00:00:00 ◼ ► Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development. I'm Mark O'Arment.
00:00:05 ◼ ► And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is never longer than 30 minutes. So let's get started.
00:00:09 ◼ ► So today I wanted to talk, or I guess a little bit of sort of checking in as well as discussing
00:00:14 ◼ ► some recent things I've been doing around customer support and around a sort of evolving philosophy
00:00:22 ◼ ► that I've been developing for customer support. So when I first started with most of my apps,
00:00:28 ◼ ► I did what I think most sort of indie developers do is that in the settings area of your app,
00:00:33 ◼ ► there is a button that you push that button and it sends an email to you. And that was how I
00:00:38 ◼ ► started off doing support. And you very quickly realized that, originally that goes just to like,
00:00:45 ◼ ► you know, my email. And that was first very deeply problematic, because then suddenly customer
00:00:50 ◼ ► support is being intermixed with your, you know, your work email, which is not a good idea. So then
00:00:55 ◼ ► you create a separate email account, you start going there, and then you start running into the
00:00:59 ◼ ► issues of like, well, this isn't works well to manage inside as mail, because support is a
00:01:04 ◼ ► different thing. And so you move it on to something. So ultimately, I moved it on to Help Scout.
00:01:14 ◼ ► And it works all right, generates a reasonable amount of emails every day. But in general,
00:01:22 ◼ ► that's scaled all right. And I've had people help me with it, especially because it's honestly,
00:01:27 ◼ ► especially around launching a new product, I tend to get a lot of negativity in the feedback you get
00:01:34 ◼ ► there. And that can be incredibly discouraging and incredibly, just emotionally difficult. And so
00:01:39 ◼ ► over the years, I've hired people to help me with that, to shield me from that as well as to make
00:01:45 ◼ ► it so it's not taking up too much of my time. And then all went well until Widgetsmith launched.
00:01:51 ◼ ► And Widgetsmith's launch was like, there's just a button in there. It's like, you know, email,
00:02:01 ◼ ► because Widgetsmith's scale was just something that I'd never run into. And this is, you know,
00:02:05 ◼ ► I think I've mentioned a few times, but, you know, when Widgetsmith was having its crazy
00:02:09 ◼ ► first couple of weeks, I would get multiple emails per second into that system, which is completely
00:02:17 ◼ ► impossible to keep up with and to manage. And it just was a bit of a nightmare. And so at that
00:02:24 ◼ ► point, I replaced the kind of expectation in my mind that I was going to respond or read
00:02:30 ◼ ► all of the emails with instead I was putting a sort of an autoresponder to that. And the way
00:02:36 ◼ ► the system worked is if you emailed, you've got an autoresponse that had kind of a frequently asked
00:02:41 ◼ ► questions in it. And if the person responded to the frequently asked questions email, so essentially,
00:02:48 ◼ ► they've emailed us twice, then that would kind of get percolated into something that would actually
00:02:53 ◼ ► be seen by a person. And that worked reasonably well, or at least it made the problem invisible
00:03:00 ◼ ► to me, to a large degree, because suddenly my customer support queue is very small. And it seems
00:03:08 ◼ ► like people are getting, you know, it's like, well, there's not a lot of people who are emailing
00:03:13 ◼ ► back a second time, so things must be okay. One of the things I've been wanting to do for my updates
00:03:19 ◼ ► this fall was I was trying to revisit this and I was trying to understand what is the best way that
00:03:24 ◼ ► I can provide useful customer support to people. And kind of starting from the beginning of like,
00:03:30 ◼ ► why is this, why does this exist? Why am I providing customer support? What is its purpose?
00:03:35 ◼ ► What am I trying to do there? And it's funny, I was starting to think about it from a perspective,
00:03:44 ◼ ► generally, like it's not the kind of thing that you have like this concept of sort of this help desk
00:03:49 ◼ ► or this thing that you need to do, but it is certainly something that is part and parcel with
00:03:53 ◼ ► having, you know, an indie app, I think we've developed an expectation, this is what you do.
