I've learnt a few tricks for managing early stage pain points.

- You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for customer support.

- Once your core product is built, its worthwhile spending some time automating the heck out of everything. This will save a TON of time in the near future.

- Invest in good docs, even if you're not running a api saas. Good docs + consistent ux + rock solid support will solve most of your support issues.

I think a lot of literature around running a online biz has been boiled down to rather basic advice and its hard to find anything solid in this area. I've been running a small blog where I document these issues(operational.co) if anyone wants to check it out.

And very focused responses in terms of action items.

You might think of 3 things to say, check, but sadly 90% of the people you respond to with a list will behave like they read just one of them. Sadly this also leads to dragging things out for everyone who can handle more than one thing at a time :(

Me: Please try these 3 things and let me know how it goes: (list of 3 things with instructions)

Them: I tried (thing #1) and it didn’t work.

Me: Thank you, please try these 2 things and let me know how it goes

Them: I tried (thing #2) and it didn’t work.

Me: Thank you, please try this thing and let me know how it goes

Them: (no response)

Me: Just checking in to see if this is resolved?

Them: (no response)

Me: I’m closing this ticket as I haven’t heard back, let me know if this is still a problem and I can reopen it

Them: Don’t close the ticket, I’m still having this issue

Me: No problem, can you try this thing and let me know how it goes?

Them: (no response)

(Siemens) Support: Before I can help you, please find the serial number via , and the exact version of subsystems .

Me: Here you go, though I fail to see how my specific setup is relevant as the problem has been reported on forums for years, and it is easily reproducible

Support: Please update to latest version x.

Me: Version x has known regression which will break the machine for the customer. I did the 1 hour procedure anyway but the issue is still present.

Support: Please execute this and download the log from with SCP

Me: O well, did that here is the file. Don't understand why you can't run it on your machine

Support: Please try , reboot (wait 5 minutes) and run the trace again

Me: (Gives up)

Except… recently I completely misdiagnosed something. So while I was getting politely frustrated with the support clerk, he was stepping me through a set of irrelevant seeming procedures which, indeed, resulted in identifying that a piece of hardware was broken.

In this case it was the fiber to Ethernet adapter my ISP uses. He needed me to verify that, at every step of the way, pieces of my infrastructure were not the cause of my flaky connection (they weren’t). However, as a final step he had me reboot the adapter and it didn’t start back up. Turns out this is a rare failure mode and the flaky network I’d been seeing was an early, year long, symptom of this issue.

Is Support just completely disconnected from Engineering? Do they not have a way to report issues and indicate that many customers are having a specific issue?

Does the company believe that giving a customer a runaround will make them less upset than saying "Sorry, this is a known issue. We're working on it but do not have a timeline"?

Certainly at some point, some support person is going to be like "Huh, we have a lot of customers complaining about an issue, and our usual flowchart script doesn't seem to resolve it" and try to work it up the chain, right? Or does it get to their manager who says "Meh, that's an engineering problem, not a support problem. Get back to your tickets!" and never pass it up?

Cheating your customer is a dangerous game. They are not dumb.

This is the usual response when a companies customer numbers start to scale up so far that the volume of users like the ones in Vegenoid's parent comment start to overwhelm the support staff. Keeping up the good/decent customer support that you could give to your first few hundred or perhaps even few thousand users eventually becomes ludicrously expensive or even impossible.

Then the original article's "Keeping this running and supported is shit. People are idiots and time wasters! Automate all the things!" stage kicks in.

So "first level support" is created, who's main objective is to get rid of support requests with the minimal effort by the least skilled staff possible. So everything is written into a script that call centre employees are required to follow. Low skill minimal wage staff are required to ask stupid things like "Have you tried reinstalling Windows?" and getting a confirmation that they have - before any support request is passed on to even a junior or intern developer. At this stage nobody gives a damn about users who need help, and they outsource that work to other users on the "community forums" and the entire support team is fired.

(Google, of course, being a world leader in both webtech and customer acquisition, completely skipped the "provide decent customer service" stage and went directly to the "don't give a damn about users" end game.)

The tendency to wall off engineers is often taken to a counterproductive level.

But there's a line SOMEWHERE. The few tickets that DO need engineering time REALLY NEED IT, and it's completely asinine that in some corporations, it's impossible.

If, for example, 100 people are talking to support for the exact same crash, and people in support are able to reproduce it, it needs to go to Engineering, rather than support telling customers "Have you tried formatting your drive and reinstalling everything from scratch?" when they already know it won't fix anything.

That combination kept the customer-frustrating bugs quite low, while still allowing engineering to keep developing new features at a fairly rapid pace.

(and then we got purchased by a PE firm and dismantled)

Support is almost always tiered because $$$. In an ideal situation (hello GitLab!) tier 1 they are friendly and competent triage artists that can redirect lost customers and handle the common basic cases. Tier two is essentially an experienced and skilled tier 1. It's not until you get to tier 3 that you reach an engineer, usually one dedicated to support. That engineer is the one who reaches out to the operational engineering team if needed.

