How to stop losing customers from frequent bugs | Hacker News Reader

How to stop losing customers from frequent bugs

1 pointshinamee5 comments

Hello,

We are a young startup with just 3 people in the team (1 sales, 1 tech + design, 1 support) and we are just over 1 year old.

Our product is slowly starting to gain customers on a weekly bases but we also seem to be loosing them from being disappointed with few things not working as expected or sudden bugs.

We are currently the only one in the market with our product, we have few unexpected bugs that keep coming up from nowhere and its a bit out of our control. But after 1 or 2 experiences, it’s hard to convince them to stay.

It’s becoming worrisome and not sure how to manage the customers because the product is quite hardcore. We are self funded, so things are taking time to build to perfection.

Any idea how to manage our position with the customers?

There comes a time where you need to focus on stability over features. Good, automatic testing on every commit is going to be your best antidote here.

It should be easy to add regression tests for bugs so they don't come back. It should also be easy to add new tests. Not just unit tests, also integration tests of the full platform. Reducing the barrier to adding and running tests will help prevent them from being avoided. It should be cultural to do this, instill this behavior early.

You might want someone with experience to come in and help you get this initial setup in place. Feel free to ping me if interested, email in profile

Either be more upfront about the state of your product, and the size of your team, and maybe reflect that in pricing too eg X% off the first year.

Or just get some experienced devs on the team to do things properly. no idea what your gig is but this might very well be some project well too big for one dev, who's constantly adding another shiny thing some customer wants or even just suggested adding, without setting the previous one straight first.

How bad are these bugs?

Why do you keep having bugs escape into production? Are there any commonalities between them?

Please it is 'losing' not loosing.

Thanks. Any input?

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