I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by throwaway2037 » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 12:55 AM UTC

eps wrote: post #250

philsnow wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

- Hey, this is John, I'll be happy to help you with that. + Hello Xxx, No need to fake being happy (or sorry). Just provide an actual answer.

Is this very specific to the culture? In many cultures, there are standard written greetings that always appear at the start of a letter or even email response.

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

#292

Post by samstave » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 12:56 AM UTC

samstave wrote: post #238

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…

Ive had tremendous success submitting files to AI and just having it produce a structured readme.md for the logic within the code, I'll do a thing where I say Give me a readme, include description of functions, logic, how its invoked, dependencies, monitoring and give me a mermaid and swim diagram of the workflow. Its great. Another thing I do with an AI helper is when I have it write out a function for me I have it…

EDIT: One thing I attempted was to have claude keep a running artifact for a readme while I worked out a problem - but that didnt work so well. Also, as it hallucinates, one of the first indicators that its losing context is that I keep a header section on artifacts it makes and a version and description ad path for the artifact...

when iterating and the header gets stripped in the response, the bot is taking a turn...

Sometimes ask it to spit out the full context and its understandings in a manner I can use to re-prompt itself for best efficiency, and it gives a nice summary of the concept I am thinking through, and I use that with vary degrees of satifying results.

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

#293

Post by zoogeny » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 12:56 AM UTC

This comes at a decent time for me. I am pondering a new piece of software and customer service is the number one thing on my mind. I've mostly decided that the first hire I would make if it were to become any kind of success would be customer service.

But the economics of hiring are brutal. Customer service don't get paid a huge amount but if you consider vacation, benefits, taxes, and all of the other costs of employees then somewhere in the range of $100k/year is reasonable. Then it is just math: how many subscriptions do you need to cover that cost?

Even if you price your product at $100/month then you will be losing some large portion of that to taxes, payment processing, etc. It's unlikely you'll see it all but that is maybe $1000/year. So you need over 100 stable customers at that rate tier to cover one customer service employee. Going from 0 to 100 customers paying you $100/month is risky. I can't imagine the pressure if you are closer to $10/month (or $100/year) where you need 1000 stable customers to cover the same cost.

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

#294

Post by richardw » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 1:00 AM UTC

I very much feel you.

Choosing customers is crucial.

Patio11 has some great write ups on the type of customer who will suck your life force: Retail, not much money, not very busy.

Rather have business clients who are less price sensitive and have better things to do than argue about font choices.

I had one lady who spent 75 emails sending me on wild goose chases for a $30 app. At one point she mentioned a refund and I processed it before she could change her mind. She then offered me a job. Noooooo.

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

#295

Post by throwaway2037 » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 1:00 AM UTC

_se wrote: post #10

sklarsa wrote: post #5

I love the ending of this story, which isn't obvious from just looking at the title. The author identified key pain points around customer support, automated them, and went back to enjoying life. This is the kind of thing that gets me excited about the possibilities of technology and AI as a force multiplier, especially when working on side projects, "lifestyle" businesses, or even startups as a single founder.

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

And, yet, millions already do. The point of AI for customer support is to handle the very simple requests (maybe half). The rest, you can escalate. If AI doesn't know what to do, "Hmm, I'm not sure. Let me escalate your question/request to my manager." For most normies, this will work well.

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

#296

Post by RachelF » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 1:01 AM UTC

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…

"- Invest in good docs..."

In my experience, end users don't read the docs or FAQ's or help search - they send you a question.

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

#297

Post by throwaway2037 » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 1:03 AM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #40

btbuildem wrote: post #16

This was a fascinating read, really. The potential customer base being basically suckers waving wads of cash to be taken from them. The wild contrast of how nice the author tries to be to every single person that interacts with the project -- despite majority being the equivalent of single-celled organisms poking the fb markeplace "is it available" button. Reading some of the messages from potential users is so eye-o…

I've done exactly one legit "SaaS startup" type venture around 2012-2015. I still think about the absolutely insane customer service requests we'd get. It was a very niched down Eventbrite competitor, so we did things like PDF ticket generation, QR code generation, attendance tracking, there was a big fundraising component as well so lots of payment infrastructure. We charged a percentage of ticket sales so any one e…

    > As many have learned, the people actually paying you money are usually pretty reasonable. It's the people who haven't paid you a cent who have all these crazy demands.

Real question: I wonder if this phenom has been part of a case study for MBAs. It makes sense to me. If you are paying customer, you have already convinced yourself it is a valuable product. Deeper: Is it every worth trying to convert the "crazies" using sales strategies? Example: Well, if you sign-up for our enterprise package, we promise your needs in X months.

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

#298

Post by nick3443 » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 1:14 AM UTC

lbotos wrote: post #67

bluedino wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually agree, but Lemonade (insurance) has an amazing support bot.

uh, I beg to differ. I felt like an autocomplete with a knowledge base and "direct links to the right email forms" would have been faster than the fake chat interface that the "bot" uses. (Also, if you own a home in NY and use lemondade -- do know that they don't cover cast iron piping (extremely popular in NYC). I found that out at renewal...)

Cast iron water supply piping, cast iron gas supply piping, or cast iron drain/waste/vent?

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

#299

Post by chamomeal » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 1:27 AM UTC

_se wrote: post #10

sklarsa wrote: post #5

I love the ending of this story, which isn't obvious from just looking at the title. The author identified key pain points around customer support, automated them, and went back to enjoying life. This is the kind of thing that gets me excited about the possibilities of technology and AI as a force multiplier, especially when working on side projects, "lifestyle" businesses, or even startups as a single founder.

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

If it’s well-implemented, it’s fantastic.

This isn’t really customer support, but prisma (popular typescript ORM) has an AI that can answer just about any prisma-related question. It’s got a great RAG setup, can help think through novel scenarios, and always refers to specific docs pages and GitHub issues.

I think it’s made by a company called kapa. Those guys are gonna go far. That thing works SO well. I’ve been imagining how good life would be with a prisma-style AI docs assistant for things like massive, obtuse google APIs.

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

#300

Post by deadfoxygrandpa » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 1:38 AM UTC

hermitcrab wrote: post #244

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think sometimes the company doesn't know what to do or doesn't care. But they have to make some response. So they just ask you to do a load of busywork, to keep you out of their hair for a while.

sometimes we're aware of an issue and management has decided its not worth the effort to actually fix it, but also management doesn't want support to straight up tell people we wont help you, so they basically obfuscate