You're not charging enough, you need to weed out the poor losers. Sad (and maybe rude) but true. The more you charge, your customer base will shrink, but the quality of customers will increase exponentially.
I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
331–340 of 441 posts
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#332You're not charging enough, you need to weed out the poor losers. Sad (and maybe rude) but true. The more you charge, your customer base will shrink, but the quality of customers will increase exponentially.
Would love to know from OP and others why this isn't the most sound advice.
I worked for a very small online retail company recently (I know it's not exactly the same but in the same vein) and raising the price for $18—$40 items by $5 had zero affect on the number of people placing (sales weren't amazing but not bad).
But ya, in the first line you say you made $15k over....... FOUR YEARS? Obviously that's a bunch for some people, but certainly not MOST people in tech?? You could have made much more and had a lot more fun bartending or even being a barista.
Having read the whole post... keep it up! Just raise your prices by... like, a LOT! Like, a lot a lot!
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#333You're not charging enough, you need to weed out the poor losers. Sad (and maybe rude) but true. The more you charge, your customer base will shrink, but the quality of customers will increase exponentially.
This is actually good advice, someone who pays a lot of money for a service will have high expectations but they will also be vested in getting things working.
I don't know the original attribution but it's something along the lines of "don't be afraid to fire unprofitable customers." If you have a customer who is drowning you in support tickets, and just not "getting it," politely tell them "sorry it's not working out" give them a refund and cut them off.
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
- 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.
Recently, I canceled a subscription for a newspaper, they make you go through chat to cancel. The agent was so nice that it was annoying. I don’t mind waiting in silence, but when they keep asking about weather, vacation plans, etc, I find it hard to not respond. This might part retention technique though.
Outsourced call centers obsessing over dumb metrics like "dead air" and "hold time". They think you are gratified by obsequious groveling and fawning reassurance. There is always some guy in management who gives pep talks about improving outcomes by avoiding words like "can't" or "impossible". He demands improvement to an already satisfactory situation, and so they scramble to out-customer-service themselves.
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#335Can 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.
Run stats on support requests and make canned/auto replies for the common ones?
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The other side of the coin is that support gets an ocean of lazy/unrelated/confused support requests that the engineer cannot help with, and responding and explaining that eats up a huge amount of time. I don't know that I agree with putting up barriers to reach support, but they are trying to address a real problem and I get where they are coming from
i remember we had similar issues at my 2nd to last job a bit ago. we would often times try to reduce the friction, but it built up and built up until, one day, there was zero chance of reaching anyone worthwhile. i wish we had gone back and really focused on providing as much support as we provide in product!!
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#337Anyone hired some offshore outsourcing people at a super cheap rate that are slow and mostly useless but cheap and act as a first line barrier? Something like Dell support line.
I hate dealing with those people but realize a cheap product wont have a highly paid developer hand holding me because I wont RTFM.
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#338[dead]
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#339Customer: You never emailed me the link I paid for. You ripped me off!
Me: I see an email was dispatched to bob@fmail.com 15 minutes ago. Can you double check your inbox?
Customer: Oops, typo. I meant bob@gmail.com
(Happens multiple times each week...)
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#340This 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 empl…
Surely you can just outsource customer service to an offshore provider that is (a) cheaper, and (b) just a company that invoices you for their time (i.e. not your employee therefore not directly owed benefits taxes etc by you)?
I haven't looked into it, so I don't know exactly what price range is involved (and I don't know if it's a price that one could justify, depending on the exact income involved in your side project - but let's assume it's a fairly modest income), and I don't have any names to recommend. But from what I've heard, Philippines is the go-to for this sort of work these days (not that it's the only country, there are other options).