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

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

#221

Post by Aurornis »

pjc50 wrote: post #105
joshuaturner wrote: post #98

Before Reddit changed API access I built an iOS app called Pager ( https://pager.app ) that allowed users to set up alerts for content posted on Reddit. It had a lot of success but the issues you highlighted here kept me from monitizing the project. 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…

The usual suggestion, often given by HN's patio11, is to charge, and charge more. For some reason free customers are the most demanding, and the more you charge the more people self-select out of the customer base.

The usual way this is presented as a free lunch has become disconnected from reality, IMO.

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.

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

#222

Post by reilly3000 »

wongarsu wrote: post #36
101008 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once people notice AI is responding they will skip it and will request to talk to a human. AI will look the same as FAQs or Chatbots, people don't want to interact with them, they want a human being that is able to understand their problem exactly as it is.

Most chatbots are both useless and tedious to interact with. But I've also had plenty of interactions with human first-level support that's just following a script without any actual understanding. An AI would be able to provide a genuine improvement over that. 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 t…

That is exactly what is happening at my employer, and it’s been really effective for trivial support, especially when it’s empowered to make meaningful changes on the customer’s behalf. It’s got large swaths of the whole UX in chat, with an authenticated session. You could see it being better a better experience than clicking around anyhow. It does a great job at search too. Lots of room to improve but it’s hitting its targets for reducing human support time and as a sales tool.

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

#223

Post by suprjami »

duxup wrote: post #79
shash7 wrote: post #37

Can relate, I've been in a similar boat running a small B2B Saas over the last 2 years. It does get easier over time. 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. - Inve…

>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 :(

Giving people a bullet point action plan at the end of an update helps with this.

## Action Plan

- Read my comment

- Try it

- Comment on your experience

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

#224

Post by joshuaturner »

brandon272 wrote: post #171
joshuaturner wrote: post #98

Before Reddit changed API access I built an iOS app called Pager ( https://pager.app ) that allowed users to set up alerts for content posted on Reddit. It had a lot of success but the issues you highlighted here kept me from monitizing the project. 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…

It feels like a hostage situation. Had you started to charge money for that app, the most demanding and unreasonable cohort of users would have become apoplectic and invested time into trashing you and the app. It's almost like that in order to start charging in that situation, you need to retire the app under that name and rebrand as a different, fee-based product.

Especially because if I had monetized it, it likely would have been a subscription model because that would obviously be the only way to cover the continued operating costs, and users have such an aversion to any subscription.

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

#226

Post by creesch »

hluska wrote: post #203
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…

Would you care for a counterpoint? 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…

Okay, different person as the one you responded to. Your entire comment was reasonable up until the last line.

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.

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

#227

Post by al_borland »

This sounds about right. The ongoing support is why I don’t think I could ever be an indie dev. If I ever do put something significant out publicly, it will be free and offered as-is. Not because of any grand philosophy on what software should be, but simply to avoid the support obligations without being riddled with guilt.

Automation can help, but there are limits to what it can handle, not to mention something needs to happen enough times to see automation is needed. There is also the question of time invested vs time saved. It’s not the silver bullet I’d need it to be.

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

#228

Post by QuantumGood »

Aachen wrote: post #159
QuantumGood wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customer support isn't paid well, so they often aren't motivated to become very skilled beyond the level of a chatbot before they move on to other things. So the interface to bad docs doesn't matter much. And good docs are very hard to produce. AI magnifies problems when good docs are lacking.

> aren't motivated to become very skilled beyond the level of a chatbot 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 bette…

Chatbots are loaded with issues. But I have also had a lot of issues with humans.

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.

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

#230

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

tda wrote: post #204
Vegenoid wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. All the time when I worked in IT: 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 re…

Me: This very specific thing is broken in general for your product when I do a and b. Just like users x,y and z report on . (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 t…

I wonder how flows like that happen.

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?

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