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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

#281

Post by tonyarkles »

Aurornis wrote: post #211
siliconc0w wrote: post #140

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 decid…

I agree with most of what you said, but there's significant nuance to this piece:

> 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.

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

#282

Post by lolinder »

philsnow wrote: post #237
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 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 worked at a tiny startup with a single customer support plus sales person—she had an array of fake names that she'd use for different purposes (billing, sales, tech support, etc) to try to simulate a larger org. She actually kept them all straight and apparently it worked.

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

#283

Post by whiterknight »

ecnahc515 wrote: post #161
zelphirkalt wrote: post #144

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…

You have a future in management.

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

#284

Post by whiterknight »

taberiand wrote: post #216
whiterknight wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bots are designed to waste your time and save the company time:

- 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.

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

#285

Post by bigiain »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #230
tda wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I wonder how flows like that happen.

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.)

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

#286

Post by RicoElectrico »

gnutrino wrote: post #93

The amount of fraud and scammers out there is insane. I worked on a platform that only had a few hundred in revenue a month (just starting out). We did many smaller transactions, and getting hit with disputes was a killer. If someone did 15 transactions, they could get hit with 15 chargebacks up to 3 months later. So for every transaction, even if it only generated $3 in revenue, the chargeback could be potentially $…

How come the chargeback value could be that much higher than the revenue? (NB: revenue, not profit)

If I buy a $3 product and chargeback, then I get $3 back, right? Or does the payment processor bill you $15 for each chargeback no matter the transaction cost?

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

#289

Post by dayjah »

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…

This is me almost every time I interact with ISP support.

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.

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

#290

Post by drpancake »

I can relate to a lot of this. The customer emails in particular. I was experiencing flashbacks while reading the article.

Back in 2014-2015 I created a platform for building crypto trading bots in the browser with Python scripts. You could write a bot, backtest it and trade live on multiple exchanges. It was a lot of fun to build, initially. I kind of stumbled onto the idea without any trading background.

It got some early traction. So I raised $100k of funding and went all in on the idea. I worked like mad.

But I slowly realised that all of my customers were "technical analysis" bros. Basically horoscopes for trading. I received endless support requests for exotic new indicators and obscure features.

I added a marketplace that let you sell your bots to others. It quickly jumped up to $10k/mo in commission after the fee I took. That seemed bananas to me as a 24 year old.

But the bots being sold were pure snake oil. I distinctly remember that the guy who sold the most didn't even run his bot with his own money.

I felt like was running a gambling site. After 14 months of this I was completely burned out. I quit and I wasn't able to work at all for four months.

Glad to see you figured out a smarter solution.

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