Comment by burnout1540 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by burnout1540 | Hacker News Reader

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Co-founder and CTO of HelloSign here.

Sorry to hear that OP's bug reports weren't taken seriously. Good tech support is a must for mission critical APIs.

At HelloSign we take great pride in our API and our tech support. Rather than outsource support or rely on less technical people, we have our developers directly support the API they built. So when you give our API a try, I encourage you to check in with one of our developers by visiting our public HipChat room (https://www.hipchat.com/gq4BMFKt1) or emailing them directly at apisupport@hellosign.com. And that's available to all customers no matter what pricing tier they’re on (including free).

Take a look at our API documentation here: https://www.hellosign.com/api/documentation

We’ve had a lot of API customers switch over to us from EchoSign’s API due to reliability issues. I have a lot of respect for EchoSign and their original CEO Jason Lemkin, but I do think the API was an afterthought for them. At HelloSign we think it’s the future and are committed to having the best-in-class API.

I also wanted to touch on your point about wanting to work with "a company with a soul". This is something I also look at when making buying decisions. I’ve found a company's Glassdoor reviews to be an effective barometer of how well a company treats its employees and, by extension, how its employees treat the customers. That’s one (imperfect) way to measure "soul".

Happy to answer any questions anyone on HN might have.

We have used Hellosign for years, and they are modern, awesome, and always responsive.

We did a case study here - if that helps: http://blog.hellosign.com/simplyinsured-leverages-esignature...

Same here -- never had a problem with the product or customer service

Another proud user of HelloSign. Their product is one of the most useful services I pay for and their support is incredibly responsive.

Personal note - HelloSign and HelloFax are sweet. We use HelloFax alot more than Hello Sign, but both made my startup's daily operations a lot easier.

Highly recommended, and we've been with them for 2+ years!

Disclaimer - Never used the API, just like the service and its Box integration

Are there any decent online fax services for less than $10/month. I send so few faxes that pricing doesn't make sense.

HelloFax has a no-subscription tier that lets you send individual faxes at $0.99 each. If you're like me and send only a few a year, this is a great option.

I've been using HelloFax since shortly after they launched, and it just works (TM). Highly recommended.

+1, we use Hellosign's API and love working with the Hellosign team. It was incredibly easy to integrate their API into our workflow. We actually have a case study with them here: http://blog.hellosign.com/esignature-api-powers-bintis-rapid...

One of the best parts of working with Hellosign is their amazing tech support team. They are incredibly responsive (and nice!), and have helped us troubleshoot issues on many occasions. We are on a first name basis with these guys, and would recommend working with them!

> Rather than outsource support or rely on less technical people, we have our developers directly support the API they built.

Then you're not paying your developers enough. A developer commands a much larger salary than tech support. You're either underpaying the developers, overpaying techs and calling them developers, or you're not being completely honest in an effort to pull in more customers.

I'd go with 3, but whichever it is, I don't trust anything you've just said.

Our approach may not be scalable (and may not fit into your worldview) but having our developers do API support for us serves two important purposes:

1. Giving our clients the best possible technical support

2. Making our developers feel the pain (and joy!) of clients using what they built. I can't think of a better way to motivate developers to fix what's sub-optimal, share in the success of a job well done, and come up with new ideas to help our customers.

We're not alone in this strategy:

http://www.helpscout.net/blog/customer-pain/

https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch14_Feel_The_Pain.php

I think your intuition is correct when you suggest that this approach isn't scalable. It runs counter to the concept of "flow", articulated in Peopleware[1] 30 years ago and confirmed many times since then.

Sharing the pain has benefits, but you're almost certainly paying more in lost productivity on both bugs and features than you're gaining in insight and sensitivity. As a small and stable company, you can probably afford the loss as you learn more about your market and as you prepare for more organizational complexity, but it will eventually inhibit your growth and burn out many of your developers.

That's a fair point. The one constant in a startup is change. It may be that in the future we'll have developers only doing front-line support for beta features of our API.

Regarding flow, we don't have all of the developers doing support all of the time. We have one developer doing support at a time and rotate each week. This protects the rest of the team from having their flow I interrupted.

More than that, the links he gave talked about the entire company doing support, not just the developers. In other words, he misunderstood the point being made.

Putting the responsibility for tech support on your development team is how you increase your turnover rate.

Personally, I don't believe he's really doing that, I think it's just marketing.

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