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Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

I don't think either party comes out especially well here, but my sympathies lie with the CEO. The only thing I might have done differently would be to include a tarball of the site in the "Sorry it was not a good fit" email, thereby avoiding the accusation of wasted work.

If I'm providing a service and someone has a problem with it, I expect them to look to resolve it with me first, before tweeting about "shady practices".

Added in edit: People seem to think I believe the CEO acted well and that I'm defending him. I don't, and I'm not. But neither party comes out well from this, and I can see why the CEO acted as he did, even if I think it was flawed.

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Yeah, neither party looks good here, but my sympathies doesn't lie with Ghost (nor the CEO).

The user complained about something, then the company deleted his content? Feels like it's missing something in the middle. Why would Ghost simply delete his website because he's complaining? Feels like they are making the decision for him, instead of just leaving things as they are, and if the user doesn't upgrade, then they don't.

> If I'm providing a service and someone has a problem with it, I expect them to look to resolve it with me first, before tweeting about "shady practices".

Yeah, you might want to readjust your expectation if you ever end up running a service on the internet. This happens _constantly_ and if you start feeling you need to delete users content when this happens, then please don't run a service for public usage.

I think the thing in the middle is taking to Twitter to complain immediately, rather than giving the company time to respond. One piece of advice constantly given to people who run businesses is to delete/remove/get rid of problem customers. In this case the CEO has decided - rightly or wrongly - that this customer is likely to be more trouble than they are worth. So the CEO has refunded his money and terminated the service.

What's wrong is simply deleting the data/site. All the data should have been returned to the (now ex-)customer.

> ...please don't run a service for public usage.

I run multiple services, and I expect people to give me a chance to resolve problems before taking to Twitter. If they don't then I contact them to express my disappointment that they haven't done so, and then I have, on occasion, refunded people, returned their data, and terminated their service.

Admittedly my communities aren't the public in general, but I do have some relevant experience.

Comments here are clearly divided, and it gives me pause to consider how many people are commenting as those who have, and those who have never, had to deal with customers.

> I think the thing in the middle is taking to Twitter to complain immediately

What I meant is that flow of the events seem to have been something like:

- User received notification about impeding upgrade

- User replies to Ghost and tweets about the event

- CEO replies on Twitter

- ??? (Here it feels like some information is missing)

- Ghost terminates the users service

I cannot fathom that a user complains once via Twitter, and Ghost terminates their account. Has to be something else that have happened, otherwise this is way beyond crazy to do (from Ghosts side)

> I run multiple services, and I expect people to give me a chance to resolve problems before taking to Twitter. If they don't then I contact them to express my disappointment that they haven't done so, and then I have, on occasion, refunded people, returned their data, and terminated their service.

Same here, with lots of people complaining about bunch of different things and I have never, paying user or not, terminated their service unless I've asked before if I can terminate it or not.

Interesting to see that there are others who simply terminate users service when the user complains (gives feedback), wonder how that impacts the bottom line?

I've said elsewhere that I've never terminated services purely because the customer complains, and I've never done it without notice. I think the CEO gets that wrong. As I said, neither party comes out of this looking good.

But I have certainly terminated services from one side, without asking permission, after trying multiple times to resolve the issues.

If people complaining about your company on Twitter as a first resort is a problem for you, perhaps you’re not cut out to run a big company, because it happens to all of them.

The Ghost CEO might as well have just put out an advert saying “We’re not ready to compete with Wordpress.”

> I have, on occasion, refunded people, returned their data, and terminated their service.

You have terminated a customer's account without notice because they made a complaint?

Did I say without notice? No.

I have not terminated someone's account without notice. I have always first tried to find out what the problem is so we can resolve it. But when someone has raised an issue, not given us time to resolve or even investigate, and then accused us publicly of inappropriate behaviour, I've contacted them to say that I think it better we go separate ways, returned their data, refunded their money, and gave them 48 hours before considering the issue closed.

We (you and I) probably agree that the CEO did not get it entirely right, and certainly I would not have done what he did. But in this situation, where neither party comes off looking good, my sympathies still lie somewhat with the CEO.

Wow, I don't think I could ever really trust a service that thinks making a complaint on social media is a valid reason to terminate someone's account. It feels unprofessional (I can't think of a major company I've ever heard doing this) and makes me wonder what other reasons the CEO might find to terminate my account. I (like the author) never in a million years would have guessed that making a complaint on social media (a channel commonly used to get support) would be grounds for my account being terminated.

