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Ghost CEO lectures locked out customer about empathy
- hartator 5y agoFrom Ghost CEO's email: > Years ago, when l was younger and knew better, used to be very aggressive to companies on Twitter and lecture them about how they should do business. It was awful, honestly, and I regret how I behaved. Even ignoring the obvious typo, it is a little condescending indeed.
- ahoyhere 5y agoespecially considering I’ve been running a SaaS for 12 years
- 1cvmask 5y agoCongratulations. What is your SaaS of 12 years called? And in your HN bio some of the url domains do not work. FYI. You also state that you can get angry (and bored). Would you still have publicized this if you were merely annoyed but not so angry.
- dilatedmind 5y agoI think he's making fun of his past self, thinking he knew everything when he was younger.
- dexterdog 5y agoBit he's actually making fun of his current self because now he has the gig and doesn't want to ruin a good thing.
- smoldesu 5y agoWhen I was young and foolish, I also used to defend random CEOs on Hacker News. But now I'm older, and rationalizing their absurd and offensive rhetoric is too time consuming for my desired lifestyle.
- samspenc 5y agoThe rest of the paragraph: > Later, I started my own business. Ghost. And after 9 years of doing this, my perspective changed a great deal. The cycle is complete.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ivanmontillam 5y agoI reckon some of the powerful distribution that can give you a centralized platform like Ghost, Medium, Substack or similar. But the long-term solution is to own your website. At the very start the reach is not very enticing... but your home, your rules. (As long as you don't break the law, you'll be fine).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ng12 5y agoTwitter has become so annoying. I can't even see what @ghost is without signing in.
- riffic 5y agoTwitter's had a login wall for a few weeks now. The company is pretty user-hostile. edit: There were some threads on this in the past that are worth checking out. Public service announcements like fire notifications are pushed out by public agencies through these services and they can't go to the intended audience when put behind the wall. Public sector really needs to be compelled to adopt interoperable and freely consumable protocols. https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+login+wall+site:news.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+login+wall+site:news...
- rileymat2 5y agoI understand why, but a lot of social media has gone this direction. It feels like a bit of a bait and switch over time. The deal was we give them free content for eyeballs to serve ads and they give us a platform for exposure. Requiring login as well is a long trend I don’t like.
- quickthrower2 5y agoIronically I couldn’t see Amy’s tweet when signed in I had to sign out! “ You’re unable to view this Tweet because this account owner limits who can view their Tweets. ” Limited to friends and completely anonymous people I guess!
- torstenvl 5y agoThat checks. Ghost CEO launched massive e-mail flame at me when I asked them to clarify their migration policy (it used to say you could "request" your data but gave no indication as to whether they honor such requests). Dude is outright abusive.
- zexodus 5y agoI wonder how they'd respond to a GDPR request.
- pc86 5y agoWell they're based on Singapore (at least as far as it appears from the Contact page) so they're outside of any EU jurisdiction unless they have servers there.
- untitaker_ 5y agoYou're subject to gdpr if you're serving eu customers, where your hq is doesn't matter. Enforcement is a problem tho.
- pc86 5y agoIf you can't enforce a law, saying you're "subject" to it is mostly an academic exercise.
- untitaker_ 5y agoIt's definetly hard to enforce, but not impossible, if EU is dealing with a party in a random country which clearly shows no intention of doing business in the EU. I.e. the internet is practically lawless a lot of the time. But it depends on whether you're accepting payments and whether you have paying customers in EU.
