and Cloudflare Warp with split tunnels enabled.
> you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself.
Which is exactly why HN's anti-telemetry stance is so unjustified.
Why exactly? "Error logging" is mentioned there as an alternative. I would have thought that if you can do telemetry you ought to be able to generate a local log file that is readable enough for the customer to feel confident about sending part of it back to you without breaking the law or their contracts with other parties.
Why would customers want great support on a podcast app? Who is choosing a podcast app based on their customer support? How many problems can you possibly have?
US Mobile, TJ's, Amazon, Apple, Mullvad, HN come to mind when I think of companies with great support and I recommend them because of it.
All of these are closer to essential services with competition and frequent problems so I appreciate and interact with the support frequently.
When I was in college, I worked at a bakery and actually made some long-term friends by talking to customers that came into the store. I later used this job experience to get an email support job, answering questions that users had about our software plugin. Never made any long-term friends with customers there, even if they emailed us once a month.
The difference is that email / online support has no “human downtime moments.” At the bakery, I usually would talk to people while we were waiting for their order to be finished heating up / cooking / etc. So there was a moment or two people standing around waiting, which naturally leads to a conversation. Or at least it did a decade ago when cellphones weren’t quite as omnipresent.
I wonder if having a monthly Zoom “open office hours” type thing would replicate some of this feeling in a software context. Probably not, but it might be better than just answering emails.
There's also the fact that, email / online support leave records. You really don't want to leave a written record of you asking someone about their life, as when/if it gets audited - you can possibly get into trouble.
I think this is an uncharitable reading of GDPR that is probably not backed by actual decisions?
Who said anything about GDPR? If someone reveals to you that they are in some kind of protected class, then there’s a risk that anything you do they don’t like could see you tagged for discrimination even if it’s how you’d treat any customer in the same situation.
If you have evidence it's the usual approach (e.g. written policy documents, aggregate statistics), then it should be fine. If it's a situation that only comes up for certain demographics, and you handle it poorly such that members of those demographics consistently have a worse time than everyone else, then that might be a legitimate discrimination issue even if there's no malice intended.
> 99% of the time, no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email.
When I was in a product leadership position I liked to spend time doing some of the customer support work. This is a common experience. Customers who write angry emails do not care about your reasons. They want something from you (cheaper rates, a specific feature they need, a discount, a freebie) and they do not care about anything else. It’s the digital version of the “I’d like to speak to your manager” customer who thinks that if there’s a 10% chance of getting what they want by being a jerk then it’s worth pushing as hard as they can.
Some times you’d get a little satisfaction from someone who realized there was a person who cared on the receiving end of that email address. Made it feel worthwhile.
Most of them are just doing some transactional game where they think that they can exercise some power over the company if they complain loudly enough.
This also has a lot of cultural differences. Some of the customer contact we’d get from one of the countries we served were out of control mean. There were casual threats of violence from time to time and 90% of them came from one country, which I’m not going to name but I’ve added it to my mental list of places not to visit. It was weird that it was so consistent.
> “I’d like to speak to your manager” customer who thinks that if there’s a 10% chance of getting what they want by being a jerk then it’s worth pushing as hard as they can.
Throw those people out immediately. Not only are they bad customers themselves, they also drive away the good ones.
> Some of the customer contact we’d get from one of the countries we served were out of control mean.
genuinely curious. Which country was it?
Dude, they've already explicitly said they won't say.
The author hired someone with technical knowledge, but that's not enough.
Technical knowledge and people skills are different things.
If someone has taken the effort to contact you, they likely already have a bad first impression of you. If your response is focused on "educating the customer" or is too conscious of what's fair for the business itself, it will probably not impress.
Great customer support is the kind that might result in a customer sharing their interaction with friends or social media. The support the author mentions in this post isn't likely to do that.
Too late to edit my comment, but here is one example of going above and beyond for this business:
Uncommon Apps should create and maintain a pdf document with fair, useful information about competing podcast apps that do not use the subscription business model.
When someone complains to Uncommon Apps about the subscription model, if Uncommon Apps cannot change the person's mind (which will be the usual case), then Uncommon Apps can offer to forward a list of alternatives.
