anujseth

After this email exchange I couldn’t really sleep last night. I am posting this here for advice from people more experienced than me, on how to deal with customers who just don’t seem to be ok with whatever you do. Maybe I was in the wrong and it is me who doesn’t get it. Please share suggestions, opinions, whatever.

In no way is this an attack/vendetta thing on the person/company and I have anonymised it to the best extent possible.

I have also not posted previous email exchanges with the said person because they are long and have him calling me “pissy” our design opinions “stupid” and the like. They are also not about this particular bug (more below) but other features in the app.

This particular bug is in the iOS version of our app, Tabata Stopwatch Pro (a Tabata and HIIT Timer) https://itunes.apple.com/app/id664563975 and affects just 1 thing. The voice announcements get reset if you swipe up to force close the app. Till date 4 people have complained about it and it is not a priority at all. In all cases I tell people to not swipe up to force close the app.

This is not an us versus them thing. I am genuinely not sure how to best accommodate our growing needs of users who just ask for feature after feature, and want their bugs fixed right now. Saying no just really makes some people un-happy.

The emails yesterday (edited slightly to make them more readable) are in a text file on this link (they are above the HN character limit to be posted directly and not sure if posting them in parts in comments would be right) https://1drv.ms/t/s!FpBqmKEOgVTliBxLajRtRVpuVlpxZyQM

Made a simple iPhone app for small timers like in the Kitchen, Pomodoro, etc.

Would love to hear suggestions https://itunes.apple.com/app/id977069992?at=1l3v2Fs

Hi,

I have a dilemma related to the free download version of the my startup's software (www.graphitecharts.com/download). We are a silverlight based charting library with an aim to support WPF and Windows Phone 7 in the near future. I know most people here hate plug-ins but our aim is to focus on intranet and extranet applications and sites, and eventually support sharepoint and possibly excel.

We launched on 22nd march 2011, that's the date I officially announced it on twitter and posted it to the visual studio gallery. We haven't had any sales yet, but we do get around 5-10 unique visitors a day from the visual studio gallery and google. 2 out of every 5 people who visit the site do download the free version. We have had around 50 downloads so far. The problem is I have no way to contact these people. I do not force them to fill any forms and but there is an optional comment form below. This setup stems from the fact that I personally get annoyed when I have to fill a form to try something out. I also hoped people who are genuinely interested will email us back on their own.

Problem is its not working. No one has filled the form and no has emailed us back. Its still early days but charting is hard (the first version has taken 1 year to build) and I would love feedback from users before I start working on the next version. So do you think I should force users to fill a form ? I will explicitly state there that we might contact you to ask for suggestions etc. in the future.

Any thoughts on this would be really helpful.

ps: I know the site needs a lot of work, so be gentle, but any feedback is welcome.

thanks, Anuj.