When they send us an email, even a reply to a mass email, a real person reads every message and follows up. Simply thing, but people are routinely surprised.
Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?
221–230 of 288 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?
#222Most of these seem to be very on the side of "I'm a company", so as a sole developer what I like to do for clients is implementing sockets into their apps. Adding sockets for, say, the 3 newest logs they get in real time. Or if they have anything that maps to a graph/app-overview just make sure that will always update in real time. It's not a huge time investment for me. Customers usually never request it specificall…
For large datasets I've switched to using HDF5 files. They are easy to use from Matlab and a few other applications engineers typically have already.
Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?
#223My answer here is more relevant to an e-commerce company but the basic idea can be adapted to any company. So, back in 1994, my dad and me started an ecommerce company (bikeworld.com) that sold bicycle parts online. It was an extension of his brick-and-mortar bicycle business and I took a couple of years leave from college to help him build it. He did one thing early on that generated amazing word-of-mouth support: s…
Thanks for the story. Advanced Circuits (aka 4pcb.com) includes a package of microwave popcorn with every prototype order—since they know you will be up all night when the package arrives.
Ha, I should have read down a few comments, I didn't even see yours!
Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?
#224I get marketing, developers, content-people, biz-dev, product, higher management, middle-management ... in one room ... and after 2 days we produce a prioritized roadmap on how to move the company forward. Plus: No dead bodies, they actually liked beeing there. Most of the time they can't believe it either. It's fun.
That sounds awful. How do you avoid dead bodies?
Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?
#225The funniest thing I got in a package was a pair of earplugs that Moog Music included in their Minitaur bass synthesizer's box.. I found it hilarious
Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're lucky. We always try to explain that CSV is a mostly-clean format while XLS and XLSX are a mess. Yet, most of the time customers insist on XLS export, and we are happy if they at least acccept XLSX instead.
Evil pro-tip : you can output a csv file and name it "foo.xls". Excel will open it fine, with just a click-thru complaint dialog that no one will read anyway.
Israeli bank websites export an HTML table and call the file "foo.xls", and it works quite well.
Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
I generally respond rather negatively to automated emails or chat messages that seem human but are not, and I've been thinking of how I would approach this if I had a company big enough that automatic greetings are 'necessary' (or desirable, at least). Perhaps one solution is to use a clearly non-human company 'avatar' character specifically for some of these interactions? A robot or pet character?
How about a clip?
only if it has giant eyeballs and doesn't disappear no matter how hard you try to make it go away... Otherwise, it just seems disingenuous.
Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?
#228I don't know if these things "blow them away" but I do think they are differentiators: - I bring homemade cookies to our first meeting and if the client likes them, to subsequent meetings. The first time I did this for purely selfish reasons; I like cookies but I'll eat the whole batch myself unless I get someone else to "take a cholesterol bullet" for me. - I'm extremely honest and forthcoming. I tell them that it m…
Looks like a good strategy to find the job you're going to enjoy, but is it working well for you in the long run? Or you just have enough savings at bank to not rush until you find a good position? Since I wish to find some non-freelance job in future, but requirement of bullshit talk scares me. And few times when I attempted to act similar to what you posted I just bumped into a wall of misunderstanding.
I'm hard wired for the "honesty thing" but started going out of my way a few years ago after a bad experience.
I interviewed with a company for a contract and I had told them I only had 5 days of experience in technology X. They hired me and then let me go after a week because they needed a true expert to fix something in time to ship. I said them "I told you I only had 5 days experience with technology X, why did you hire me when you needed an expert??!"
The manager responded "We just liked you so much!"
After that experience, I would tell them [interviewers] right at the beginning of the interview that I was going to try my best to "open my mind and let them peek inside" and give them any data they might need to reject me. I'd tell them, "It's going to sound like I'm trying to talk you out of hiring me but I'm really just trying to make sure we're a good fit." Somewhere in there I'd tell them the above story so they'd know why I was taking such an unorthodox approach (and offer them another cookie).
I'm a freelancer with multiple clients now. I have too much work so I guess I have the luxury of not taking jobs that aren't a good fit. That said, being so confident that you can be radically honest with a potential client or interviewer, also signals competency. A desperate person doesn't behave that way.
Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?
#229Most of these seem to be very on the side of "I'm a company", so as a sole developer what I like to do for clients is implementing sockets into their apps. Adding sockets for, say, the 3 newest logs they get in real time. Or if they have anything that maps to a graph/app-overview just make sure that will always update in real time. It's not a huge time investment for me. Customers usually never request it specificall…
Can you say a little-more about the "sockets"? How do you implement this? I'm not even sure exactly what you mean, do you have an example? It sounds like a fun feature to implement so I'd love to hear more. Thanks
Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?
#230Here's an internal facing one: We send an automated greeting from the CEO as part of onboarding, but he actually sees and replies to every customer response, in both english and spanish, and forwards the more heartwarming ones on to the entire office. It's pretty cool to get a handful of emails every day from actual customers who are very grateful for the work we do. It also changed my opinion on the "canned CEO gree…
I did the same for new account registrations on my site. The humorous side effect was actually LinkedIn. That whole thing where you can auto invite everyone on your contact list... led to me getting several connection invites a day from users I had never personally met.