This would allow Castro support tickets to end with something useful. Uncommon Apps is losing this sale regardless, but at least there is some reputational gain.
> If someone has taken the effort to contact you, they likely already have a bad first impression of you.
Quite the opposite. If somebody has a bad first impression, they will not bother contacting a business. They'll find an alternative.
It depends on the nature of the interaction.
If I contact a company to decide if I want to become their customer, I probably like them.
If I contact a company about a post-sales problem or for technical support, it's a different story.
> post-sales
Then that's not your first impression.
That's fair. I suppose "current impression" would have been a better choice of words.
Thank you, @dabluck, for sharing what failed. I think stories of failure are incredibly valuable, and more useful than stories of success, which are often post-hoc rationalizations.
I’m sorry all the airchair geniuses in this thread feel compelled to express how they’re so much smarter than you and would never fail… or at least, never admit it.
>The real positive experience comes when you actually improve the product
Yes, it turns out "fix the bugs" is a real world solution to "what should we be doing to make people like our app"
It's like they're traveling south to go north, and eventually get there by going around the pole.
Lots of worthwhile observations in the article, but I think the framing is a bit off. It sounds transactional and by the numbers.
I think it's fairly well understood that vocal users aren't necessarily representative. The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.
You need to build your own model of who your users are to provide a basis for interpreting user requests: is the support request signal or noise? if the request is coming from someone in your target market, and expressing a pain point, that's potentially an important signal. If the request is to charge only 20% of your current price, that's only useful if you're prepared to consider restructuring your offering (receiving many such emails might signal an opportunity for a budget product with specific feature subset) -- otherwise: "Thanks for your email, we don't have any plans to change our price right now." move on.
By the way, I'm impressed that this is even a conversation for a developer selling through the App Store. I always felt that Apple killed the ability to maintain customer relationships by injecting themselves into the process. Never published on the Mac App store myself.
> I think the framing is a bit off. It sounds transactional and by the numbers.
It's really not possible to avoid that when, at the end of the day, you're doing it to make a living for yourself and your employees, not doing charity work in your free time because you enjoy it.
> The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.
Yep, but that's then called market research, not customer support.
> We have never heard this before. User can provide details for us, but if others aren’t experiencing it, it’s unlikely to be prioritized. Still, useful signal for us.
That's a common mistake. Since the support is of the level you've experienced yourself
> I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use.
You should realize that many people don't contact support with their issues, so the fact that you haven't heard about it before doesn't mean much
> putting too much time into support isn’t a differentiator
> It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request. If I did, by catering more to persnickety power users
Sure, why would a user care about how much time you put into declining to improve the app for them? How is that a differentiator, almost every single app doesn't cater much to power users
The CEO/founder as the L1 support is not the flex it may appear to be.
As a user, if the CEO/founder is answering my questions, I honestly will wonder if this is a one man fly by night operation that will be gone next week.
Also, a satisfactory support experience may not be the fastest one. If I ask for something, L1 says "no", but then escalates to sales, sales say "no", but escalate to the founder, the founder says "yes", the user may feel more "heard" and has a better sense of achievement than if the founder is the L1 who says "yes" immediately. The outcome is the same, but one will feel "earned".
I work partly supporting users. It's been very frustrating and this interesting post has helped me to put the finger on the reason.
It only works when you have a path to not only listen but also improve the situation. If 10% of calls or emails are related to X and you can solve X, then you can reduce 10% of calls or emails. Otherwise is just fixing problems manually but not going to the root cause.
> While in theory building rapport and loyalty sounds nice, what you actually end up doing is spending a lot of time on the people who ask the most of you, but their subscription dollars aren’t worth more, and they’re rarely satisfied. You end up feeling taken advantage of.
This seems an incorrect assumption, or at least a conclusion built on incomplete information and consideration of additional factors. The first one that comes to mind is that these customers will on average be the heaviest users. That doesn’t make them less valuable, that makes them the exact ones most like to be willing to refer others to your product and the most able to do so with specifics on their recommendations and, hopefully, a positive endorsement of the service received, not just the product features.
