You don't need every customer | Hacker News Reader

You don't need every customer

marco.org

73 pointsajhit40625 comments

I've been saying this forever here but Marco says it so much better. The majority of the times I see an article on HN getting popular about how awful some app or site is its usually this kind of scenario that Marco describes in effect.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen an article here about some poor guy complaining that his favorite app changed a feature or price or policy that's often pretty trivial and turns it into an opportunity to start drama and shame the company because he didn't get the memo. Except everyone else did.

When we see something we don't like it isn't bad to complain about it in and of itself but what isn't okay is this self-righteous attitude people have started to acquire. It's this phenomenon where we think that we can not only publicly shame companies on our blogs and believe we're important enough for them to change it back for us but, worse, we seem to think we're objectively right. This sort of mentality doesn't seem to carry over into the real world nearly as often. It seems that if you do business online your customers expect you to cater to each and everyone one of them individually. If I have oddly sized feet and can't get a pair of good fitting Nike's I don't try to publicly shame the company for not providing a shoe in the style I want in the size exactly tailored to my odd foot measurement. But when it comes to the Internet you had better be all things to all people it seems.

Even stranger, for a community like HN where many of us are working on online products, we seem more guilty of this than the average person. How is that? Is it that we think because we know how to build things that our way is right? I don't know but I'm really glad Marco wrote this and I'm really glad people here are reading it.

Social media is great - platforms like twitter and facebook give people an online voice. However, this also creates an over inflated sense that their voice matters more than anyone else.

Part of the phenomenon you describe regarding public shaming is that this has become default way of addressing situations - because that's the culture those social platforms have created & reinforced.

Further, it's much easier to do this online because you're just looking at pixels on a page - not into the eyes of a fellow human.

This makes me think of this quote:

The only way to avoid criticism, is to not do anything of value.

So expect that it will happen, because it means you created or did something worthwhile.

I think Marco has a good point -- that you basically can't expect to please everyone and you'll kill your product if you're optimizing for edge cases (especially from irrational users and especially with a 1-man shop). However, I also think it's important to be gracious to every one of your customers.

If someone paid for something and they're not happy, and if your costs are virtually zero for that customer (and with iOS apps it almost inevitably is), then you should always apologize and offer them a refund. Even if you don't want them as a customer, you can be gracious and they're probably less likely to bash you publicly. That $0.99 is a small price to pay to avoid a negative review. Mitch Hashimoto wrote a good post that serves as a basic guide for customer support:

http://mitchellh.com/apple-the-key-to-my-success

that is the reason apple should provide free trial.

If i apologize the cost is not zero any more.

For people requesting a refund I tell them to contact App Store support. Their official policy is no refunds, but I've never had someone come back saying Apple said no. With enough hassle they might add a way for developers to do refunds.

I learned that catering to everyone leads to mediocrity while in the restaurant business. One chef I worked with was not afraid to tell people where the door was. He had one of the top kitchens in Vancouver BC because of it.

Listen to your customers, but know that in the end, you are responsible for and the sole guardian of quality. If you don't know what quality is in your area in business, move to somewhere you do.

Sometimes I wish there was a way to flag a comment and have it pulled while it's investigated. I wonder if there's enough reviews on the App Store to make that impractical.

Also, I'd ban people from reviewing apps once they are found to leave inappropriate ones like "this isn't a very fun game" on Instapaper - it makes me immediately think they're a troll.

[Edit] to a degree, I wonder if we could algorithmically determine if a comment is likely to be inappropriate and have it hidden until investigated. But this all reminds me of a quote: "You can't solve social problems with technology".

I wish reporting a review had at least a non-zero chance on the App Store. I've never had a single result or any feedback at all with it.

"If you sell a 99-cent app to just 1% of the people who bought new iOS devices in the 2012 holiday quarter alone, you’ll clear about $519,750."

http://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-falla...

Marco's statement is not an instance of "The 1% Fallacy". He's not suggesting that you can throw arbitrary products against the wall and succeed because 1% => 500k; he's saying "it's silly to try to cater to every customer because the math doesn't make sense".

Here here. March's point is also that if you piss off 99% of the potential market, you can still make a lot of money. He's addressing the 100% fallacy, the idea that you have to satisfy 100%. He's pointing out that that's not necessary

"you’ll clear"

Not to mention the fact that the "you’ll clear" is totally arbitrary anyway. How much does it cost to offer support to that many people obviously not being taken into account.

Best part:

When evaluating complaints, we need to consider whether the complainer is credible, whether they have reasonable expectations, and whether a significant number of others have made similar complaints or are likely to have experienced similar problems. For many complaints, a reasonable outcome isn’t possible or pragmatic, and the best solution is to ignore them.

I think Marco is describing two things that I've felt strongly about for a long time:

(1) The medium deeply influences the conversation. It just seems like human nature that people are much more likely to speak up to complain about something than to say that they liked something. On top of that, the Internet as a medium results in an overwhelming slant towards negativity (the GIFT), nitpickiness, etc. in online reviews and commenting systems. So, you have to take this into account when using online sources for getting a sense of how people feel about something.

