Castro’s Customer Support Lessons
Dustin Bluck (archive link, Hacker News):
I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator. I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation.
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However, what I found is this whole thing didn’t work as I thought it would. Sure sometimes we were able to wow customers, particularly when we responded right away with an exact fix for them. But the vast majority of our honest, thoughtful answers were deeply unsatisfactory to users, and it often annoyed them more than anything else.
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Customers email us with confusion about how podcasts work, how the App Store works, how their Mac works, and any number of tangential issues. What tends to happen is the same users do this over and over, and once they find out we answer, the requests get more frequent and more burdensome.
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To the user, any response aside from “Okay, we’re going to build that right now” is meh-to-negative. Various honest responses, such as “I thought about this or tried it in the past and it unfortunately didn’t work very well” are not going to knock their socks off. These just don’t do much in terms of loyalty and rapport.
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Avoiding explanations and specifics tends to get a neutral response and doesn’t suck anyone in or waste too much time. In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do. Because building loyalty or rapport at the moment something isn’t working and the user is frustrated hasn’t worked. The real positive experience comes when you actually improve the product, so that’s where we’re spending our time.
I have definitely seen all these categories of customer interactions, but I don’t agree with the conclusion. Yes, in the end you want to be improving the product, but I don’t think that’s fully separable from interacting with customers as humans. I’ve found spending time on customer support incredibly valuable for making my products better. Even a lone report of an issue can often lead to a fix and learning something important that has wider implications. It’s also enjoyable and motivational to hear about real people making use of what I’ve built or to turn around someone who started with a negative view. And it seems to help with marketing, too.
I also see a correlation with the apps that I use—the better ones tend to also have good support. That said, I use a podcast app that famously doesn’t offer support. There are different situations, and there’s more than one way to a good product and a successful business.
I do think there’s an art to all this. Not everything can be measured, and there’s more to it than just committing to answering e-mails thoughtfully. You need to set boundaries and steer the interactions to make them productive, efficient, and satisfying for both sides. I’m still learning.
Previously:
Update (2026-07-07): Jeff Johnson:
This is what you get from the free with IAP business model: most of your support emails are from freeloaders!
My apps are upfront paid, thus most of my support emails are from customers. I don’t get overloaded with emails, and paid customers are more incentivized to solve issues with you, because they’ve invested money into the app.
I find myself agreeing with you that customer support is valuable and we should do it. But over the years I have also realised that, in a way, being good at support is punishing. I’ll explain[…]
