This is the first post in what would probably be a series of posts about Stuffed Guys, a kind of post-mortem to the second phase of the company’s life, which ended on Nov 10th, 2008 with this farewell post on the company’s forums (and started on Jan 1st, 2005).
Stuffed Guys was created by programmers, we wanted to create our own software, make living out of selling it to individuals and companies and take extra pleasure from the fact that something we’ve created is being used and loved by people around the world.
Almost everything eventually worked out as I personally envisioned back in 2004. “Almost” — because user support over the years had become a major challenge.
The truth is, developers don’t like doing support. I think you need to have a certain mentality to be able to answer and resolve user queries on a permanent basis and find pleasure in doing this.
Two major problems for a developer:
- In a small company like Stuffed Guys, with only a few developers, solving user problems everyday takes too much time out from actual programming. And we’ve chosen to be programmers because we.. well.. we wanted to program everyday. User queries, especially tricky cases, which could take a whole working day to resolve, take too much time, leaving too little for programming
- Once in a while you encounter “mentally challenged” people, who don’t like you or your product for the reasons that only they know of. Such people won’t listen to the word of reason, they will tell you and sometimes your customers too (via the forums, for example) how they hate you, how bad your product is, and other such things. If you are doing user support and encounter such people, you can’t ignore them as you would probably do in the real life (or kick them in the face for that matter), you need to stay polite regardless of what they say. For a programmer this is a nightmare. When this first happens — it ruins a whole day, then a week, then a month and then you just can’t bare it anymore psychologically, your job becomes a nightmare.
It seems that in order to work in product support you need to have a special state of mind and support should better be your main responsibility in the company. So, once I realized this, I started searching for a dedicated support person for Stuffed Guys. But it didn’t work out well.
Supporting users of such products as our Stuffed Tracker requires quite a lot of technical knowledge about the internet technologies and even some basic programming skills (to be able to debug problems on the spot with the client).
Turns out most of the people with that kind of knowledge are not searching for a technical support position, they want to be programmers. Probably a position in a support department can be looked at as a starting point in the company, but this doesn’t work in a Russian job market. Until late (maybe with the worldwide economic crisis this will change) there was such a big demand for programmers, that people who knew how to program at least on the basic level had no desire to search for any job position other then programming (it also pays more).
When I will be preparing Stuffed Guys for the 3rd phase I would like to have a plan for support from the start, without this problem solved it doesn’t make sense to return to our own products at all as this kills all the fun.
I recently thought of one trick. We have support forums where our users can chat with us and with each other — this is a small community that gathered around our products. They actually already do user support for us in some way. They know how our products work, they use them already for some time. If only we could come up with a way to outsource the support to our own users! Psychologically, these people should have little or no pressure, as they are not really a part of the company officially. So people who can be aggressive towards the company or the products should not be taken by the community supporters personally (as it happens when we do user support ourselves).
But the ideal solution would probably be for someone to create a company to provide outsourced technical support for small companies like Stuffed Guys. We can introduce support charges for our customers (which is a common practice anyway) and would redirect most of these payments to this outsourced support company. I think it is quite possible that this company can also provide their own support software to the companies they work with, so that both we and them can login in the same system and monitor user queries and things like this. A ready-to-use support system would be an additional advantage of such support company.
That would be a perfect solution, for us at least. I wonder if such company already exists, or if someone would be interested in creating one (we would be the first customers!). The idea from the business perspective looks to be pretty interesting indeed.
PS. From Guy Kawasaki –
Hire the right kind of people. To put it mildly, customer service is not a job for everyone. The ideal customer-service person derives great satisfaction by helping people and solving problems. This cannot be said of every job candidate. It’s the company’s responsibility to hire the right kind of people for this job, because it is a bad experience for the employee and the customer when you hire folks without a service orientation.
Tags: Software Development, Stuffed Guys, Support
Hi Sergey,
nice that you started a blog, in fact I wanted to writeto stuffed guys longer time ago,in this way, it is “direct” so even better.
There are several things I wanted to write you, so lets go one by one:
1. SW Factory Nova
What a great piece of SW! I bought the Factory Nova for our company about 2 months ago. I did a lot of research and went over dosens of hosted, server based, open source and paid solution.
I found FN more or less by accident (there is much to be done in matter of promoting the product, far to little mensions about it in net) – and after I tested it, the customer value seems to me much higher than of competitors. The funkcionality and usability is really great and it seemed to me that somebody programmed it with passion – I am glad that you confirming that ;-).
2. Closing the support phorum
I think that was not a good decision. It is ok to stop official support, but why did you stop users to help each other?! Even in this post you state, that the users support is a value, so why stop them?
Definitely a bad idea.
3. Support company
Your offer sounds interesting to me. Infact, we needed some customisation of FN (worklog reports by month/employeee, multitask worklog input etc.) and as you had no capacities we did it by ourselves. We thought we might offer this customisation to you or other users via phorum (there were some requests for such features).
