Hacker News Reader

Comment by tata71 | Hacker News Reader

How do you avoid promising or implying shit you don't intend to deliver?

I'm going through this right now — people trying to use super-fine permissions (dozens of points!).

Besides role-based groupings, there's no chance this fixes more issues than it causes in my case (less technical managers and workers using an SaaS).

Any ideas and insight appreciated!

View on HN

Hey dude, please check this out. Basecamp had a similar issue but the underlying cause was very simple and was fixable within a day.

https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.2-chapter-03#narrow-down-the-...

By consistently delivering on everything else that they are asking for and most importantly... helping increase their revenues (or whatever other metric you use with your customers for their success).

Not delivering sometimes has a reverse psychological effect that you can use to your advantage... it keeps them wanting more.

This is the 1000x startup toxicity attitude people talk about, right?

Surely there's better, more comfortable long term gain to be had being good customer service human beings, to some extent(?)

Toxic? Far from it... we onboarded about 800 customers, they loved us and we grossed $80m in our first year.

A lot of companies just say "We've added it to the backlog, thanks!" - I'd recommend avoiding this.

An honest "we don't plan on taking the product in this direction for some time" will do wonders (at least for customers worth keeping IMO).

I've been saying things like: "we'd like to hear more about how you'd use this, to help us build future versions".

Any smart customer would know that is code for "We've added it to the backlog, thanks!" and won't ever see that feature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com