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Comment by adampunk | Hacker News Reader

How would you staff a support line for a product with a billion users?

it's hard, but not THAT hard, to find a few dozen people who can deal with large volumes of support tickets every day. so for a company like anthropic, you'd use a customized claude to triage and then those few dozen people spend all day actually caring about solving users' problems. a contract with fin fka intercom (lol) to offload this is a step in the wrong direction imo, but then nobody pays for support so it's hard to turn it into a revenue stream.

I'm sorry but a few dozen people actually caring about the problems of a billion users is a fart in a windstorm. You might as well hire a half-dozen to care, or none, for all the work you'll do. You'd need a dozen people just to design a scheduler for handling tickets only to watch that catch fire too.

I don't get it. None of the hyperscalers have human support teams at scale because it's obviously infeasible. Why, just because it would be nice, do we take leave of the requirement that something actually be possible before demanding it.

Not infeasible, just allows lower net margins.

oh i think i agree, with the economics tech companies (all companies, really) and their users currently accept/demand.

but if caring about and solving customer problems was an actual income driver for a company, it could be very different.

i don't think that's going to happen, because i think most users (like Anthropic's) will continue to refuse to pay >$0 for support -- or to claim that their subscription payment should somehow also cover support, which is ridiculous, since they can see with their own "eyes" how little support their "compute subscription" gets them -- and thus companies will continue to invest ~$0, if not less, in meaningful support models.

it still blows my mind that nobody is willing to try charging people an extra $20 a month for unlimited support calls. most customers are DESPERATE for people to talk to about their problems.

instead, they all just try to winnow the cost down as low as possible, and then point to the expense to explain the degradation of service.

also, remember that MOST of those "billion users" generally don't have problems that require product support expertise every day. if each of them were still paying a retainer for access to high-touch support, all kinds of crazy fun stuff would be possible.

Does Anthropic have a billion users?

That's just it. If they were prioritizing humans they'd have a product with a measely million users, charge more, and offer great support. Their game isn't a good product though, their game is scale because they think that's the only way to win, and winning is the only way to survive.

Wait, how would limiting a great tool to 0.1% of the TAM demonstrate caring for humans?

Are you picturing them running a lottery for who’s allowed to use it, or an auction?

And with the loss of scale economies, it would have to be much more expensive.

So you end up charging, what, $10,000/month and only making it available to the very wealthy?

I don’t see how this game plan is better for humans. And I’m honestly not being snarky. Have you thought through how your proposed limits would work? Am I missing something?

I mean look at how Apple prices their computers and phones, or how WSJ charges for subscriptions, or how "Linux" keeps its market small by being awful at marketing. The point is there are plenty of ways to scale sustainably and support your customer base in a long-term way that keeps them, and it doesn't seem like Anthropic is doing that.

I am really not convinced that Linux is intentionally bad at marketing so as to ensure that they aren’t overwhelmed with users, all in the name of providing great support.

Love how you’re literally saying “instead of serving humanity they should serve the wealthiest 0.1%”

Very humanitarian

Honestly I never thought about it that way, but I do think that's an exaggeration. I don't see any believable sign that Anthropic's goal was ever to "serve humanity." That said, how do you serve humanity properly? Do you scale a mediocre product to a billion people and treat them like shit or do you build it deliberately and support what you make, even if that costs more?

You sound like "AI" is something people deserve for free when clearly, if you look at the garbage energy footprint alone, it's going to have to cost. Supporting it is going to have even more.

P.S. How can you "serve humanity" if you literally don't support the humans who use your stuff?

Don't have a billion users if you can't offer them support?

Like, what? Since when can you control how many people want your product?

A user is someone who uses your product, not someone who wants your product.

How much budget have they allocated to support?

With lower margins of course. Walmart, Indian Railways, major airlines etc all support massive user bases comparable to or bigger than the paid tiers of these apps. But of course the cult of Big Shareholder value creation means the CEO that does this, especially in the US will be fired.

Imagine if they had access to a good AI! They don't even have a bot support.

I mean, the simplistic answer is that if a billion people are paying you, you should be able to hire a proportional number of support staff, because you're getting additional revenue from each customer.

I can imagine scaling may be difficult, but that should be a temporary problem.

It's funny how silicon valley bros always talk like making real world things is essentially impossible. I mean walmart or aldi are serving > 200 million customers a week, how do they manage that I can tell you that's much harder than customer support for an online product.

As a side note, how do you make up that billion user number? Claude has 10 million users.

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