(I'm a mod here - your posts didn't get flagged! HN's software was filtering them because posts by new accounts are subject to a few extra restrictions.
Fortunately a user vouched for your third try, which restored it, and I've marked your account legit now, so this won't happen again.)
No, this was a decision that had negative effects and it makes you look very, very bad.
But on the plus side you provided an excellent lesson to these teens and I'm sure they will consider the importance of trust, leverage, and incentives when dealing with other companies in the future.
Exactly. This theatrical damage control behavior is every time same story. Mistake made by fault in our system or by intern which no longer works here. Not a greed at all.
It's not a mistake that you're only reachable when your bad business practices are so heinous they go viral. You are an executive at a company that saves money by not offering customer support except when there's bad PR or a lawsuit.
Are you going to be fixing that your billing system is not human-reachable, or are you just going to be fixing this one incident while leaving the broken system as-is for everyone who didn't go viral?
This is the new way of doing business. Rip off as much as you can until there is enough publicity around your bad behavior such that it may affect your bottom line.
And then say sorry to convey some kind of human connection in the hopes you will be forgiven and the bottom line can be raised again.
Funny you mention Oracle: Slack’s former SVP of NA sales just moved on to a CRO job elsewhere a few weeks back. Their early career? Sales @ Oracle! Really, can’t make this stuff up. I went looking to see who Slack’s CRO was given it was their product C-level here commenting instead of someone more relevant in charge of the operational area where this happened. I did not at all fall over in shock to see that the person who shepherded Slack’s sales tactics to a culture where this is even a possibility was previously associated with Oracle sales.
Slack has been a rip off from the absolute beginning really. It's good to see more examples like the OP on why to stop using them, there has never been a single one besides FOMO.
Since this was a public facing mistake, will there be a post mortem including details about the blast radius, how many customers were affected and what steps are being put in place to ensure this never happens to a customer again?
I get automated billing mistakes, but a real human reviewed this case and demanded the money and the timeline. At that point, that is just a business practice.
The community here is very forgiving of software bugs, but why did the rep act that way? To paraphrase Warren Buffet, what are the incentives that directed that led to this outcome? Why did the rep in this case act so viciously?
If Hack Club did pony up the $200k the rep would probably be compensated in some way. That would increase the propensity of a rep to strong arm with short deadlines and hold their 11 year chat history hostage even if it’s not the appropriate pricing for a non-profit.
Since this is bad for Slack and Salesforce’s brand I imagine they’ll be putting in new mechanisms to disincentivize this in the future. When it comes to the rep getting paid they’ll become an expert at how to do it properly.
> Since this is bad for Slack and Salesforce’s brand I imagine they’ll be putting in new mechanisms to disincentivize this in the future.
You are dreaming... look at all of the other posts on topics like this. It's going to continue to be business as usual until you have the social capital for a post that gets to the front page of HN or similar status elsewhere.
While I'm encouraged by this response, I still feel a sense of fear that this fix is a one off, if you could speak to how this could even happen and how mistakes like these would be prevented in the future I'm sure the community would appreciate it.
I cannot guarantee that we won't make another mistake as we and our customer base grows. We're fallible!
In this particular instance, this was the result of an oversight in our billing process, and we are returning Hack Club to its previous nonprofit pricing. We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
Out of curiosity, will you be facilitating them exporting their chat history? Like obviously you see that this wasn’t just a billing error, this was extortion under threat of losing eleven years worth of data.
If you see this massive screwup as just a price issue that can be fixed by lowering their bill, you’ve missed what’s happened here. Your company has entirely obliterated any trust here, and the way to fix this is to acknowledge that and do everything necessary to help them migrate their data to a place where you aren’t holding a gun to their heads.
Yeah, I don't care about some non-profit or whatever. I care that the company thinks it's a-okay to demand from their customers 10x their yearly bill on the spot and to commit to 4x that yearly or else their data will be deleted in a few days. That's not an employee acting out of band, it's obviously their modus operandi.
So if they want to export all of their data they might have to pay you more money to do so? How exactly does that seem fair when they don't agree to the existing price increase?