Please note: I'm not saying the CEO got it completely right, I'm trying to provide a different perspective.

So ...

It wasn't just making the complaint on social media that got the response, it was the wording of the original email as well. Already in that email he has said:

> This is an extremely shady business practice ...

and

> ... makes me question my commitment to moving to Ghost.

I think the CEO got it wrong, yes, but as I said, I have some sympathy.

> I ... never in a million years would have guessed that making a complaint on social media ... would be grounds for my account being terminated.

You might want to double-check the fine-print on some of the services you use. Often there's a clause about "publicly disparaging the service provider" or similar.

Let me finish by saying I think the CEO acted wrongly, but I have some sympathy.

Neither is someone saying you're saying the CEO got everything right. The issue is that you're still feeling sympathy for the CEO, even though you believe he did wrong (and also the author, but less important).

> You might want to double-check the fine-print on some of the services you use. Often there's a clause about "publicly disparaging the service provider" or similar.

Yeah, ToS and similar usually have language like that + "we can terminate your service for any reason, without telling you", but companies who do terminate peoples service for any reason, without justifying it, will rightly get less business because it´s a shitty thing to do. Just because it´s legal doesn´t mean it´s right.

> Neither is someone saying you're saying the CEO got everything right.

It does feel like that. Perhaps it's not being said out loud, but there is a sense that that's what people think/mean. But you're right, no one has said that explicitly.

> The issue is that you're still feeling sympathy for the CEO, even though you believe he did wrong

The implication there is that if someone does something wrong, somehow you're not allowed to understand their motivations and sympathise, even if you don't agree. I find that disappointing, but I'm getting used to being disappointed by people.

>> ... the fine-print ...

> ... companies who do terminate people's service for any reason, without justifying it, will rightly get less business because it's a shitty thing to do. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right.

Absolutely.

Most people who "deal with customers" have a boss who would be upset with them if they responded to people getting angry on Twitter by taking their ball and going home.

The tweet doesn't contain the "shady practices" wording you quote. Critising is normal when you have a bad experience and if you don't expect it, you're going to be very very disappointed when you launch a product that actually has a few users.

You are correct, "shady practices" is wording from his email, not his tweets.

His tweets say things like:

> How can it be fiercely independent publishing and a "non-profit" with such practices?

and

> Ghost operates a very sleazy "auto upgrade" practice.

Both parties handled it with emotion and childishness.

The CEO should not have acted the way he did. No excuses for what he did.

I wanted to be careful before blaming OP but after reading his blog post, he did not send a polite email to begin with and then on top of that, he immediately complained on Twitter and even accused them of shady practice. He went too far. Sorry OP, an email that starts with "This is an extremely shady business practice and makes me question my commitment to moving to Ghost" is NOT a polite email, whether you are right or wrong. A Polite email would have been "I am a little surprised receiving this email from you guys and wasn't aware of this rule you guys have. Can I get more time to think about this since I am not sure I want to pay that kind of money" etc etc.

On top of that, OP says "I also decided to tweet about it - because that’s what people do, right?". No OP. People don't do that by default. Good customers try to work it out with the business first. They wait for a first response. They give them a little benefit of doubt before making judgements. If you cannot resolve it together in a friendly way and you feel you have been wronged, go ahead and rant on Twitter by all means. But it was a knee jerk reaction on OP's part to post on twitter which accused Ghost. No business likes these types of customers. Of course, the CEO had an equally if not worse response and now Ghost deserves all the negative press. This doesn't absolve OP's immature reaction. I cannot agree with their tactic.

Why is a company entitled to having customers that give the benefit of the doubt, try to work out something, and act in private before making public statements?

The owner of the blog felt like the billing update was shady, sent an email, and complained harshly on Twitter. Regardless of the harshness of the tweet, that is literally a customer wanting to work something out and providing feedback. It's what every company should want. It's even better than working it out privately because Twitter is a public platform that ghost can utilize to make their customer service look better. "We have given you a free 30-day upgrade so you have more time to think about this. In the meantime, we will take your feedback into consideration and discuss this internally. Thank you for being a loyal customer" or whatever corporate-speak ghost wants to partake in.

