[1dom]

> I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator. I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation.

This is the opening paragraph. I think a lot of the disagreement or criticism here in HN is from people who recognise the author went into this assuming they know better than basically anyone who's ever done anything in customer service before.

They don't say it, but the author seem to start with the assumption that nobody knows or cares about customer support so they do a rubbish job, and all the author needs to do is go in and try and be a decent human and they'll fix customer support.

And the result was what anyone who's ever done any customer support for even half a day would know: it's not that easy, it's generally infuriatingly hard and demoralising to keep all customers happy, and 10% will take 90% of the time/effort until it drains you. This is customer support 101.

I hope this has waved in the author's face the value of having decent conversations with people they trust in the domain first, as they could have saved themselves a lot of time and effort here. I think the article would benefit and get less flack from acknowledging this is the authors learnings, not some new insight into customers.

[dabluck]

People keep talking about how much flack I got but I don't think I've ever written anything that has resonated more with people. I'm not mad I got feedback guys I can take it. As for your comment, the title of the piece includes "what I got wrong" so I think it's pretty clear where the learnings were.

[1dom]

That's fair, thanks for the response.

I'd like to respectfully disagree with it being clear what the learnings are. Your conclusion says:

> In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do.

The failure here, based on the article, is you had an idea about customer support, and you bought a company to test it. Personally, before getting that far I would expect someone to do some googling or research or conversations with people in the area and they would have told you what they do and why, and why your idea would not work.

What happened? How did you get this far? Did you ignore people, or not talk to people? What was it you had or thought you knew about your idea that lead you to believe it would result in something different?

Another learning from your conclusion:

> Because building loyalty or rapport at the moment something isn’t working and the user is frustrated hasn’t worked. The real positive experience comes when you actually improve the product, so that’s where we’re spending our time.

Again, this is common sense! I refuse to believe this is new to you or anyone else!

I appreciate the response, sorry for the harsh feedback, and thanks for taking to time to actually try and improve customer support. I think you sincerely have some great learnings and experiences from what you've been through here, I just don't think you've really got to the bottom of them with what you've written here yet.

[dabluck]

> The failure here, based on the article, is you had an idea about customer support, and you bought a company to test it.

That's not at all what happened, nor did I say that anywhere. I didn't buy a company in order to test a theory. This is just describing one of the things I did after buying it.

[1dom]

From the article:

> I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator.

Sorry for taking that a bit too literally.

The other points still stand.

You have interesting experiences. There's a common theme in my feedback, and in the other comments that provide constructive feedback: you're missing accepted learnings by being a stubborn/arrogant/maybe just inexperienced entrepreneur. e.g.:

> Ultimately, for us, putting too much time into support isn’t a differentiator, and it’s often counter-productive.

Your language here, and in the rest of the conclusion, frames the learning as "the problem was that my idea [that maybe customer support would be good if people just tried] just didn't work for specifically for us because x, y, z is different for us".

It didn't work for you because it's a fundamentally flawed assumption that CS was easy if you just try to be good at it and care about the customer. You wrote that as the idea you had when you bought the company. The idea didn't fail because of your special circumstances, the idea failed because it's a demonstrably bad idea, sorry.

Many other commenters have made the same critical point as me, but your first response to me was essentially: "what critical points? I can take it. And besides, I said 'what I got wrong' so you're wrong to say I got the wrong learnings". Which is - again - you dismissing people's experience (of you).

In the meantime, I noticed your site is down. I'll keep a look out for your writings in future. I mean it genuinely that you have interesting experiences. I think you need humbling a little though. Sorry again for the harsh feedback. I sincerely think your world and everyone else's world would be better and brighter if you really reread and absorb the constructive feedback from me and other HN commenters with an open mind, rather than looking for ways to dismiss it.