So you have a billing process that includes a step where you extort the customer and demand substantial amounts of money or else you delete the customer's data on very short notice? Because that's one of the "mistakes" that your "billing process" made.
There was no "mistake", this is how you operate, this is what you've already done in the past, and, the only reason you backtracked now is because this one blew up in front of a large enough audience, many of whom are potentially decision makers in their (large) companies.
> So you have a billing process that includes a step where you extort the customer and demand substantial amounts of money or else you delete the customer's data on very short notice
I think this is the most important finding from this story. It's not that someone has mistakenly billed a non-profit, but that this form of "customer relations" is apparently part of the standard billing process for business customers.
They are free to do so of course, but I imagine that this may impact customer retention if the practice continues. This short notice is something that I would have reacted very strongly about if I had integrated Slack so deeply in my business as the OP did. With the push for workflows, agents and additional functionality, it is actually a huge risk to the business if you get a short notice to migrate if the new terms can not be met.
The reason you’re not providing details about the oversight like you should (this should be treated like a data breach, transparency = trust) is because you’d have to admit that this “oversight” was you meant to only exploit smaller companies that can’t cause a media ruckus like this. Prove me wrong.
No I’m pretty sure they’re suggesting that the account got somehow flagged as a for profit account, and they consider that a mistake and are fixing it.
I think you don’t have to find the least charitable interpretation for what they’re saying. There can be something in the middle.
So if it were indeed a for-profit account, it would also be okay to give them just a couple of days to "find the money" or otherwise lose 11y of history?
I would guess that the issue came from losing the flag, and the disparity in amount owed built up over years, thus prompting the drastic action.
A company that had a for-profit account would likely not incur that much of a bill that quickly, so it wouldn't play out the same. I imagine there are a series of escalating collections steps, and the flag switch popped them right to the most extreme end.
Not sure if this works out, from my understanding the $50k would not even remotely cover a hypothetical for-profit categorization (should only cover less than 500 annual users, while my understanding is that Hack Club is significantly larger, by some orders of magnitude).
> least a dozen explanations less charitable than this one
Because you've already made up your mind that they're the bad guy, so it doesn't matter what really happened. One of the prevailing rules at HN used to be engage with the most charitable interpretation of an argument. It's always a better conversation when it's followed - this thread has just devolved into a bunch of pile-on virtue signaling with no actual interest in engaging honestly.
I don't perceive this as virtue signalling, this is your own slightly uncharitable interpretation. People are responding to what they perceive as bullying in line with what looks like extremely heavy-handee sales tactics that do not seem uncommon.
It also looks like it only got addressed because it hit a someone with enough traction to go viral. That they had to resort to this channel at all raises questions in itself that go beyond the initial mistake and this particular customer.
So while I agree that we do not know yet what actually happened, the response from Salesforce so far does not really address these all concerns, and is not inconsistent with less charitable views on what's going on.
I think this is rightfully getting called out. With big power comes big responsibility.
It's the literal definition of virtue signaling - a bunch of folks with zero context jumping to conclusions of evil and malicious intent to satisfy their own needs to join the pile-on comments and show how fake mad they are.
I see a thread of accusations and statements, not questions and engagement.
> It also looks like it only got addressed
The issue was less than two days old, in what world do you think a senior leader is going to learn of an issue like this in an org with 3,000 people? Most managers don't even get back to their direct reports in 24 hours, nonetheless getting a decision to someone higher up the ladder.
The fact of the matter is that Slack knew they were a nonprofit and made the deliberate decision to engage in the SaaS equivalent of rent-seeking. This is honest engagement, and given the circumstances I think people in this thread have been incredibly charitable.
"Slack" didn't know anything. Slack isn't a human being. Like somehow everyone that joins the company connects a collective consciousness with shared memory.
> deliberate decision to engage in the SaaS equivalent of rent-seeking
Clearly you were involved in the process and have fist-hand knowledge to be so confident lol. The crazy absurdity of everyone being so convinced of the conspiracy theories they've pulled out of their asses.
> given the circumstances I think people in this thread have been incredibly charitable.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
>> Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack, including all message history from 11 years, unless we pay them $50,000 USD this week and $200,000 USD/year moving forward (plus additional annual fees for new accounts, including inactive ones)
> This was a mistake.