This implies another aspect as well: even if good support weren’t to get you wider positive awareness, poor customer service and even average service that nonetheless has more negative recommendations to other can lose you business, and that too can have a compounding effect.
In general there’s also no getting around the fact that a smaller number of people will (or should) have disproportionate support requests, unless you’ve got a very homogeneous user base with homogenized use patterns. Or your products &/or documentation are of poor quality.
It’s probably not a bad idea also to take most support requests that aren’t inherently specific to a customer and require intervention as an opportunity & need to review your documentation, perhaps auto surface the most relevant bits it when a person submits a request with a an option “if this answered your question click here and we’ll mark your message as resolved, otherwise we have it, and will be in contact with”.
There’s no getting around the need to provide support and it’s possible for some businesses there could be an ideal global min/max that provides least effort & service cost for then elasticity of price & quality and customer tolerance, but I think if you find yourself in the mindset of “what’s the worst I can get away with” instead of “most I can afford to optimize long term contentment and good will referrals, you could be looking at things wrong. I’m not sure what “relationship” should mean in any case, if not something like what I’ve described.
> We have never heard this before. User can provide details for us, but if others aren’t experiencing it, it’s unlikely to be prioritized
> We have heard this before, but we cannot see it or replicate it. The user gets to do work for us and/or get no resolution
Well, if you're not willing to resolve individual customer's problem then don't expect to build goodwill with just prompt reply on support!
Hmm fair comment I guess I could've elaborated. I've definitely done a lot of this, but you would be surprised how often you don't build goodwill even when you do resolve the problem.
I am well aware customer support can be hell, and the most vocal customers are not necessarily the most relevant ones. What I’m reading here though, is:
- we don’t care about your pricing feedback. We’ve thought a lot and won’t change our minds
- we don’t care about your vaguely described bug unless it’s been reported multiple times (go use something else, I guess?)
- we don’t care about your easily reproducible bug either, unless it affects a significant % of users
- we don’t care about feature requests, we already know what’s best
This would be a standard approach for an enterprise product, but for a small independent app it’s not surprising it would fail to build rapport with their user base.
(note: I am not a user of this or any other podcast app)
Pretty fair comment RE pricing feedback, I thought I was pretty clear I do care about your bugs quite a bit, but you're not necessarily going to have a good experience reporting it, and it's just not going to build rapport despite my best efforts. Though I guess I wasn't clear enough, tbh I just didn't expect so many people to read it
Sometimes I write angrily to companies. Usually not on the first email (though it can be incredibly formal).
The cases I can remember is bike rental company that didn't want to provide a receipt, airline that didn't want to accept a complaint (by making impossible to understand complaint flows), company that didn't stop stop marketing email after several reports.
So many companies are treating their customers incredibly badly.
This becomes a tax on the companies that does not treat their customers badly.
Bad customer behavior is a cost of doing business - and I honestly understand why customers are coming out hard.
Common wisdom is often common for a reason. Its good to try new things but expect 9/10 experiments that goes against common wisdom to come up with negative results, it's not that you are not smart, its just 1,000,000 hours of cumulative experience vs your personal 1,000.
From my experience building rapport only makes sense with your most valuable users in terms of revene. Everything else is noise. Non-paying users are most demanding. Its great to talk to lots of people in mvp or ppmf stage, after that once you nail your icp and start charging, you should make the human support a paid feature.
I’ll tell you even more, in enterprise b2b saas, usually the company paying few thousand per month would have less questions and requests than the one paying few hundreds.
I built and ran a couple of large games and sites for which I was the sole coder, the daily show runner, and the buck-stops-here responder to support requests for everything from bugs to feature requests to fan mail to "my computer crashed and I got kicked out of the game".
Building rapport is not the reason for doing this. Being liked by everyone is an impossible goal. And yes, there is a class of customers who are power users who think their input should dictate the development roadmap. And yes, there are users who become psychologically reliant on you as their personal Geek Squad. And yes, there are non-technical people who encounter hard to reproduce bugs, who it's worth taking the time to work with if they can help you isolate the problem.
