2 ms·

Yeah, kinda. There are quite a few wackos like that (I've seen it all in the past week), but overall it's not too bad considering I have 300K new "customers."

Yeah, kinda. There are quite a few wackos like that (I've seen it all in the past week), but overall it's not too bad considering I have 300K new "customers." I had no qualms today about raising the price of the iPhone app back up, now that it's fallen off the top 10 charts. It's kind of a support intensive piece of the app (e.g. it requires wifi to sync, and a lot of people have shitty wifi). I did release an update right before MacHeist that fixed some edge cases in the syncing (see my presentation here: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=899656 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=899656). That seemed to help somewhat. I've found the difficulty of the support load can be better quantified by the number of unique requests rather than the number of requests. I hired someone to help a few months ago to do support. I felt felt very lazy/extravagent/unresourceful doing so, but it's been a huge help, especially with MacHeist. She can't troubleshoot every issue, but that's perfectly fine, because she does a great job weeding out the riff raff. And she has a way thicker skin than I do dealing with customers. I also launched a fancy new support section for my site at the same time as the MacHeist thing. Also, there's a special box for MacHeist visitors at the top of every page that kinda tries to get them to buzz off: http://files.dangrover.com/macheistbox.png http://files.dangrover.com/macheistbox.png

patio11 17y ago
I'd describe that as "prominent, effective self-help options", and your implementation is brilliant. Seriously -- if you write that up in a blog post I will cite it for a decade. I try to strike the balance between "I am always, always happy to talk to my customers" and "There are thousands of you and only one of me so I can't talk to you all every day". Mostly I fix the app and website to answer the common issues without requiring my input and, for the recurrent ones (cough Registration Key management) emphasize that they get their answer a day quicker if they use the lookup form than if they send me an email asking me to, essentially, please use the lookup form for them. (Apropos of nothing: I would gladly abandon Registration Keys if people actually paid money for software that wasn't access controlled. Happily, the change from downloadable software to a web app has eliminated this issue for about 70% of my customers.)

patio11 17y ago

I'd describe that as "prominent, effective self-help options", and your implementation is brilliant. Seriously -- if you write that up in a blog post I will cite it for a decade. I try to strike the balance between "I am always, always happy to talk to my customers" and "There are thousands of you and only one of me so I can't talk to you all every day". Mostly I fix the app and website to answer the common issues without requiring my input and, for the recurrent ones (cough Registration Key management) emphasize that they get their answer a day quicker if they use the lookup form than if they send me an email asking me to, essentially, please use the lookup form for them. (Apropos of nothing: I would gladly abandon Registration Keys if people actually paid money for software that wasn't access controlled. Happily, the change from downloadable software to a web app has eliminated this issue for about 70% of my customers.)