Calling a customer and extorting them for $50k USD this week and $200k USD per year going forward is not "a mistake."
It is a business decision which your organization made and did not expect to be held accountable for same.
> We appreciate you, Hack Club ...
You have a very different definition of "appreciate", unless you are using it in the accounting sense[0].
By this you mean making sure something like this won’t happen to ANYONE ever again, right?
I hope so and I hope that you will post about it so that you can somewhat recover from this certified PR disaster.
I had previously considered advocating for your product but sure as hell won’t as long as this situation isn’t thoroughly solved. It also prompts me to look into your other business practices before ever considering speaking positively about you again.
As I said in another reply, I cannot guarantee something like this won't ever happen again. We're fallible for sure. But I can guarantee we'll keep trying and improving.
This was the result of an oversight in our billing process, and we are returning Hack Club to its previous nonprofit pricing while we work with them directly to ensure their workspace remains fully accessible. We will be reviewing and modifying as necessary our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
I can see how the bill itself was a mistake, but the real scary thing to me is the timeline. Seven days from action required to deletion of all your data isn’t reasonable under any circumstances.
Let's be real, when an entity like Slack says "delete all your data," they actually mean they will add a flag in the database to make it inaccessible to those who aren't purchasing bulk data for data mining and llm training. The data will persist regardless.
Nah, this was one of those evil customer service reps who will do anything to make thier employer look bad. No corporation would ever leverage data custody to extract a quick balloon paymemt. Devilish customer service reps reading from false scripts are the real problem.
Hey. I think we all accept that all companies are inevitably fallible. What companies can be consistently good at---but very few take the effort to excel at sadly---is customer support communication. Honestly, reading TFA, it's still conceivable that putting Hack Club in the wrong pricing tier was an honest error on your part, but the communication was horrible to say the least. As others already pointed out, seven days to pay-up or your data goes poof sounds more like ransomware than a company trying to meet a customer half way.
And ofc, it has C-level attention now because it blew up on HN. Sorry but this screams damage limitation. For every Hack Club, you wonder which other non-profits suffered this "mistake" but didn't have the social media reach to get C-level treatment.
(Speaking as someone who spent this week being gaslit by Amazon and Google support. :mad: )
A postmortem — software bug fix please.
1. Why did this happen?
2. What was the root cause in billing that caused this?
3. What are you doing to fix the issue that will ensure that if this error was to happen it escalated to the right medium expediently? What is the SLA on disputes?
@solarkraft: This response you got from Rob is why its important not to treat this sort of outreach as if it's being made in good faith when it clearly is not. It is precisely what Rob and the crisis communication team he's working with hopes for.
Let's walk through what's going on a little more clinically in this response from Rob that was shaped like an answer:
Rob's comment looks like a good response, but only in form. Structurally it mimics apology in syntax but the batteries are missing. He starts with something a little self-effacing, a little "ownership", to bring down dehumanizing walls. All fine, if you're sincere. But Rob didn't choose to respond to a direct question and there were plenty. If he had, the mismatch between his words and the reality where his use of "oversight" did itself elide over a phone call demanding $50k in five days... that would sound absurd. By replying where he did, he gets the appearance of substance without risking contradiction when he's a no-show on any followups after this.
For crisis communication, getting a question for Rob to respond to like this works better actually than getting incoherent rage. That would be easy to dismiss as "unwilling to engage in discourse". But a comment like this can be answered harmlessly precisely because the commenter is looking to have a discourse, and socially acceptable discursive pragmatics don't require an immediate and comprehensive answer. The established pragmatics allow for a response like Rob's without seeming immediately absurd. As a result, he can be the more grounded human personality, less distant than even a sincere CEO of a multi-billion corporation would look, and soak up blame without conceding anything or answering any questions.
That's Rob's role here, to be the face to blame. This is hugely important in a crisis like this where the situation was highly avoidable and the damage is reputational. Blame. Not to be accountable: that is different than blame, though they overlap and get confused. Blame is hard to do in either direction without a specific face, and so we have Rob. Rob is the blame face. Not the architect of the policy, not the one who made the phone call, but the human buffer that makes Slack look responsive without putting someone in the firing line.