    Them: Don’t close the ticket, I hadn't had a chance to check that yet.

Having bots close issues, accompanied by a rude automated message is often contra-productive. It would be fine to instead post a reminder in the issue, asking for an update like shown in the example:

     Me: Just checking in to see if this is resolved?

I've started replying to it with "No updates here." to reset the timer.

So many software projects close bugs with bots, and they have an unrealistically rosy picture of how bug-free their software is.

This is the real problem an automated close addresses. They are are afraid to tell their customers this.

I've seen places where tickets were not allowed to be re-opened. If a ticket was closed for any reason at all besides a misclick, a new ticket had to be opened with a link to the old ticket if necessary.

If you're moving fast enough that you don't have time to close them manually, you're moving too fast (and breaking too much).

If I received a bug like that I would immediately think why are you telling me this... just fix it yourself and share your fix if you want. I probably have higher expectations from my users. You give the software away now they want you to fix it for them.

Then you're part of the problem.

I am far less equipped to handle a bug like this than you'd think. It would take me so much more work and time than asking someone who already knows the project and how to work on it.

If I did this for every bug I reported, I wouldn't have a job because I wouldn't have any time left for one.

You know, this is also my issue with Linux. The attitude is generally that if you want to run Linux, you are expected to do anything you need completely on your own, including fixing bugs. This is why macOS is my preferred operating system. (Not that I can run it right now...)

I'm of course not entitled to anything from you (or anyone), but the one thing I won't do is fix it myself.

I don't really want to be a hacker right now. I've tried. I can be, but it rarely pays off for me. Not even financially, just emotionally.

I was punushed for "leaving" the game, banned for a couple weeks, and sent an obnoxious email about my bad behaviour. I reached out to them on customer support handfuls of times and was always given a list of three steps such as "upgrading graphics drivers", "ensuring i disable my firewall", "using a pc with high enough specs" (my machine is ridiculously overspecd) and things like that. I would follow the three obviously pointless steps, and then be given another set of obviously unrelated steps. This went on about five times over a month.

At some point I just told them, look im a fucking game developer, give me a log dump tool, or a build with debug symbols and I will fix it myself, and finally a real human showed up and actually sent me one. I recreated the bug and sent log captures but they wouldnt let me help beyond that. Then at the end they still scolded me for "leaving" the game.

I dont blame the average person for expecting customer support to be unhelpful or a robot by default, and not following steps.

He'd do one thing, report that it still didn't work. I'd ask if he did the other four things. He'd do the next thing, report that it still didn't work, etc.

God only knows how much that department was paying him.

1. Customer describes the problem 2. You get the problem, parsed by the model, including a summary and a suggestion what could help. 3. You write "do that 3 things" 4. The model tells the customer to do the 1st, then the 2nd and so on 5. The model reminds the customer in intervals that things are not completed 6. the model notifies you after the 3 things are done and the issue is still there.

Give the user a checklist instead of just freeform text -- where they can check off the three individual things to try. When they've checked them all off, they can go back to the well for another response from support.

I noticed I do exactly this when troubling shooting problems with LLMs!

I also feel that this is happening more and more, since there's more rewards for giving very small pieces of attention and energy to a bigger pool of people, instead giving extra energy or attention to a smaller pool of people seeking for one's help.

I'm just facing this with a contractor doing repairs in my house, a month ago was finding a decent mechanic to fix just 2 issues on my car.

The first promptly finds energy to discuss things it receives through social networks or messages, but can't provide a decent list of things that I need to provide him to finish his work faster.

The second case took a lot of time and discussing with 6 different mechanics, until th car broke and it was towed.

I'm seeing this more and more, unfortunately.

The only interaction possible is they can tell you the problem, then you can give them a list of things to try, and they can do nothing but give feedback on each step, in order, and you arent bothered until they at least respond something for each step

This is obviously satire, but we could make every internet app completely modal: once you start a flow on any site your computer prohibits you from starting any other flow on any other site before you complete the previous one.

- be on time

- respond to emails/texts, and especially: phone calls

- give quotes

Then if you're even halfway competent, the world is your oyster. Please come do work for me!

If you can manage people and budgets, you can have more work than you'll know what to do with (assuming there's work available).

The inability of many people to focus their attention and prioritize their work is shocking to me. This isn't just for the stereotypical "younger adult" either, this seems to apply across the board (and especially to boomer-aged adults!).

Are you saying that you give your contractor a list of seven things to address, and find that they only address two and say they're done?

I can't remember where I heard of using painter's tape for this, but it's used as a metaphor in this article https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-blue-tape-list/

.... I also found this link while looking for the above article, https://www.quantumbalancing.com/news/bluetape.htm . That's. ... just... well. Not what I was looking for, but was so remarkable that I thought I would link to it here. I suppose they have probably sold some of their devices. I'm curious to know what the insides are like, but not curious enough to spend $1k+.

