Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

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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.

It’s hard, but my best advice for Saas builders who get crazy feature requests from non-customers is simple:

Don’t reply.

You have to judge which requests are “crazy” of course, which isn’t always easy. “If you could just do this one thing, I would gladly pay for a subscription” has to be weighed with how much work it would be, and whether you think it would apply to other potential or existing customers.

But a reply explaining your rationale for politely saying “no” simply gives the potential customer a reason to stay engaged, often leading to indignation when the inevitably feel dissatisfied with your reasoning. After all, they don’t care about your other customers, they just want their problem solved.

Many, many prospective customer inquiries don’t deserve answers, and you’ll find yourself buried in unproductive back-and-forth if you don’t do the simplest thing of ignoring them.

A collected a few crazy support requests here:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/11/21/problem-exists-bet...

Unfortunately the IBMs of the world have taught a lot of entrepreneurs a very valuable lesson:

Companies only pay attention to you as a customer when they think the checkbook is coming out, or going away. Big companies have different reasons, but the behavior is similar. The people who understand this start making everything sound like a quid pro quo situation even if it's not very sensible.

The more clever and slightly pessimistic entrepreneur might go so far as suggest the problematic customer talk to one of their competitors. But that sort of biological warfare really should be covered by the Geneva Convention.

    > 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.

Real question: I wonder if this phenom has been part of a case study for MBAs. It makes sense to me. If you are paying customer, you have already convinced yourself it is a valuable product. Deeper: Is it every worth trying to convert the "crazies" using sales strategies? Example: Well, if you sign-up for our enterprise package, we promise your needs in X months.

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.

I reply to every support request that isn't an obvious scam. It feels rude not to.

I get it but main thing is you should know that's a choice and it shouldn't be a requirement/burden. For the common things I think I'd just setup an autoreply that said something like;

Thanks for your message, please know that we are limited on time and only respond to critical issues. However, also please know that we do eventually read and monitor these emails;

- Bug reports or issues on our current application: we will respond within a week, usually within 2 days

- Feature requests: we are unable to confirm when or if a feature will be added. We typically put it on a log and review them quarterly.

- Requests for source code or how our tool was built: we're glad you're curious however we do not share this information.

Taking up to a week to respond to a bug report sounds like a long time. I would wonder that anyone would bother to submit a bug report if they think they might have to wait a week to get a response. But I guess its acceptable, if you set customer expectations accordingly.

A week can be a long time, even 2 days might. If you want to respond sooner that's great, they will likely be pleasantly surprised. However, for those times when you're offline for the weekend or on holiday for a week - the messaging helps you out with no extra effort to update it. Always better to under promise and over deliver in my book.

I also think expectations are relayed based on the price and scale of your business. Being transparent about your operations is helpful. If you're running your business as a one person side project but pretending to be a large multinational corporation (which is common) or charging a larger sum of money for service then perhaps it's expected. Also if you're providing some mission critical application, then probably expected. The author is talking about a charting plugin to a trading app that he charges peanuts for and has no intention of continuing development on. I think most people's "businesses" fall into this camp, even if mildly revenue generating. In any case, it's mostly about setting and managing expectations. It helps if you are transparent if you are not actively making improvements or it's just a hobby/solo/side hustle thing for you. At the end of the day, they can decide if they want to discontinue using your thing or not and if your optimizing for "least amount of time invested" then you also just need to come to accept that some churn is the price of it. Obviously, if you can charge more or have a huge amount of users, that churn becomes negative ROI versus providing more attentive support and that would likely justify a change of strategy - for some.

> 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).

I hope your disdain for your fellow humans is only in jest. It's still sickening.

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