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Comment by ignoramous

2 days ago

Definitely there exist customers one must fire, but the flip side is, some of them might have genuine complaints.

  ... an extremely popular marketing tool ... sending an equally excessive amount of data above what they were paying for. They were far less adamant about the product, and on some days I didn't even want them as a customer. If there was a minor blip in the service, they were the first to complain. Reminder, [Sentry] was still a side project at the time so I had a day-job. That meant it was often stressful for Chris and I to deal w/ customer support, and way more stressful dealing with outages.

  We had one customer who loved the product, and one who didn't. Both of these customers had such extreme volumes of data that it had a tangible infrastructure cost associated with hosting them. We knew the best thing to do was to find a way to be able to charge them more money for the amount of data they sent. So we set off to build that and then followed up with each customer.

  To our surprise, the customer that loved the product didn't want to pay more. The customer who was constantly complaining immediately jumped on the opportunity. What's the lesson to take away from this? 

  ... when I was a teenager I worked at Burger King, and there was an anecdote I will never forget: for every customer that complains, there are nine more with a similar experience. I've cemented this in my philosophy around development, to the point where I now believe over rotating on negative feedback is actually just biasing towards the customers who truly see the value in what you're offering. The customer that was complaining really valued our product, whereas the customer that was happy was simply content.

A $7 Subscription, https://cra.mr/a-seven-dollar-subscription / https://archive.vn/IWS0A (2023).