Oh, no. It's not a shuffle. They unerringly identify the least important possible action item. Sometimes just a single clause of a single sentence in a list item.

You have to scour your communication of anything that can possibly be interpreted as an easy request. It has to be a curt, imperative, isolated, request to do something hard or it will be ignored.

At my last job we had a customer who was famous for doing this. Since he generated a significant amount of sales, we couldn't just sideline him, so I learned to only ask one question at a time on email. Otherwise, if you asked e.g., three questions, it was a complete tossup as to which one he would decide to answer, all the while reminding you that this was a "hair on fire" issue for him.

Compounded with the fact that he was on another continent, multiple time zones away, this made debugging anything a difficult proposition.

We had another customer for the same product in the same country who had absolutely no problem answering whatever questions you asked him, in as much detail as he could supply. It has to be a personality thing.

"I need your engagement level to be set to 10 for this communication. It's ok if you can't do that, but then just say you can't do that. I'm already set to 10 and rando guesswork / tidbits are only going to cause problems."

Even just "nope can't do it" responses would save me time.

I just got off a critical call with folks pulling stuff out of their ... and it was a nightmare / complete waste of my time.

Much easier and safer is to drill into your own head that your own engagement level may be at 10, but the other person's is probably going to be more like 2. And that's fine.

I'm not asking them to be at 10, I'm asking they not engage unless they are.

Notice your parent doesn't say "you must be at 10," but rather "let me know if you can't be at 10." I think that's perfectly reasonable, as long as you're willing to accept almost always getting "no."

> Much easier and safer is to drill into your own head that your own engagement level may be at 10, but the other person's is probably going to be more like 2. And that's fine.

But sometimes that's not fine! For example, if you're giving a list of instructions for some safety-critical procedure, it's not fine to find out later that the nodding "uh-huh, uh-huh" actually meant "I'll do what I remember and what sounds easy," and it's much better to do nothing than to proceed with partial information.

They wound up answering every question in my list of five, spent enough time on some of them that I think that may have been part of the motivation for them to break it up into two videos, and even emailed me the answer to the one out of five points they didn't address in the video.

In contrast if I render a list at any of my colleagues or vendor dev teams there is a <20% chance that they will address or even acknowledge 2 whole separate items out of the list, so the points they don't address get frequently brought back up again and dropped again. :(

So AI researcher has.. ..list comprehension. (YEAAAH!!)

I have to give every idea it's own sentence, and every sentence must be separated by double space at minimum.

And then I can't offer more than maybe four complete ideas, no more than one of which can demand a response.

This comment should be three paragraphs. As written, it’s very hard to read and I get lost.

If this was a professional communication and you had asked three questions, I might understand one or might not. Now I have no issues saying “dude, your writing is very hard to follow.” But what if your colleagues are nicer than I am?

Or just spitballing. You’ve admitted that you’re the kind of person who will set traps for your colleagues. What if they’re just sick of your shit but are too conflict avoidant to say that?

What is that even based on? Where did they admit to setting up traps? Is that your take on their comment about trying to ask three questions in one message?

Because, even without them creating paragraphs, it is abundantly clear they just mean that as something from experience. Not something they do as something to spring a trap on people.

“When confronted (constructively, much later) they usually get evasive and can’t explain.”

Confronted is a big word with a hostile intent. They’re incredibly measured in their language and use precise language. That sounds like a trap to me - it’s:

A.) Asking three questions and only get 1/3 answered.

B.) Waiting for a suitable period of time to elapse.

C.) Confronting them while expecting an explanation.

Letting time go by, “confronting them” and expecting an explanation is a trap. It assumes that they can even remember the conversation! Why not send a follow up email immediately and politely ask again? Heck, that’s a good excuse to use “circle back” in conversation. :)

If you missed that first read, no worries because so did I. I had to read the comment three times and then I kind of shaked my head because they are so measured and precise, and that’s an awfully big statement to make about colleagues.

We were all close and could discuss “meta” from time to time, in a friendly constructive manner. You’re probably reading more into this aspect than there is.

If this makes you uneasy, it can be easier if you sign initial support replies under another name.

  Hey, this is John, I'll be happy to help you with that.
  
  
  
  Let me know if that helps.
  --John

I don’t mind waiting in silence, but when they keep asking about weather, vacation plans, etc, I find it hard to not respond. This might part retention technique though.

You can write a support bot that sends a user's question + docs/FAQ to an LLM to automatically deal with the basic questions and only involve a human in the loop once a question goes beyond what's in the docs.

Here's more:

- Be direct, Hi, the xyz feature is available on the PRO plan. You can upgrade to the PRO plan at app.saas.com/billing

- Be brutal, Hi xyz, your card couldn't be charged for your Saas subscription, and hence your subscription has been deactivated. To reactivate, enter your card details app app.saas.com/billing

- Be honest, Hello xyz, thanks for the feature request. We'll put it in our wish list but can't guarantee it will make the cut.

