Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped

IMO this is the problem with the standard App Store business model: free with In-App Purchase. In that situation, the vast majority of people who email you are not customers but rather freeloaders.

My own App Store apps are all upfront paid, which eliminates the freeloaders, so support emails never overwhelm me. Perhaps I'm not maximizing my potential revenue, but I'm doing fine and prefer this business model and relationship with users.

Even with regard to bug reports, paid customers are more invested in doing some "work", responding to my requests for more information about the issue, because they've already invested money into the app and want a return for their investment.

If I contact a company to decide if I want to become their customer, I probably like them.

If I contact a company about a post-sales problem or for technical support, it's a different story.

This seems an incorrect assumption, or at least a conclusion built on incomplete information and consideration of additional factors. The first one that comes to mind is that these customers will on average be the heaviest users. That doesn’t make them less valuable, that makes them the exact ones most like to be willing to refer others to your product and the most able to do so with specifics on their recommendations and, hopefully, a positive endorsement of the service received, not just the product features.

This implies another aspect as well: even if good support weren’t to get you wider positive awareness, poor customer service and even average service that nonetheless has more negative recommendations to other can lose you business, and that too can have a compounding effect.

In general there’s also no getting around the fact that a smaller number of people will (or should) have disproportionate support requests, unless you’ve got a very homogeneous user base with homogenized use patterns. Or your products &/or documentation are of poor quality.

It’s probably not a bad idea also to take most support requests that aren’t inherently specific to a customer and require intervention as an opportunity & need to review your documentation, perhaps auto surface the most relevant bits it when a person submits a request with a an option “if this answered your question click here and we’ll mark your message as resolved, otherwise we have it, and will be in contact with”.

There’s no getting around the need to provide support and it’s possible for some businesses there could be an ideal global min/max that provides least effort & service cost for then elasticity of price & quality and customer tolerance, but I think if you find yourself in the mindset of “what’s the worst I can get away with” instead of “most I can afford to optimize long term contentment and good will referrals, you could be looking at things wrong. I’m not sure what “relationship” should mean in any case, if not something like what I’ve described.

Then that's not your first impression.

Sometimes people link to our "guides", like this one https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/measure/bodyfat/

my app is in fitness field https://macrocodex.app/ and the people who use it are:

1. Bodybuilders

2. Overweight / obese / skinny fat / underweight individuals

3. General gym crowd

Bodybuilders, well they immediately understand the app on first impression.

One user told me he has kidney disease and asked if I could add a “low protein” diet mode, so he could reduce protein intake below standard recommendations. I had never faced this requirement before, but after hearing him out, I decided to add it. This is just one of the many interactions.

Then there is another group, people who have spent a long time being underweight or overweight and have started attributing it to genetics. I often see posts like “I am genetically fat” or “I am an ectomorph / hardgainer"; "I can’t gain weight no matter how much I eat” in subreddits and fitness groups. Don't you dare to call them out of anything, they'll get mad! but are willing to give app try especially if they hear about it from someone else.

They typically use it for 2–5 weeks, and then they start gaining or losing weight depending on their goal. They are genuinely surprised that it’s possible.

Once they start seeing results, they usually just keep going.

I am not particularly good at communication, nor a guy with social skill.