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I work for an competitor to an AWS product. We've grown rapidly over the past ~7 years in a generally competitive (lots of startups, some really old tough incum

by aspir 9y ago

I work for an competitor to an AWS product. We've grown rapidly over the past ~7 years in a generally competitive (lots of startups, some really old tough incumbent companies). Without revealing too much on our end, here's some lessons learned: * AWS is bad at customer service, even for their large or premium customers. If you position yourself, and _seriously_ invest in making your company's culture rooted in exceptional customer service, that's a foothold. * Don't compete on price. This is hard for most tech startups, as pricing is a very difficult thing to do properly, but resist the urge to drop price to compete. You'll never have the scale, the supply chain masterminds, or the financial modeling to compete with AWS on price, so position yourself as a premium or luxury offering and don't be afraid to price accordingly. If you do the first step properly (a deeply rooted culture of service) you'll be able to justify the price. * AWS has great uptime, but often the actual operating performance of their service isn't that great, especially when you push the products beyond the 80% use case. They know that for the majority of their customer base, best-in-class performance isn't actually business critical (despite how flashy it sounds). However, there is absolutely a market for people who truly need best in class performance, or product flexibility, or some other best-in-class trait (latency, interaction design, etc.). Find who these people are, and optimize for that ruthlessly. This focus, in combination with the culture of exceptional service and positioning your brand as a premium provider, puts you into a completely different market space than AWS.

philliphaydon 9y ago
Really? I’ve had better customer experience with AWS than Azure or GCE... Even their SDK devs are responsive, I raised a bug for the SDK for their queues and went to bed, woke up and they had published a new SDK with the fix after 7 hours of raising the ticket... There is a lot to dislike about AWS but from my experience customer server isn’t one of them...
- electricEmu 9y ago
  What was your experience like on Azure and GCE? Azure had me on the phone within minutes of filing critical issues. Their engineering department provided updates all night. Amazon issue resolution could be summarized as "won't fix" or "someday/maybe". Their API inconsistencies might be considered a poor developer experience [0]. It's great you like AWS. I do too for some use cases! I disagree their customer service is "better" though. [0] http://apievangelist.com/2017/01/05/what-i-learned-crafting-api-definitions-for-66-of-the-amazon-web-services/ http://apievangelist.com/2017/01/05/what-i-learned-crafting-...
  - ToFundorNot 9y ago
    We had an instance crash (first time), once we were bestowed the honor of submitting a ticket after an hours of downtime (to which the clock only started an hour after the instance went offline, we were able to solve the issue ourselves, and closed the ticket an hour after submitting it... to which a couple of days later we received a response asking about the issue.
    - philliphaydon 9y ago
      Ah I had that experience on Azure. With aws we have paid support so when we have issues and raise critical tickets they respond in ~20m but azure. When they were still doing sql server as a service I lost access to my database. Support told me there was no problem. The azure insiders forum said others were having issues. The support wouldn’t even acknowledge I couldn’t access the database. 2 days later I finally got access again randomly. I never got a response to why this happened. I’m just Glad this was a non production application for some contract work but they ended up wanting to go aws over the experience. I Guess at the end of the day we all experience different levels of support from all these providers.
      - mattmanser 9y ago
        I got some support from Azure a few months ago asking about DTU spikes, more of a shot in the dark than hoping for a good answer, but got an extremely good, knowledgeable woman go through it with me within a day. We only spend a few thousand a year at the moment. I may hate their admin interface, but their support was top notch in my experience.
  - philliphaydon 9y ago
    Ah their API is far more consistent than Azure. Azure has the worst API of all. But their services are much faster than AWS. Aws is much more consistent if you know how to use one API then learning a new feature is simple because it’s more or less the same thing (only basing this on .NET and JavaScript SDKs) Been on Aws for... 6 years now. I was an Azure insider for like 5 years till they discontinued the program and use it for contract work. GCE I don’t have a lot of experience in but just try to Ensure I know what’s going on incase we need to switch one day or I move to new job.
- aspir 9y ago
  I dunno, that sounds pretty good honestly. The only info I have on AWS's service is testimonials, so I don't have anything concrete. The industry we obsessively study/studied was hospitality, where service is literally the differentiator between the "pretty good" and the "absolute best in the world," and we've been pretty meticulous about iterating and building upon our service ecosystem (it's way beyond just one team at this point) like one might do with a software product. Most of our customers, from the small ones in the early days to the huge internet juggernauts we've had the privilege to work with use us as the standard to which all other vendors are measured, sometimes quite literally in a very odd way. So, I don't know if we got lucky with some stinker incumbents, or we stumbled on to something completely different, but we've got a good system in place that's built a pretty solid competitive moat. I guess if folks on the thread are still reading and interested in replicating this at their startups, my advice is: study elite hospitality and restaurants, not tech. I'm very rarely impressed with the service ecosystem in the tech world, though it happens, but I can learn something massive every day from hospitality.
- superasn 9y ago
  True their support has been quite helpful and pretty amazing. A dev reached out to me days after the issue was resolved for feedback and advice, and it wasn't a cookie cutter template. He actually wrote a 300 word letter to me, including asking for my feedback on a new feature they were working on. I couldn't believe a company as big as AWS would seek out opinion of some guy just posting on their forum.
- oliwarner 9y ago
  > better customer experience with AWS than Azure or GCE Yeah, they're all awful. A comparison might show one is better than another, but it's all a wash when you look at actually good customer service. A good host has a phone number, you ring it, somebody answers and then they fix your problem, without pinging you around a call centre. You're in and out within 20 minutes. For AWS (and their class) you submit a ticket and in 4-48 hours, you twiddle your thumbs while the cheapest labour available to Amazon wakes up on the other side of the planet to investigate your problem (also known as walking you through a script). AWS-sized hosts have advantages but I put a lot of weight in scaling things back to the RackSpace, Linode and Hetzner size operations. They put so much more effort into their human interaction.
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    I have to say that these days the people on the other side of the planet are getting really good. As mentioned in another comment, I had an Indian woman answer a non-trivial support ticket and she really was excellent. She had a breath of knowledge about SQL & SQL Server that I'd hire on the spot.