- Be generous, Hey xyz, thanks for pointing that out. We have identified that as a bug and have pushed a fix for it. In the meanwhile, I've extended your trial by 7 days, on the house.

Couple of other tips:

- Dumb down your reply as much as possible. If you can't, throw your reply through chatgpt and make it dumb down.

- Unless a support issue is very basic, reply after a few minutes if you're near your computer. Usually users figure out things on their own if given some time.

- But don't allow issues to go stale. To really wow customer service, reply as humanely quick as possible, especially for existing customers.

- Make your support timelines clear somewhere in your product, eg: Our support will respond within max 48 hours, but most responses take 2-3 hours.

- Make your terms and privacy policy pages clear. People do read this. getharvest.com is a gold standard in this area.

> But don't allow issues to go stale. To really wow customer service, reply as humanely quick as possible, especially for existing customers.

As a customer, the absolute worst possible thing for me is to be left in limbo, not knowing if my problem will be fixed in the next minute, hour, day, or never. While I may not be thrilled if the answer is "never", at least at that point I can move on and know that I'll need to solve the problem some other way.

This is the biggest thing I struggle with. I have a couple of semi-successful side projects. They bring in some money, but not enough to hire someone to help with support. I have never been at a place in my life where something like "I will response to all support requests within 48 hours" is remotely realistic for me. I'm lucky if I get to a support request within a week or two.

I don't know what the answer is beyond just "don't sell products", because I hate dealing with support more than I enjoy making stuff to sell.

Even just confirmation that the website form isn't a black hole and that support tickets aren't now exclusively accepted through Twitter, Instagram, or a secret discord server can be very reassuring.

or just pass all support responses through "business support LLM" for uniform “polite but curt” tone

"Our premium support can investigate this for $XYhr. If the fault is at our end we will waive any fees. Please let us know if you wish to proceed."

I would say this would only feel justified if the product pricing page already had clear tiers outlined for paid support. Putting a price per hour on customer support otherwise would make me feel like I am just being milked behind closer doors for more money, and non-paying customers are getting shafted. If a paid customer support tier is something you offer, imo it should be clearly outlined on publicly available pages with explicit explanation about the differences between free vs paid customer support. You suggesting it in private communications only would feel suspicious and shady to me as a customer.

However, if the customer themselves suggested to pay you extra for that personal support, that’s a different story.

The reason it can be framed as curtness is because they're being curt about the expectations, and the real expectations are pretty low. "Sure, I can delay really addressing the issue for a couple weeks. You're only paying me 40 bucks a month, why would you expect more? The goal of responding within two days is just for a canned response." See, they were curt and didn't let me demand something more than I deserved, like being able to use the product I'm paying for in the next several days!

Interesting. Anything you've automated successfully that you can share? I've heard so many times that you should hold off on automating too early because constant pivoting and refining can end up making you spend more time fixing the automation than actually doing the work itself, so I kinda paused on it. I can see how it would make a big impact on my marketing outreach, which I'm doing manually right now with not much success.

when iterating and the header gets stripped in the response, the bot is taking a turn...

Sometimes ask it to spit out the full context and its understandings in a manner I can use to re-prompt itself for best efficiency, and it gives a nice summary of the concept I am thinking through, and I use that with vary degrees of satifying results.

It can backfire when the new price point bumps it into a different category of decision making, though. For many, a $20/month product is an easy decision but $100/month price tag bumps it to a point where it becomes a more complicated decision making process. If you're not careful you can easily raise prices so much that people decide to jump to a more full-featured competitor product.

Projects like this one that are personal/side projects have an additional risk of raising prices: If the product becomes expensive, many people are going to notice that it appears to be highly profitable while also being within the realm of what a single person or small team can produce. Competition starts appearing quickly and you're back to cutting prices to stay relevant.

Finally, higher prices come with higher expectations from your customers. Whereas previously they might shrug off a slow response to a customer support request at $20/month, their $100/month service might lead them to expect more customer support, not less.

There are several indie SaaS companies that get posted on HN from time to time that take the opposite approach: They offer a low price but they're up front about what to expect. They don't try to pretend that you're getting world-class reliability, uptime, or support, but they do commit to offering a good service at a fair price. They could raise prices to match competitors, but now they're playing a very different game with very different expectations.

> Finally, higher prices come with higher expectations from your customers. Whereas previously they might shrug off a slow response to a customer support request at $20/month, their $100/month service might lead them to expect more customer support, not less.

This is potentially true, but there's other effects here too:

- When I was doing software and hardware consulting work, the people who paid the most were also the happiest customers. It felt paradoxical for a while until I really let it sink in and stew. Most of the high paying customers would just kind of... take my work products, say "yup, this meets the requirements we agreed to", and run with it. The ones who were paying the least were the most likely to pull the classic "well... is what we agreed to but... maybe you could move that button over to the other side and I've got this other feature idea that we didn't talk about, oh and I don't like how this works... it might be what we agreed to but it's not how it worked in my mind..."

