liztsai

Most of the companies that we work with actually aren't in SF either.

Think of it as an AWS analogue. If you are a company running some large predictable number of servers with a constant load, it's probably cheapest to just have a rack of servers, if the scale can cover the people to maintain them. If you have varying loads across different days and seasons though, AWS might make a lot of sense since you don't have to pay for servers sitting around idle. That flexibility comes at a premium.

To take it a step further, if you're a slightly smaller company that values time and agility and doesn't have a large dev ops team in-house, you might want to use a PaaS, like Heroku.

Thanks for the perspective! To be fair, we can't claim to have any experience running operations at the scale of thousands and thousands of agents - we think we know a way to get there someday soon.

As a related tangent, one thing we do for a few companies is essentially serve as air traffic control. Even if we can't solve all of the issues and some issues need escalation, we help make sure that it's only one hop away from the right group.

Thanks for commenting - it’s good to get your take on things. We’d love to chat further if you’d like - ping us at hi@hioperator.com .

A few quick thoughts though. We are committed to keeping support local - in this case in the US. We’re not trying to be the lowest cost option, nor are we trying to handle the long tail of customer support. We focus on 80/20. And there is plenty of 80 to be had, even at scale.

There are a few specifics to how we’re organized and how we incentivize our agents that we’re seeing help align incentives a bit better.

Our usual onboarding time is around a week although our record is 1 day for a company that was in a tight spot. We don't charge setup fees for most situations. It's built into the price and we want our customers to stick with us because they like the service - not because they've forked over a large upfront fee!

Hi there! This is Liz from HiOperator. We set out earlier this year to build a scalable US-based customer service solution that we would have used as startup founders ourselves.

Would love your thoughts! Happy to answer any questions and tell you more.

If you're taking a protectionist view of their manufacturing business, China relaxing duties on finished goods would make sense. It's unclear (to me anyway) that that decision was made with the intent to spur raw aluminum exports vs some clever guys putting two and two together.

And yes, in case the loophole closes. These guys may have been the largest operation that some guy flew a plane over but they probably weren't the only ones.

Heh, well, depends on whether or not the material was hedged in and how much flat price risk he took. He may very well have caught the market at a good time and storage/carry costs in Mexico should be low.

This is a simple duty arbitrage play.

For anyone wondering what he actually did wrong, there are a few key points to note. Aluminum (and all materials, really) is exported and imported and duties are paid on the basis of the HS code and (if there is a trade agreement to be taken advantage of) certificates of origin (COO) along with the usual shipping docs.

China is inclined to tax exports of primary aluminum because aluminum is power intensive to produce. Thus, exporting raw aluminum ingots whose production has been state subsidized is basically akin to exporting (even giving away!) power. However, China relaxed export duties on certain 'finished' aluminum products. This opened up a loophole where Chinese companies could make 'finished aluminum products' which are classified under a different HS code than primary aluminum and ship it out of the country, duty free. In reality, this meant that they sloppily made it into whatever shape wasn't ingots or T bars rather than into any concretely useful shapes.

These 'finished' products then made their way out to places like Mexico and more recently Vietnam. Since they were still carrying Chinese COOs, they couldn't be directly re-exported to the US (or any other country without a FTA with China). They needed to be remelted/recycled into 'raw aluminum' and given a new COO (or for the less scrupulous given a fake COO...), hence the need for the Mexico factory.

So...if cost to ship to Mexico + cost to extrude and remelt < difference in Chinese VS Western manufacturing costs + duties on primary aluminum ... this is a profitable (and legal) trade!

Look pretty cool! Somehow between work and personal groups, the number of Slack teams I'm on has multiplied greatly. I'm guessing this might be more for intra-team Slack summaries but if it ever lives across teams, it would be awesome! I miss messages constantly.