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One of the reasons I recently shut down a free tool was due to the frankly horrific comments I received from users if it didn't work just exactly as they expect

One of the reasons I recently shut down a free tool was due to the frankly horrific comments I received from users if it didn't work just exactly as they expected. Whilst it did worked, and I probably could have explained things a bit more clearly, I don't understand the mentality of users sending messages like "WHY THE [nsfw filter] ISN'T THIS WORKING YOU [nsfw filter]? I HOPE YOU DIE." They put me off checking emails for that account, and Twitter via TweetDeck as a whole. None of my other - paid with no free option - services suffers from this, despite similar numbers of users trying them out. In fact, I don't think I've once received an email with a swearword in it from one of the paid tools, whether from users on the free trial or fully paid-up.

relix 14y ago
Seconded. I don't have paid services I can compare too, but the free service I'm running generates some feedback that make me lose hope in humanity. Some people feel so entitled for something free, it's as if I killed their first-born baby when something goes wrong. On the other hand, getting sweet soundbites like "I love this!" or when a polite person sends suggestions starting with "I'm really sorry to bother you, but I think if you did X it would really improve Y!" my hope is restored.
- mootothemax 14y ago
  On the other hand, getting sweet soundbites like "I love this!" or when a polite person sends suggestions starting with "I'm really sorry to bother you, but I think if you did X it would really improve Y!" my hope is restored. Agreed, those are the emails that leave a smile on my face and lift my mood far beyond what such a simple email should do. I've also found that they tend to happen on a regular basis from the paying customers. The free ones, much less so.
doktrin 14y ago
One of the reasons I recently shut down a free tool was due to the frankly horrific comments I received from users if it didn't work just exactly as they expected. Whilst it did worked, and I probably could have explained things a bit more clearly, I don't understand the mentality of users sending messages like "WHY THE [nsfw filter] ISN'T THIS WORKING YOU [nsfw filter]? I HOPE YOU DIE." They put me off checking emails for that account, and Twitter via TweetDeck as a whole. This is horrifying, and only further dissuades me from ever pursuing a venture built around the freemium model. Frankly, I'm not a fan of it as a concept to begin with. The fact that it contributes to the mis-guided sense of entitlement of (in the words of Louis CK) non-contributing zeros only adds insult to injury.
- mootothemax 14y ago
  This is horrifying, and only further dissuades me from ever pursuing a venture built around the freemium model. Heh, to be fair it's not all doom and gloom, I can't see how so many people would offer it if it was. Even with the paid tools, you will still receive the occasional bewildering email, such as this gem which arrived over the weekend: Dang!! I love this app sooooo much. I thought it was free. Until i looked over and saw it was only a trial. I'm no longer using this site until it becomes free Sigh.
- zcvosdfdgj 14y ago
  I don't think this has anything to do with it being free. I run an ecommerce site and everyone pays.. and have always paid for everything for the past 10 years. Most people are polite and nice, and realize they are dealing with another human being. But a small percentage will say things like that. My "favorite" email was 2 paragraphs, telling me what a terrible human being I was ("burn in hell", etc) because USPS required a signature for his package, and the UPS store refused to sign for it (even though that's their job). Never asked for the signature to be waived on his $200 package... which I would have happily done. If you take a group of thousands of people, some of those people are just going to be terrible to deal with. I think people confuse this with it being free because the free version of their product is used by so many more people. But I can guarantee that if their paid version had as many users, they would be receiving those same emails.
Peaker 14y ago
Do you have the same numbers of users in your free/paid versions? Maybe the free ones are just exposed to more users?
shazow 14y ago
It's not always so bad. I think a lot of it comes down to UX optimization. My points of reference are http://colorblendy.com/ http://colorblendy.com/ which gets +6,000 uniques per month and http://tweepsect.com/ http://tweepsect.com/ which gets +25,000 uniques per month. If you look at https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/tweepsect https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/tweepsect you can see that the quality of users is... not of the highest IQ, and yet they manage to figure it out. About once every 3-6 months I'll get someone @mentioning me saying "HOW DOES THIS WORK I DON'T EVEN" or something, but those are extreme exceptions. When I first launched tweepsect, I had a lot more complaints and questions, but I iterated on it and tried to obsolete any recurring issue. It's been up for multiple years now and requires basically a few hours of maintenance per year. I'm happy to provide utility at near-zero effort for free. That said, I completely agree about paying users. They're the best. When I was prototyping SocialGrapple, I invited +100 of my peers. The feedback was completely superficial and uncommitted. When I looked at how much time the people spent on the site, I realized that they weren't my target users and that the feedback was worthless. I shut down the beta and a month later I relaunched SocialGrapple with a monthly fee membership. The userbase completely changed--people really cared. I got people whose productivity and business was seriously impacted by the usefulness of my product to the point where I wrote custom views for specific users just to cater to their specific needs (until I could generalize it to everyone).
- glimcat 14y ago
  Users make my head explode sometimes, even when I'm expecting it. I've caught users recommending a product of mine (feels awesome), then they turned around and insulted it in the same conversation. Upon a little anonymous interaction, they were upset because the CSS didn't match Google. Users, WTF??? Thank god for A/B testing.