- It sounds like OPs customers took that to the extreme with "customers" who hadn't paid anything at all yet being demanding.

- By going up-market, you can lose customers for sure but it might be worth it anyway. Given the support burden it sounds like 1/5 of the customers at 5x price would be a net win. Especially if it tracks my experience consulting where the remaining high paying customers are happier about your product in general. If you still maintain the same per-customer support burden or even have it climb some it could end up being less work overall.

If features don't work as advertised, I will absolutely make no distinction between a 500$ or 1$ product, and will demand a fix. But I will more likely have more patient if the service is cheap, before migrating away.

And then, if your customers are businesses, do you think the employees really care how much the product costs? No.

I hate to put you on blast but this is exactly why people charge $100/mo instead of $20/mo. They do not want the customers who feel (sorry for the term) "entitled" to a heroic level of features, support, polish, etc. They want people who have a hair-on-fire emergency that is so awful that they'd gladly pay $1000/mo for it, and are thankful that your software - klunky as it is - is giving them $900/mo of free value.

Lots of people feel entitled to free, clean, potable tap water. Lots more people don’t because they live somewhere without it.

There is nothing wrong with saying, “our product is not for people entitled to X”. There is no judgement there, let alone anything negative.

Part of the reason that political discourse is currently so polarised and pushes us towards bad outcomes in our societies (thinking particularly of US and UK here, but I'm sure it applies elsewhere), like the recent riots in the UK, is that so much of it is bad faith, dishonest, assumes the worst of others, casually alienates to score points, etc.

My worst customers were the ones that ask for discounts, or are otherwise looking for a deal. My theory is that people that happily fork out for an expensive product have already seen the value.

There are exceptions, but a lot of business owners see the same pattern.

I get where you're coming from, but it's hardly surprising that a business's favourite customers are those who are happy to get fleeced.

And as a customer, if you're not already a subject-matter expert, you have no idea which business is trying to fleece you or not unless you price compare and try for discounts everywhere.

I don't want a customer who thinks that paying asking price for a product is me taking advantage of them.

I don't want a customer that thinks I am starting the relationship as an adversary rather than a partner in a mutually beneficial transaction.

I want customers that are happy. I can't make you happy if you already think what I am selling is not worth what I'm charging. We will both be happier if you find a different supplier.

The kind of people that look for an angle on every transaction are the ones that will be the biggest pain in your ass while asking for more than everyone else. That's the generally held wisdom for a reason. It isn't always true, but its true often enough that it normally doesn't pay to play the game.

> And as a customer, if you're not already a subject-matter expert, you have no idea which business is trying to fleece you or not unless you price compare and try for discounts everywhere.

Yes, be a savvy consumer. But also realize that if you go around looking for the lowest price and asking for discounts, you will end up with the cheapest product or service, not necessarily the best value.

No, that's explicitly not what I'm saying.

Of course, you, as an honest business that stands behind their work, prefers customer who are happy to pay your asking price while not being a pain in the ass. But that's going to be exactly the same stance as your competitor who spends half the effort on their product and double the effort on marketing. They really don't want savvy customers to ask many questions, because they don't have a product to back it up.

It doesn’t make sense as an end consumer, but B2B lens it makes sense.

If a business can afford the higher price tag, they most likely would rather have a hands off approach for the problem they’re trying to solve (in a service based business)

Many of our mid and lower tier customers want everything drawn out and explained, and give feedback at every step. Our higher tier customers pay faster, request minimal input (outside of times we ask for it), and generally much easier to work with

Yes, but it should be noted that the price is acting as a filter to exclude a subset of customers, reducing overall customer count.

Obviously it's easier to have 100 customers paying $100/month than to have 1000 customers paying $10/month, but finding those tradeoff points can be hard. It takes time for market signals to settle out and customers to churn away due to high prices.

I've been a customer of several SaaS products that embraced "raise your prices" so much that they slowly became a second-choice option in the market. It takes a long time for people and websites to stop recommending a product as the first-choice option after a price change, so these signals don't appear immediately.

And 1 problem client, even if they pay 80% of our higher tier pricing, can lead to major headaches across the board.

Something we learned (and are continually learning) is vetting clients as much as they vet us, versus just trying to get the sale.

Funny enough, being more stern on pricing, what we offer, and in general our boundaries of what we cover has led to higher satisfaction from clients and our team.

The customer support efforts when you don't feel like it, being ghosted after helping a customer, the random or fraud disputes.

It's really tricky at that stage between hiring help and having the time/motivation to maintain those very non-tech parts while trying to continue doing other core parts of the side project / startup.

The first sale feels great, as does first showing the prototype.

