Ask HN: Best/worst stories re. startups communicating with users
Managing user expectations can be tricky as a startup grows from, say, 20 users to product-market fit. What startups (I'm most interested in web startups, but any will do) have done this well? Poorly? Why and how?
33 comments
[ 93.9 ms ] story [ 1270 ms ] threadhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358446
There is an answer embedded in there:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358624
It's a pity that the company actually took the opportunity to communicate with their users and that because of killing the story the response will not be seen by many.
Their customers should probably read that second link.
Their credibility is at stake here, and your squelching of the discussion does not help matters imho.
edit: And the only reason people get to play pretending they're wakemate is because wakemate does not communicate regularly in the first place.
edit2: wakemate really sets themselves up for trouble, this part of their blog especially is troublesome:
"In the coming weeks, we’re going to be more active on the blog, publishing photos, screenshots, and videos of what we’ve been working on. Hopefully this will help assuage some fears that the product is “vaporware” and get our pre-order customers as excited for the next wave of shipments as we are."
And that was on the 26th of April, total radiosilence since then. If you promise activity in 'the coming weeks' then you should show some. I'm really not surprised by the posting that was originally done, and in fact I think that person should be commended for their restraint rather than to see their post deleted.
I'd like to be more communicative about my startup too. The reason I don't is that I'm spending all my energy working on the product. These things are hard. We are finite.
Wakemate don't owe anybody anything who hasn't given them money, and if anyone who has is unhappy, I'd be shocked if Wakemate wouldn't be eager to give them their money back. Sometimes it seems like what people are really buying with their 5 bucks or 50 or whatever is the feeling that they have the right to kick up a stink.
Thanks! It's mutual by the way.
> but sometimes it seems to me that you cross the line into being a busybody
Possibly. But I'm not going to fall over and roll on my back just because it is PG that does something.
Wakemate has a great chance to manage their image here and PG has essentially thrown that away.
> I'd like to be more communicative about my startup too. The reason I don't is that I'm spending all my energy working on the product.
I've worked for enough start-ups to know that you need to do everything right, not just work on your product. If you spend all your energy on that - and you've signed up customers for pre-order - I suggest you do something about it before you copy wakemates mistakes. It's really a pity, I've seen them go from having a ton of goodwill to essentially being damaged goods.
That's wasteful.
And to see PG squelch discussion about a YC company when he's fine with us discussing everything else under the sun is for want of a better description less than elegant, especially if HN has been used as a venue to get initial customers. Another reason why it is bad to do so is because we can all learn from each others mistakes and to see bad stuff discussed in public is a learning experience for all, not just for the company involved.
You simply can't launch off HN and rely on us to do our bit with passing word of mouth to friends if there is an interesting new YC start-up and hit the mute button if there is a legitimate concern by a HN member regarding non-performance by said company. That's what causes the stink.
People that put their $5 or $50 down have a reasonably expectation of in order:
Less simply won't do, and even if it was free you'd still be morally obliged to keep people informed. Stonewalling is the dumbest thing you could possibly do.The OP wasn't trying to kick up a stink, he was simply a concerned customer. And given the way PG handled it now he probably went from 'disappointed' to something a few steps lower than that.
I wrote about the first time they screwed up, as a kind of "Learning" post, on my blog. It did quite well here (to show that not all negative posts get killed).
(Warning, slow page) http://friendfeed.com/search?q=from%3Adanielha+help
You're very right about the fail whale. Although not 100% successful in changing the emotion associated with downtime from frustration to amusement, it went an amazingly long way.
Another is www.influads.com who have been extremely open in their finances and process and at least with me, have gathered a lot of respect.
Poorly? Well, had I known posting that Wakemate post would give this much trouble, I wouldn't have done it. This doesn't excuse Wakemate themselves, though.
Some time ago, I signed up to FogBugz. A few weeks later, I got an email from... omg! Joel Spolsky!
I thought that was pretty awesome, that he got in touch with all his users to see how they were getting on. Great way to build strong customer relationships. Of course the initial email was probably automated, but the intention was there.
I took a good 20 minutes or so to write a fairly detailed but concise, 4-5 paragraph email listing some of the things I thought could be improved about Fogbugz from a start-up point of view.