relix 14y ago

Seconded. I don't have paid services I can compare too, but the free service I'm running generates some feedback that make me lose hope in humanity. Some people feel so entitled for something free, it's as if I killed their first-born baby when something goes wrong. On the other hand, getting sweet soundbites like "I love this!" or when a polite person sends suggestions starting with "I'm really sorry to bother you, but I think if you did X it would really improve Y!" my hope is restored.

mootothemax 14y ago
On the other hand, getting sweet soundbites like "I love this!" or when a polite person sends suggestions starting with "I'm really sorry to bother you, but I think if you did X it would really improve Y!" my hope is restored. Agreed, those are the emails that leave a smile on my face and lift my mood far beyond what such a simple email should do. I've also found that they tend to happen on a regular basis from the paying customers. The free ones, much less so.

doktrin 14y ago

One of the reasons I recently shut down a free tool was due to the frankly horrific comments I received from users if it didn't work just exactly as they expected. Whilst it did worked, and I probably could have explained things a bit more clearly, I don't understand the mentality of users sending messages like "WHY THE [nsfw filter] ISN'T THIS WORKING YOU [nsfw filter]? I HOPE YOU DIE." They put me off checking emails for that account, and Twitter via TweetDeck as a whole. This is horrifying, and only further dissuades me from ever pursuing a venture built around the freemium model. Frankly, I'm not a fan of it as a concept to begin with. The fact that it contributes to the mis-guided sense of entitlement of (in the words of Louis CK) non-contributing zeros only adds insult to injury.

mootothemax 14y ago
This is horrifying, and only further dissuades me from ever pursuing a venture built around the freemium model. Heh, to be fair it's not all doom and gloom, I can't see how so many people would offer it if it was. Even with the paid tools, you will still receive the occasional bewildering email, such as this gem which arrived over the weekend: Dang!! I love this app sooooo much. I thought it was free. Until i looked over and saw it was only a trial. I'm no longer using this site until it becomes free Sigh.
zcvosdfdgj 14y ago
I don't think this has anything to do with it being free. I run an ecommerce site and everyone pays.. and have always paid for everything for the past 10 years. Most people are polite and nice, and realize they are dealing with another human being. But a small percentage will say things like that. My "favorite" email was 2 paragraphs, telling me what a terrible human being I was ("burn in hell", etc) because USPS required a signature for his package, and the UPS store refused to sign for it (even though that's their job). Never asked for the signature to be waived on his $200 package... which I would have happily done. If you take a group of thousands of people, some of those people are just going to be terrible to deal with. I think people confuse this with it being free because the free version of their product is used by so many more people. But I can guarantee that if their paid version had as many users, they would be receiving those same emails.

Peaker 14y ago

Do you have the same numbers of users in your free/paid versions? Maybe the free ones are just exposed to more users?

shazow 14y ago

It's not always so bad. I think a lot of it comes down to UX optimization. My points of reference are http://colorblendy.com/ http://colorblendy.com/ which gets +6,000 uniques per month and http://tweepsect.com/ http://tweepsect.com/ which gets +25,000 uniques per month. If you look at https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/tweepsect https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/tweepsect you can see that the quality of users is... not of the highest IQ, and yet they manage to figure it out. About once every 3-6 months I'll get someone @mentioning me saying "HOW DOES THIS WORK I DON'T EVEN" or something, but those are extreme exceptions. When I first launched tweepsect, I had a lot more complaints and questions, but I iterated on it and tried to obsolete any recurring issue. It's been up for multiple years now and requires basically a few hours of maintenance per year. I'm happy to provide utility at near-zero effort for free. That said, I completely agree about paying users. They're the best. When I was prototyping SocialGrapple, I invited +100 of my peers. The feedback was completely superficial and uncommitted. When I looked at how much time the people spent on the site, I realized that they weren't my target users and that the feedback was worthless. I shut down the beta and a month later I relaunched SocialGrapple with a monthly fee membership. The userbase completely changed--people really cared. I got people whose productivity and business was seriously impacted by the usefulness of my product to the point where I wrote custom views for specific users just to cater to their specific needs (until I could generalize it to everyone).

glimcat 14y ago
Users make my head explode sometimes, even when I'm expecting it. I've caught users recommending a product of mine (feels awesome), then they turned around and insulted it in the same conversation. Upon a little anonymous interaction, they were upset because the CSS didn't match Google. Users, WTF??? Thank god for A/B testing.