I love the ending of this story, which isn't obvious from just looking at the title. The author identified key pain points around customer support, automated them, and went back to enjoying life. This is the kind of thing that gets me excited about the possibilities of technology and AI as a force multiplier, especially when working on side projects, "lifestyle" businesses, or even startups as a single founder.
Can relate, I've been in a similar boat running a small B2B Saas over the last 2 years. It does get easier over time.
I've learnt a few tricks for managing early stage pain points.
- You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for customer support.
- Once your core product is built, its worthwhile spending some time automating the heck out of everything. This will save a TON of time in the near future.
- Invest in good docs, even if you're not running a api saas. Good docs + consistent ux + rock solid support will solve most of your support issues.
I think a lot of literature around running a online biz has been boiled down to rather basic advice and its hard to find anything solid in this area. I've been running a small blog where I document these issues(operational.co) if anyone wants to check it out.
You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for customer support.
And very focused responses in terms of action items.
You might think of 3 things to say, check, but sadly 90% of the people you respond to with a list will behave like they read just one of them. Sadly this also leads to dragging things out for everyone who can handle more than one thing at a time :(
I’m observing this for many years and it feels like there are two types of people. Those who perceive lists as a whole and those who list.shuffle().pop(). Try asking your colleagues/etc three semi-related questions in one message and you’ll get only a partial answer in a significant number of cases. When confronted (constructively, much later) they usually get evasive and can’t explain. I could theorize it’s a learned behavior to avoid threaded pedantry or something, but my messages aren’t even long and other people share my frustration too (we communicate 10x faster and clearer between us). I’d write it off to attention capacity issues, but these people often aren’t even busy at all.
I'm pretty sure it's because they're not paying full attention, even worse, sometimes already building an intense narrative with only few items internalized inside their brains.
I also feel that this is happening more and more, since there's more rewards for giving very small pieces of attention and energy to a bigger pool of people, instead giving extra energy or attention to a smaller pool of people seeking for one's help.
I'm just facing this with a contractor doing repairs in my house, a month ago was finding a decent mechanic to fix just 2 issues on my car.
The first promptly finds energy to discuss things it receives through social networks or messages, but can't provide a decent list of things that I need to provide him to finish his work faster.
The second case took a lot of time and discussing with 6 different mechanics, until th car broke and it was towed.
I'm seeing this more and more, unfortunately.
Or simply their priorities are not your priorities. They have encountered a problem, they asked for help, but they have 10 other things going on. By the time you answer, they have forgotten half the context of the issue. They try one thing, it doesn't work, they don't have more time right now so they answer that thing 1 didn't work. Repeat.
I find most people suffer from at least one (and more commonly two) of the following: insufficient attention to detail; poor time management; and bad organization skills.
That actually sounds like a good idea for a technical support app:
The only interaction possible is they can tell you the problem, then you can give them a list of things to try, and they can do nothing but give feedback on each step, in order, and you arent bothered until they at least respond something for each step
list.shuffle().pop()
Oh, no. It's not a shuffle. They unerringly identify the least important possible action item. Sometimes just a single clause of a single sentence in a list item.
You have to scour your communication of anything that can possibly be interpreted as an easy request. It has to be a curt, imperative, isolated, request to do something hard or it will be ignored.
In written communication it often works for me to create an explicit numbered list with indentations and plenty of white space between the items. It also makes it easier to refer to the items in the following communication.
I really wish there was a reliable way to ask people.
"I need your engagement level to be set to 10 for this communication. It's ok if you can't do that, but then just say you can't do that. I'm already set to 10 and rando guesswork / tidbits are only going to cause problems."
Even just "nope can't do it" responses would save me time.
I just got off a critical call with folks pulling stuff out of their ... and it was a nightmare / complete waste of my time.
Yep. All the time when I worked in IT:
Me: Please try these 3 things and let me know how it goes: (list of 3 things with instructions)
Them: I tried (thing #1) and it didn’t work.
Me: Thank you, please try these 2 things and let me know how it goes
Them: I tried (thing #2) and it didn’t work.
Me: Thank you, please try this thing and let me know how it goes
Them: (no response)
Me: Just checking in to see if this is resolved?
Them: (no response)
Me: I’m closing this ticket as I haven’t heard back, let me know if this is still a problem and I can reopen it
Them: Don’t close the ticket, I’m still having this issue
Me: No problem, can you try this thing and let me know how it goes?
Them: (no response)
And sometimes the last one becomes:
Them: Don’t close the ticket, I hadn't had a chance to check that yet.
Having bots close issues, accompanied by a rude automated message is often contra-productive. It would be fine to instead post a reminder in the issue, asking for an update like shown in the example:
Me: Just checking in to see if this is resolved?
I almost never see bots close issues that are less than 30 days old. Many projects can change a lot in 30-90 days and the bug may no longer exist, keeping issues open when they may no longer be relevant isn't helping anyone either. If it is still relevant, it can simply be re-opened. I don't see any downside to semi-aggressively closing stale issues. If it's easily reproduced then most good projects will mark it so that it won't be auto-closed.
Do you have an example of “polite but curt” tone? I’m struggling to see what you mean.
Both xyproto and Gustomaximus have solid examples.
Here's more:
- Be direct, Hi, the xyz feature is available on the PRO plan. You can upgrade to the PRO plan at app.saas.com/billing
- Be brutal, Hi xyz, your card couldn't be charged for your Saas subscription, and hence your subscription has been deactivated. To reactivate, enter your card details app app.saas.com/billing
- Be honest, Hello xyz, thanks for the feature request. We'll put it in our wish list but can't guarantee it will make the cut.
- Be generous, Hey xyz, thanks for pointing that out. We have identified that as a bug and have pushed a fix for it. In the meanwhile, I've extended your trial by 7 days, on the house.
Couple of other tips:
- Dumb down your reply as much as possible. If you can't, throw your reply through chatgpt and make it dumb down.
- Unless a support issue is very basic, reply after a few minutes if you're near your computer. Usually users figure out things on their own if given some time.
- But don't allow issues to go stale. To really wow customer service, reply as humanely quick as possible, especially for existing customers.
- Make your support timelines clear somewhere in your product, eg: Our support will respond within max 48 hours, but most responses take 2-3 hours.
- Make your terms and privacy policy pages clear. People do read this. getharvest.com is a gold standard in this area.
Make your support timelines clear somewhere in your product, eg: Our support will respond within max 48 hours, but most responses take 2-3 hours.