00:03:59 ◼ ► And in some ways, it's maybe to avoid getting bad reviews that you're providing an outlet for
00:04:05 ◼ ► people who are upset or confused or have issues with your app to funnel that into a way that is
00:04:12 ◼ ► not public facing, but it was also kind of like, why is this there? When and honestly, too, I also
00:04:18 ◼ ► wanted to understand, am I missing things in the way that I'm handling support right now? Are there
00:04:24 ◼ ► issues that are just sort of simmering under the surface that are slowly making the app worse over
00:04:30 ◼ ► time? And so the system that I've been working towards, and this is something that I've been
00:04:36 ◼ ► rolled out for a couple of weeks now, so I have some feedback on, is I moved to a system in
00:04:42 ◼ ► Widgetsmith now where in the settings area, there's a help button and you push on that. And right now,
00:04:47 ◼ ► what it's doing is it opens a website that is just the frequently asked questions in this kind of
00:04:53 ◼ ► more... I'm terrible at JavaScript and CSS, but it's designed to look a little bit more interactive.
00:05:00 ◼ ► So it just has the questions and you tap on a question and it expands and it collapses. And
00:05:05 ◼ ► I'm right at the bottom, it says, if you still have a question, you can still email me. And I've
00:05:09 ◼ ► separated those emails out to a different place so I can get a sense of people are emailing from the
00:05:15 ◼ ► old just sort of like the button that would just send an email and people who have gone to this
00:05:19 ◼ ► frequently asked questions area and then said they still had a question. And it's been very
00:05:25 ◼ ► interesting because as far as I can tell, it's like the majority of the people who were emailing
00:05:30 ◼ ► before, their question was one of the frequently asked questions and very few people are now going
00:05:37 ◼ ► all the way down to the bottom to tap that. And the people who are, the signal to noise there is
00:05:44 ◼ ► much higher, that the people who are going to this page, going to the bottom and hitting
00:05:49 ◼ ► are both motivated that they've done something that is a little bit more difficult than just,
00:05:53 ◼ ► you know, tapping and then starting to type their thing. I've had to be a bit more thoughtful about
00:05:57 ◼ ► it. And so I'm getting good suggestions or genuine bugs that are things that I need to be aware of
00:06:03 ◼ ► at a much higher rate than before where I feel like I would get a lot of support that was very
00:06:09 ◼ ► repetitive and very similar questions or things that are just, they're not really helping anything
00:06:16 ◼ ► or someone's just emailing to say they don't like it or it's confusing or things that are very
00:06:20 ◼ ► general and vague. But it's something that I've changed. And I thought that was, it's like,
00:06:25 ◼ ► I've been very impressed and pleased by the response of how simple of a change this is.
00:06:29 ◼ ► And it reminds me a little bit of a, at least I haven't looked at Overcast's help recently,
00:06:34 ◼ ► but I remember you had a similar thing where to get to the link to send you an email, you had to
00:06:40 ◼ ► do a little bit of work as a user. And I imagine that had a similar effect to put just enough of
00:06:46 ◼ ► a barrier to make the quality you get at the end is a bit higher. You know, I saw with previous
00:06:52 ◼ ► stuff, like with Instapaper, I forget exactly how it was in Instapaper, but it basically just had,
00:06:57 ◼ ► you know, like a support link in the setting screen somewhere. And it would just fire off
00:07:01 ◼ ► an email to me, you know, it would just bring up an email compose sheet. And I got so much support
00:07:07 ◼ ► email for Instapaper. It was, it was overwhelming. And I ended up, you know, trying to hire various
00:07:13 ◼ ► people to answer it for me. I had mixed success with that. I had some good experiences, some bad
00:07:19 ◼ ► experiences. And it just, it wasn't, it wasn't very good for anybody involved, honestly. People
00:07:26 ◼ ► weren't really getting, you know, they weren't getting access to me because I had to hire someone
00:07:31 ◼ ► and that's, it's different when you're doing it yourself. I'll get to that in a minute. But,
00:07:35 ◼ ► but yeah, it just, it wasn't, people really didn't get a lot of value out of that system basically.