- officialchicken 5y agoSame experience here with the CTO... I was trying to notify some terrible security problems in their product. What she doesn't like she dismisses, deflects, and deletes. edit - it was the CTO, not CEO
- Jugurtha 5y agoI often test our product by recording a speedrun video of the main functionality, not to be shared, but to reveal all the learned helplessness and clunky user experience. It is amazing how recording a video going through the product does: the video is full of swear words and cursing. All the things that were invisible suddenly become glaring. All the un-necessary clicking and convoluted flows become torture with cognitive dissonance: "And you can easily just do [steps that clearly are not easy]" and it hits you. Hard. Hence, some things trigger that agression, especially in a more mature product. For example, I only used YouTube as a consumer of videos, but recently I was putting a lot of videos there in my personal account. I then created another account and wanted to transfer the videos. Easy, right? No. I looked and looked, and read documentation, and searched on the web, and people said you need to download the videos from one account, then upload them back again to the second account. That can't be, right? I mean I clearly am not the first one to want to do that, and YouTube has existed for ages. There has to be a way I'm stupid enough to have overlooked. I contact them on Twitter, and they link to the documentation that tells you to download videos somewhere, then upload them back again. This is insanity. They're already on YouTube's infra, why do the round trip. Just move the darn thing? I'm not privy to how their infrastructure works, but I have a feeling that this is not the flow I want. One other example... I have one Android phone that was not physically in the same place as me. I wanted to get the call history (which is backed up in Drive) to urgently call the last number that called me. I could clearly see that the call history was backed up in Drive, and it shows you a "Preview" button that, when you click on, shows a modal that tells you the call history is backed up, and has a button that says "Delete". I can use Find my Phone and pin-point the location, I can erase it, I can make it ring, I can download all my data and Drive. I can download the device settings. I can Delete a backup, but not download it. Now I need to wait for tomorrow to be able to get that phone for that call log. Here's what is interesting: it's almost impossible that I be the first one that hits something like this (either for YouTube or Drive) for products with this many users existing for this long. Moving a video around is practically so obvious, you don't think there would be a documentation for it, let alone a documentation that tells you you can't do it. Heck I'll run my mouth and say it's harder to write and maintain the docs that tell you you can't do it, than add that no-brainer functionality... But then again, I'm running my mouth.
- 5y ago
- 1cvmask 5y agoGhost ghosted their trial customer. Perhaps the reason of the name
- kleinsch 5y agoIf the Ghost CEO really knew better about Twitter they’d recognize that this person is flaming for attention, not trying to get their problem resolved, so sending condescending emails is just throwing fuel on the fire.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rahimnathwani 5y agoAfter reading the initial Tweets, and then the email exchange, I can empathise with both sides.
- hogFeast 5y agoThe best part is saying that you have learned so much about why you shouldn't be mean to companies on Twitter, and how embarrassing that behaviour is...and doing it in a whiny email to a customer. Some people go through life "learning" the same lesson over and over.
- jonas21 5y agoHonestly, both sides of this conversation seem pretty obnoxious.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bdcravens 5y agoIn a customer/company interaction, the company should ALWAYS take the high road. They don't get to be offended or defensive. They have more to lose by doing so.
- ummonk 5y agoYes, hence why both sides are obnoxious here.
- bdcravens 5y agoI think the difference is a customer is an individual; a representative for the company, and the CEO especially, is representing the company.
- true_religion 5y agoGhost is B2B. Their whole value proposition is that they help you make more money from your customers. So technically they're both businesses. This is a bit different than say... Walmart talking down to a single mother who tried to use an out of date coupon.
- bdcravens 5y agoA business is still an individual customer. (Whether that customer has 1 employee or 1 million) I'm talking "individual" in the many to one sense, not the C in B2C sense.
- threatofrain 5y ago
- nostrebored 5y agoHorrific CX. I'm sure if Ghost discovered a bug causing data loss it would become an engineering priority. From a customer's perspective this is the same thing. This shows a complete lack of empathy with what customers feel when they use your platform. Stories like these stick with me. When I evaluate using a product, hearing about customer pain like this makes it a no go. Similarly I've told friends that I wouldn't work for a company they've applied to based on bad c-level engagement with customers. Stuff like this spreads. If you won't fix it for your customers sake, fix it out of self interest.
