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Comment by gigamick | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I think one of the things I do that - perhaps - many people don't, is that I email everyone who signs up. or at least I did for a long long time. Not sustainable anymore.

Now I email everyone who takes a paid plan.

But yeah to answer your questions I just email everyone like a human being. Not like some marketer gasbag. I build relationships, make sure I'm on point when someone has an issue, and then just ask them for a testimonial.

All the testimonials on there just are are legit paying customers.

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Theres many tools out there that will handle the follow up marketing part for you. Most will offer powerful workflow tools based on conditions etc.

I do utilise such tools but I 100% advocate for being a human being and just speaking to people.

Customers really appreciate it. I guess its not for everyone, and it's not infinitely scaleable but it is highly valuable in the early stages.

I think this is the essence of the much-bandied "do things that don't scale" advice. Scaling inherently involves abstraction and generalisation, engaging with individual human beings can generate much clearer insights until it becomes impractical (scale being a forced issue).

100% Agree

So much this! I'm one of the people that appreciates seeing "behind" the product very much :)

If you feel that a real human person is behind all that, and not a faceless company, you're also much more likely to share feedback. (Nobody would share improvement ideas for Windows with Microsoft, since you can be sure that those go straigth to /dev/null (or, more appropriately, the recycle bin).)

I really agree with you. I think in any walk of life you can reap so much benefit from just being a human being and treating others the same.

I get so much response when I email people. Every email is hand typed and I just say whatever comes to mind at the time.

Its super helpful for getting feedback and getting to know my customers.

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