I really like the FN, and as we will work with it in the company, support/implementation of it for some SMEs might be an interesting diversification of our present activities.
We also operate and develop an etravel system: relaxos.com/.ru and head to some other ecommerce projects, so Stuffed Tracker might be interesting for us (we currently use http://www.qualityunit.com/postaffiliatepro/ – which might be compared with some features to your SW) – so that might be interesting for us too.
By the way have a look at other products of that company http://www.qualityunit.com/, they also offer great value.
Well have a nice end of the year and a lot of success with phase 3 of your company. And… , thanx a lot for your with passion created SW ;-)
Thanks for your kind words, Ludo.
Closing of the support forums was not an easy decision. You have to imagine my position — I certainly don’t mind users helping each other on their own in the forums. As you correctly point out, I’ve actually suggested this solution myself in my blog post.
The problem is that somebody still have to moderate the forums (to filter out spam if anything else). We certainly can’t do this anymore ourselves. So the most obvious choice was to lock the forums in the read-only mode.
Maybe somebody from the people active in the forums would like to become moderators, that’s a good idea as well. But even in this case, it will be risky for us, since such moderator won’t have any obligations to continue moderating. Now he or she is interested in doing this, in a week they’ve lost the interest. What should we do then?
Having said all this, I’d love to find a way to allow users to communicate with each other even now. Maybe you’ll have some suggestions?
Well, maybe an option would be to create an unofficial forum, just for registered users. One way would be to clone the original phorum (which still might be kept the official “locked” phorum and let users use the unofficial one.
If the phorum is only for registerd users, spam should not be a problem and I guess moderation would also not require much time.
Well, or entirely basic solution which might work, is to create a google group (I can do it) and you could invite into group people, who have purchased FN or registered into the phorum.
But anyway from a long term perspective, if you want do sell your product you will have to solve the support this or the other way, there will not be many people who buy it without that. I guess you are aware of that.
Our current forum was also only for the registered users all the time, this didn’t stop people (or probably robots) registering somehow even with captcha enabled and posting spam posts or mass-sending personal messages to the registered users through the forum’s build in pm system. This might be due to vulnerabilities in the current version of the forum software, but keeping up with the new security updates to the software also requires time and there is no one who can do this now in Stuffed Guys.
Opening “unofficial” forums is a nice idea, but this implies that someone else does this, not us. If this happens I can announce this on the Stuffed Guys site, no problem.
And finally, of course, closing down support and forums was not my devilish plan to sell software without support now on. I only did this while still keeping the ability to purchase the products because I thought someone would still like to use and buy our products even when officially there is no more support (or planned updates) for them for the time being.
We virtually cut our spending to 0 now on the products, so no sales is ok for this in-between-the-phases business model.
happy, new year Sergey!
well again my question: if I setup a FN google group, would you send an invitation mail to registerd users of your forum with information about the group?
You can be (un)oficially owner or moderator of the group (under a nick) so if the group gous in the wrong direction, you can lock/delete it.
Hello Ludo and a Happy New Year too!
Well I certainly would not like to spam all the users with this, but I can post a link to the group:
1. In a blog post in the official Stuffed Guys blog.
2. In a news forum over at stuffedguys.com so that the post would appear on the front page.
Hi Sergey,
I too found Factory Nova in December by accident. I was searching for a software like this a long time. Factory Nova is a very nice software, but it isn’t promoted well. If you had sold more you possibly had money enough for support people.
I wanted to buy an unlimited version of FN in December but was shocked after I read about the end of your company. So I had to search again and lastly I found a software which fulfills our needs: OpenGoo.org. It’s very nice too.
Happy New Year and I wish you all the best for your life.
Karl
Karl, I am glad that you were able to find the right software for your needs after all.
We had problems with support not because we didn’t have money to pay to a dedicated support person. The problem is that it seemed to be impossible to find such person due to the reasons I outlined in the post above.
Also, just to make this clear, the company did not end. We had to end what I call a “Phase 2″ of the company. The company exists from 2001, but our Factory Nova and Stuffed Tracker 2.x-3.x were created only in Phase 2. Phase 1 was basically me alone selling very simple Stuffed Tracker 1.x written in a different language (Perl instead of PHP) and doing consulting work.
Phase 3 seems to be quite possible. Based on all the experience we’ve got so far and given that we will be able to solve all the problems that we’ve encountered (like this support challenge).
@Karl
Ok Sergey, here we are
http://groups.google.com/group/factory-nova.
http://groups.google.com/group/factory-nova/subscribe?note=1
Be so kind und publish the message to general discussions of the support forum of FN so at least the subscribers get notified.
Thanx
We will see what comes out from it.
Thanks Ludo.
I’ve posted the links in the Stuffed Guys Blog, in the Company News forum and also sent an email to approximately 700+ registered users of the forum who opted to receive emails from the forums administrators when they registered.
Hopefully that would make things going.