This is the biggest thing I struggle with. I have a couple of semi-successful side projects. They bring in some money, but not enough to hire someone to help with support. I have never been at a place in my life where something like "I will response to all support requests within 48 hours" is remotely realistic for me. I'm lucky if I get to a support request within a week or two.
I don't know what the answer is beyond just "don't sell products", because I hate dealing with support more than I enjoy making stuff to sell.
Sometimes it's valuable to receive a (clearly non-automated) support response indicating that the message was received and a proper response is in the works, just to confirm that the support channel is actually still functional.
Even just confirmation that the website form isn't a black hole and that support tickets aren't now exclusively accepted through Twitter, Instagram, or a secret discord server can be very reassuring.
A large part of my job is end user support in a corporate environment. I always do this - even if I know an issue is going to take a while due to me having to reach out to other departments/a vendor, wait for an answer, and potentially go back and forth, I always reach out to let people know I got the email, that I'm working on it, and that I'll reach back out when I know more. If possible, I also suggest workarounds/alternatives for them to use/do in the time while I'm working on the problem.
Just wanted to say thanks, I think you've given great advice. In particular this bullet point:
But don't allow issues to go stale. To really wow customer service, reply as humanely quick as possible, especially for existing customers.
As a customer, the absolute worst possible thing for me is to be left in limbo, not knowing if my problem will be fixed in the next minute, hour, day, or never. While I may not be thrilled if the answer is "never", at least at that point I can move on and know that I'll need to solve the problem some other way.
Thanks for reaching out. The issue you’ve described seems to be on your end. Please check your settings or consult our docs for further guidance. If the problem persists, feel free to get in touch.
Would it be worth putting a price to investigating? Message like:
"Our premium support can investigate this for $XYhr. If the fault is at our end we will waive any fees. Please let us know if you wish to proceed."
Take my advice with a grain of salt, as I am a customer rather than someone running a product with customer support.
I would say this would only feel justified if the product pricing page already had clear tiers outlined for paid support. Putting a price per hour on customer support otherwise would make me feel like I am just being milked behind closer doors for more money, and non-paying customers are getting shafted. If a paid customer support tier is something you offer, imo it should be clearly outlined on publicly available pages with explicit explanation about the differences between free vs paid customer support. You suggesting it in private communications only would feel suspicious and shady to me as a customer.
However, if the customer themselves suggested to pay you extra for that personal support, that’s a different story.
I'd 100% expect that to be a template from someone who either has no clue and can't investigate, or has 200 other tickets to get to and couldn't be bothered to look into a case that isn't in the FAQ. It also does not say what makes you have this assumption and so it works only as a brick wall to alienate any customer goodwill you may have built up. Please never write this unless it's self evident why it's on the customer's side and you have good reason to think they're just trying to annoy you by reaching out despite that
"Check yourself before you wreck yourself"
Docs... And a technical writer that'll tend to them.
Spending some time to learn technical writing (if you want to bootstrap a saas) is worth its weight in gold (same with marketing, business admin, accounting).
Wow! This is a great blog. Thanks for putting it out :)
Make sure not to apply this polite but curt tone to consumer apps.
Wow I can really relate.
The customer support efforts when you don't feel like it, being ghosted after helping a customer, the random or fraud disputes.
It's really tricky at that stage between hiring help and having the time/motivation to maintain those very non-tech parts while trying to continue doing other core parts of the side project / startup.
The first sale feels great, as does first showing the prototype.
By comparison, extra $100 MRR milestones don't feel so great, nor does dealing with customers/disputes eventually (it's a lot of negativity in general - pleased customers just leave reviews occasionally, negative ones email you). And a down negative month or two always feels like a stabbing and like it's all over.
Really don't know how to avoid this. Scaling quickly? Via investment in most cases? Maybe.
I wonder if there's often a mismatch between what one thinks a business is going to be like, and what a business is actually like.
One of the things that keeps me away from doing stuff like this is that I _hate_ every part that isn't the engineering part, and the engineering part is a minority share of what it takes to run a business.
We know the answer to this even before modern tech businesses existed: running a business is a very different experience from what people expect. This is exacerbated with certain experiences that create worldviews which are closer to the opposite of running a business.
This is why startup people straight out of school are often unencumbered with ideas that impact their mission. If you go into a large organization, you are exposed to a reality that can distort your perspective. It's a myth that people can't move between large and small organizations, but the differentiator is their awareness of and desire to embrace the current circumstances. Many end up preferring the luxury and ease of large organizations and fail because they don't make the switch. Many startup people don't make the move in the other direction (even if they are exceedingly successful and it might be practical move.)
Similarly, a desire to only focus on engineering is something you feel will inhibit your ability to run a business. Over time you might be able to discover ways to reduce your hate for the other work. People here love to prescribe advice for situations like this, but it's really hard to give good advice without knowing a lot more about you.
The paycheck mentality. It depresses economic output and productivity across the board by keeping people unengaged and dependent.
I don't think that 'everyone an entrepreneur' would increase economic output and productivity, and the fact is that some people just want a paycheck because they don't really care about making more money than the paycheck gives them, and the work is fine.
In old world Egypt they kept the creative class in a seperate village. I believe this was needed to keep group harmony and focus.
Indeed. I love that my career is a minor sideshow of my life. I love the stability of working about 40 hours a week and then doing what I really want to be doing with life.
It’s a bonus that those 40 hours don’t feel like work.
My solution largely came out of recognizing this reality. So I just don't do side gigs. I channel that energy into little tech projects that do not seek to be a salable product. So I make my living 40 hours per week, and then do the rest on my terms.
One thing most programmers need to painfully have beaten into them is that the software itself is a minor part of a successful software business.
It's a necessary part, but without marketing/sales/support/etc, very few projects work as a business.
Yeah a supported 60% solution is better than an unsupported 90% solution that you can figure out how to make it work
A trite phrase that stuck with me: "The hardest part of business is everything you are not good at."
being ghosted after helping a customer
I am one of those people. Gotta keep in mind to let people know that the solution worked
Usually if something isn't working it becomes a bottleneck so a lot gets built up behind it. Once the 'dam breaks' so to speak you're playing catch up plus you probably don't want to think about the problem anymore. This is also a reason things don't get documented.
Also its easy to verify that it doesn't work but hard to verify that it does. So often it might take time to verify that and when you're confident about it you've lost the chat session or closed the browser, restarted the computer, went home already etc.
Me too but I only ever do this unintentionally, and it usually corresponds with a delay in the reply from support coming back to me. (Ie I’m now focused on other things or have solved the problem a different way).