00:07:46 ◼ ► from what people were saying. And it was, it was kind of a weird situation. Whereas in Overcast,
00:07:51 ◼ ► Overcast has more users than Instapaper did, but I get way less email from it because what I did in
00:07:58 ◼ ► the, from the, from day one, you know, learning, you know, Overcast in many ways is like lessons I
00:08:04 ◼ ► learned from Instapaper implemented in, you know, in my next app, right? And this is one of those
00:08:09 ◼ ► lessons where I had this screen, this feedback screen, and I, and nowhere in the app does it say
00:08:15 ◼ ► support. It says feedback. And that's very intentional because support is subtly different
00:08:22 ◼ ► than feedback. Now, many people will email the feedback address with what is basically a support
00:08:26 ◼ ► request, but it's so few of them. And what, and I say in that screen, basically like, I'm one person,
00:08:34 ◼ ► I won't be able to answer most emails. And if you still want to send feedback, I'd love to hear it,
00:08:39 ◼ ► you know, I'll read it, but I won't reply. And that does put off some people, you know, I will
00:08:45 ◼ ► occasionally get a nasty review from somebody in the app store saying this developer doesn't provide
00:08:50 ◼ ► any support. But you know, in many ways, like you kind of are better off without a lot of those
00:08:56 ◼ ► very support needy people, because the, the value of putting a lot of your time into pleasing one
00:09:04 ◼ ► customer, when you're selling an app for a few dollars, or for free with ads or something,
00:09:09 ◼ ► the value of one customer is pretty quickly negated by you having to write more than like one or two
00:09:17 ◼ ► emails to them. So, so basically, like, you know, it's, it's, you're better off not having people
00:09:23 ◼ ► who need a lot of support as your customers, in most cases. Now, this is very different in
00:09:28 ◼ ► different contexts. So for instance, people who use my app, just as customers, that there's a
00:09:35 ◼ ► certain value of that to me. But people who, for instance, buy ads for their podcast, well, they're
00:09:41 ◼ ► giving me like hundreds of dollars. And so if they needed an answer to an email, I'm going to try
00:09:47 ◼ ► harder to answer that one, compared to, you know, somebody who is using a free app and is having
00:09:52 ◼ ► trouble, you know, deleting a podcast or something like that's, that's a more basic need that I feel
00:09:57 ◼ ► more comfortable just, you know, letting those go, or not responding to most of them. And, and that's
00:10:05 ◼ ► fine. But, you know, I think a lot of this comes down to setting expectations with your customers
00:10:12 ◼ ► or users in right in the app. As you said, most apps don't provide technical support. And people
00:10:20 ◼ ► get by, you know, people will respond differently. But I think largely, if you tell people right up
00:10:30 ◼ ► front, what to expect, good or bad, they will take it better than if their expectations are not
00:10:37 ◼ ► matched with the reality. So by me telling people right up front, I'm probably not going to respond
00:10:47 ◼ ► if you ask them, like, do you expect any a support email response from from an app that you use,
00:10:52 ◼ ► most people might say yes. But if you tell them right up front, this is not available here,
00:10:58 ◼ ► you know, I'll help you if I can, but this is mostly not not an available service that I provide.
