Show HN: PilarHQ, The Posterous of Customer Support | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PilarHQ, The Posterous of Customer Support

pilarhq.com

14 pointshajrice20 comments

PilarHQ, is a product which I've been secretly building for my other projects. I wanted a "light-weight" customer support tool for startups and projects which I hack on. Zendesk is kinda complicated, as it requires some training. I wanted something really really simple - like posterous.

It works simply: You cc/forward any support you'd like to be published on your help page to post@pilarhq.com and we update your support page. If people come to your support/help page, search for an answer via our instant search and dont find an answer, they just have to leave their email and your entire support team is notified.

PilarHQ is lightweight because all you do is pretty much embed an iFrame to your site at pilar and you're set. Thats really all there is to it. You later on recieve emails from us and your customers, if you forward the ones you want to publish, we publish it to your cool support page.

I don't understand, what is the posterous of customer support?

agree with the above,

it's unclear to me if i'm outsourcing support or if this is like an autoupdating FAQ page?

Pretty much an autoupdating FAQ page.

I was planing on emailing you with a demo, but you don't have your email in your profile. Email me at hajrice@gmail.com if you want a demo.

I think it is better to build your own brand name rather than relying on another one. An 'autoupdating FAQ system' is a better description/tagline than calling it Posterous for customer support. Posterous is famous but what if a small online flower retailer wants to use your product and he has no idea what Posterous is? It is better to directly explain what your product does rather than relating it to another one.

On the other hand, if a tech blog writes PilarHQ is the posterous for customer support, that is well and good!

Hi there. Thanks for your comment and to be honest, this is still a test whether or not I should release this to the public and build it into a product. That being said, I totally agree with ya. So many people want a posterous for support. An autoupdating faq system is slightly vague, a posterous for support is much more descriptive from my perspective.

I don't understand what "Posterous for support" means. Posterous is a blog, how can I use that for support? Also, how does this autoupdate? There's nothing on the front page about it :/

Sure. I made a bad decision using this way of explaining an idea. Sure wont do it again. Here's a simple flow from your customer's perspective.

- goes to your website

- Search's your help page, if cant find it, email you

- You get an email, you respond to it, customer is notified

- IF you forward that email to a special cool email which we give you, it's published on your support page(which is embeddable to your website).

- Next person searching for this question doeesnt have to email you as they're problem's solved!

Ah, I see, thanks. That does sound handy!

Sounds kind of cool!

Posterous is really not too well known outside of tech circle. Even for people who know and use it, more will think of it as a blog rather than "email to blog". To understand your product, people need to learn what is Posterous first. Its best to avoid such association in marketing.

You're very right. Lesson learned!

Lots of people not understanding what this is. Perhaps you could put up a help page.

haha, good one. I should, right after I send out the emails with account details.

Sounds like a great idea, but I'm always wary of businesses whose tagline is "Like X, but for Y".

Not going to start a business and say "Like LinkedIn, but for dental hygienists".

I definitely agree with you. I made a big mistake using this annotation for my idea, won't ever happen again, as it's really not that similar to posterous.

That being said, please look at my response to StavrosK for a quick overview of a simple user story ... just in case you're wondering.

"By allowing you to forwarding all your support emails to a special address..."

By allowing you to forward

Hey, sorry for that, didn't notice it. Fixed it now.

"By allowing you to forwarding all your support emails to a special address"

HRrrrk... grammar.

Whoops, haha. I'm sorry for that, didn't see it. Fixed now.

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