Building rapport is not the reason for doing this. Being liked by everyone is an impossible goal. And yes, there is a class of customers who are power users who think their input should dictate the development roadmap. And yes, there are users who become psychologically reliant on you as their personal Geek Squad. And yes, there are non-technical people who encounter hard to reproduce bugs, who it's worth taking the time to work with if they can help you isolate the problem.

But doing it for "likes" is a terrible idea. I was once put out as a coder to be a public face of a big AAA game, on their dev forum, to interact with fan requests, and I think that was catastrophic both for my own sanity and for the company that chose to field fan mail that way.

With your big fans, you see what you can do about their feature requests. Never promise anything. With people who encounter real bugs or otherwise provide signal, try to turn them into sleuths and get them to beta test your next release. Draw boundaries. Letting your users be your testers is enormously valuable, so respect them and don't stop listening to their feedback. But the overarching goal here is to get value out of the process. Explicitly not to waste your time on being "liked". Because the kind of people who become obsessive over your CS responses are actually the worst customers who don't want to pay for anything anyway, and expect everything to be free.

What I'm saying does not mean to pull back on customer service, at all! It means that the goal is to improve your product, not to suck up to all those categories of customers in the hopes they'll like you more. They will or they won't like your product, and in the end, whether they personally feel that affinity for it is based on their enjoyment of it. If it's based on their sense of importance at being able to order you around, they're not your real customers anyway.

It’s interesting that you did the experiment, and I appreciate you sharing your results. It all seems reasonable, even if a bit depressing.

Your support strategy is missing an outlet for needy users to ask questions, effectively blaming customers for a structural flaw in your own setup. You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other and devs can occasionally jump in to help or note pain points. Furthermore, your development and QA processes clearly need scrutiny. The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.

It’s completely okay to define your product however you want and to reject feature requests, but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.

I think it's fairly well understood that vocal users aren't necessarily representative. The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.

You need to build your own model of who your users are to provide a basis for interpreting user requests: is the support request signal or noise? if the request is coming from someone in your target market, and expressing a pain point, that's potentially an important signal. If the request is to charge only 20% of your current price, that's only useful if you're prepared to consider restructuring your offering (receiving many such emails might signal an opportunity for a budget product with specific feature subset) -- otherwise: "Thanks for your email, we don't have any plans to change our price right now." move on.

By the way, I'm impressed that this is even a conversation for a developer selling through the App Store. I always felt that Apple killed the ability to maintain customer relationships by injecting themselves into the process. Never published on the Mac App store myself.

The difference is that email / online support has no “human downtime moments.” At the bakery, I usually would talk to people while we were waiting for their order to be finished heating up / cooking / etc. So there was a moment or two people standing around waiting, which naturally leads to a conversation. Or at least it did a decade ago when cellphones weren’t quite as omnipresent.

I wonder if having a monthly Zoom “open office hours” type thing would replicate some of this feeling in a software context. Probably not, but it might be better than just answering emails.

When I was in a product leadership position I liked to spend time doing some of the customer support work. This is a common experience. Customers who write angry emails do not care about your reasons. They want something from you (cheaper rates, a specific feature they need, a discount, a freebie) and they do not care about anything else. It’s the digital version of the “I’d like to speak to your manager” customer who thinks that if there’s a 10% chance of getting what they want by being a jerk then it’s worth pushing as hard as they can.

Some times you’d get a little satisfaction from someone who realized there was a person who cared on the receiving end of that email address. Made it feel worthwhile.

Most of them are just doing some transactional game where they think that they can exercise some power over the company if they complain loudly enough.

This also has a lot of cultural differences. Some of the customer contact we’d get from one of the countries we served were out of control mean. There were casual threats of violence from time to time and 90% of them came from one country, which I’m not going to name but I’ve added it to my mental list of places not to visit. It was weird that it was so consistent.

I’m sorry all the airchair geniuses in this thread feel compelled to express how they’re so much smarter than you and would never fail… or at least, never admit it.

This is a podcast app. It's in no way essential, how did you use to explain this to your customers ?

Also, I think that we want to communicate with a company (Human or AI), and not a person, quite often. As you’re supporting a business transaction, not making friends. There’s a certain anonymity that comes with the business transaction. I wouldn’t ask for a refund from a friend.

