Marco, who is one of the founders of Tumblr (the platform that this Blog is on) wrote the below post. It is about another really cool application that he developed called Instapaper.
Over the years of having customer facing businesses I have personally run into a lot of angry customers who have initially said things to me that would make Andrew Dice Clay (Sorry he is the first guy that came to mind) feel uncomfortable.
The interesting thing that I have found is that this group of insane customers overall are just really passionate people. By dealing with them properly you can turn them from being insanely hateful to your most passionate product advocates.
It is never easy to be beaten up by someone and still come back to them with a smile but trust me it is worth it to swallow the pride with these customers and put in the time to turn their impressions around. It only takes a few hundred passionate advocates to spread your product (for free) to thousands.
marco:
You wouldn’t believe how angry many people are when they send Instapaper.app support emails.
People seem personally offended that they don’t understand how something works. They swear at me. They insult me. They taunt me. They throw the problem back in my face with no explanation.
You can see a lot of this in the negative reviews of nearly any app in the App Store, too.
They refuse to read documentation right above the support-email link, then they email me with a question that’s answered right there.
It’s incredibly discouraging. I don’t think people realize that app developers are regular people, too. We make mistakes, we’re not perfect, and we didn’t mean to confuse you.
I can’t even imagine what these people’s tone will be like when I start charging money for a pro version. I just hope that the negative people don’t buy it. Of course, it looks like I should probably expect a bunch of 1-star reviews saying things like “stoopid you can get this for free! too much money! not worth $10 but maybe I’d pay $3!”
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I thought I should post my response to the email that was sent to me in my last post, I tried to have a little fun with it, I hope that the person I sent it to understands my sense of humour:
Dear XYZ,
If we decide to use your services would you also include our name to our competitors in your marketing emails? While you might have felt that this “punches” up your email it quickly shows me that your company is not interested in holding your customers info confidential (I am almost sure that your are violating agreements with both COMPETITOR and COMPETITOR by disclosing your relationship in this email).
Now that we have that out of the way, send over your pricing and I will look at it.
Jamie
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I grow more tired by the day of companies contacting me that work with my competitors and touting that fact. I have mentioned it before so sorry for the repetitiveness of this post but it really is a pet peeve of mine.
Adding competitors names is not a show of strength at all, it just shows that as soon as you get my account you will use that info to give to my next competitor.
Here is an email I received today, all they had to do was say that other companies in my industry use them and that because of that we might find them a good vendor to work with. (I have protected the anonymity of the person and the company)
Hello Jamie,
I would like to introduce myself and XXXXX to your company because I could imagine that we could be of interest for you.
We currently supply our telecom access products to (NAMING COPETITORS HERE) and other similar Voice Messaging companies in several countries.
I was wondering if you are interested in our global coverage, especially in case you are planning to extend your service to other countries soon.
If you have any questions or you would like to test some of our numbers, please let me know and I will get in touch with you.
Best regards,
Account rep that does not keep things in confidence
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Image via Wikipedia
I did a post over the weekend about the Dow and where it is based on historic levels. My brother gave me an interesting twist on the post when I spoke to him about it.
So the first time the dow closed above 11,000 was in May of 1999. Right now (at 3pm) the Dow is at 11,042.
However that is not the whole story, when the Dow closed at 11,000 in May of 1999 the dollar was worth a lot more. So if you equalize for the loss of value in the dollar the May 1999 (based on the Euro) the Dow is actually at 7,700 today.
I am very positive on the future of the US economy and future opportunities to create wealth but it is crazy to see that a single Euro invested in the Dow almost 10 years ago would be worth less then 0.70 today.
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On CNBC right now there is a discussion about Bush’s decision to open up additional offshore drilling, which is a knee jerk reaction to high oil prices. Offshore drilling takes so long to actual produce oil that doing this is of little consequence.
If the US was a company it would have been bankrupt a long time ago. The best CEO’s look ahead at the macro issues and create policies today to insure that the future will be bright. You see this style of leadership and thought in many of the world’s greatest and most dynamic companies.
It is incredible how much the US (under both Democratic and Republican control) has allowed one of our most important resources, energy, to become the world’s noose around our economy.
Whoever wins the next election I just hope that they have the intelligence to put the right policies and people in charge of things to set in place the policies which will bring the US back to some level of leadership in the world.
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