

Ask HN: Best/worst stories re. startups communicating with users - brlewis

Managing user expectations can be tricky as a startup grows from, say, 20 users to product-market fit.  What startups (I'm most interested in web startups, but any will do) have done this well?  Poorly? Why and how?
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swombat
Here's one bit of bad communication I'll throw in, and unrelated to the
current brouhaha.

Some time ago, I signed up to FogBugz. A few weeks later, I got an email
from... omg! Joel Spolsky!

I thought that was pretty awesome, that he got in touch with all his users to
see how they were getting on. Great way to build strong customer
relationships. Of course the initial email was probably automated, but the
intention was there.

I took a good 20 minutes or so to write a fairly detailed but concise, 4-5
paragraph email listing some of the things I thought could be improved about
Fogbugz from a start-up point of view.

I got a reply the next day, from some intern who basically explained how they
wouldn't do each of the 4 points I'd raised. Not even "we'll look into it" or
"it's on the plans, but I can't tell you when it'll come out". Just no, no,
no, no. Basically, an email that not only had nothing to do with Joel Spolsky,
but clearly had been delegated to someone who didn't yet have basic customer
service sense.

With that, Spolsky lost all the credit he got in that first initial email, and
then some.

Since then, I've copied the Spolsky approach. All our users get an email from
me, two weeks after they join, asking how they're doing. But _I_ am the one
receiving and responding to that email.

~~~
jacquesm
That's a great way of doing it.

I take all of our customer support 'problem' cases, that's where you can make
the difference and where you get to hear what's up with your service so you
can make it better.

This usually amounts to maybe one or two such cases per week so work-wise it's
small fry but it really helps keeping your head close to what the users are
experiencing.

And the problem cases are the ones where you learn fastest.

The other day there was a 'support is sales' post here that was really good.

~~~
swombat
Actually, I do get several responses a day, but most of them are, thankfully,
positive.

Here's an example received today:

 _I wasn’t sure how to access the plans, but once I figured that out I have
had no trouble since._

I think about 10-15% of the people who sign up and confirm their account end
up replying to me.

~~~
brlewis
Are you thinking ahead to when there are too many new signups for you to
continue? I don't mean that accusatively. There are good reasons _not_ to
think that far ahead.

~~~
swombat
When I can't handle it anymore, there's a number of things I can do.

1) Make the emails more random - if I only send half the emails, it stands to
reason that I'll only get half the responses!

2) Stop sending them! There are other ways to gather feedback that may work
better later.

I haven't spent too long worrying about this, though. It'll be a good problem
to have.

------
maxklein
I think posterous are really good at communicating with users. A few times I
wanted to switch to wordpress due to some missing feature or the other, but
then when I said my complaint on twitter I'd get a message with some time line
and it would keep me happy...for a while.

WakeMate are pretty bad at communicating and if I were them I'd hire someone
whose job was really only to communicate.

Apple are pretty good at communicating nowadays and if you are doing well on
their platform.

Microsoft is really good at communicating with developers. All their dev team
are on twitter and blogging and you can reach them by email, and there are
docs about everything, etc.

Google is terrible at communicating. Do they even communicate? They just never
reply.

Facebook has the same problem. Don't reply. Probably too many users.

------
p01nd3xt3r
I co-founded a startup called NetWinner. It was a casino style online game
that allowed users to win prizes. Everything was absolutely free and users
never paid. They just watched ads while they played the game and they could
instantly win gift cards and cash prizes.

When the economy started to tank our ad revenues tanked and the model as it
was could no longer be supported. So we changed it so that users won raffle
tickets for prizes instead of winning prizes directly.

We did not message this to our users well and the BBB got over 250 complaints
about the change we made. It was covered on local TV in charlotte, NC and lots
of other bad stuff happened. They could never take legal action because they
never paid but they still tried. They posted stuff all over the web about how
we cheated and scammed them out of the prizes they won (which we did). I was
just the technical co-founder and did not have a vote in financial decisions
but since I owned the domain people thought I was the head guy and came after
me. Good thing it was always free to play.

~~~
brlewis
What did you do to get the message to users, and what more would you do
knowing what you know now?