> We have heard this before, but we cannot see it or replicate it. The user gets to do work for us and/or get no resolution

Well, if you're not willing to resolve individual customer's problem then don't expect to build goodwill with just prompt reply on support!

I would even be happy to talk to a bot if it was fine-tuned to speak like a regular person instead of a corporate drone.

Every line item there has a solution. Even if it is just 4 different email addresses.

Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!

Let's review some common areas.

- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.

- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.

- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.

- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.

- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.

I've often heard stuff like "telecom provider support sucks" or "IKEA furniture breaks easily."

When you ask people whether they researched support quality before deciding on a provider or whether they considered a $3,000 heavy-wood furniture the boomers had, they immediately sense the accusation in the question: It was their decision to suffer these fates. They then tend to get mad fast.

People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill and to disassemble their furniture in 5 minutes. It's exactly why everyone is optimizing for it.

It’s not too late to change the first sentence to:

> I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…

I think you meant "I can think of exactly one customer in two years who was NOT surprised that software costs money"?

> I have already thought about this a great deal. I am not changing anything based on your email.

> User can provide details for us, but if others aren’t experiencing it, it’s unlikely to be prioritized.

> We know about this, but fixing it is a decent amount of work or low-priority because it’s not a big deal or few users see it.

> a human response detailing why I am unable to solve your problem today and am not even going to try is about the worst thing a user can receive!

> Good in theory, sometimes useful, but often the same small, unrepresentative segment with strong thoughts.

> Castro is an opinionated app and I’ve thought a lot about what we’re building and what we’re going to work on next. It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request.

Your support policy seems to be more along the lines of "you may e-mail me for an explanation of why I'm not interested in your thoughts" than an actual commitment to support for paid customers. You aren't interested in comments on the payment model, bugs, or feature requests.

> why software lends itself to subscription so well [...] no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email

Especially when you're using it to justify scummy practices, it's no wonder that no matter how kindly and carefully you piss on your users, they know it's not raining.

You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products. But does your user experience with other products tell you that you want to subscribe and be nickle-and-dimed for the rest of your life for every last thing? Especially when you're promising to users that while you're still working on the software and that's why they need to pay every month forever, you won't work on the bugs nor features they want? Subscription works "so well" for software because it makes you a lot of money, but it doesn't work well for the users its being forced upon who don't actually want the updates you're working on.

As far as I can tell, your software is not significantly based on ongoing maintenance costs, ergo it does not inherently justify ongoing payments to use. If you let greed stop clouding your eyes, you could adopt the approach that many ethical independent developers use: an option to pay once per major version and keep it for life, with optional subscriptions to try the waters and keep up with the latest and greatest version.

And for some subscription situations, you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you.

There's a 'PhotoSync' app that offers a premium option for either $1/month or $24 for life. Presumably because they looked at the average subscription duration and found it was in the region of 2 years. Modulo the time value of money and per-transaction processing costs.

Personally I much preferred the one-off purchase, even though it's not clear I'll be using the app in 24 months, because it fits a lot better with my (somewhat chaotic) way of managing my money.

> but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.

Somehow incredibly ironic when applied to you comment itself...

Yes and no.

You want enough logging and telemetry that you can roll out an update to 2% of users and know if something is terribly wrong before you roll it out to the other 98%.

On the other hand, you probably don't want enough telemetry to detect that customer Jim Smith has trouble with WebRTC when joining calls without a microphone while using Firefox and Cloudflare Warp with split tunnels enabled.

Which is exactly why HN's anti-telemetry stance is so unjustified.

This was the biggest (1) complaint for me - in light of what you discovered from your actual support experience, why was your expectation so off?

Was it that you expected support to be full of "how do I do this complicated thing?" questions that can be answered by an expert? That's an unrealistic expectation, but I guess now you know.

Or was it that you really thought that customers would be happy if you just took the time to explain your pricing model to them (also unrealistic).

It is kind of obvious from the types of emails you get, and the types of responses you give that it was not going to lead to strong customer relationships. If all you're doing is writing a 100 words to say "No, I'm not going to do what you want" that's not going to make things better.

(1) Actually 2nd biggest - the biggest was talking about "buying Castro" but having no explanation/links about who the author is, what Castro is, or how/when/why it was bought.

It seems to often boil down to the fact that paying customers are paying to solve a problem so they don’t need to deal with it. Whereas developers are more interested in writing code than solving said problems for customers.