00:11:02 ◼ ► Most people then will be like, Oh, all right. And they'll proceed with their day. So I find a lot of
00:11:09 ◼ ► people's reactions to whether you offer good or any support really comes down to just expectation
00:11:14 ◼ ► management. And if there's a mismatch, they'll be upset. But if you if you're very clear about what
00:11:20 ◼ ► you're capable of, and what you're not what you offer, and what you don't offer, I find that
00:11:24 ◼ ► actually goes a lot of the way towards pleasing people. Absolutely. It's about managing expectations,
00:11:29 ◼ ► I think both for your customer as well as for yourself. Like, I think I very easily can fall
00:11:35 ◼ ► into this trap of, yeah, it's like over overvaluing each individual interaction, because, I mean, the
00:11:42 ◼ ► nature of email is like, it's personal, like, this is I'm having a one on one interaction with a
00:11:47 ◼ ► particular person who is using something that I made, and they're confused, they're having a
00:11:52 ◼ ► problem, it isn't working right. It, you know, in the worst case, they've they've lost something
00:11:57 ◼ ► that they've worked hard on, you know, like, I even out then I'll get an email that someone who's,
00:12:01 ◼ ► they set up a widget the way that they liked it, and then for some reason, it's gone, or it isn't,
00:12:05 ◼ ► you know, some something happened that has caused them some harm. And that is difficult because it,
00:12:11 ◼ ► you know, it's like that's a personal reaction. And you're interacting one on one with someone
00:12:15 ◼ ► and that can be impactful, it can be hurtful, it can be difficult. But also, it's like, it can be
00:12:21 ◼ ► potentially productive. But I think, but I've definitely found for setting expectations for
00:12:25 ◼ ► myself is like, not that I want to be totally selfish about support, but it's like, I want to
00:12:30 ◼ ► structure my support system so that my expectation is that it is benefiting the overall app eco,
00:12:36 ◼ ► like the overall app itself, way more than it is benefiting any individual user. And it's like,
00:12:50 ◼ ► necessarily make the experience of that one person better, which is kind of a weird thing. But it's
00:12:55 ◼ ► increasingly where my mind is going to this, that what I'm trying to do is use support as a way for
00:13:01 ◼ ► me to identify what's confusing, identify where the problems are, that it's a, you know, a early
00:13:07 ◼ ► warning system if there are bugs or issues or problems. But beyond that, I don't want it to be
00:13:13 ◼ ► something that I'm creating an expectation. I think the way you handle it is great in terms
00:13:17 ◼ ► of just telling people straight up, "Hey, this is unlikely to be, you know, this is not going to be
00:13:25 ◼ ► a conversation we're going to have, this is likely just going to be something that you can let me
00:13:28 ◼ ► know about, and I will may or may not get back to you, but don't have a great expectation there."
00:13:33 ◼ ► But I think what I've really found interesting, and it's not like frequently asked questions is a
00:13:38 ◼ ► novel concept, but it's been really interesting to me how changing the expectation. So like, I
00:13:44 ◼ ► capture a question, I write a good answer to it once. And in some ways, what I'm saying is,
00:13:48 ◼ ► that's the only time I'm ever going to answer that question. I don't know if you ask that
00:13:53 ◼ ► same question again, in the email that you send me, it's like, I'm going to ignore you. That's
00:13:57 ◼ ► not helpful to me. But if it isn't one of those things that was captured, then that's good for
00:14:02 ◼ ► me to know. And also something that I think we'll get into after the break, I've also found really
00:14:07 ◼ ► interesting is, I can use the way people interact with the frequently asked questions as a means to
00:14:18 ◼ ► Yeah, and that to me, that is one of the big benefits of running your own support. You know,
00:14:25 ◼ ► I mentioned before, I've used people, I've hired people to do it for me, and I've done it myself,
00:14:29 ◼ ► I've spent more time doing it myself, you know, support, whatever I actually offer. But I spent
00:14:35 ◼ ► most of the time doing it myself, because I have found, something that Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater
00:14:41 ◼ ► Software told me years and years ago that kind of stuck with me, is that he answers all of his
00:14:46 ◼ ► own support email, as far as I know, I'm still today. But he said that one of the reasons he did
00:14:50 ◼ ► it was that, like, the burden of support email is its own motivation to him to minimize crashes and
00:14:59 ◼ ► bugs and the need for support in his apps. So it's like, it's a feedback mechanism, like, if he