By comparison, extra $100 MRR milestones don't feel so great, nor does dealing with customers/disputes eventually (it's a lot of negativity in general - pleased customers just leave reviews occasionally, negative ones email you). And a down negative month or two always feels like a stabbing and like it's all over.

Really don't know how to avoid this. Scaling quickly? Via investment in most cases? Maybe.

These three challenges + context-switching between marketing and product are really tough at the early stage.

I've found that growing a business from 0-1 is very formulaic - not easy but the roadmap is clear. Scaling one is much harder, especially without outside capital. There's a huge gulf between earning enough to replace your salary vs. hiring good people to take over lower-level tasks early on. And marketing usually ends up being too critical to outsource at first.

At least with digital products, customer disputes can always be settled with refunds, even when the claim is dubious. Eat the loss and move on. Physical product disputes really sting when you're out the cost of inventory + labor.

Whenever I’m conscious enough of it I do try to thank people - trying to remember how hard it must be on the other end!

I guess that's a matter of expectation.

A ticket system I've worked with in the past had an "autoclose" state where you could set the ticket to automatically close after a set date if no reply comes in until then.

If a reply comes with the info that it worked, I get a smile and close the ticket. If not, I never see the ticket again, no hard feelings.

I know it's more than once, but less than 100%.

One of the things that keeps me away from doing stuff like this is that I _hate_ every part that isn't the engineering part, and the engineering part is a minority share of what it takes to run a business.

This is why startup people straight out of school are often unencumbered with ideas that impact their mission. If you go into a large organization, you are exposed to a reality that can distort your perspective. It's a myth that people can't move between large and small organizations, but the differentiator is their awareness of and desire to embrace the current circumstances. Many end up preferring the luxury and ease of large organizations and fail because they don't make the switch. Many startup people don't make the move in the other direction (even if they are exceedingly successful and it might be practical move.)

Similarly, a desire to only focus on engineering is something you feel will inhibit your ability to run a business. Over time you might be able to discover ways to reduce your hate for the other work. People here love to prescribe advice for situations like this, but it's really hard to give good advice without knowing a lot more about you.

But if you kill the culture before the IPO, then you have nothing and nothing.

It’s a bonus that those 40 hours don’t feel like work.

It's a necessary part, but without marketing/sales/support/etc, very few projects work as a business.

Something that helps to offset this psychologically, and is also a good thing to do anyway, is to proactively reach out more frequently to all your users. It can be the case that 95% of your users are happily chugging along, while 5% are unhappy and complaining frequently for whatever reason. If you rarely hear from that 95%, it can start to irrationally feel like no one is happy with your product, since that's the message coming from most of your support interactions.

The variable is "20% of what type of client?". 20% of Taylor Swift concert attendees, or 20% of assembly coders? Each comes with its own unique challenges!

I started out thinking that we've all been conditioned by bad customer support chatbots whose only purpose is to look up facts from the FAQ and then tell you to call the real customer support line to actually handle your problem. the problem was that the chatbots weren't granted hee ability and authority to actually do things. wouldn't it be great if you could aks a bot to cancel your account or change your billing info and it would actually do it?

but then i realized... anything with a clearly defined process or workflow like that would be even better if it were just a form on an account settings page. why bother with a chatbot?

customer support lines run by humans exist for two reasons: - increase friction for things you don't want your user to do (like cancel their account without first hearing a bunch of sales pitches) - handle unanticipated problems that don't fit into the happy-path you've set up on the settings page

My worry is that business dudes will get excited about making chatbots that can do the former and they'll never trust an AI to be able to handle the later. So I'm now of the opinion that having AI customer support will only be used to make things worse.

Everyone has some amount of common sense. The current state of the art does not, so it cannot make decisions. This is why these things can't currently replace real support beyond being a search function exceedingly capable of interpreting natural language queries and, optionally, rephrasing what the found document says to fit onto the query better

You can't even have these systems as first line support, verifiying whether the person has searched the docs because you can't trust it with a decision about whether the docs' solutions are exhausted and human escalation is needed. There currently simply needs to be a way to reach a human. I'm as happy as the next person to find that a no-queue computer system could solve my problem so I use it when my inquiry is a question and not a request, but a search function is all they are

By the time I have an issue, I have usually covered basic ideas and FAQs already. Currently, I tend to use perplexity supported by ChatGPT before engaging online tech support, and I create a document for them before beginning.

"We choose not to pay customer support well".

I've worked at companies where customer support was both strongly supported, paid well and given the tools to do their jobs well.

They were incredible.

I think I'd rather troubleshoot with a well-scripted AI chatbot, than a human being who's forced into the role of an automaton - executing directly from a script. Just, FFS, let me escalate to an actual competently trained human being once I've been through the troubleshooting.

There's no wait in line. There's no waiting 2 min for each response in chat, or waiting 5 min on hold while the rep figures out what to do. And I've, shockingly, gotten issues resolved faster and better.