Cutting the customer off completely, knowing full well that they will then talk about this publicly, is not only the complete opposite of working things out professionally, but works against ghost's public image.

This is the exact kind of customer a company wants. They go public with complaints that can be easily fixed and remedied. It's the easiest form of free goodwill.

> If I'm providing a service and someone has a problem with it, I expect them to look to resolve it with me first, before tweeting about "shady practices".

That’s just someone being frustrated. Maybe its not the right thing to do and a bit rash, but that you will have a few frustrated customers act rash is part of being in business. It doesn’t make the guy look great, but its still not a reason for the CEO to say he looks like an asshole (which IMHO makes him look just as bad, for the same reasons the customer looks bad, as you described it) and then cancel his account without warning (which is just outright an asshole move).

I agree entirely that it's wrong for the CEO to tweet that the customer looks like an asshole, and I agree entirely that simply terminating the account without further warning or interaction is wrong. I'm not defending the CEO, and I never said that I was.

I'm saying that I have some sympathy for them. Clearly a lesson I need to take away from this is that expressing sympathy for someone is taken ipso facto as complete agreement.

So let's say again, neither party comes out looking good, I think both parties have behaved less well than they should, and the CEO should not have terminated the account without more interaction.

But I have more sympathy for the CEO than the customer, which is not the same as saying that I agree with their actions, nor that I support them.

That sounds reasonable.

Really? I'm rather gobsmacked to find someone defending this.

I think OP comes across as a bit of an asshole. They send a fairly confrontational email and didn't even wait for a response before taking their dirty laundry to Twitter.

I disagree with Ghost taking down the site without more discussion, but I do think their original practice of giving the user the benefit of the doubt and allowing the use of upgraded features without upfront payment to be generally good. I think OP's complaint could probably be addressed through the UI (though I don't know what that looks like presently).

I'd be interested to hear more ... why do you find this so surprising? People running businesses are constantly told "Keep good customers, identify and get rid of toxic ones." That appears to be exactly what the CEO has done here. As I say elsewhere, rightly or wrongly he has decided that this customer will be more trouble than they are worth, so he has refunded his money and terminated the service.

To me the indefensible thing is not returning the customers data, but other than this, why do you find it so unreasonable that a vendor should choose to terminate a service? It seems to be in the Ts and Cs of every (nearly) service I use.

So on that basis, can you explain why you think the CEOs behaviour is indefensible?

> "Keep good customers, identify and get rid of toxic ones."

This quote right here doesn't mean that if someone is saying "you have a good service" or "you have a terrible service" once is "good customer" vs "toxic customer". One message doesn't allow you to extrapolate the full situation, what if the user was simply having a bad day?

Now, if you have a user that constantly is being a drain on customer support or otherwise ruins the business, sure, go ahead. But just because you send one email about the pricing and bitch a bit on Twitter, you get your service terminated? That's super petty, and not at all what I would expect of a company like Ghost.

Customers who immediately try to raise a mob on social media whenever they encounter the slightest issue are toxic customers, there's no way around it. There should be a list of such customers for companies to filter them out of their business when possible, ideally at signup. I know multiple small companies that would gladly pay for this service. Market for a new startup?

Blame all the big corporations who provide minimal customer service through anything except getting their attention on Twitter.

I think the CEO stepped in and made a judgement that the customer was not going to be worth it. I'm not saying the call was the right one.

Everyone here seems to think I believe the CEO acted perfectly correctly and that I'm defending him. I don't, and I'm not. I'm saying both parties come out of this looking bad, but I can at least understand the CEOs actions, and even if I don't actually approve of them, I have some sympathy.

BTW: I suspect we are not far apart here, the difference might be in the nuance. We both believe the termination without warning was petty, we both believe that there are such things as "bad" customers and "toxic" customers. We both believe that both parties behaved badly. The question is whether either or both deserve any sympathy.

But more importantly ... what lessons should we take from this?

* As a customer?

* As a provider?

I see. I think your comment which includes "and then I have, on occasion, refunded people, returned their data, and terminated their service." makes it seem like you have acted the same way as Ghosts CEO did here, terminating the service without asking if that's what the user wants before, and you were fine with acting in that way, but seems I misunderstood you.

I have personally no interest in figuring out if anyone deserves sympathy here, I simply want to make sure that other founders and CEOs reading HN don't believe that terminating someones service willy nilly is perfectly fine, because complaining once on Twitter makes you a "toxic" user.

