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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

We used BetaPunch extensively whilst testing our latest Decal CMS tour/on-boarding process[1] and I have nothing but good things to say about the service and Ross himself who was very pleasant and responsive. I've recommended the service to everyone I've met since. For the type of user testing you get, you just can't beat the price.

Although some of the testers weren't exactly in the "target market", by having some people that weren't designers or developers muddle through our demo, we were able to fix some really critical bugs.

I even met some people through the service (testers) that were willing to jump on Skype with me to discuss the product and who were interested in taking the beta process further.

I'd highly recommend you try them out. The social strategy Ross is going for here may be a little misguided, but the product itself, and indeed Ross (as far as I've dealt with him) are hard to fault.

[1]http://www.decalcms.com/

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While it's useful to know he was nice to you (and I also had good interactions with him), it's still only one data point. That there are more than a few data points showing a profound inability to play nicely with others is far more enlightening. We all make mistakes, but I'm guessing most of us here seldom make very public, mean-spirited mistakes like his.

Yes, mine is one data point, as is Danielle's, as are a few others' stories on this page. I wanted to add my data point to the list to provide some balance, I think it's a great service and I never had any problems with him.

Sorry, but come on, "social strategy?" What is that, exactly? Antagonizing your potential customers?

I dunno, could just be that he's antagonistic by nature but also could just be that he wanted to get a lot of publicity for betapunch. I'd assume a lot of people who have never heard of betapunch, have heard of it now and he'll probably get a few users out of it.

You're getting downvoted but you are correct and he could very possibly have used this as a strategy. Anyone who doesn't recognize or even consider that possibility doesn't fully understand the nuances of PR.

Using PR to lose customers is some mighty nuanced PR!

"Using PR to lose customers"

The idea is that there is a net gain. People will remember the name and forget the bad rep. The amount of people who remember or stop doing business is less than the amount gained by the bad publicity.

Yeah, I don't think there's any strategy here. Strategery, maybe.

One satisfied customer is enough to offset roughly 0.0000000001% of a public tweet from the official company Twitter account calling another customer a "silicon valley douche".

I agree - I worked on the other side of the fence doing some back-end dev for Ross and would happily do it again.

Hopefully this all blows over and his fingers get burnt and everyone can get on with it.

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