Whenever I’m conscious enough of it I do try to thank people - trying to remember how hard it must be on the other end!
The customer support efforts when you don't feel like it, being ghosted after helping a customer, the random or fraud disputes.
These three challenges + context-switching between marketing and product are really tough at the early stage.
I've found that growing a business from 0-1 is very formulaic - not easy but the roadmap is clear. Scaling one is much harder, especially without outside capital. There's a huge gulf between earning enough to replace your salary vs. hiring good people to take over lower-level tasks early on. And marketing usually ends up being too critical to outsource at first.
At least with digital products, customer disputes can always be settled with refunds, even when the claim is dubious. Eat the loss and move on. Physical product disputes really sting when you're out the cost of inventory + labor.
Before Reddit changed API access I built an iOS app called Pager (https://pager.app) that allowed users to set up alerts for content posted on Reddit. It had a lot of success but the issues you highlighted here kept me from monitizing the project.
Users became so demanding and I felt like if I began to take money from them it would only get worse. Looking back on it I'm not sure it was the best choice, but at least at the time the application being free felt like an important defense against users that you really could never satisfy.
The usual suggestion, often given by HN's patio11, is to charge, and charge more. For some reason free customers are the most demanding, and the more you charge the more people self-select out of the customer base.
There's this old story about an old farmer and his horse. You see, this old farmer had a horse that he loved dearly; took great care of it and pampered it. But he was getting old, and wanted to retire to the City, where he could not keep a horse.
So what do I do with this horse, he wondered? He asked a wise friend, who told him: sell the horse for the highest amount of money that you can.
What?!? replied the farmer; I love my horse dearly and would never think of selling it like some goods.
The wise man replied: if you give it away, whoever gets it will abuse the shit out of it, and treat it like a workhorse, whip it every day, etc. because they got it for free, and won't value it. On the other hand, if you sell it for a huge sum, the buyer will pamper it and take good care of it, because it's an investment to them.
Or, give it to someone who can't afford a horse but really needs one, because it will be worth more to them than to someone who can afford to overpay for it.
Would they be able to afford to care for the horse? Do they need it because they need a workhorse? It’s more of a gamble and if you’re trying to get best odds for the horse you’d probably skew towards someone that’s paying a large sum and not based on their human necessity
Pager was great! Thank you for building it.
Not all B2C is the same. If you make a product for professionals you won't get random chargebacks, incoherent emails, or general rudeness. One great way to filter for professionalism is by simply charging more. Another strategy is making it harder to purchase the product. For example by disabling the checkout process until people have completed the tutorial, or only allowing purchases after the free trial has expired.
These strategies don't maximize revenue, but you don't have to maximize revenue. You can optimize for revenue/agony instead.
It's better but this is not uniformly true. For one, people use random sites to test cards to see if they can get away with using stolen CC details at every stripe-integrated company I've seen, target audience irrelevant.
The proportion of negative/wild interactions with support and chargebacks is always going to be in an uphill battle with positive correspondance unless you are selling multi-seat deals with support as part of it. I speak a little out of my area of expertise here but from my friends experience, the downside to professional services is that a small proportion of people, or people on bad days, see it as a service, not a SaaS, and will willingly throw threats, insults, etc at you. A small error on your service can stop their whole business which is different for B2C - it's the difference between fear and frustration.
people use random sites to test cards to see if they can get away with using stolen CC details
I already addressed this. By forcing people to use the product before allowing them to purchase you make drive-by fraud impossible. We use stripe and we have 0 fraud to deal with.
You can optimize for revenue/agony instead.
That's a great way to put it. I'm going to start using that one.
Tangent: I'm a programmer at a small company, which has three programmers total. I make a decent wage, but one that's significantly smaller than I could make at a larger company. I often get questions from people who can't believe that I'm not jumping at these other opportunities, but I make nearly six figures, my team and bosses trust me, I have nearly unlimited flexibility to choose what I work on and shape my software the way I feel is best, and I get to work full remote and basically make my own hours, giving me all the time I want with my family. It would take an incredible raise to give this up just for better pay.
An agony-per-dollar ratio is a perfect way to frame the calculation, and it factors into so many places in life. Many forget that it's not just optimizing for the most revenue possible, but a balance of maximizing revenue and quality of life, and often getting diminishing returns when pushing hard on the former.
Agree with all of those, and such a business has B2B potential also. That describes mine pretty well. And while I’d love to make more B2B sales, I hate dealing with purchasing departments. Dealing mainly with professionals definitely has its upsides.
This was a fascinating read, really.
The potential customer base being basically suckers waving wads of cash to be taken from them. The wild contrast of how nice the author tries to be to every single person that interacts with the project -- despite majority being the equivalent of single-celled organisms poking the fb markeplace "is it available" button.
Reading some of the messages from potential users is so eye-opening. I don't know if there's a sane way to deal with the entitlement, other than just plain ignoring those interactions.
How would one handle this type of project in 2024? Route most of the rote communication via an LLM, automate as much as possible, ignore all feature requests, dogfood everything as you continue to use the project yourself?
I really like the learnings the autor took from this experience. Seems like most of them came from adopting "I give up" attitude when flirting with burnout -- which inadvertently seems to follow the 80/20 rule.
I've done exactly one legit "SaaS startup" type venture around 2012-2015. I still think about the absolutely insane customer service requests we'd get. It was a very niched down Eventbrite competitor, so we did things like PDF ticket generation, QR code generation, attendance tracking, there was a big fundraising component as well so lots of payment infrastructure. We charged a percentage of ticket sales so any one event or even customer was not worth very much (a positive IMO). I still remember someone emailing me directly with the "oh we'd love to give you money but you have to add these features for us first" so they could use this event ticketing and fundraising platform to ... run their dog grooming business.
As many have learned, the people actually paying you money are usually pretty reasonable. It's the people who haven't paid you a cent who have all these crazy demands.
Yup yup yup. Big reason for avoiding free users is avoiding those requests.
This is the kind of thing no startup puts in their year one budget and (alongside supplier cashflow issues) is why those projections don't work for
Idk. It’s totally ok to just ignore those types of requests. Even a lot of the requests the author was getting. They’re just fishing and there’s Practically zero chance they’ll even ever follow up to see why you never responded.
Mega corporations get away with awful support of paying customers, people don’t actually expect you to jump at their command as a startup or even as a toy side project. If you’re able to ignore a beggar on the street, you should be able to ignore a lot of these emails. Stop guilting yourself into a heavy administrative burden and don’t avoid consumer apps because of that fear.