by aspir 9y ago

philliphaydon 9y ago

Really? I’ve had better customer experience with AWS than Azure or GCE... Even their SDK devs are responsive, I raised a bug for the SDK for their queues and went to bed, woke up and they had published a new SDK with the fix after 7 hours of raising the ticket... There is a lot to dislike about AWS but from my experience customer server isn’t one of them...

electricEmu 9y ago
What was your experience like on Azure and GCE? Azure had me on the phone within minutes of filing critical issues. Their engineering department provided updates all night. Amazon issue resolution could be summarized as "won't fix" or "someday/maybe". Their API inconsistencies might be considered a poor developer experience [0]. It's great you like AWS. I do too for some use cases! I disagree their customer service is "better" though. [0] http://apievangelist.com/2017/01/05/what-i-learned-crafting-api-definitions-for-66-of-the-amazon-web-services/ http://apievangelist.com/2017/01/05/what-i-learned-crafting-...
- ToFundorNot 9y ago
  We had an instance crash (first time), once we were bestowed the honor of submitting a ticket after an hours of downtime (to which the clock only started an hour after the instance went offline, we were able to solve the issue ourselves, and closed the ticket an hour after submitting it... to which a couple of days later we received a response asking about the issue.
  - philliphaydon 9y ago
    Ah I had that experience on Azure. With aws we have paid support so when we have issues and raise critical tickets they respond in ~20m but azure. When they were still doing sql server as a service I lost access to my database. Support told me there was no problem. The azure insiders forum said others were having issues. The support wouldn’t even acknowledge I couldn’t access the database. 2 days later I finally got access again randomly. I never got a response to why this happened. I’m just Glad this was a non production application for some contract work but they ended up wanting to go aws over the experience. I Guess at the end of the day we all experience different levels of support from all these providers.
    - mattmanser 9y ago
      I got some support from Azure a few months ago asking about DTU spikes, more of a shot in the dark than hoping for a good answer, but got an extremely good, knowledgeable woman go through it with me within a day. We only spend a few thousand a year at the moment. I may hate their admin interface, but their support was top notch in my experience.
- philliphaydon 9y ago
  Ah their API is far more consistent than Azure. Azure has the worst API of all. But their services are much faster than AWS. Aws is much more consistent if you know how to use one API then learning a new feature is simple because it’s more or less the same thing (only basing this on .NET and JavaScript SDKs) Been on Aws for... 6 years now. I was an Azure insider for like 5 years till they discontinued the program and use it for contract work. GCE I don’t have a lot of experience in but just try to Ensure I know what’s going on incase we need to switch one day or I move to new job.
aspir 9y ago
I dunno, that sounds pretty good honestly. The only info I have on AWS's service is testimonials, so I don't have anything concrete. The industry we obsessively study/studied was hospitality, where service is literally the differentiator between the "pretty good" and the "absolute best in the world," and we've been pretty meticulous about iterating and building upon our service ecosystem (it's way beyond just one team at this point) like one might do with a software product. Most of our customers, from the small ones in the early days to the huge internet juggernauts we've had the privilege to work with use us as the standard to which all other vendors are measured, sometimes quite literally in a very odd way. So, I don't know if we got lucky with some stinker incumbents, or we stumbled on to something completely different, but we've got a good system in place that's built a pretty solid competitive moat. I guess if folks on the thread are still reading and interested in replicating this at their startups, my advice is: study elite hospitality and restaurants, not tech. I'm very rarely impressed with the service ecosystem in the tech world, though it happens, but I can learn something massive every day from hospitality.
superasn 9y ago
True their support has been quite helpful and pretty amazing. A dev reached out to me days after the issue was resolved for feedback and advice, and it wasn't a cookie cutter template. He actually wrote a 300 word letter to me, including asking for my feedback on a new feature they were working on. I couldn't believe a company as big as AWS would seek out opinion of some guy just posting on their forum.
oliwarner 9y ago
> better customer experience with AWS than Azure or GCE Yeah, they're all awful. A comparison might show one is better than another, but it's all a wash when you look at actually good customer service. A good host has a phone number, you ring it, somebody answers and then they fix your problem, without pinging you around a call centre. You're in and out within 20 minutes. For AWS (and their class) you submit a ticket and in 4-48 hours, you twiddle your thumbs while the cheapest labour available to Amazon wakes up on the other side of the planet to investigate your problem (also known as walking you through a script). AWS-sized hosts have advantages but I put a lot of weight in scaling things back to the RackSpace, Linode and Hetzner size operations. They put so much more effort into their human interaction.
- mattmanser 9y ago
  I have to say that these days the people on the other side of the planet are getting really good. As mentioned in another comment, I had an Indian woman answer a non-trivial support ticket and she really was excellent. She had a breath of knowledge about SQL & SQL Server that I'd hire on the spot.