An extreme example seems to be pretty much any Linux-centric forum anywhere. An article about some distro or desktop environment or programming language or anything really, no matter what's being discussed, will inevitably be filled with comments about how much it sucks. The more helpful ones will be along the lines of, "X sucks, you should use Y instead". People reply to that one with, "Y sucks, you should use Z instead", where Z is more obscure than Y which is more obscure than X. Eventually things peter out when the leaf nodes are all about things so obscure that there's no one participating who can say that they tried that, and it sucks too. The reader is left with the feeling that absolutely everything is freaking terrible, except for some random thing you've never heard of that no one uses, which is just not true.

(2) From a design perspective, he's basically just saying that you can't please everybody, and attempting to do so may just end up pleasing no one. Certain computer companies are well-known for focusing on a few very specific products with relatively few config options, as opposed to other companies (HP and Dell being prime examples) that try to exhaustively cover every possible niche and top it off with a gazillion build options. The former is intentionally limiting their appeal in order to make something that will make a smaller group of people very, very happy, whereas the latter is trying to be all things to all people.

These are both legitimate business strategies, but if I happen to be in that target audience for the more specialized company, then they are pretty much guaranteed to have my business. The key for success for the more specialized company is to cast a wide enough net as to not restrict themselves to a niche audience, have the design and engineering chops to offer stuff that the all-things-to-all-people companies can't match, and not be tempted by market share to dilute that vision. It's an inherently risky approach but it can be very rewarding, financially and creatively.

An analogy I like to use: imagine you own a Thai restaurant. People come in and love the food. Others don't like it, saying things like "You know, I really prefer sushi, can you serve raw fish?" or "I really like spaghetti, can you use more tomato sauce?"

You have to recognize when criticism means the customer is just not your target market ("Look -- you're in a Thai restaurant!") vs. a real complaint on an issue with your product or service ("Your waiters are rude" or "You are using too much salt.").

Not all criticism is of the 2nd type. We want restaurants to be their best, authentic selves, and not some amalgam of everyone's preferences.

I don't know if I fully agree with this post. I mean its true you don't need every customer but if someone uses your product or service and is upset by specific features/aspects, its important to make them feel heard by acknowledging their sentiment. That doesn't mean you go and build whatever they wanted you to build. But it just means you value people who took the time to say something. I think every customer or user wants to feel valued.

In theory, I agree with this -- in practice, I suspect you have to do a bit of subjective triage, particularly once you get past a certain volume level (which is itself subjective). The key is "upset by specific features/aspects."

Bob writes to you, "Hey, I really like this app, but feature X is very important to me." Sam writes to you and says, "Your app is a useless piece of shit." Writing back to Bob to say, "Thanks for your feedback, I'll consider that for the next version" -- or even to say, "Thanks for your feedback, but I'm sorry to say that feature X isn't on our roadmap" -- may well be worth your time. (Especially since your time, in this case, is probably about two minutes, less if you set up a couple Text Expander snippets for this.)

But is writing back to Sam worth your time? It may be that Sam feels the same way that Bob does, that he mostly likes your app but considers feature X a critical omission. But you have to get him to stop flinging flaming poop at you and actually explain what his dilemma is. And he may just hate your app, full stop. He may be too inarticulate to explain what he needs from your app. He may just like flinging flaming poop.

Without redefining the word "important", can you say why it's important to make every customer feel valued? There are finite number of hours in the day, and 5 minutes you spend trying to make an intractable customer feel better is 5 minutes not spent on something else.

> I don't know if I fully agree with this post. I mean its true you don't need every customer but if someone uses your product or service and is upset by specific features/aspects, its important to make them feel heard by acknowledging their sentiment.

No, you don't. Just as one shouldn't try to please everyone and be understanding to all in their personal life. This is toxic.

Marco seems to achieve quite a bit of acclaim from saying very intuitive things in a very verbose way.

This entire piece could be effectively conveyed in a pair of sentences: "Reviews are arbitrary and uncontrollable, and reviewers are irrational and untrustworthy. Reviews should be ignored so long as your app is doing as well as you'd like."

The trick is not in the saying of the idea, it is in the preparation of a nest for the idea in the next host brain.

Just a little anecdote that I've found interesting since I started my music website HypedSound. I'm completely redesigning and relaunching the site with the same community and a new vision in a couple months, but right now I still have a paid featured artist spot on the homepage. I've had a fair number of people pay for this spot and not one single person has complained. Nothing about wanting their money back, not liking that they paid for it, or anything. Sometimes I feel like the people who pay for an app or feature of your product are less likely to complain than someone who uses it for free. That being said, at the moment I think they have every right to complain because the site is slow and clunky and lacks any sort of design hierarchy or central theme :)

"The most important input for your pricing is quite simple: are enough people buying it at its current price? If not, you might have a pricing problem, but not necessarily. If enough people are buying it, you face the interesting question: can you charge more?"

Wished he'd defined what's "enough" at least for him.

I think that's the point: He can't, and if he did, it wouldn't be relevant to anyone else. Figuring out what entails "enough" is exactly the exercise that makes the question useful.

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