How would one handle this type of project in 2024? Route most of the rote communication via an LLM, automate as much as possible, ignore all feature requests, dogfood everything as you continue to use the project yourself?
As someone else on the thread said, you start charging more. The large swathes of people looking for freebies will fade away and your customers, fewer in number perhaps, will be higher quality (or at least a bit more serious).
One suggestion is simply increase the price. Price is strongly correlated with quality of customer. Price also acts as signaling that this is a tool for professionals who make actual money and so shouldn't be bothered coughing up something trivial like $100 for a subscription. You end up making more with far less customer support.
I find it hard to believe that this is true. For 100$ a month I expect a far more polished product than for 20$, where I can look over a lot of missing features.
If features don't work as advertised, I will absolutely make no distinction between a 500$ or 1$ product, and will demand a fix. But I will more likely have more patient if the service is cheap, before migrating away.
And then, if your customers are businesses, do you think the employees really care how much the product costs? No.
We’ve also seen customer support inquiries, and in general quality of our customers, rise with an increase in price.
It doesn’t make sense as an end consumer, but B2B lens it makes sense.
If a business can afford the higher price tag, they most likely would rather have a hands off approach for the problem they’re trying to solve (in a service based business)
Many of our mid and lower tier customers want everything drawn out and explained, and give feedback at every step. Our higher tier customers pay faster, request minimal input (outside of times we ask for it), and generally much easier to work with
Having run my own tourism business (so dealing with consumers directly, rather than b2b), and having spoken to many other business owners, this is counterintuitively true.
My worst customers were the ones that ask for discounts, or are otherwise looking for a deal. My theory is that people that happily fork out for an expensive product have already seen the value.
There are exceptions, but a lot of business owners see the same pattern.
Possibly the primary reason that software engineers don't just go into business for themselves is that running a business is a very different problem domain with different challenges and rewards.
I have never envied any CEO, VP, or manager I've worked for their job. The hardest part of my day is crafting novel SQL queries or tricking C++ into compiling code that will work on all my target hardware in spite of an unknown number of undefined behaviors. I've never had to figure out how we're going to keep documentation in sync on our flagship project when the head documentation engineer is dying of cancer (and has chosen to finish out the week because he knows how screwed the project will be without him and he believes in it), or how to make payroll next quarter if the next investor says no, or how to keep the quarterly goals met when the President has just declared that all of our employees working in the country on a visa may suddenly not return to the country.
What if you knew that the VP and CEO are dealing with those problems by letting the chips fall and making the ICs and customers work around it?
If that bothers me I change companies.
I think certain personality types just have a really different view about risk than we do. I once talked to our CEO about it and he was like "I'd risk it all again, I like to play!". There are people who LIKE to take those kinds of risks, I'm certainly not one of them. But one must also not forget the upside: get really, really rich from the work of others.
The wording in the fraud cancellation emails gave me a good laugh.
"My payment provider said you used a stolen credit card. Why did you do that? I've revoked your access."
That gave me a chuckle too. The list of "reasons someone would use a stolen credit card" is what, 2 options?
There are 2 options? I can only think of "I'm a person with poor ethics who wants to get something without paying for it".
The other actually happened to me recently, my wife answered one of those automated bank texts checking on a transaction with no, which cancelled the card (and marked it stolen), and I tried to use it before she told me about it.
But yeah those are the only two I can think of and yours is the case 99.99% of the time.
Side projects have always been the most exciting banes of my existence.
I LOVE the initial rush of building and launching something. Even maintaining it is SUPER exciting for the first few months. The first customers are a rush of endorphins.
Then the shine wears off. Life can't be kept on pause. Your partner wants a date night, but you have a backlog to work though. You got a frantic email from a customer that they accidentally deleted something and you currently have no way to recover that data. So now you have to add more resiliency to the application. In the middle of the night, your cron server dies, backups stop, emails stop, customers on the other side of the world can't log in.
All for a few dollars a day in revenue. Then after a year of that, you get burnt on the project. Then after another year, you stop working on it as much, the bug reports build up until you are scared to even look at your reports.
Your partner goes away for the weekend to visit their family, you get a renewed sense of pride in this project that has been limping alone. You fire up your code editor, you pull the last commit down. You start to re-familiarize yourself with the code base. Day 1 was wasted with remembering how you did things. Day 2 starts with a coffee after only sleeping a few hours. You begin to work through the small tasks on your list, because you feel the snowball will work. About 8 hours in, you've made a SERIOUS dent in the backlog. You are feeling good and decide you should eat something finally. Your partner comes home while you are eating your breakfast at 4pm. They start to tell you about their family drama. You start to fade. You walk back to your office and try to get back into the groove. You can't. The weekend is over. Work starts again in 10 hours. You now feel angry that you wasted your weekend, and have to do real work in the morning.
And the cycle repeats.
I recently read an HN post where a LOT of people reported having the same rather specific dream that I have had many times (about being enrolled in a class they forgot about only to remember on the day of the final exam). It literally rocked my world to see evidence of how similar all of our 'wetware' is. And now I'm reading you describing a scenario I have experienced so many times, right down to 4pm breakfast and distracting stories of family drama. I am now pretty much convinced we live in a simulation and we're all subclasses of each other.
I have done this loop dozens of times, sometimes for pleasure projects that are released for free, sometimes for projects that make $100/week. It's hard to maintain motivation when you are working for less nothing.
I've actually stopped launching software now. I devote my passion projects to things where the customer is a one-time interaction. No support, no emails, no late nights working out why there is a 500 that only happens on this ONE user at 1:16AM.
Now, I make rolling trays, refinish antique furniture, and garden. In the new year, I will be converting half of my workshop into a CBD/hemp farm to grow my own hemp to make my CBD tinctures and oils (currently I buy CBD flower from Oregon).
Software has stopped being my only source of joy and income. After 2 decades of programming almost every single day, my brain is tired, and I don't even know what it was all for.
My garden provides nectar for bees, vitamins and minerals, for myself and my family, sunshine for my body. My woodworking provides that sense of pride that I had with software without all the bugs (well sometimes there are grubs in the wood). My CBD is "medicine", and it helps my dad with his phantom limb pain, me with my Hashimoto's flareups, and other's with their anxiety and stress.
My software made people money...
You haven't built a side project, you've built yourself a job.
This is why I've always been scared to make any commitments to paid subs other than "I'll send you all my blogs early"
And this is why I would make to sure to log all the time that I spend on that side job, so that I can make some estimate about what my hourly rate would be with the earnings I make.