But doing it for "likes" is a terrible idea. I was once put out as a coder to be a public face of a big AAA game, on their dev forum, to interact with fan requests, and I think that was catastrophic both for my own sanity and for the company that chose to field fan mail that way.
With your big fans, you see what you can do about their feature requests. Never promise anything. With people who encounter real bugs or otherwise provide signal, try to turn them into sleuths and get them to beta test your next release. Draw boundaries. Letting your users be your testers is enormously valuable, so respect them and don't stop listening to their feedback. But the overarching goal here is to get value out of the process. Explicitly not to waste your time on being "liked". Because the kind of people who become obsessive over your CS responses are actually the worst customers who don't want to pay for anything anyway, and expect everything to be free.
What I'm saying does not mean to pull back on customer service, at all! It means that the goal is to improve your product, not to suck up to all those categories of customers in the hopes they'll like you more. They will or they won't like your product, and in the end, whether they personally feel that affinity for it is based on their enjoyment of it. If it's based on their sense of importance at being able to order you around, they're not your real customers anyway.
Interesting post. I was a bit confused why they were seeking to build rapport with their users. These people pay a few bucks a month. What's the upside to a close, cosy relationship?
The answer might often be to understand the users' needs better in order to design for it. But OP seems to have a clear idea of how the app should work already. So...unclear.
I wouldn't use the word cozy but in theory loyalty, evangelism, retention, word of mouth would all improve if people had great experiences and felt like I was accessible and responsive, and this might be transferable to other projects, etc. And of course I talk to users to understand their needs, just doesn't mean I implement all their ideas.
Sure, people want a personal human answer. But not as much as they want the correct answer.
Also, I think that we want to communicate with a company (Human or AI), and not a person, quite often. As you’re supporting a business transaction, not making friends. There’s a certain anonymity that comes with the business transaction. I wouldn’t ask for a refund from a friend.
This is a good point and was a good learning for me. Sometimes people just want to vent or whatever to a corporate email, then they actually aren't delighted at all when a person answers addressing their concern.
Porkbun is an interesting case study for this support model. They reply to everything personally, and for me the important thing is not that I'm talking to a human, but that I'm not hearing corporatespeak.
I would even be happy to talk to a bot if it was fine-tuned to speak like a regular person instead of a corporate drone.
> When emails overwhelmed me, I asked a thoughtful user who emailed frequently and seemed to know as much about the product as I did if he’d help answer the emails, so I paid him to do that. And he did a great job, especially in terms of directly solving user problems.
Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!
Let's review some common areas.
- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.
- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.
- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.
- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.
- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.
While working for a telecom operator, I tested the idea of having people paying more for dedicated support. We did a market study.
I turned out that customers are not ready to pay for support. Cognitively, paying for a service and paying on top for this service to work well is not consistent.
As a result, people have minimal support and complain. But they don't value good support either.
NB: companies do pay for (insurance) support, especially for swift resolution. But consumers or small businesses don't want it.
US Mobile has great support and great prices and is constantly recommended because of it.
Asks for feedback, gets feedback, complains.
It started with agreeable cases, then ended up on a holier than thou attitude.
> I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator. I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation.
This is the opening paragraph. I think a lot of the disagreement or criticism here in HN is from people who recognise the author went into this assuming they know better than basically anyone who's ever done anything in customer service before.
They don't say it, but the author seem to start with the assumption that nobody knows or cares about customer support so they do a rubbish job, and all the author needs to do is go in and try and be a decent human and they'll fix customer support.
And the result was what anyone who's ever done any customer support for even half a day would know: it's not that easy, it's generally infuriatingly hard and demoralising to keep all customers happy, and 10% will take 90% of the time/effort until it drains you. This is customer support 101.
I hope this has waved in the author's face the value of having decent conversations with people they trust in the domain first, as they could have saved themselves a lot of time and effort here. I think the article would benefit and get less flack from acknowledging this is the authors learnings, not some new insight into customers.
