17th
Angry users
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.
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!”