This might then allow a better decision on whether it is a worthwhile endeavor or not.
agreed. this isn't a "side project", this is a "side business".
Is it me or are there a lot more posts on HN where people are just complaining in the title?
No. I just checked the front page [1] for each August 21 from 2014 to 2024, and there is typically no or one complaint in the title. Some lamenting here and there, an uplifting tone every now and then, but most of it is neutral.
Perhaps you are running into some negativity bias? [2]
I strongly relate to this post. Having grown mailsac.com to above average side project revenue, the admin overhead isn't crazy, but it's exceptionally repetitive and boring. So much time is spent on fraud and normal "running the business" really sucks the enjoyment out of a side project (for me as an engineer). I think that having a side project co-founder who is a relentless business operator is more important than having a decent technologist.
I would personally never get into a side project for anything that requires decent fraud prevention (email, telecom, payments, etc.). I have worked at medium-sized startups in these areas struggle to keep their heads above water on fraud prevention even with well-staffed and well-paid teams of experts.
It's a never ending battle where you cannot win, you just manage to not lose so badly that lawyers and federal regulators pound you in the behind or users abandon your platform.
What is the name for the economic fallacy or paradox where I see an article like this and thing "$15k over 4 years is not worth my time" but if you were to ask me if I wanted $15k or a small fraction of that right now with no recurring aspect I'd take it in a heartbeat? That's how I feel reading any of these side project pieces. I look at the total revenue and how long it took them to get there and I groan thinking how I'd hate to do that. Maybe I'm just too focused on hourly rate?
That's called rationality. The paradox is thinking it's worthwhile to squander the few free hours you have to make a number go up.
OP made $15K selling snake oil of a specific nature that, if it were a legitimate product, would have made far more than $15K if he simply used his tool himself instead of productizing it and selling it to rubes and crooks.
Similar experience. I built a very small online helpdesk platform in the early 00s. This was to support my own business mostly. I had several paying customers after 6 months. They were HELL, particularly when it came to paying the bill. I sold the whole business for pocket money after a year to a small tech company who rewrote it into a fairly well known commercial product. I couldn't be bothered. I have ZERO regrets about this.
I still have the source code somewhere, which was about 25,000 lines of ASP in one file!
I’ve done enough freelancing and side jobs to know that I didn’t enjoy and—most importantly—didn’t care enough to get better at the customer service aspect of it.
When I get an email, I try to answer it as best as I can. Years of working with clients taught me to explain things in a simple and easy-to-understand way. So, I spent hours patiently answering questions from potential customers only to never hear back from them.
I’m a big believer in choosing your battles when communicating online. I’ve found bad grammar, lack of focus, confusing content, etc are all signals that the sender didn’t put much effort into their communication, and if I respond to those at all I usually put in proportional effort. Rarely have I experienced low-effort comms leading to high-reward outcomes, and I found my mental health benefits from the “justice” of proportional response. I’m curious though, the writer seems to imply that lack of active communication led to a decrease in sales. I wonder if/how my approach could be sabotaging me.
Also, shipping a broken product is a signal that you didn't put much effort into your development.
I think in terms of official correspondence, I don't think it's a good idea to ask criminals why they did a certain thing, ref the reply to the scammer about his access being revoked. Yes, it might feel good to berate him and ask "Why did you do that?" But what if he answers? Would you really entertain valuable business time arguing with a fraudster?
In general, I also think it's a bad idea to entertain feature requests, unless the person is showing willingness to pay hourly for that extra bespoke service. I personally prepare for eventualities like that, so I can answer in a polite and productive way. "No, sorry we don't offer that feature, but if you want to enter the Bespoke Service Subscription for $10000 a month, then I can do everything you wish and mow your lawn!"
In payment disputes bank dispute resolution often requires a response of any kind from the customer to consider rejecting the dispute. In addition, the submitted forms/disputes often have nonsensical or no information on why the dispute occurred so you truly have no background. Lastly, disputes can be initiated by people without emails or just different emails so you have no chance to connect it to relevant support cases.
That's why he's curtly asking why the dispute was raised - yes in part to pressure the guy directly on his BS knowing he responds, but also because you need any kind of response to win disputes.
I remember the the BBC would upsell on requests from artists visiting their studios in London.
Artist management: “Hey, can you fix XYZ beverage, towels, etc, in the stage ante room?”
BBC: “Sure! That will cost....”
Most would stop pestering at that time, but ever so often you got artists who were willing to pay for the extra service.
Conversion to the mentioned case:
Individual feature request: “Hey, amazing script, I rated it 5 stars! Can you implement the take profit levels for me?”
Generic reply: “Thank you for your interest in Project X! We get thousands of feature requests each week so sadly we cannot cater to individual ones. If you need help on setting take profit levels, I'm afraid you'll have to revert to TradingView's official documentation. Sorry for the inconvenience. Hope you have a nice day!”
Continued pestering: “Ok, but can you please put them for me? I follow this [insert some YouTube crypto day-trader], and he uses [some very specific take profit levels]. I would like the script to draw them for me.”
Up-sell: “I'm sorry, but we sadly cannot cater to individual requests unless you're a Diamond Member. But if you still want bespoke service you can sign up to the Diamond Member Subscription. Please bare in mind that it entails a 1000 monthly retainer with a 300 hourly consultation fee beginning after the first 15 minutes. Please inform me when you want to sign up, and I'll send you the details so we can get started right away!”
I did this very recently for a wedding vendor and it worked like a charm. There was no stipulation that I'd have to provide dinner to a vendor who would come in after the dinner ended. The owner insisted a few days before the wedding that the staff can come in earlier and would be able to eat, would be energized and appreciate the dinner etc.
I was annoyed but said I can charge him (the owner) the exact cost for a plate if this would mean that much to him and he instantly was willing for forgo dinner for his staff, lol...
The amount of fraud and scammers out there is insane. I worked on a platform that only had a few hundred in revenue a month (just starting out). We did many smaller transactions, and getting hit with disputes was a killer. If someone did 15 transactions, they could get hit with 15 chargebacks up to 3 months later. So for every transaction, even if it only generated $3 in revenue, the chargeback could be potentially $15. (And you lose the revenue!). So for one customer who only spent $45, you could lose $270.
Even when we knew the person was legit, and just wanted a refund, they would do disputes. We only won a handful of disputes. The bank / credit card company will almost always side with their customer, even when provided receipts / terms of service / conversations with the customer where they admit the product met their needs.