People keep talking about how much flack I got but I don't think I've ever written anything that has resonated more with people. I'm not mad I got feedback guys I can take it. As for your comment, the title of the piece includes "what I got wrong" so I think it's pretty clear where the learnings were.
That's fair, thanks for the response.
I'd like to respectfully disagree with it being clear what the learnings are. Your conclusion says:
> In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do.
The failure here, based on the article, is you had an idea about customer support, and you bought a company to test it. Personally, before getting that far I would expect someone to do some googling or research or conversations with people in the area and they would have told you what they do and why, and why your idea would not work.
What happened? How did you get this far? Did you ignore people, or not talk to people? What was it you had or thought you knew about your idea that lead you to believe it would result in something different?
Another learning from your conclusion:
> Because building loyalty or rapport at the moment something isn’t working and the user is frustrated hasn’t worked. The real positive experience comes when you actually improve the product, so that’s where we’re spending our time.
Again, this is common sense! I refuse to believe this is new to you or anyone else!
I appreciate the response, sorry for the harsh feedback, and thanks for taking to time to actually try and improve customer support. I think you sincerely have some great learnings and experiences from what you've been through here, I just don't think you've really got to the bottom of them with what you've written here yet.
I personally know some businesses in which the key differentiator is excellent human customer support. But then again, we’re talking 5 digit software licenses where that matters a lot more then for simple SaaS subscriptions
> I’m happy to explain why an essential app is worth your money
This is a podcast app. It's in no way essential, how did you use to explain this to your customers ?
First paragraph: "When emails overwhelmed me"
IMO this is the problem with the standard App Store business model: free with In-App Purchase. In that situation, the vast majority of people who email you are not customers but rather freeloaders.
My own App Store apps are all upfront paid, which eliminates the freeloaders, so support emails never overwhelm me. Perhaps I'm not maximizing my potential revenue, but I'm doing fine and prefer this business model and relationship with users.
Even with regard to bug reports, paid customers are more invested in doing some "work", responding to my requests for more information about the issue, because they've already invested money into the app and want a return for their investment.
Interesting how this can be different in a B2B setting. I run a B2B SaaS and consider personal support to be very important. While I do see some of what the OP described, the overall experience is mostly very positive. I enjoy talking to customers and from what I see, most customers appreciate honest responses, even if those responses explain why something can't be done right now or is much more complex than it seems (all too often).
The difference is that my customers are mostly engineers in small to medium sized businesses. They understand that 1) ongoing development costs money, hence subscriptions, 2) there are no magic wands and things are indeed more complex than they seem.
This is one of the reasons why I don't want to get into B2C. At a first approximation, people just don't want to spend money, hate subscriptions, have zero appreciation for how much ongoing development costs, do not understand that the money has to come from somewhere and that $5 purchase 6 years ago really doesn't cover the costs, and do not understand the complexity of software and product development.
Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.
Incidentally, I thought personal support would be a competitive differentiator, but I don't think it really works that way. Yes, customers do appreciate it a lot, but so what? Business customers don't talk to each other much, you won't get "viral" recommendations. And new potential customers have no idea how your support works, they think it's the same AI chatbot and knowledge base search as anywhere else.
You're right to point this out.
Having maintained and done tech support for both B2B and B2C products, as a small shop and often solo, B2B customers are far more predictable and less inclined to load you up with nonsense. And your weekends are always free. However, when they do complain, you're up at 6am on a Sunday. When you have a consumer complaint, you're welcome to sleep as long as you want.
This may seem trivial, but it's a proxy for saying that your feet are constantly to the fire with B2B deployments, in a way that you are not held accountable with B2C apps. I personally work better with the B2B stress and motivation... but it's not without its mental overhead.
I also run a B2B SaaS and I could have written this word for word.
The only exception is that I do get a decent amount of word of mouth because many of my customers are individual franchisees in national networks, so they tell their peers who they don’t compete with about me. But that’s not really so much about customer support as the product itself.
The main value I get from doing customer support myself is the same that I get from doing sales myself: learning. I have my pulse directly on what my customers need, like, and dislike about the product.