Using one semi-popular consumer app -- once it pointed me to docs on their site that Google wasn't finding because I didn't know what keywords to use. And twice it escalated me to send a message to the relevant team, where I got a response that addressed my problem -- and where escalation would have been necessary with a human call-center rep anyways.

The point is that it was far, far faster than any chat rep OR phone rep. And it's far faster to escalate too.

I'm sure this experience isn't universal, but I've been truly shocked at how it's turned what are otherwise 15-20 minute interactions into 3 minute interactions. At the same level of quality or better.

This is a billion-dollar company you have definitely heard of.

Bot: Welcome! Please tell me what you'd like help with.

Me: how do I X?

Bot: Please choose an option: [list of irrelevant things].

Me: None, I need to do X.

Bot: Okay, please try [instructions copy-pasted from the docs].

Me: I already read the documentation and it didn't answer my question, that's why I'm here.

Bot: I'm sorry, I don't know how to help.

Me: Can I speak to a human?

Bot: Welcome! Please tell me what you'd like help with.

Human contact doesn't scale, or is prohibitively expensive. I sat with customer support a while ago (again energy sector, but different company) to observe, and every phone call was at least ten minutes, often 20-30, plus some aftercare in the form of logging the call or sending out a follow-up email.

They also did chat at the time, where a chatbot (which wasn't ChatGPT / AI based yet but they're working on it) would do the initial contact, give low-hanging fruit suggestions based on their input, and ask for their information like their address before connecting to a real human. The operator was only allowed to handle two chats at a time, and each chat session took about half an hour - with some ending because the person on the other side idled too long. I mean granted, the UI wasn't great and the customer service guy wasn't a fast typer, but even then it was time-consuming and did not scale. They had two dozen people clocked in, if they were all as fast as this one person, they can handle 50 support calls an hour at most.

It does not scale. This was for a company with about 2.5 million users who rarely need customer support. Compare with companies like Google or Facebook that have billion(s) of users. They automated and obfuscated their customer support ages ago.

    2.5 million users : 24 support staff
    1 billion users   : 9600 support staff

I frankly doubt the numbers, surely it costs more than this for an average company?

If you have an AI customer support that can actually support customer service requests and provide resolution, people will use it and be happy about it, or at least indifferent.

This isn’t really customer support, but prisma (popular typescript ORM) has an AI that can answer just about any prisma-related question. It’s got a great RAG setup, can help think through novel scenarios, and always refers to specific docs pages and GitHub issues.

I think it’s made by a company called kapa. Those guys are gonna go far. That thing works SO well. I’ve been imagining how good life would be with a prisma-style AI docs assistant for things like massive, obtuse google APIs.

And for less than about $50 a month, I understand why they need to spend less than half an hour per month to retain me. It'd be net negative profit otherwise. (unless they offshore, in which case the math is only slightly better).

(Also, if you own a home in NY and use lemondade -- do know that they don't cover cast iron piping (extremely popular in NYC). I found that out at renewal...)

But,

In this particular story, the people were asking questions that were answered in the instructions.

No one wants to waste their time answering stupid questions, particularly if they are a solo small shop who gets entitled people asking questions around the clock.

Or for really common cases (ie. turn it on and off, you're affected by an outage, etc), redirect them to an prerecorded message and then let them know that they are still in the queue and can wait for a person. 9/10 it'll solve everything, but also reduce friction of simple things that might be answered.

AI isn't an improvement for companies that already provide great customer support, but it has the ability to seriously raise the bar for companies that want to keep customer support costs low or that have a lot of trivial requests that they have to deal with cost-effectively

- either it has no authority and is simply restating publicly available information

- it has authority but only after pressuring it. In which case I have to spend time to find the right combination of things to get what I want

If I’m calling it’s because I have a special need that is unlikely to be resolved by a flow chart.

The potential customer base being basically suckers waving wads of cash to be taken from them. The wild contrast of how nice the author tries to be to every single person that interacts with the project -- despite majority being the equivalent of single-celled organisms poking the fb markeplace "is it available" button.

Reading some of the messages from potential users is so eye-opening. I don't know if there's a sane way to deal with the entitlement, other than just plain ignoring those interactions.

How would one handle this type of project in 2024? Route most of the rote communication via an LLM, automate as much as possible, ignore all feature requests, dogfood everything as you continue to use the project yourself?

I really like the learnings the autor took from this experience. Seems like most of them came from adopting "I give up" attitude when flirting with burnout -- which inadvertently seems to follow the 80/20 rule.

As many have learned, the people actually paying you money are usually pretty reasonable. It's the people who haven't paid you a cent who have all these crazy demands.

Companies only pay attention to you as a customer when they think the checkbook is coming out, or going away. Big companies have different reasons, but the behavior is similar. The people who understand this start making everything sound like a quid pro quo situation even if it's not very sensible.

The more clever and slightly pessimistic entrepreneur might go so far as suggest the problematic customer talk to one of their competitors. But that sort of biological warfare really should be covered by the Geneva Convention.

