How to Support 5,000 Customers with No Support Staff
It will probably surprise you to find out that we actually have no dedicated support personnel inside of New Relic! Each and every support request is handled by a development engineer who has full access to our entire source base, and the full authority to do whatever is necessary to make things right. This includes agent tweaks, production patches and – on rare occasions when we mess up – free upgrades to RPM Gold.
New Relic is doing development right. Because they have no support staff, their development engineers are supporting the customers. This means that the people designing the software are put right in contact with the people using the software, and thus can easily hear feedback about the product. If a common problem occurs, the engineers know it and can make a change to eliminate it.
We have our engineers take support calls because engineers like to code their way out of the support queue rather than execute manual repetitive tasks. Instead of coming up with one-off workarounds for specific customer issues, our team is more likely to implement solutions that the entire customer base can benefit from. Some of our best product ideas come out of support cases. If we can avoid future support issues by adding a feature or fixing a bug that makes the product easier to install, use, or manage, then everybody wins.
If more companies were able to get this type of information from their support calls to their engineering staff, we’d see an improvement in software. However, this isn’t enough. The reason New Relic is able to encourage engineers to fix the bugs as soon as possible is because every time the engineer needs to respond to a user about an issue, that engineer feels the weight of the issue. The engineers don’t want to respond to a dozen users with the same thing, so it is just easier to code a fix for the issue and not have to worry about it anymore.
Klassio. A Multimedia Blogging Platform
Klassio, a very early stage blogging platform, has some interesting features. Instead of focusing on text, Klassio instead focuses on a range of media types. While platforms like WordPress and Blogger require every post to be made up of words, Klassio allows you to create posts using any sort of medium: Photos, Videos, Music, etc. This means that it is trivial to post a video, or music, or anything else you would like to share with the world; no embed code required.
The setup of Klassio is very standard. You get a username.klassio.com url to get to your blog, and can select from a couple themes. You can input you own custom CSS, which is helpful if you would like to change the theme yourself.
Klassio is very focused on content. The home screen prompts a large text box ready for a new post to be entered, or you can also select from one of the other supported media types.
In the future, I would hope to see a lot of polish put into this product. As of now, there are really only 4-5 pages in the entire admin backend. This is fine, for simplicity is very user friendly. However, if there is going to be a minimal amount of feature, each feature needs to flow with the other features. Think of how Apple does their products. They don’t have a lot of features, but the features available are polished and highly usable.
The custom CSS might be a little much for most users. I’d suggest putting in some sort of wizard, similar to how Twitter allows users to style their profile pages, to make it easy for users to change the look of their page without needing to know CSS.
Overall the service is usable, put definitely needs polish.
TeensInTech is Trying to Corner the Teenage Market – Again
So, I’m sure we’ve all heard of TeensInTech by now. Led by Daniel Brusilovsky, a group of both teenagers and adults are off to try to conquer the Teenage Market. According to their site, a new product will be announced on July 31sts at 9am. As a tribute to them, let’s all remember the wonderful things they’ve had planned for the past year or so.
A Blogging Network
Teens In Tech was first founded as a blogging network. Using WordPress MU, they wanted to create a community for young teens in the tech industry to blog under, similar to the WordPress.com brand. According to Techcrunch, this happened around August of 2008, and, might I add, never caught on.
A Conference
After failing to attract the teen market through the blogosphere, Teens In Tech tried once again in January of 2009 by starting the Teens in Tech Conference. Sponsored by Google and other companies, it supposedly was a huge success. When speaking to a member of Teens In Tech, they said that they believed their conference was such a big success that it was now their main product, and that they were planning on taking the conference audience and expanding that presence into an online community.
A Network
Having at least one victory under their belt, Teens in Tech decided to acquire Youth Bloggers Network. While it was only a very nicely done BuddyPress installation, Youthbloggers.net had 100 members when the deal occurred, and now has 1,000 registered users. However, there has been very little activity on the site for the past month, and it looks like posting has been scattered for the past few months. 2 Strikes, 1 Hit.
So Whats Next?
So, with a successful conference, and two failed communities, Teens In Tech is going for another round at the youth market. What can we expect from them? Well, my guess is not anything interesting. They’ve tried the community gig twice, and both times can’t seem to garner a sustainable audience. And even if they do get an audience, chances are they will have a very hard time monetizing it. Young people tend to be unendingly cheap, mainly because a large majority aren’t controlling their own purse strings.
Maybe they’ll surprise us, but don’t count on it.
5 Holes That Twitter Needs to Fill (and Soon)
While I agree with a lot of this post, there is one clear item that is being misrepresented. The Verified Account System:
At the time of writing, Twitter has verified just 2,808 users – a number that’s probably just a little shy of the bonafide famous people who sign up every month.
Okay, so it’s a big ask. But there are some major, longstanding celebrities, power-users and brands on the network who have never been given the stamp of approval, including @wossy, @glinner, @jimmycarr, @problogger, @copyblogger and @cnnbrk. The latter which, of course, was the #1 most-followed account on the network for the early part of 2009.
The point of the Verified Account System was never to be a famous person list. The original intent was to be a way to make a distinction between a real person and impostors. As far as I know, no one is trying to pretend they are Copyblogger, or Problogger, or CNN Breaking News. All of those people are very well established and most people aren’t going to confuse them with other accounts. So why verify them?
The author further backs up my point by pointing out that Twitter founders don’t have their accounts verified:
To be fair, @biz, @jack and @ev aren’t verified, either, but that just supports my theory that they’re imposters.
This person, and probably many other people, are way off base when it comes to the intent of the Verified Account System. Maybe that is the hole they need to fill?
Spam Filtering? Patented! 36 Companies Sued
36 companies have been sued for patent infringement in Marshall, Texas (of course) for supposedly violating a patent (6,018,761) on spam filtering. The companies sued represent a who’s who of corporate America, including Apple, Google, HP, RIM, Citigroup, Capital One, Alcatel Lucent, AIG, AOL, JP Morgan Chase, McAfee, Symantec, Yahoo, IBM and many others.
For some strange reason, I don’t think this lawsuit will be going anywhere.