Secondarily, I do think it helps with both close rate and retention to be able to talk to the business owner, but this might be less true in other niches.
With B2B there’s also the big benefit that quite often, the person buying it and the person paying for it are two different people. That makes it easier for the one you built rapport with to still prefer your services over cheaper alternatives.
> there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.
This is correct thanks for the comment. You will enjoy my next post which is about exactly this. (HN will not enjoy it)
Indeed a helpful article for it's detailed insights. Once you think about alternatives, it's clear why everyone else is on the well-known path (such as unhelpful support.)
I've often heard stuff like "telecom provider support sucks" or "IKEA furniture breaks easily."
When you ask people whether they researched support quality before deciding on a provider or whether they considered a $3,000 heavy-wood furniture the boomers had, they immediately sense the accusation in the question: It was their decision to suffer these fates. They then tend to get mad fast.
People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill and to disassemble their furniture in 5 minutes. It's exactly why everyone is optimizing for it.
> People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill
It's rarely 0.03 though in my experience. More like 10 a month or even more between the cheap options with bad support and the better ones. Even if you have one issue every year (sounds high to me), that's over a hundred per support phone call. Makes you think twice about the trade-offs.
Hell yeah! I mean, sorry about the results, but thanks for trying and sharing your findings
> didn't turn out as hoped
Personally I don't think hope is a good strategy. What did you hope for? What was the measurable outcome you wanted? It reads like a big investment with unclear goals.
More generally I learned that giving proper feedback is statistically worse than not doing so.
When I started doing technical interviews I wanted to be different than other companies giving canned unfortunately.
I naively thought that explaining candidates what went wrong would be appreciated, because I would've wanted to know if I was in their position.
To the guy that had 20 technologies in their CV but failed to answer on any topics I would suggest:
"Anything you put on a CV increases the risk of you being asked about it. Maybe try to move those you don't want to talk about to previous experiences instead of a "skills" section. If you list C but can't answer basic pointer or compilation questions, or you put Node.js but can't talk about eventemitters or TypeScript but can't describe a union, you are casting a giant doubt in the other 17 technologies you have listed, even though you might be great at them."
Just to be met with a 300+ likes post on LinkedIn about how my company expected the impossible, was _hiring a team instead of an individual_ and how I was the worst interviewer in the world.
I thought it was a one off, but months later I would get occasionally angry candidates emails arguing my feedback and how I didn't understand how good they are.
Then I realized why corporate bs talk it is the way it is. Genuine content and feedback, especially in the social media age is a liability, it has more cons than pros.
I thought we’re talking about Building Relationships for a second. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2666920/Building_Relation...
To the writer of the article: you missed a big opportunity with this article by not having an obvious link straight to your product, Castro, and by not telling us in a few words what it does.
It’s not too late to change the first sentence to:
> I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…
Yes thanks added. Next article: "What I got wrong: Marketing 101"
i still don't know what castro is, and I'm not interested to look it up. something to do with podcasts, is all I've gleaned from the comments.
I didn't really write this to promote the product and it's not important to understand the content but it's now linked in the first sentence. But since you don't care I think we are good.
> I can think of exactly one customer in two years who was surprised that software costs money
I think you meant "I can think of exactly one customer in two years who was NOT surprised that software costs money"?
Haha, I meant it the way I said it but I see what you're getting at. Perhaps it's better to say one person was genuinely surprised we work on the product all the time and it has to maintained, etc and was happy to support it since that was the case.
Messages from price complainers should be deleted at once. Every business in the world gets this as the most common feedback and the value of that feedback is zero.
"Your product should be cheaper". That will be your most common feedback no matter what you're selling and at what price. A large percentage of the population dedicate their entire lives to complaining about prices.
I've been in a similar position. This is a transactional relationship with hard boundaries and it is good not to look for more in it. The best strategy is to be fast, professional, and to funnel them in a way where they can help themselves. Publishing roadmap and providing community forum for support works for some and others just cannot be helped. Live with that and carry on. No human connection will make them pay ten time the money, so just being responsive and reliable will make you the goto provider for the particular need.