    > As many have learned, the people actually paying you money are usually pretty reasonable. It's the people who haven't paid you a cent who have all these crazy demands.

This is the kind of thing no startup puts in their year one budget and (alongside supplier cashflow issues) is why those projections don't work for

Mega corporations get away with awful support of paying customers, people don’t actually expect you to jump at their command as a startup or even as a toy side project. If you’re able to ignore a beggar on the street, you should be able to ignore a lot of these emails. Stop guilting yourself into a heavy administrative burden and don’t avoid consumer apps because of that fear.

As someone else on the thread said, you start charging more. The large swathes of people looking for freebies will fade away and your customers, fewer in number perhaps, will be higher quality (or at least a bit more serious).

I have a project that allows building web applications out of SQL queries [1]. When I started receiving support requests by people who did not know SQL and were basically learning it along, I was thrilled. I was happy that my tool had a greater audience than I initially envisioned.

In any given domain, specialists are the minority. If the thing I am building is unexpectedly appealing to non-specialists, I rejoice, even if it means getting strange support requests. In the end, it helps me making the project more approachable and easy to use for everyone.

[1] https://sql.datapage.app

One startup I made, that actually gained some traction, turned into a struggle for me as well. I made a site to share and find tutorials for the new Swift programming language. I released the first version the day after Swift came out and it was actually getting used all over the world even. I expanded the platform a bit and I had a number of tutorial creators regularly cross posting their stuff on my site but ultimately, I myself did not jump into learning Swift and I just didn't have the continued drive to keep working on it.

It is funny because this Swift project was probably the startup I was the least passionate about building but it really was the only one that has ever garnered any real traction. Some of my take aways from it are how important timing is and that I get very enamored with the initial building phase but as you talked about in your writeup, the amount of work _after_ launch dwarfs that initial rush.

Users became so demanding and I felt like if I began to take money from them it would only get worse. Looking back on it I'm not sure it was the best choice, but at least at the time the application being free felt like an important defense against users that you really could never satisfy.

Free customers are not the most demanding, in my experience, but they are the most plentiful. If you cut them out, you don't lose any income (obviously) but you do cut down on requests by filtering out a lot of your users. A win!

So some people assume this is a monotonic function, where charging more increases their revenue while filtering out bad customers even further. If you press that button too many times, though, you discover that the higher price comes with increased churn, fewer signups, new competitors appearing on the scene, and, surprisingly, more demands from customers.

The last one is confusing because we were all told that "charge more" is a magic button you press to increase revenue and improve customer quality. The problem is that once your product becomes expensive enough, people expect it to perform at a certain level. If your $10/month service breaks one day, the number of people cancelling their subscriptions over it is going to be small. If your $100/month service is down for an entire day, people start asking themselves why they're paying so much for this thing anyway. The higher price gets more scrutiny at businesses looking to cut costs, so churn goes down. The higher price results it in getting recommend less over alternatives. It starts adding up.

Ideally you find the sweet spot where revenue is maximized, but that's hard to do. The feedback loop on price increases can take a very long time to show up in customer churn and reduced signups.

I've signed up for a number of SaaS products over the years that played the "raise prices" card too aggressively and then backtracked and cut prices.

So what do I do with this horse, he wondered? He asked a wise friend, who told him: sell the horse for the highest amount of money that you can.

What?!? replied the farmer; I love my horse dearly and would never think of selling it like some goods.

The wise man replied: if you give it away, whoever gets it will abuse the shit out of it, and treat it like a workhorse, whip it every day, etc. because they got it for free, and won't value it. On the other hand, if you sell it for a huge sum, the buyer will pamper it and take good care of it, because it's an investment to them.

Ever try giving something away for free on an online marketplace?

If not, don't. Always charge something. Even if you'll just tell them afterwards you don't actually want/need the money.

You'll run into the worst people imaginable on the internet.

<3

I can imagine the specific type of user base also increasing specific types of annoying support requests. Although customer support almost always ends up being one of the things that at some point will annoy the hell out of you. Even on open source projects, the entitlement can be incredible. Although there you can get away with a remark like "You are free to uninstall , we will give you a full refund!".

Automating a lot of that certainly was the right call, as well as filtering out all the low hanging fruits of bullshit requests. If people can't be bothered to read instructions (assuming they are clear instructions) then they certainly will also run into various other issues making them not worth the effort.

The one thing I don't entirely disagree with is "Be nice" which I personally have replaced with "Be civil" over the years. It still means listening to peoples requests, helping them where reasonable, even be courteous where applicable. To be fair, there might also be a cultural aspect involved here. In communication with US companies the "being nice" mantra often seems to be taken to such a degree where I am less wishing for someone sane to just help me swiftly with my support ticket and be done with it.

Overall, nice write up of the experience though!

This is why I've always been scared to make any commitments to paid subs other than "I'll send you all my blogs early"

This might then allow a better decision on whether it is a worthwhile endeavor or not.