Chargebacks are a creditcard thing. In some countries people are willing to pay with methods that do not allow chargebacks.
Also chargebacks do not work for wiretranfers. So you can ask them to do a wire transfer instead
Over the years I have had some good (to me) ideas for side projects, but I have always hesitated to build them rationalizing that the potential market was way too small (a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of developers).
If anything, this post shows how wide - or deep - any internet niche is.
Silly me.
Well, this is interesting because what you described is the best way to start a project. Trying to build something too broad from the get-go is very likely to fail, starting small/specific and expanding from there usually works considerably better. If you research famous large companies you'll find that almost all of them did precisely this.
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.
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.
I can relate to so much of this! I've had a couple of relatively successful B2C products take off as side products in my time, and it is very hard not to develop a personal involvement in the support requests; whereas the detached, time-boxed, semi-automated approach is by far the best way to prevent it from taking over your life. Ultimately you're not a charity (unless you are) and, unless you specify an SLA, you owe these people almost nothing: I tend to suggest offering an automatic refund to anybody dissatisfied for this reason: then invest 95% of your time in whatever makes 95% of the profits.
I think a critical business skill is learning to communicate and receive communication without letting it greatly affect your internal mental state. Communication about your business has to just be information and a tool.
Reminds me of my (far less exciting) story when I opened a php forum for a small community I was in charge with, way back, only to come the next day and find it full of botspam.
Forum didn't last too long after that.
Very candid experience - I love it.
I've been in a similar boat running a small B2B Saas over the last 2 years. Over the years I've learnt a lot of tricks in this area.
- You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for customer support.
- Once your core product is built, its worthwhile spending some time automating the heck out of everything. This will save a TON of time in the near future.
- Invest in good docs, even if you're not running a api saas. Good docs + consistent ux + rock solid support will solve most of your support issues.
I think a lot of literature around running a online biz has been boiled down to rather basic advice and its hard to find anything solid in this area. I've been running a small blog where I document these issues(operational.co) if anyone wants to check it out.
Very relatable, had a similar experience.
This is a perfect example of how attaching money to a hobby is guaranteed to ruin it. Dealing with customers is a gigantic pain in the ass, it doesn't matter if it's a large product or some niche esoteric project.
I have the exact same issue regarding support with a simple app I have on the App Store, I can perfectly relate. Despite being a really simple app and extremely cheap, every once in a while I have to wake up to angry e-mails from disgruntled users.
Appreciate OP's post and the other anecdotes shared here.
This side of things doesn't get much coverage since it doesn't sell books or increase subscriber counts!
Why I like the stuff that can support itself for free with a reasonable level of adds.
No expectations of amazing customer support. No refunds. No I'm bound to keep offering the service because it's already paid for.
(look, I'm sorry, I also cringe when I write those words)
Just came to say I laughed and really appreciate the honesty in that statement. :)
Fighting disgruntled customers over $20 is not a good way to spend time.
Absolutely. The advice I'd give for anyone in these situations is that if someone is stressing you out, tell them no, give them a refund, and move on. Always be nice about it (well explained in the post). You don't have to answer every question either.
It might not be the best way to do customer support, and it may feel like you're failing, but you have to protect yourself. You can spend your whole life attempting to appease overly needy customers, it will never end and they'll never be happy.
It's ok to care more about your project than its customers.
OP had to think a bit bigger to get a great ROI. He got himself neck deep into performing tasks or small minuscule work items. I wish he had thought about evolving it into a trading platform or even started with that, something like Robinhood
I've heard that people have had success selling side projects with https://acquire.com (haven't used it myself, though) – have you looked into it?
> Why on earth would you bet your money on some random tool you don't even understand? ... I built a tool for people who knew what harmonic patterns were.
The tool is for drawing "technical analysis indicators", one of the most convoluted ways to ascribe meaning to a random process and something that will only ever be true in the self-fulfilling sense. I don't think it's a surprise that some users are willing to blindly trust the tool, when all users of it are blindly trusting concepts that are built on sand.
Although I'm sure the author is burnt out from the experience now, I'd be interested in hearing how their next side project venture goes- is the experience more enjoyable when you're dealing with a user base that self-selects differently? Or do all users suck equally, just in different ways?
Seb! Look at who reached the top of Hacker News today! haha!
I never considered Gumroad because of their high prices, but I must say that chargeback and fraud interaction seemed pretty painless which is nice.
Great article! I'd add another tip: Use marketplaces to get visibility and traffic. Maybe part of your success was being on Gumroad to begin with (which is not just a MoR)
3K MRR here after running for 5 years and the projects are on autopilot too. Growth is very slow, zero marketing efforts made on my side. I think it's hard to get more value from this product though, hence why I focus on other ventures.
Not that many support requests.
A few customers racking up bills for thousands; 3-4 never paid and I didn't persecute them, the rest did.
You were lucky on chargebacks resolution, generally the b**rds always side with the scammer customers trying to get service for free. I've tried arguing many times but it's completely useless. That's also why I'm afraid of doing a project where my margins are smaller. Plenty of them then try to resuscribe Right now hosting is 50$ per month, so if someone steal access to my product I don't care much.
Merchant of Records saved my life, F*k Europe VATMOSS, Sales Taxes, GST and every other crap governments add just to kill small businesses and make them flock to Amazon. Paddle support is pretty bad, I wouldn't go with them if I would do it all again. Probably I'd try LemonSqueezy (now acquired by Stripe).
Selling the business: I was offered money for the business but I don't think it's worth it, given how much it's on autopilot.
This reminds me of the book 4 Hour Workweek.
That book is really about Tim Ferriss figuring out how to automate and delegate everything in his business, until he only has to put in 4 hours a week to keep it going.
Until you reach a similar point, as this article shows, you don't really have any "passive" income. You just have another job.
A business can be worse than a job because there’s even more required things to be done that can’t be ignored.
the way to get the doge project to not take your time is learning to hire for existing tasks while you figure out new ones.
Also if you can use some of the funds towards a required like a vacation that you and your partner can enjoy guilt free
I understand the struggle. Finding and keeping customers can be a challenge, especially in B2C. But $15K is good, so I would continue fighting for it. To reduce the stress, you should automate everything as much as possible. I’m also currently learning Pine Script, so thanks for giving me a side business idea.
Dealing with this crap and actually wanting to do this for years is, in part, why software is expensive.
It is ok to let some fire burn.
Say no more often, and focus on the core of your business.
> Others had very basic questions, answers to which were given in the description of each script.
