

Ask HN: Vet my idea - macguyver

Dear HN community, let me know your thoughts.  If you are a founder or know someone who&#x27;s having the exact problem, please put them in touch so we can help you better serve your customer.<p>Problem: Some founders are so focused on growing their business and working on product&#x2F;sales&#x2F;biz dev&#x2F;funding that they sometimes can&#x27;t keep up with the customer development&#x2F;feedback process.  A good problem to have.<p>Example: I recently had lunch with a founder with $1M ARR, 100% growth rate, who basically told me that his support has seen zero process improvements for the past two years.  Everything is manual.  They had been growing so fast, so busy onboarding customers and responding to product issues that there was no time to create a better customer life-cycle process.<p>Solution: Customer success as a service to help startups get a pulse on customer happiness by analyzing feedback and designing process and UI improvements that thinks a few steps ahead.  Give us your customer feedback (text and&#x2F;or voice) and we will tell you what your customers are thinking, what&#x27;s not working, and processes&#x2F;UI&#x2F;UX that will eliminate the issue they are having.
======
dylanhassinger
No.

\- Its the founder's (and company culture's) job to always be taking feedback
and improving processes. If a founder can't find at least a little bit of time
to implement suggestions that their customers or their team have, then they're
not going to be able to find the the time it would take to implement
suggestions you give them.

\- Even if they did, what would they pay for this / how do you grow a real
business around it? For B2B non funded apps, you need at least a $100/month
per user.

\- This sounds like a consultancy, not an app. It would make for an
interesting "productized service" but pricing it would be tricky.

my 2 cents

~~~
macguyver
Thanks for the feedback, particularly on the pricing.

Agreed with all of the first point. Based on firsthand experience working at 3
startups and with a handful of business owners, I hypothesize that there are a
large number of founders who are indeed interested in acting on the
suggestions. It's not every founder, but many that I've worked with are open
to finding what works and trying along the way.

Problem #1: Some founders are not that good at understanding their customers.
Working with customers is an art, just like sales, in that there's no cookie
cutter solution or exact steps like assembling widgets on a factory line.
Interpersonal communication is uniquely human and can't be automated. Of
course persuading them to change habits can be hard, but maybe not when framed
in the perspective of the bottom line.

If this is indeed a consultancy, how would you price it? Based on email/call
volume or users?

~~~
dylanhassinger
This might help - [http://casjam.com/resources/productize-your-
service/](http://casjam.com/resources/productize-your-service/)

------
vitovito
I tried something along these lines a decade ago, offering infrastructure for
developer relations, for companies that were interested in productizing and
licensing their technology to developers, but didn't know what to do.

Found no buyers, because the companies that were interested in outsourcing
this, weren't interested in changing their internal practices to accommodate
the feedback that their new customers were providing. I would have been
fighting against the people cutting my paycheck.

The companies that were willing to change their internal practices, weren't
interested in me, because infrastructure is not the hardest part of this:
culture change is.

~~~
macguyver
Interesting observations.

How long did you work on this before you came to the conclusion? How many
companies did you approach? Who (and what titles) did you speak with?

~~~
vitovito
Nine months? Three or four companies in the particular space I was in? I
talked with both the tech owners and the company owners in all but one case.

I had just come off of three years building a developer relations platform
that drove one of their competitors basically out of business. The
relationship was not smooth, however; it was financially successful for them,
but I butted heads with them constantly, again, because they didn't want to
change their culture or processes, and I had scores of customer evidence that
they needed to. They wanted to finally bring it in-house, so I thought I'd try
it again elsewhere.

One company realized, as they talked with me about it, they would have the
same problem: they hadn't realized what "doing it right" actually entailed,
and weren't prepared for an internal culture shift. They brought this up with
me directly and I agreed, and we stopped talking.

The other three just stopped talking, and I inferred it was something similar
from how they were behaving during the initial discussions (I only received
feedback later from one of them).

I've had related experience talking with startups over the last couple of
years. I don't generally try to help startups that don't already know they
need customer development and product/UX design. It's not an effective use of
my time to teach you the value of design when there are other startups who
already understand my value. (In addition, unless you're talking exclusively
with VC-backed startups, most startups can't afford to pay you.) As design
includes user research and customer feedback, I feel these are the same issues
you'd run into. I think you're underestimating the amount of culture change
you'd need to effect.

Your business proposition sounds a little like a managed Get Satisfaction. You
triage the boards and collect feedback and provide some UI comps... to whom?
To the C-suite guy who hired you? And then he demands it of the product
manager and tech lead, to fit it into the roadmap? The roadmap they previously
had full control over? What is the priority of these changes over all the
other changes that had been signed-off on? And that's how your changes get
swept aside, and your contract doesn't get renewed because none of your
changes ever made it into a release.

Every person in that company is used to doing their own thing, or they'd
already be taking feedback in from customers and supporting them better. You
may need to convince an entire chain of people to implement your changes, and
_then_ a whole other chain of people to implement instrumentation and
reporting in the app so you can see patterns of use in the app, and _then_ a
whole other chain of people to implement servers to collect that data, and
_then_ a whole other chain of people to analyze that data, then _then_ a whole
other chain of people to let you go interview customers directly (because data
can't tell you _why_ they're behaving that way), and then back to the first
chain to change the roadmap _even more._

That sounds exhausting and expensive, why would anyone let you do that if
they're already making a million dollars a year?

Perhaps there's a narrow niche of change you could effect, a very limited
subset of non-threatening, incremental change, like Draft Revise does with its
A/B-testing-as-a-service. But if the entire internal chain of command isn't
banging down your door to help them change their culture and processes, I'm
not sure I'd invest myself in the work, as it's not likely to stick.