That's the difference between being a company and a person. The threshold for an entity taking money for a service to be publically highlighted is lower than for a person behaving badly

Agreed, both appear unprofessional here, I don't sympathise with either any more than two children I might walk past bickering in a playground.

Instead of emailing about 'shady business practices' off the bat, why not just ask the question? 'Please limit my account to the features of tier X rather than autoupgrade me'.

Instead of tweeting, wait for an email response. Then if necessary, again just ask the question: 'uh, what if it goes viral and I break 100k limit too?'.

Then the CEO, well, why's he even getting involved, just ignore it. If he must reply on Twitter, why not just answer the question about what happens on the 100k limit? Why not apologise that autoupgrade wasn't desired and say (even if bullshit) you're grateful for the feedback and it'll be reviewed? Certainly don't start calling customers 'asshole's on the internet.

But.. the tweet seemingly had no traction (so maybe it didn't matter!) but what was 'what are you on about [...] asshole' even supposed to achieve?

Just seems so petty, on both sides...

The CEO of Ghost did not ever call his ex-customer an asshole, though.

In the quoted tweet in the submitted post the CEO says:

> "Kicking a screaming on Twitter doesn't actually accomplish anything other than making you look like an asshole."

Exactly.

You're playing semantics and it's making you look like a pedantic loser.

I know you won't take offense to this, because I never called you a pedantic loser.

Is this correct?

It is, especially in a legal framework, and it means I probably won't win if I sue you for writing that sentence. Do you have a point?

Ok, my mistake. But nobody's suing anybody for calling anybody an asshole here. What I actually said:

> Certainly don't start calling customers 'asshole's on the internet.

is not materially changed if I had not missed the edit window and instead said 'do not start saying your customers look like assholes on the internet'.

Basically just don't say 'asshole'.

In a legal context, the ruling is often on the basis of how "the average person" would interpret something, and not on the minutiae of what you think the exact semantics are. Given that, it's likely that "the average person" would interpret the CEO's remark as, to all intents and purposes, calling the OP an asshole.

This is why (a) it's a gamble "going legal", because the interpretation the judges make might not be what you expect, and (b) nitpicking like this is unhelpful and unconstructive.

There is no expectation that customers be professional. There is no profession, no salary, and no stakeholders. The failure here is almost all with the one professional involved: the CEO.

My expectation is that the customer who writes a more professional/courteous/mature email will be the one more likely to see a better outcome.

Same and there are costs involved in hosting and automatically billing for bandwidth is generally preferred by customers to shutting down the site when it goes viral. It's also the standard in the industry. If you link a credit card and agree to a pay-for-what-you-use plan, then yeah, you'll pay for what you use.

I can see very strong use cases for each approach - can it not be an option? I mean, if the advice is "just keep an eye on it and cut the service yourself once you get close to the limit" then surely "how about I throw you a dollar a month to do that for me, since it's far more efficient that way?" seems reasonable. The people who are at most risk here are those with the least means - it just seems quite unnecessarily unfair.

I would have simply ignored the tweet instead of attending it in a rude manner. Many people rage tweet and it's expected when they are frustrated.

If Sundar Pichai started banning hners for everytime they compain about Google here, half of HN would lose access to google services.

Don't ignore the tweet: yes people may be unhappy, but it's an opportunity to offer an explanation and a solution! Then you can win a happy customer, and also "win" the internet (ie. many more customers) as the tweet is going to stay and be found through search

Agreed, a complaint is a gift can help you in so many ways. Often better than never knowing why a customer just upped and left.

This is indefensible, and terrible for Ghost's reputation. Both you and the CEO should be groveling. This was a huge mistake. Please think of the actual engineers, designers, and everyone else who works on this product, who are probably facepalming over this. What a horrible representation of one's work. Hopefully you can still sympathize with them, along with the customer.

(The withholding and potential destruction of data and IP, not the tweeting).

Fully agree. Both parties should have handled it better, but I can understand the CEO. Entitled customers who immediately complain on social media are people you should avoid whenever possible.

Yeah, I'd also side with the CEO in terms of his Twitter reply, but not with shutting the site down. I think the OP going to complain on Twitter is going overboard; it's not as though he didn't get any warning at all before being upgraded and he is using features that he's expected to pay for.

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