~~~
p01nd3xt3r
We sent them an email after we pushed the change live. If I could do it over
again I would send them an email a week in advance and funnel all the
complaints to our support team. The biggest mistake was having nowhere for
them to complain because then they took to fb, twitter etc...

------
jacquesm
This comes to mind as a particularly shoddy episode:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358446>

There is an answer embedded in there:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358624>

It's a pity that the company actually took the opportunity to communicate with
their users and that because of killing the story the response will not be
seen by many.

Their customers should probably read that second link.

~~~
pg
I don't think the second comment you link to is by the Wakemates.

~~~
jacquesm
Possible. The only way to rule that out is to have wakemate post something on
their blog, it seems they're due for an update anyway. Maybe you could ask
them ? And they could post that update on HN, I think it would do a world of
good, whatever the news. Leaving your customers hanging is not a good thing.

~~~
pg
Actually the easiest way to rule it out is to call them, which I just did.
That comment was not posted by anyone from Wakemate.

~~~
jacquesm
So are they going to do any kind of end-user communication in the near future?

Their credibility is at stake here, and your squelching of the discussion does
not help matters imho.

edit: And the only reason people get to play pretending they're wakemate is
because wakemate does not communicate regularly in the first place.

edit2: wakemate really sets themselves up for trouble, this part of their blog
especially is troublesome:

"In the coming weeks, we’re going to be more active on the blog, publishing
photos, screenshots, and videos of what we’ve been working on. Hopefully this
will help assuage some fears that the product is “vaporware” and get our pre-
order customers as excited for the next wave of shipments as we are."

And that was on the 26th of April, total radiosilence since then. If you
promise activity in 'the coming weeks' then you should show some. I'm really
not surprised by the posting that was originally done, and in fact I think
that person should be commended for their restraint rather than to see their
post deleted.

~~~
gruseom
Man, I like a lot of your comments, but sometimes it seems to me that you
cross the line into being a busybody.

I'd like to be more communicative about my startup too. The reason I don't is
that I'm spending all my energy working on the product. These things are hard.
We are finite.

Wakemate don't owe anybody anything who hasn't given them money, and if anyone
who has is unhappy, I'd be shocked if Wakemate wouldn't be eager to give them
their money back. Sometimes it seems like what people are really buying with
their 5 bucks or 50 or whatever is the feeling that they have the right to
kick up a stink.

~~~
jacquesm
> Man, I like a lot of your comments

Thanks! It's mutual by the way.

> but sometimes it seems to me that you cross the line into being a busybody

Possibly. But I'm not going to fall over and roll on my back just because it
is PG that does something.

Wakemate has a great chance to manage their image here and PG has essentially
thrown that away.

> I'd like to be more communicative about my startup too. The reason I don't
> is that I'm spending all my energy working on the product.

I've worked for enough start-ups to know that you need to do _everything_
right, not just work on your product. If you spend all your energy on that -
and you've signed up customers for pre-order - I suggest you do something
about it before you copy wakemates mistakes. It's really a pity, I've seen
them go from having a ton of goodwill to essentially being damaged goods.

That's wasteful.

And to see PG squelch discussion about a YC company when he's fine with us
discussing everything else under the sun is for want of a better description
less than elegant, especially if HN has been used as a venue to get initial
customers. Another reason why it is bad to do so is because we can all learn
from each others mistakes and to see bad stuff discussed in public is a
learning experience for all, not just for the company involved.

You simply can't launch off HN and rely on us to do our bit with passing word
of mouth to friends if there is an interesting new YC start-up _and_ hit the
mute button if there is a legitimate concern by a HN member regarding non-
performance by said company. That's what causes the stink.

