danielzarick

It is definitely something different, and a different framing on some existing activities. But the same way that engineering roles change, non-engineering roles also change in focus and title and expectations.

Thanks for the feedback about that chapter, will dive in and see if we can try to make the answer more clear!

Appreciate your feedback, we will look into the titles and summaries to better explain the value inside each chapter.

Sorry you feel nice design devalues information.

Thanks for the feedback! Will think about ideas for how we can change it. Sorry you found it distracting, totally understand.

Because even though tons of people think customer success is important and give it focus, we talk to startups every week who are still under-resourcing it and not giving their team the right focus... even though they'd tell you they believe in the impact of customer success.

That's not a fair characterization of the guide at all. Did you even read it?

There's tons of useful information (fully available on the website, no need to download) for anybody who's building / working with a customer success team for the first time, which is much of the audience on HN.

And yes, our "marketing" is trying to be generous with our knowledge and experience. That doesn't mean it isn't useful.

Thanks so much! The team is thrilled with how it turned out... and our first marketing hire doesn't start until next week, so this was a bit of a grind.

We looked at Clearbit's and Productboard's ebooks, frankly. And then we worked with a designer on the PDF itself: http://nonfik.com/studio

(FYI - I’m the co-founder of Arrows, which created this guide)

In our time building and working at startups, we came to realize customer success was a secret weapon that’s massively overlooked and underfunded. If you use customer success properly, it’s the core tool that helps you get to the SaaS holy grail of negative churn.

The first employee we hired after raising money this year was our customer success advisor, Shareil Nariman. And he’s who wrote this guide which is fully published on the site. Just a small way we hoped to use the benefit of having funding to give back to the community.

Let us know if there’s stuff you think we missed!

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you like it.

Not a problem if your colleague is skeptical, we'll have time to convince them. What type of role are they in?

Integrations will come. But for now every tool which stores contacts or spreadsheets has a CSV export. It's usually just one click to export, and uploading to Arrows Outreach is immediate.

So I'd hope they'd give it a shot if they have the problem we had, which is jumping back and forth between spreadsheets and Gmail to send personalized emails to a large list.

I designed and built this over the past week after a freelance project fell through. The idea came to me the Friday night before the election, and I figured would be fun to build over a few days.

Right now I'm keeping things small and simple: What are the best products you and your Twitter friends have bought on Amazon recently? Hope you dig it.

Haha yeah, sounds familiar. That's actually one of the primary reasons to raise them! Unfortunately, your biggest support costs will be from unreasonable people on the cheapest plans. So by raising prices you often weed out the people who complain, but make up for it in the extra dollars from all the silent people who love the product.

The "exclusive features" thing is awesome in theory, but unlikely to matter to most customers. Having a simple, well-designed, straight-forward product can be worth a few extra bucks. Extra features will be gravy in the future (or more stuff for the higher plans).

Free plans are tough, because adding one without a good strategy usually ends up being a distraction and more server/support/etc cost than good for upgrades. Most people will just sign up for a paid plan or a free plan and stay there, unless you have a really great strategy for getting them to upgrade. With that said, I worked at Twilio and we made sure to give a bunch of free credit because we knew getting devs to try it for fun or personal projects would often translate to them convincing their employer to use us for something that made us a lot of money. The difference here is that the true customer was businesses that paid a lot of money.

(If you can't tell, I really enjoy this stuff haha. Hope it's not annoying.)

Three quick thoughts for you which should hopefully help:

1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.)

2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly).

3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or something that feels very high for you. Not sure what features it should have, but there is definitely something you can provide businesses that would be worth that amount. And they'll be fantastic, low-fuss customers.

Good luck!

TJ – I've found this book to be particularly useful for generating marketing ideas: https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu... Written by the founder of DuckDuckGo, and a great reminder of all the different channels for marketing.

Love this game so much.

Hey Jon. I don't check HN comments very often. Keith was unable to record the audio on his side, plus he didn't have headphones or a microphone. On top of all that, we had to use Google Hangouts instead of Skype, which would have improved the audio at least a little bit. Overall, I think it turned out pretty good for how little I could control myself. Even Nate's episode was bad IMO because the room was so noisy and we were far from the mic. It's hopefully going to get a lot better!

Yeah! He's so awesome. I really loved recording this episode with him.

It just approved by iTunes actually! The email came from Apple just after you posted this. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/strange-beings/id9066020...

For sure. I'll make sure to add something about which topics we covered.

I really love when I see products take this route. I'm also currently working on something that is passwordless. I think there is a small cognitive hump that new users have to get over, but I'm working on ways to make it smoother. Nonetheless, I believe this route is the future & we will continue to see more passwordless products, which will increase the general understanding of how to use them.

Haha that's funny. He was all over it. He responded to my tweet saying he'd stop if I wanted him to. I just told him to be mindful of annoying people.

Not a bad idea. I would like to know how many people actually made the transfer as well. Also, I'd definitely like to see what happens to the domains after a few weeks... if anybody puts anything up.

Yeah a few of my friends told me about that. Sent him a message, but still haven't heard back. He's offering $$$, but it still feels spammy and annoying. :-/ Hope nobody was annoyed.

Great tip. I was hoping people would figure this out on their own, but I should have made it more explicit in the email. This is exactly what I did with the domains I sent/received.

Because it's useful to have two ways to contact someone in case the exchange goes awry. It's already come in handy today.

That's fine... you're only an asshole who broke the rules.

JK – I'll let if fly. :)

Feel free to buy it and donate it to the cause. I'm already investing hundreds of dollars in opportunity cost for a dumb way to give people a few laughs, so I don't feel like throwing down another $10. :)

P.S. I showed this to a friend and her response was: "Little does that guy know, you're totally an asshole." So there's that...

Actually, I really don't need to do that. The absurd length is part of the humor. Plus, WDWEE.com is 10x more difficult to type.

We just hit 300 people/domains who have signed up. Is that enough for you? ;)

Awesome! Thanks for this. I'll play with it over the weekend. Still working on the specifics.

Emails will definitely stay private. Your name, @username, and personal website will likely be published.