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"People would be calling us constantly". Would people call if they did not have a problem with your service? This is either very pessimistic or it means "lets kill the messenger".


Having worked in support for a long time, yes. If you set too low a bar on ease of access for support, people will call you for imagined problems that could have been sorted if they spent all of 5-10 seconds thinking about it. Support is expensive. It's certainly a necessity, unless you have unimaginable resources, but you need to temper access to it. This goes double if your target audience is the general public rather than a niche market.

One classic mistake I've seen made time and time again by all sorts of companies is to think that support is free or cheap. It really isn't. It's a product unto itself.


OK - it requires some balance - but what I have often seen is that what developers think are 'imagined problems' are nuisances that can be extinguished by spending all of 5-10 minutes thinking about it :)




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