Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

switowski.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 441 posts

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#181

Post by attentive »

shash7 wrote: post #96
thehappyfellow wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of “polite but curt” tone? I’m struggling to see what you mean.

Both xyproto and Gustomaximus have solid examples. Here's more: - Be direct, Hi, the xyz feature is available on the PRO plan. You can upgrade to the PRO plan at app.saas.com/billing - Be brutal, Hi xyz, your card couldn't be charged for your Saas subscription, and hence your subscription has been deactivated. To reactivate, enter your card details app app.saas.com/billing - Be honest, Hello xyz, thanks for the featu…

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

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

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#182

Post by NightlyDev »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #106

Great article! I'd add another tip: Use marketplaces to get visibility and traffic. Maybe part of your success was being on Gumroad to begin with (which is not just a MoR) 3K MRR here after running for 5 years and the projects are on autopilot too. Growth is very slow, zero marketing efforts made on my side. I think it's hard to get more value from this product though, hence why I focus on other ventures. Not that ma…

Can confirm that Paddle support is really bad. Onboarding and calls was very hands on(at least before they opened up for all), but everything after that was terrible and frankly idiotic. At least they can switch to using LLMs now, cause even those would do a better job.

And yeah, VAT and GST is annoying. Terrible for small businesses.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#183

Post by [deleted] »

parpfish wrote: post #29
_se wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to talk to an AI for customer support.

i've gone back and forth on this over the last few months. I started out thinking that we've all been conditioned by bad customer support chatbots whose only purpose is to look up facts from the FAQ and then tell you to call the real customer support line to actually handle your problem. the problem was that the chatbots weren't granted hee ability and authority to actually do things . wouldn't it be great if you cou…

[deleted]

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#184

Post by fragmede »

detourdog wrote: post #165
Eisenstein wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that 'everyone an entrepreneur' would increase economic output and productivity, and the fact is that some people just want a paycheck because they don't really care about making more money than the paycheck gives them, and the work is fine.

In old world Egypt they kept the creative class in a seperate village. I believe this was needed to keep group harmony and focus.

was the separate village to keep the creatives in by themselves, or to keep them away from everybody else.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#185

Post by kelnos »

duxup wrote: post #164
wruza wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m observing this for many years and it feels like there are two types of people. Those who perceive lists as a whole and those who list.shuffle().pop(). Try asking your colleagues/etc three semi-related questions in one message and you’ll get only a partial answer in a significant number of cases. When confronted (constructively, much later) they usually get evasive and can’t explain. I could theorize it’s a learne…

I really wish there was a reliable way to ask people. "I need your engagement level to be set to 10 for this communication. It's ok if you can't do that, but then just say you can't do that. I'm already set to 10 and rando guesswork / tidbits are only going to cause problems." Even just "nope can't do it" responses would save me time. I just got off a critical call with folks pulling stuff out of their ... and it was…

I think that's unreasonable to ask for just about anyone. The only time that's going to work is if you're helping them with an issue that's critical to them. Otherwise you are never going to get their full attention, it even close.

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

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#186

Post by perlgeek »

authorfly wrote: post #9

Wow I can really relate. The customer support efforts when you don't feel like it, being ghosted after helping a customer, the random or fraud disputes. It's really tricky at that stage between hiring help and having the time/motivation to maintain those very non-tech parts while trying to continue doing other core parts of the side project / startup. The first sale feels great, as does first showing the prototype. B…

> being ghosted after helping a customer

I guess that's a matter of expectation.

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

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

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#187

Post by rthomas6 »

wruza wrote: post #116
duxup wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for customer support. And very focused responses in terms of action items. You might think of 3 things to say, check, but sadly 90% of the people you respond to with a list will behave like they read just one of them. Sadly this also leads to dragging things out for everyone who can handle more than one thing at a time :(

I’m observing this for many years and it feels like there are two types of people. Those who perceive lists as a whole and those who list.shuffle().pop(). Try asking your colleagues/etc three semi-related questions in one message and you’ll get only a partial answer in a significant number of cases. When confronted (constructively, much later) they usually get evasive and can’t explain. I could theorize it’s a learne…

I think this issue is a lot of why ChatGPT feels smart to me. It actually parses all the parts of what I say and tries to respond to it comprehensively. It doesn't always succeed, but it's usually better than my experience asking a multi-part question to a random real-life person in a support role.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#188

Post by dartos »

I’ve been working in software for 15 years and have been doing it for fun 5 years before that.

Seeing this does not make me love my job. I miss making little toys and learning random things.

The more I work in this field, the more I realize building products isn’t what I love, it’s just what pays the bills.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#189

Post by sunnybeetroot »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #146

I think the merchant of record bit is a bit overblown for a lot of side projects. Tuvalu isn't going to extradite you for not paying them their $5 VAT. If you're frequently dealing with multiple jurisdictions (especially with EU) and the fees don't add up to 10% or higher (which MoRs can do if you're in a less popular jurisdiction), it can make sense to take care of admin headaches. That might be many projects, but i…

I agree if you can guarantee your project isn’t going to make more than X a month. But like the author said, it’s painful to change merchants later when you start needing to care about tax.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#190

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

shawnz wrote: post #174
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you get situations like this one where the AI invented a non existent policy (which the airline did not want to honor) https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...

There's a non-zero chance that real humans working as customer service agents will invent facts, too (whether to try and be helpful about something they're not completely sure, or just to get a problematic customer to leave them alone)

Humans get things wrong, but are less likely to generate novel facts.
Post reply on HN