Oh, I feel that from DayJob. If it wasn't for the possible arguments is might cause about professionalism, my standard response to a client question in DayJob would be a gif from TaskMaster, looping through instances of Alex Horne saying “all the information is on the task”.
> Somehow all those claims from 'people with large communities' never materialized beyond testing the trial.
Very few people ask for something for themselves, they think they'll get a better response if they can convince you they are part of a larger interested group, or by suggesting what they are asking for would benefit “the community”.
Neither of these things is new: I had some software out there in the late 90s¹ and it was much the same back then, just perhaps less intense.
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[1] initially shareware-ish, then when the amount I made wasn't worth the faf of dealing with people (and payment processors), and talks with the couple of people who were interested in buying ownership/copyright annoyed me by going round in circles, it became open source so others could build take it on (no one did, they just all wanted me to continue to add features they wanted), then when I got more sick of dealing with people I buried the thing.
But for now, the $200 I get every month with almost no work is a nice passive income.
Wow, not that I wouldn't enjoy having an extra $200/mo, but it would be a pretty insignificant chunk of my budget. Stepping back from the author's initial perspective (wanting to help people and grow business) - was this ever worth spending more than a couple hours a week on?
Interesting article to read. Part of the issues also seem to come from a few contributing factors like the unusual platform and expanding from this platform including whatever limitations come with it. Meaning you implemented things in a reverse order than people might otherwise do as they don't start out with a product on a platform trying to make it fit a subscription model.
I can imagine the specific type of user base also increasing specific types of annoying support requests. Although customer support almost always ends up being one of the things that at some point will annoy the hell out of you. Even on open source projects, the entitlement can be incredible. Although there you can get away with a remark like "You are free to uninstall <open source product>, we will give you a full refund!".
Automating a lot of that certainly was the right call, as well as filtering out all the low hanging fruits of bullshit requests. If people can't be bothered to read instructions (assuming they are clear instructions) then they certainly will also run into various other issues making them not worth the effort.
The one thing I don't entirely disagree with is "Be nice" which I personally have replaced with "Be civil" over the years. It still means listening to peoples requests, helping them where reasonable, even be courteous where applicable. To be fair, there might also be a cultural aspect involved here. In communication with US companies the "being nice" mantra often seems to be taken to such a degree where I am less wishing for someone sane to just help me swiftly with my support ticket and be done with it.
Overall, nice write up of the experience though!
When you're going into business for yourself, you're no longer a programmer. You are the head of customer support, you are the president, you are sales, advertising, and accounting too.
It requires a large set of skills that you either have to learn, or you'll struggle.
I do all the direct customer support for my 2 businesses (radioreference and broadcastify) which typically equates to 20-30 Zendesk tickets a day addressing login/password issues, payment issues, technical support etc.
Boy can I relate to burn out and frustration. It's shocking to me how many times I have to deal with things like customer mental health issues, extremely disrespectful customer behavior, some of the wild ways in which customers will try to get out of payments that they directly authorized, and of course the occasional edge cases that customers can get themselves into which will really have you as a developer questioning your sanity.
But the truly perplexing situations are folks that will click through and pay for a product, such as your most expensive subscription plan, and then instantly have buyers remorse and just go off the deep end demanding refunds, implementing chargebacks, blaming you for being misleading, and dishing out wildly disrespectful behavior. "I didn't know what I was purchasing" is a common support ticket.
... and my business does not do recurring billing or automated subscription renewals. You literally have to renew any subscription you have with us when it comes due.
I actually had a customer file a class action lawsuit against my business because we sent him a reminder that his subscription was about to expire and if he wanted to renew it he could, and he subsequently filed this lawsuit claiming we were violating a Florida consumer protection law which doesn't allow debt collectors to contact people during certain hours. That cost me a cool chunk of change to get dismissed.
A lot of it is enough to give a sane person PTSD and to drive the most patient personality to throw a chair through a window in frustration.
It sounds to me like the really valuable product here isn't the harmonic charts but the little automation platform (based on n8n?). I can imagine there are plenty of devs with even less tolerance for customer service and actually running a business, but are happy to build software and sell it to people.
I think the merchant of record bit is a bit overblown for a lot of side projects.
Tuvalu isn't going to extradite you for not paying them their $5 VAT.
If you're frequently dealing with multiple jurisdictions (especially with EU) and the fees don't add up to 10% or higher (which MoRs can do if you're in a less popular jurisdiction), it can make sense to take care of admin headaches.
That might be many projects, but it's certainly not all. I've written about this from the "third world" perspective over here: https://nik.software/building-global-wealth-from-south-afric... (and the "Accepting Payments" section above it)
No one wants to talk to an AI for customer support.
Actually, I do.
There's no wait in line. There's no waiting 2 min for each response in chat, or waiting 5 min on hold while the rep figures out what to do. And I've, shockingly, gotten issues resolved faster and better.
Using one semi-popular consumer app -- once it pointed me to docs on their site that Google wasn't finding because I didn't know what keywords to use. And twice it escalated me to send a message to the relevant team, where I got a response that addressed my problem -- and where escalation would have been necessary with a human call-center rep anyways.
The point is that it was far, far faster than any chat rep OR phone rep. And it's far faster to escalate too.
I'm sure this experience isn't universal, but I've been truly shocked at how it's turned what are otherwise 15-20 minute interactions into 3 minute interactions. At the same level of quality or better.
I've recently encountered one that just sends you in a loop, and there is literally no way to actually speak to a real person. Unless you want to give them more money; they're very responsive in that case.
This is a billion-dollar company you have definitely heard of.
Why don't you just name the company?
I'm guessing Amazon?
I've had exactly one AI chatbot point me to the right documents. All the other interactions were exercises in frustration, and I've canceled more than one product due to shitty AI support. When I have a question, if an automated system could handle it, I wouldn't have a question.
There's also no useful output whatsoever if you actually tried any troubleshooting yourself.
Never has a chatbot been of help to me.
Then you get situations like this one where the AI invented a non existent policy (which the airline did not want to honor)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...
i've gone back and forth on this over the last few months.