Maybe if your product would get more valuable if you were connecting users together and you were moderator of the community, it would've been different, but it is quite different product to sell.
I started off reading this article thinking "well, anyone who has ever maintained an open source project has almost certainly experienced the unending entitlement of users even when working for free". But after reading the article, I'm not surprised your users dislike you more after communicating with them...
> I have already thought about this a great deal. I am not changing anything based on your email.
> User can provide details for us, but if others aren’t experiencing it, it’s unlikely to be prioritized.
> We know about this, but fixing it is a decent amount of work or low-priority because it’s not a big deal or few users see it.
> a human response detailing why I am unable to solve your problem today and am not even going to try is about the worst thing a user can receive!
> Good in theory, sometimes useful, but often the same small, unrepresentative segment with strong thoughts.
> Castro is an opinionated app and I’ve thought a lot about what we’re building and what we’re going to work on next. It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request.
Your support policy seems to be more along the lines of "you may e-mail me for an explanation of why I'm not interested in your thoughts" than an actual commitment to support for paid customers. You aren't interested in comments on the payment model, bugs, or feature requests.
> why software lends itself to subscription so well [...] no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email
Especially when you're using it to justify scummy practices, it's no wonder that no matter how kindly and carefully you piss on your users, they know it's not raining.
You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products. But does your user experience with other products tell you that you want to subscribe and be nickle-and-dimed for the rest of your life for every last thing? Especially when you're promising to users that while you're still working on the software and that's why they need to pay every month forever, you won't work on the bugs nor features they want? Subscription works "so well" for software because it makes you a lot of money, but it doesn't work well for the users its being forced upon who don't actually want the updates you're working on.
As far as I can tell, your software is not significantly based on ongoing maintenance costs, ergo it does not inherently justify ongoing payments to use. If you let greed stop clouding your eyes, you could adopt the approach that many ethical independent developers use: an option to pay once per major version and keep it for life, with optional subscriptions to try the waters and keep up with the latest and greatest version.
Software owner learns that posting blog posts about their support woes also doesn't lead to an outpouring of love.
> You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products.
This was the biggest (1) complaint for me - in light of what you discovered from your actual support experience, why was your expectation so off?
Was it that you expected support to be full of "how do I do this complicated thing?" questions that can be answered by an expert? That's an unrealistic expectation, but I guess now you know.
Or was it that you really thought that customers would be happy if you just took the time to explain your pricing model to them (also unrealistic).
It is kind of obvious from the types of emails you get, and the types of responses you give that it was not going to lead to strong customer relationships. If all you're doing is writing a 100 words to say "No, I'm not going to do what you want" that's not going to make things better.
(1) Actually 2nd biggest - the biggest was talking about "buying Castro" but having no explanation/links about who the author is, what Castro is, or how/when/why it was bought.
Pricing is a bad example I guess I should've minimized that part of the post.
I guess I didn't think about it enough, but if someone emailed in with a feature request, or with an opinion that this tab should behave differently or whatever, I thought giving explanation would be helpful. "I actually tried it that way, but it didn't work because X, and Y, and I didn't even think about Z which breaks the whole concept, etc etc." As a dev, these types of explanations would seem meaningful to me. But in reality, these conversations are mostly not helpful for either party. That was the point I was trying to make in the post.
Fair point on 2, I honestly didn't expect anyone to read this tonight and had another post planned I thought might get comments on HN, but I just put this up for now until I could finish that one. I will do better at giving context next time.
I agree his responses could be more compassionate and show more effort, but i feel your characterization is over-critical. There _isnt time_ to chase bugs that aren’t reproducible. The software _cant_ have every form factor, _some things_ need to be set in stone as a North Star. These aren’t scummy practices, these are realities of a time-bounded existence.
> There _isnt time_ to chase bugs that aren’t reproducible.
There absolutely is. I fully engage with any user who is willing to put effort into helping me identify the problem, even if I can't reproduce it myself. Many users are cooperative and will go to great lengths to assist. If they don't, then sure, put it on the backburner as "I literally don't know how I can solve this". But I value my users and fix every single bug I'm capable of fixing.