I got a reply the next day, from some intern who basically explained how they wouldn't do each of the 4 points I'd raised. Not even "we'll look into it" or "it's on the plans, but I can't tell you when it'll come out". Just no, no, no, no. Basically, an email that not only had nothing to do with Joel Spolsky, but clearly had been delegated to someone who didn't yet have basic customer service sense.
With that, Spolsky lost all the credit he got in that first initial email, and then some.
Since then, I've copied the Spolsky approach. All our users get an email from me, two weeks after they join, asking how they're doing. But I am the one receiving and responding to that email.
I take all of our customer support 'problem' cases, that's where you can make the difference and where you get to hear what's up with your service so you can make it better.
This usually amounts to maybe one or two such cases per week so work-wise it's small fry but it really helps keeping your head close to what the users are experiencing.
And the problem cases are the ones where you learn fastest.
The other day there was a 'support is sales' post here that was really good.
Here's an example received today:
I wasn’t sure how to access the plans, but once I figured that out I have had no trouble since.
I think about 10-15% of the people who sign up and confirm their account end up replying to me.
1) Make the emails more random - if I only send half the emails, it stands to reason that I'll only get half the responses!
2) Stop sending them! There are other ways to gather feedback that may work better later.
I haven't spent too long worrying about this, though. It'll be a good problem to have.
I have many users asking for things and they usually ask for them same things - things I already decided not to do. Sometimes after many requests I change my mind, but only one of the people gets the email "you're right I changed my mind" and everyone who came before him gets "I thought about this and decided against it".
It's impossible to have a popular product and not be in this situation.
WakeMate are pretty bad at communicating and if I were them I'd hire someone whose job was really only to communicate.
Apple are pretty good at communicating nowadays and if you are doing well on their platform.
Microsoft is really good at communicating with developers. All their dev team are on twitter and blogging and you can reach them by email, and there are docs about everything, etc.
Google is terrible at communicating. Do they even communicate? They just never reply.
Facebook has the same problem. Don't reply. Probably too many users.
When the economy started to tank our ad revenues tanked and the model as it was could no longer be supported. So we changed it so that users won raffle tickets for prizes instead of winning prizes directly.
We did not message this to our users well and the BBB got over 250 complaints about the change we made. It was covered on local TV in charlotte, NC and lots of other bad stuff happened. They could never take legal action because they never paid but they still tried. They posted stuff all over the web about how we cheated and scammed them out of the prizes they won (which we did). I was just the technical co-founder and did not have a vote in financial decisions but since I owned the domain people thought I was the head guy and came after me. Good thing it was always free to play.
Wouldn't you know, that post ended up experiencing the Reddit effect, and more comments came pouring in. I tried to contact Disqus, but all I got was a ticket number. Meanwhile, the Reddit users had already started having a field day with, "Steve censors his readers and and deletes comments! We don't like his blog anymore."
Disqus was very slow and unhelpful in resolving the bug, even as I frantically updated the ticket with more and more debugging info and speculation as to what the problem could possibly be. In fact, to this day they've still never fixed the bug or closed out the ticket. Technically, they closed the tickets, but never resolved them (I guess that means, "we got this guy to stop bugging us about this issue... CASE CLOSED").
I ended up having to log into my disqus.com account, copy and paste the comments into an HTML file, then upload the file to my blog and link to it at the bottom of the post.
I understand they're providing a free service and thus have little to no accountability. But when you create a service that asks users to entrust their readers' voices and reputations to you, you should make an honest effort to live up to that responsibility.
[EDIT: Disqus is now helping me to resolve the problem. Better late than never! :-) ]
I'm sorry to hear that you've had a bad experience with our support. What was your ticket number? I'd be more than happy to help you figure this out, shoot me an email here: giannii@disqus.com
-Giannii
Since Disqus is a service used on sites (and not contained in our own world), our support inquiries come from both website owners and their audiences and involve so many different scenarios. So we need to better educate users on how things work first of all. But that support volume made finding real bug reports or big issues hard (I just posted a HN comment about using our support software earlier today). We've made some changes here though.
This also pains me because we try really hard for great interaction with users, even calling up users to help them figure things out. We're definitely closer to a more holistic solution in this area.
(P.S. the most likely reason for your issue is perhaps you changed your post's permalink URL so Disqus could no longer find the right association. Still our fault, but that's an explanation if you still care to wonder.)