Ask HN: Can you help me out of Adwords API purgatory?

20 points by glasner 14 years ago | 2 comments

Hey HN, I'm at a standstill with my startup, and I need your help/advice. Last year I started building MonkeyWords, an Adwords management app for small businesses. It was a part time gig at first, but I sold my retail business in November to focus on it 100%.

Everything was going great. Advertisers responded well to the product, and I decided to hire a a designer and go for it. Before I made that jump though, I made sure to get approval from Google to use the Adwords API. I've tried to build businesses on 3rd party APIs before, and I had to be positive Google was cool with what I wanted to make.

And they were... Until about 10 weeks ago when my token was revoked without notice. Thankfully my specs started failing, or I might have continued on in bliss for weeks.

I immediately contacted the API Token team. We went back and forth for a couple weeks. Turned out my token was revoked for lack of use. Google had also added new minimum requirements for all apps, and they wanted me to document them in my app. No problem! A couple days later I sent them back a 13 page Google Doc with a wireframe for every feature. I was confident this was just a small bump in the road.

Then nothing. Not a rejection. Not an email. Nothing.

That was two months ago. I've sent three emails to what appears to be a black hole. I've tried being professional. I've tried being funny. Now I need a way to standout from the thousands of other emails in their inbox.

I know there has to be someone at Google that wants to help me launch. I know it, but I don't know them. Maybe you do. If not, you can still help by answering the following question:

What do you think the general reaction would be to a sign spinning monkey in front of the Googleplex?

throwaway984 14 years ago |

I know you're trying to be nice and friendly in the hopes of enlisting somebody at Google to help you out in an act of desperation.

Inside though, I know you really want to call out Google for the downright insulting process of trying to get anybody at Google to get customer support. I've been there before, and its one of the worst experiences in the world.

There are advertisers that have their own direct representative within Google that essentially get tens of thousands of dollars stolen from them by Google and can't even get a response to their issues, so how do you think the average small business fares when issues inevitably arise?

Googlers, you should be downright embarrassed at how much of a scam your company is. Help this guy out, and tell your managers to create a customer support department. Even if you have to charge $50 or $150 per call, people want support options from Google and you've helped destroy thousands of businesses over your repeated and deliberate lack of responses to important issues.

Posting this under a throwaway account because I fear further retaliation against my businesses.

staunch 14 years ago |

Build a Facebook Ads tool instead. Google clearly doesn't want to work with you, maybe their competitor does.