People that put their $5 or $50 down have a reasonably expectation of in
order:

    
    
      - a product
      
      - failing that to be kept in the loop
    
      - if all else fails their money back or an explanation
    

Less simply won't do, and even if it was free you'd still be morally obliged
to keep people informed. Stonewalling is the dumbest thing you could possibly
do.

The OP wasn't trying to kick up a stink, he was simply a concerned customer.
And given the way PG handled it now he probably went from 'disappointed' to
something a few steps lower than that.

------
JangoSteve
I use Disqus on my personal blog for comments. On one of my more popular posts
(I got just over 100 comments the first day, so nothing crazy), the comments
would disappear after a few hours. If I logged into Disqus, I could still see
every comment and they all said they were "approved" and posted. But you'd
load the blog post and nothing older than 3 hours would show up.

Wouldn't you know, that post ended up experiencing the Reddit effect, and more
comments came pouring in. I tried to contact Disqus, but all I got was a
ticket number. Meanwhile, the Reddit users had already started having a field
day with, "Steve censors his readers and and deletes comments! We don't like
his blog anymore."

Disqus was very slow and unhelpful in resolving the bug, even as I frantically
updated the ticket with more and more debugging info and speculation as to
what the problem could possibly be. In fact, to this day they've still never
fixed the bug or closed out the ticket. Technically, they closed the tickets,
but never resolved them (I guess that means, "we got this guy to stop bugging
us about this issue... CASE CLOSED").

I ended up having to log into my disqus.com account, copy and paste the
comments into an HTML file, then upload the file to my blog and link to it at
the bottom of the post.

I understand they're providing a free service and thus have little to no
accountability. But when you create a service that asks users to entrust their
readers' voices and reputations to you, you should make an honest effort to
live up to that responsibility.

[EDIT: Disqus is now helping me to resolve the problem. Better late than
never! :-) ]

~~~
giannii
Hey Steve,

I'm sorry to hear that you've had a bad experience with our support. What was
your ticket number? I'd be more than happy to help you figure this out, shoot
me an email here: giannii@disqus.com

-Giannii

~~~
JangoSteve
Thanks Giannii. Just so everyone knows, it looks like Giannii and I have
gotten this close to solved over IRC now. +1 for Disqus's new support.

------
brlewis
Good communication: Daniel Ha of Disqus. Why? Not sugarcoating, e.g.
"Importing is possible, though admittedly harder than it should be.". How?
Twitter and Disqus mostly. I bet he's using backtype and google alerts.

(Warning, slow page) <http://friendfeed.com/search?q=from%3Adanielha+help>

------
swombat
I can think of a startup that recently screwed this up quite badly, though
this second time it's not really their fault I think (I don't know the whole
story, just seen that someone's been covering up the discussion, which is
generally not a great starting point).

I wrote about the first time they screwed up, as a kind of "Learning" post, on
my blog. It did quite well here (to show that not all negative posts get
killed).

------
sharpn
Reading between the lines, I guess you are alluding to the specific example
jacquesm & swombat refer to - but as a straight answer to the question, I'd
say twitter's 'fail whale' was a fun way to take the edge off their frequent
early downtime.

~~~
brlewis
I was disappointed that the wakemate posts got killed because they touch upon
this question, so yes, that is what inspired this post. It turns out that the
wakemate thread is the least interesting one here. I'm overall very pleased
with the comments.

You're very right about the fail whale. Although not 100% successful in
changing the emotion associated with downtime from frustration to amusement,
it went an amazingly long way.

------
kilian
I really, really like how www.lollyphile.com is communicating. Not very start-
uppy, but very honest, up-front and providing lots and lots of value to
customers. Just last week, they sent their entire mailing list an email with a
25% off code: becauseitsmondaysowhynot. Their writing is incredibly
entertaining as well.

Another is www.influads.com who have been _extremely_ open in their finances
and process and at least with me, have gathered a lot of respect.

Poorly? Well, had I known posting that Wakemate post would give this much
trouble, I wouldn't have done it. This doesn't excuse Wakemate themselves,
though.