It's worth watching for this dynamic in other crises. Even if a CEO does hang out for more than the single copy-paste in the comments that Slack's did, it isn't proof of sincerity, but its absence sure does say the reverse.
The problem is that PR has learned how to simulate sincerity since the literal SCCT Theory playbook of the '90s. Unfortunately the the lesson learned wasn’t "do better" it was "signal better". But hope springs eternal, here's a paper & data set that could be part of the foundation, a a small bit of RLHF, of a state of the art corporate BS detector. It's interesting reading either way: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03638...
Hi Rob, as head of product if you’re sincere in this then maybe check in with the SVP of North American sales, see if your sincerity is founded on something more than well-wishes. It would hardly be the first time in corporate history that a sales division was wagging the dog without the dog knowing.
Heck that’s an interesting thought, why isn’t the SVP here commenting instead? If you can’t find the new one then maybe check in with Kevin Egan, congratulate him on the new CRO job, see what his take is on this being more of a mistake than standard operating procedure. Maybe have his reminisce about his sales days from way back at Oracle, where sales and revenue optimization is known for their ethical practices.
There is about as much ownership here as a squatter in a two-bedroom apartment. They are apologizing because they got caught, not because they genuinely believe they messed up.
No, I’m pretty sure Slack was never a “not for profit” company. Most not-for-profits do not ambush their customers with $250k bills on a week’s notice. I’ve seen debt collectors less predatory than this.
Although transparently self-serving, this seems like a perfect time to say, "Hey, this couldn't happen to you at Mattermost because we A) have a free tier, and B) allow you to export your data."
Thank you for addressing this issue. Could you also provide feedback on the accusations that data export is only available for high-tier pricing plans and requires Slack's explicit approval?
You mean like it has become a mistake when the story about it broken up and went viral?
But if Hack Club did not complain about it, you would have happily took and kept taking their money?
That kind of a "mistake"?
In all seriousness, why should anyone believe what you are saying?
It seems to me that your story about a "mistake" is just as plausible as this kind of behavior simply being Slack's business strategy. Be ambiguous. Change the terms of the sale after the sale. Try poking. See which tactics works. If someone bites, take advantage of it. If they complain, call it a mistake and do damage control. Collect profits. Rinse and repeat.
We all work at companies and know how it works - you get away with what you can. You bet wrong and nobody will believe otherwise. If it was a mistake, it’s fireable.
Honestly this rep and/or the rep's management should be held accountable. This is an oversight that comes from end-of-quarter pressure but it doesn't make it excusable.
This. The fuckup sounds like it started on the Slack account team's end (or their sales leadership, if it was pushed from above), so that's where consequences should start.
What you are is a parasitic liar who's reacting in disaster control spin mode. Extorting these people like that via phone call isn't a mistake, it's an obvious case of directed policy... that then got publicized and triggered some backtracking from a shitty company content with indifference.
Yep, we're not! (From a hc'er). Zach announced that slack has gifted us half a decade of enterprise+. Whilst slack's behaviour is worrying, it probably wouldn't make sense to cut all ties. Either way- another 5 years to migrate! :-)
It wasn’t a mistake, your sales incentives led to this behavior and you got caught off guard by the negative publicity.
Here’s exactly what happened: A human account manager had to meet their 3rd quarter sales goal and sent the demand for more money. It’s less than two weeks from the end of the quarter, do you really think nobody on HN is in sales and also facing the same pressure?
This is such a transparent lie that I’m surprised you took the time to post it.
It isn't two weeks until end of quarter. Like many businesses, Salesforce's fiscal calendar runs Feb 1 to Jan 31. Slack's did, too, before the acquisition. Q3 ends on Oct 31.
The time to complete the paperwork on a $200k/yr deal is longer than 2 weeks. Especially if the customer is expected to fork over 4000% more than what they were paying.
B2B procurement in this range can take anywhere from a few days to a year, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the very specific and demonstrably false claim I was responding to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287607 https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/1aj3i16/...