Is it the most efficient use of time? No, I doubt it. I would probably make more money if I didn't do that. But that's the crux of the issue, isn't it. Software development is already extremely lucrative because the cost of reproduction and shipping is effectively zero, so you have ~infinite margin on every sale after the initial development cost is covered, with a potential market size of ~the entire connected world. Yet so many of us are always chasing more, more, more. It's not enough until you make $500k/yr or sell out for billions.
Don't say "it's not possible". Say "I don't want to do it because I can make more money by not doing it". You're allowed to make that decision. But then you're at least being honest with yourself, and you'll clearly understand why your customers are angrier after communicating with you than before. I can proudly say that my users are happier after communicating with me than before.
The customer can reproduce it, or they wouldn't be complaining about it - and if you connect with them you can get much of the detail you need; especially if they're "test-support" inclined and can help diagnose possible causes.
Even just oodles of debugging for a particular customer's build can go a long way.
Thanks for reading. I'm not sure what you think is scummy unless it's just having a subscription? If so, you are going to love my next article on how subscription apps are the best invention ever and the only business model that makes sense! Definitely subscribe so you don't miss that one.
The thing you have to remember is that there are thousands of products out there all trying to charge a subscription, and most people aren't going to justify taking on more than a very small handful of them at any time. Plus (not directed at you specifically, just in general), your product almost certainly isn't as good or as important to the customer as you think it is unless you've genuinely identified some niche nobody else is operating in, of you have an exceptionally polished product with few competitors.
People are however consistently willing to regularly make one-off purchases to get something they can "own". I've bought way more lifetime licenses for software than I've taken out subscriptions. When you consider that nobody stays subscribed for life, there's always a number that you can charge for lifetime which is in fact functionally equivalent to a subscription anyway.
People on hacker news really love to argue about subscriptions! Many of them even email me the same things. Great fodder for discourse.
lol I like you, you can stay.
It’s for these reasons LLMs are going to chip away at silly subscriptions. When many projects get 70% of what the user needs and the maintainers aren’t willing or able to address what paying customers want…why bother paying anymore when you’ll soon be able to have just those bespoke features/fixes/integrations built yourself?
It seems to often boil down to the fact that paying customers are paying to solve a problem so they don’t need to deal with it. Whereas developers are more interested in writing code than solving said problems for customers.
"...you’ll soon be able to have just those bespoke features/fixes/integrations built yourself?"
How soon is it? Tomorrow? Next week? 10 years?
People are so sure that LLMs will change everything >>soon<<.
Switch your brain from problems to solutions.
Every line item there has a solution. Even if it is just 4 different email addresses.
One suggestion — when you have an unsatisfying answer for a customer like “I can’t reproduce that”, or “I won’t build that feature”, the customer may not appreciate the amount of effort you have invested in that decision. A 30 minute phone call/video call may communicate more effectively the depth of care you have. Even if you convey the same information, people _love_ talking to the owner/founder, it is a very strong indication that you care about their thoughts.
Thanks it's hard to find time to do 30 minute calls as this is a glorified side project, but I actually had the same idea and recorded some calls with customers for public consumption as I thought might improve some of this communication, but I never got around to editing it and wasn't sure if the content would be compelling.
Definitely feels like some form of video might be superior vs email, which is easiest in some ways but also seems to be a bit of a barrier in thoughtful communication.
You know what’s also great? A five minute phone call. Cuts through endless email chains and creates an instant human connection. You don’t need 30 minutes if you have competent support personnel who know how to deal with needy customers.
> this is a glorified side project
Personally I'd guess this is a big part of the issue. If this is a glorified side project, you really don't / can't care _too_ much about everything. I don't mean that as a criticism, it's just if you have little time to give the product will improve little, and the customers will get a just-ok experience. It's not surprising that translates poorly to customers. People like devotion; luke-warm commitment is dissapointing.
On the contrary I care a great deal, an unreasonable amount really, but since it isn't my primary gig my time is limited and I have to try to spend it where it is most effective.