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

switowski.com

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

#211

One suggestion is simply increase the price. Price is strongly correlated with quality of customer. Price also acts as signaling that this is a tool for professionals who make actual money and so shouldn't be bothered coughing up something trivial like $100 for a subscription. You end up making more with far less customer support.

Raising prices works wonders when a product is both underpriced and hard to replace.

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

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

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

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

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

#212
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for reaching out. The issue you’ve described seems to be on your end. Please check your settings or consult our docs for further guidance. If the problem persists, feel free to get in touch.

Would it be worth putting a price to investigating? Message like: "Our premium support can investigate this for $XYhr. If the fault is at our end we will waive any fees. Please let us know if you wish to proceed."

Oooh, the Microsoft approach! :)

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

#213
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe that this is true. For 100$ a month I expect a far more polished product than for 20$, where I can look over a lot of missing features. If features don't work as advertised, I will absolutely make no distinction between a 500$ or 1$ product, and will demand a fix. But I will more likely have more patient if the service is cheap, before migrating away. And then, if your customers are business…

>For 100$ a month I expect a far more polished product than for 20$ I hate to put you on blast but this is exactly why people charge $100/mo instead of $20/mo. They do not want the customers who feel (sorry for the term) "entitled" to a heroic level of features, support, polish, etc. They want people who have a hair-on-fire emergency that is so awful that they'd gladly pay $1000/mo for it, and are thankful that your…

>the customers who feel (sorry for the term) "entitled"

Why would the word/ term "entitled", need an apology?

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

#214
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe that this is true. For 100$ a month I expect a far more polished product than for 20$, where I can look over a lot of missing features. If features don't work as advertised, I will absolutely make no distinction between a 500$ or 1$ product, and will demand a fix. But I will more likely have more patient if the service is cheap, before migrating away. And then, if your customers are business…

We’ve also seen customer support inquiries, and in general quality of our customers, rise with an increase in price. It doesn’t make sense as an end consumer, but B2B lens it makes sense. If a business can afford the higher price tag, they most likely would rather have a hands off approach for the problem they’re trying to solve (in a service based business) Many of our mid and lower tier customers want everything dr…

> We’ve also seen customer support inquiries, and in general quality of our customers, rise with an increase in price.

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

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

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

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And sometimes the last one becomes: Them: Don’t close the ticket, I hadn't had a chance to check that yet. Life gets in between and this one library or project is usually hardly the only thing that person juggles. We need to accept, that sometimes issues remain open for an extended duration. The worst is, when you have the same error or issue someone else had already, but their issue got closed by an effin github bot…

I almost never see bots close issues that are less than 30 days old. Many projects can change a lot in 30-90 days and the bug may no longer exist, keeping issues open when they may no longer be relevant isn't helping anyone either. If it is still relevant, it can simply be re-opened. I don't see any downside to semi-aggressively closing stale issues. If it's easily reproduced then most good projects will mark it so t…

Usually it can't be reopened because you can't even really get someone to look at it, because issues are wrongfully closed so frequently that they don't pay attention to complaints about the closures.

Take a look at this issue to see what it takes to keep something open: https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui/issues/41...

(not especially proud of my reactions there, but I hate being abused, even by robots.)

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one needs to know it's one ;)

Would you like to work with a business that treats your time and problems this way?

The only thing I care about is are my problems solved for minimal effort and time invested on my part. Whether it's AI or human doing the solving, I don't care.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And sometimes the last one becomes: Them: Don’t close the ticket, I hadn't had a chance to check that yet. Life gets in between and this one library or project is usually hardly the only thing that person juggles. We need to accept, that sometimes issues remain open for an extended duration. The worst is, when you have the same error or issue someone else had already, but their issue got closed by an effin github bot…

I almost never see bots close issues that are less than 30 days old. Many projects can change a lot in 30-90 days and the bug may no longer exist, keeping issues open when they may no longer be relevant isn't helping anyone either. If it is still relevant, it can simply be re-opened. I don't see any downside to semi-aggressively closing stale issues. If it's easily reproduced then most good projects will mark it so t…

> keeping issues open when they may no longer be relevant isn't helping anyone either.

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

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve also seen customer support inquiries, and in general quality of our customers, rise with an increase in price. It doesn’t make sense as an end consumer, but B2B lens it makes sense. If a business can afford the higher price tag, they most likely would rather have a hands off approach for the problem they’re trying to solve (in a service based business) Many of our mid and lower tier customers want everything dr…

> We’ve also seen customer support inquiries, and in general quality of our customers, rise with an increase in price. Yes, but it should be noted that the price is acting as a filter to exclude a subset of customers, reducing overall customer count. Obviously it's easier to have 100 customers paying $100/month than to have 1000 customers paying $10/month, but finding those tradeoff points can be hard. It takes time…

100% agree, and in my case its a service-based business so overhead is much higher per additional client vs an additional SaaS signup.

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

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

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

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

#219
post #116
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…

Same conclusion here.

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

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

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

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For 100$ a month I expect a far more polished product than for 20$ I hate to put you on blast but this is exactly why people charge $100/mo instead of $20/mo. They do not want the customers who feel (sorry for the term) "entitled" to a heroic level of features, support, polish, etc. They want people who have a hair-on-fire emergency that is so awful that they'd gladly pay $1000/mo for it, and are thankful that your…

>the customers who feel (sorry for the term) "entitled" Why would the word/ term "entitled", need an apology?

because it's a subjective very negative judgement about another human, and in polite conversation one should assume baseline positive things about other humans. it's basically like calling someone an asshole. as HN as a culture of politeness, you apologize first, even if it's justified.
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