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Some advice: If you're going to monetize a side project, and you do it in a way where you're providing direct support, be sure the customer base it targets are

Some advice: If you're going to monetize a side project, and you do it in a way where you're providing direct support, be sure the customer base it targets are people you actually want to deal with. Whatever the niche, imagine the worst people you've encountered on it, and be sure you want to use your spare time talking to them. Otherwise, the juice is likely not worth the squeeze.

danenania 2y ago
That's good advice. Unfortunately though I think the nature of support is that on average it selects for the more difficult people in your customer base, for the same reason that doctors spend a lot of their time with hypochondriacs (despite hypochondriacs making up a small percentage of the population). Something that helps to offset this psychologically, and is also a good thing to do anyway, is to proactively reach out more frequently to all your users. It can be the case that 95% of your users are happily chugging along, while 5% are unhappy and complaining frequently for whatever reason. If you rarely hear from that 95%, it can start to irrationally feel like no one is happy with your product, since that's the message coming from most of your support interactions.
- crtified 2y ago
  I guess the old 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle somewhat applies to the support distribution for many products. That is, 80% of the support resources are taken up by 20% of the clients. (incredibly-vaguely-speaking, naturally) The variable is "20% of what type of client?". 20% of Taylor Swift concert attendees, or 20% of assembly coders? Each comes with its own unique challenges!
hermitcrab 2y ago
I'm sure there are good and bad people in all walks of life. But, yes, people in some markets are definitely (on average) less pleasant to deal with than others.
sam_perez 2y ago
How do you ensure this? Are you suggesting more analysis pre-building the product, or doing things like increasing the price until you've effectively filtered out enough of the people you don't "want to deal with", assuming that works.

danenania 2y ago

That's good advice. Unfortunately though I think the nature of support is that on average it selects for the more difficult people in your customer base, for the same reason that doctors spend a lot of their time with hypochondriacs (despite hypochondriacs making up a small percentage of the population). Something that helps to offset this psychologically, and is also a good thing to do anyway, is to proactively reach out more frequently to all your users. It can be the case that 95% of your users are happily chugging along, while 5% are unhappy and complaining frequently for whatever reason. If you rarely hear from that 95%, it can start to irrationally feel like no one is happy with your product, since that's the message coming from most of your support interactions.

crtified 2y ago
I guess the old 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle somewhat applies to the support distribution for many products. That is, 80% of the support resources are taken up by 20% of the clients. (incredibly-vaguely-speaking, naturally) The variable is "20% of what type of client?". 20% of Taylor Swift concert attendees, or 20% of assembly coders? Each comes with its own unique challenges!

hermitcrab 2y ago

I'm sure there are good and bad people in all walks of life. But, yes, people in some markets are definitely (on average) less pleasant to deal with than others.

sam_perez 2y ago

How do you ensure this? Are you suggesting more analysis pre-building the product, or doing things like increasing the price until you've effectively filtered out enough of the people you don't "want to deal with", assuming that works.