I started out thinking that we've all been conditioned by bad customer support chatbots whose only purpose is to look up facts from the FAQ and then tell you to call the real customer support line to actually handle your problem. the problem was that the chatbots weren't granted hee ability and authority to actually do things. wouldn't it be great if you could aks a bot to cancel your account or change your billing info and it would actually do it?
but then i realized... anything with a clearly defined process or workflow like that would be even better if it were just a form on an account settings page. why bother with a chatbot?
customer support lines run by humans exist for two reasons: - increase friction for things you don't want your user to do (like cancel their account without first hearing a bunch of sales pitches) - handle unanticipated problems that don't fit into the happy-path you've set up on the settings page
My worry is that business dudes will get excited about making chatbots that can do the former and they'll never trust an AI to be able to handle the later. So I'm now of the opinion that having AI customer support will only be used to make things worse.
Customer support isn't paid well, so they often aren't motivated to become very skilled beyond the level of a chatbot before they move on to other things. So the interface to bad docs doesn't matter much. And good docs are very hard to produce. AI magnifies problems when good docs are lacking.
Everyone has some amount of common sense. The current state of the art does not, so it cannot make decisions. This is why these things can't currently replace real support beyond being a search function exceedingly capable of interpreting natural language queries and, optionally, rephrasing what the found document says to fit onto the query better
You can't even have these systems as first line support, verifiying whether the person has searched the docs because you can't trust it with a decision about whether the docs' solutions are exhausted and human escalation is needed. There currently simply needs to be a way to reach a human. I'm as happy as the next person to find that a no-queue computer system could solve my problem so I use it when my inquiry is a question and not a request, but a search function is all they are
There's a third case: dealing with folks who just aren't technically savvy enough to figure some things out on there own, no matter how intuitive, well documented, or fully featured your product is.
I think I'd rather troubleshoot with a well-scripted AI chatbot, than a human being who's forced into the role of an automaton - executing directly from a script. Just, FFS, let me escalate to an actual competently trained human being once I've been through the troubleshooting.
Eh... I think there's a balance to be struck. You could leverage AI to handle the initial messages (90% of which are tire kickers or scammers) and funnel worthy exchanges to continue the conversation manually.
Once people notice AI is responding they will skip it and will request to talk to a human. AI will look the same as FAQs or Chatbots, people don't want to interact with them, they want a human being that is able to understand their problem exactly as it is.
The right pattern is to put them directly in a queue to talk to a person, but have an system (AI or otherwise) in the queue to gather the minimal information. Like having the person explain the problem (and have something transcribe it) and have the system transfer them to the appropriate team after parsing their problem.
Or for really common cases (ie. turn it on and off, you're affected by an outage, etc), redirect them to an prerecorded message and then let them know that they are still in the queue and can wait for a person. 9/10 it'll solve everything, but also reduce friction of simple things that might be answered.
Most chatbots are both useless and tedious to interact with. But I've also had plenty of interactions with human first-level support that's just following a script without any actual understanding. An AI would be able to provide a genuine improvement over that.
AI isn't an improvement for companies that already provide great customer support, but it has the ability to seriously raise the bar for companies that want to keep customer support costs low or that have a lot of trivial requests that they have to deal with cost-effectively
Maybe not.
But there are many ways in which AI can improve or help support. So even if "AI chat support" turns out to not work, AI can still be very helpful in automating support.
Like detecting duplicates, preparing standard answers, grouping similar requests, assigning messages to priorities and/or people and so on.
That's not what "AI" means now. "AI" now means LLM babble
Even LLMs can do many of what I mention. Categorizing, grouping, assigning prios etc. maybe not as good as dedicated AI trained for this purpose only (I guess many could be "simple" bayesian filters even) but good enough and readily available.
People want their support solved as quickly as possible. They don't want to talk to AI support bots because it's just an inefficient, error-prone wrapper over the documentation, which if you have an actual support need (as opposed to "I just haven't read any of the documentation") that kind of AI support isn't going to be helpful.
If you have an AI customer support that can actually support customer service requests and provide resolution, people will use it and be happy about it, or at least indifferent.
People who can understand what the AI is saying don't need the AI have problems the AI is too dumb and powerless to solve.
People who can't read the documentation aren't going to understand the AI's bad or even good summary of the documentation
No one needs to know it's one ;)
Would you like to work with a business that treats your time and problems this way?
I usually agree, but Lemonade (insurance) has an amazing support bot.
uh, I beg to differ. I felt like an autocomplete with a knowledge base and "direct links to the right email forms" would have been faster than the fake chat interface that the "bot" uses.
(Also, if you own a home in NY and use lemondade -- do know that they don't cover cast iron piping (extremely popular in NYC). I found that out at renewal...)
Doesn't need to be AI, most customer support was already automated before ChatGPT rose to prominence. Hell, I developed a mobile website once for a power company that was basically a wizard / checklist of "Have you checked for known outages? Have you checked your breakers? Have you checked if your neighbours have issues too?" before they were shown the customer service number.
Human contact doesn't scale, or is prohibitively expensive. I sat with customer support a while ago (again energy sector, but different company) to observe, and every phone call was at least ten minutes, often 20-30, plus some aftercare in the form of logging the call or sending out a follow-up email.
They also did chat at the time, where a chatbot (which wasn't ChatGPT / AI based yet but they're working on it) would do the initial contact, give low-hanging fruit suggestions based on their input, and ask for their information like their address before connecting to a real human. The operator was only allowed to handle two chats at a time, and each chat session took about half an hour - with some ending because the person on the other side idled too long. I mean granted, the UI wasn't great and the customer service guy wasn't a fast typer, but even then it was time-consuming and did not scale. They had two dozen people clocked in, if they were all as fast as this one person, they can handle 50 support calls an hour at most.
It does not scale. This was for a company with about 2.5 million users who rarely need customer support. Compare with companies like Google or Facebook that have billion(s) of users. They automated and obfuscated their customer support ages ago.
24 people on 2.5 million users and you say it doesn't scale?
Broadly, I agree. And I am furious with Progressive insurance for requiring a smart phone/mobile app to file roadside assistance claims, and my inability to get someone real on a call.
But,
In this particular story, the people were asking questions that were answered in the instructions.
No one wants to waste their time answering stupid questions, particularly if they are a solo small shop who gets entitled people asking questions around the clock.
Much better than an unengaged, unempowered exploited human.
No one wants to perform customer support either. Generally, people who are smart and capable of offering good support will stop doing it because there are more fruitful and enjoyable things for them to do.
Yes it's great writing. But it's not really about automating I feel (please chime in author OP?). To me he wanted to get away from customer email ghosting and disputes. He chose to change the customer support approach and create customer service tools to manage the common requests programmatically. I feel from the writing that his original vision, or continuing to extend the product and scale it, has now changed to maintaining it as is. He realizes customer requests and the time/disappointment of all that grows linear to revenue and does not want to do that any more.