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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

#381

Post by wtetzner »

duxup wrote: post #164
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…

I really wish there was a reliable way to ask people. "I need your engagement level to be set to 10 for this communication. It's ok if you can't do that, but then just say you can't do that. I'm already set to 10 and rando guesswork / tidbits are only going to cause problems." Even just "nope can't do it" responses would save me time. I just got off a critical call with folks pulling stuff out of their ... and it was…

You need to be able to send a form to people with required fields.

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

#382

Post by jclulow »

micw wrote: post #370
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…

_This_ is exact the place where a LLM could step in and could really help: 1. Customer describes the problem 2. You get the problem, parsed by the model, including a summary and a suggestion what could help. 3. You write "do that 3 things" 4. The model tells the customer to do the 1st, then the 2nd and so on 5. The model reminds the customer in intervals that things are not completed 6. the model notifies you after t…

You don't need an expensive, opaque, antisocial system to run interference against your users. What you need is literally just a checklist.

Give the user a checklist instead of just freeform text -- where they can check off the three individual things to try. When they've checked them all off, they can go back to the well for another response from support.

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

#383

Post by gizmo »

authorfly wrote: post #355
gizmo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people use random sites to test cards to see if they can get away with using stolen CC details I already addressed this. By forcing people to use the product before allowing them to purchase you make drive-by fraud impossible. We use stripe and we have 0 fraud to deal with.

You didn't read my comment for what it meant, I think. This isn't automated, it's people in 3rd world countries signing up to random sites that have CC as a method of payment and seeing if payment goes through. You probably pay for Stripe Radar and don't see these payments but are also silently missing out on legitimate payments, or you run KYC or have too few or only western access to your site otherwise. Have you s…

You really are not hearing me. Our legitimate traffic looks nothing like fraud traffic. Legitimate users don't sign up for a free trial, ignore our application, zoom straight to the payment form and purchase. 0% of our legitimate customers do this. Everybody wants to try before they buy! You can literally lock the payment form making it impossible for people to purchase until they have used the product for multiple hours over multiple days.

Nobody in a 3rd world country is going to spend 5 hours clicking around in a product over multiple days just to test if a credit card works. If card testers don't find the payment form within 2 minutes they're going to move on to a weaker target.

People who struggle with fraud in SaaS usually make no attempt to distinguish real user behavior from fraud-y behavior.

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

#385

Post by loa_in_ »

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…

Automatic closing tickets is a solution looking for a problem. Humans should close tickets when they're resolved or no resolution is anticipated or planned. Putting an arbitrary number of days on it with a one way trip to the [closed] tag is like following a broken clock because it's right twice a day.

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

#386

Post by loa_in_ »

suzzer99 wrote: post #352
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…

We had a Salesforce consultant who was like this. I'd send him a list of five things he needed to do to make his jitterbit connection work with our internal API. He'd do one thing, report that it still didn't work. I'd ask if he did the other four things. He'd do the next thing, report that it still didn't work, etc. God only knows how much that department was paying him.

That's a person artificially extending their own task to get some slack from their company's toxicity.

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

#389

Post by jkukul »

RachelF wrote: post #296
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.

I think in the era of LLMs good docs/FAQ are of an even greater value.

You can write a support bot that sends a user's question + docs/FAQ to an LLM to automatically deal with the basic questions and only involve a human in the loop once a question goes beyond what's in the docs.

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

#390

Post by ocodo »

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…

> Support just completely disconnected from Engineering

Yes.

Unless you want to drive engineering insane / waste a ton of money.

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