- amyhoy 5y agoSome people have since reached out to me and told me: 1. The CEO randomly picks on women on twitter he thinks subtweeted him and writes their bosses 2. The same lock-out mechanism — plus the queue for deletion — happens if eg your credit card expires or has an issue or sometimes randomly
- encoderer 5y agoAre we using HN to amplify Twitter flame wars? Submitting negative stories of people we don’t like? This is not news it’s just red meat for clicks.
- okdjnfweonfe 5y agoHN isn't just for news Its a startup, business, and tech link aggregator This covers the ramifications of poor customer treatment (business practices), and also acts as a warning to startups that might be looking at ghost as an option for their company's blog
- encoderer 5y agoEh, for my vote, I think social justice can stay on twitter and reddit.
- designNERD 5y agoThis is not social justice. This is about commerce.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- murphyslab 5y agoNot the first time that this issue with Ghost has been discussed on HN either. This article described a similar experience: https://web.archive.org/web/20200815091537/https://postapathy.substack.com/p/i-was-building-a-new-website-for https://web.archive.org/web/20200815091537/https://postapath... https://web.archive.org/web/20210407222630/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24167058 https://web.archive.org/web/20210407222630/https://news.ycom...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwawybllion 5y agoSeems like the CEO told OP that they would provide her an archive download link upon request. I'm confused what the problem is? I buy that the trial lockout thing is annoying, but... Are we supposed to be up in arms that a user has to email support for... support? I'm annoyed primarily by OP's entitlement and vitriol, and secondarily by the CEO's typos and grammar.
- throwawybllion 5y agoAlso OP claimed that she never mistreated support staff and then posted emails of her being unnecessarily condescending to support staff. EDIT: not extremely rude and condescending, just unnecessarily condescending
- bdcravens 5y agoI read the emails. Didn't seem rude or condescending to me. Unless there are other emails you're referring to? https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/1449194810749845512/photo/1 https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/1449194810749845512/photo/...
- throwawybllion 5y agoThose were the ones I was referring to. I'll agree that they aren't really rude, but I do think they're condescending. I guess by rude I meant the negative comments seemed overwrought and unnecessary in the context of a support thread. Shrug, I guess I've vented at support before, but usually in a tone that I hope better acknowledged that it wasn't the agent's fault. More commiseration than lecturing. Again, I hope.
- bdcravens 5y agoIn the various forms of support I've done, I've always encountered rude customers at some point. It's the job. If you feel like you have to be defensive (per other comments here, it sounds like this isn't the first time), you shouldn't be responding. > I guess I've vented at support before, but usually in a tone that I hope better acknowledged that it wasn't the agent's fault. I had a very bad experience with Chase. (They took $900 without explanation, and still haven't returned it) In my many calls, I had some heated venting sessions. I usually at least once told the person it wasn't personal, but they were the Chase rep at that moment. As an aside, responding to this thread with a throwaway created during this thread, everyone is going to assume you work for Ghost.
- throwawaymedia 5y agoI don't know. This is clearly not a HN kind of submission, but I actually agree with the CEO. OP sounds more like an activist looking for attention.
- davidgerard 5y agohi, company throwaway account!
- ryandrake 5y agoFrustrated users are an opportunity to learn and improve. As I read the rant about how his system is needlessly complicated web of "tens of thousands of apps, orchestrated by a complex billing management layer which has no link to the software itself, blah blah, blah" I couldn't help but think how much more fruitful the conversation would be if he had sent it to the engineering team instead of getting defensive to the customer. Even Steve Jobs would commonly take customer complaints about Apple's products sent to his E-mail address, and forward them down to engineering with a terse note "Why?" "Sorry, this is a bug and we're working on fixing it" would have been such a better response.
- stereoradonc 5y agoIts odd that Twitter flame wars are being discussed here. Though, I have steered clear of Ghost- their paid plans are too expensive. Yes, I can host it but what if I can't? Luckily WordPress works.
- MatthewJBrown 5y agoDon't stand in the way of customers trying to give you money. Isn't that a basic rule of doing business?