00:15:04 ◼ ► doesn't want to get more email, or if he keeps getting the same emails over and over again about
00:15:08 ◼ ► some problem, then he's very motivated to then go fix that problem to then minimize all those
00:15:13 ◼ ► emails, you know. And this is one of the great things that indies have the ability to do this,
00:15:18 ◼ ► where most people don't. You know, most people who are working on multi-person teams or bigger
00:15:22 ◼ ► companies, you know, whatever the support volume is being generated, they're separated from that
00:15:29 ◼ ► in some way. So they might not realize that, oh, wow, we had like a 20% uptick this week in,
00:15:35 ◼ ► you know, people who can't find their account, maybe there's something wrong with that system,
00:15:40 ◼ ► or maybe there's a way that UI could be better. Or, you know, it's even in some ways like an
00:15:46 ◼ ► excuse. Like if you know that you have a support team to clean up your mess, you're more likely to
00:15:51 ◼ ► let a mess go, you know. So, so it's, when you do it all yourself, that's, it's such a closed,
00:15:59 ◼ ► tight feedback system. You not only see it all, but you also then have a feeling for what's normal
00:16:04 ◼ ► and what's not. And so for instance, if I start getting way more emails than usual about a certain
00:16:10 ◼ ► topic, then I know something has changed, something is going wrong in this area, and then I can go
00:16:15 ◼ ► look at it. And maybe, maybe I already know what it is. But maybe I don't. If I know like, you know,
00:16:18 ◼ ► the servers really haven't had any changes in the last two weeks. And the last three days, a bunch
00:16:23 ◼ ► of people are reporting problems that sound like server problems. And then I know I should probably
00:16:27 ◼ ► go investigate something there. And as one person running the whole operation, you have all that
00:16:31 ◼ ► stuff in your head, you're familiar with the whole system, you're seeing all the inputs. So you are
00:16:35 ◼ ► way more effective at responding to that kind of stuff. You just have to be super careful to not
00:16:40 ◼ ► end up chasing your tail as a result of this. It was the thing that I ran into many times when I do
00:16:46 ◼ ► my own support. And as part of this exercise, I have taken over like really answering and doing a
00:16:52 ◼ ► bunch of this myself just to make sure that I'm in that loop. And I think what's interesting is that
00:16:57 ◼ ► you just have to be so careful that you don't end up like chasing down the one problem that's
00:17:04 ◼ ► happening to like one person out of all of your users and spend a disproportionate amount of time
00:17:09 ◼ ► or energy or effort into something or being sort of trapped into the vocal minority kind of problem
00:17:17 ◼ ► where there's a few handful of people to keep asking you for a feature, but it's actually not
00:17:24 ◼ ► that it can make it feel like, "Oh, this is so in demand. This is so important. Lots of people
00:17:30 ◼ ► care about it." You build that feature and no one can, you know, it's like the five people who
00:17:34 ◼ ► emailed you were the five people who actually care about that. And everyone else doesn't. And so you
00:17:38 ◼ ► just have to be really on guard, I think, for if you're doing it yourself, I think what you're
00:17:43 ◼ ► saying, there's definitely a lot of benefits to that. There's a lot of improvements that can happen
00:17:46 ◼ ► to there. There's a lot of motivation, but just be really careful that you don't let it drive your
00:17:52 ◼ ► roadmap too much, that ultimately you should be in control of that and be doing things and deciding
00:17:58 ◼ ► on features that you think are going to impact the broad swath of your users, not just the five
00:18:03 ◼ ► people who keep emailing you asking for whatever their pet feature is. Right. But on the other
00:18:07 ◼ ► hand, like that is, it's one input of many, you know, like it, like there's, I think 37 signals
00:18:12 ◼ ► back forever now called Basecamp. But I think back when they were called 37 signals, they made,
00:18:16 ◼ ► they wrote something about feature requests. And the gist of it, if I remember correctly, is
00:18:20 ◼ ► that they don't like keep a document of feature requests. They just watch their customer feedback.
00:18:26 ◼ ► And if people keep requesting the same feature over and over again, that's a pretty good
00:18:32 ◼ ► indication they should probably do it. You know, going back to Daniel Jockett's thing about support
00:18:35 ◼ ► email, you know, kind of optimizing for less email. If people are asking for the same things over and
00:18:40 ◼ ► over again, you won't need to write them down in a document. You'll know because you'll be seeing
00:18:43 ◼ ► those emails all the time. And that is very different from like two people asking for it ever.
00:18:48 ◼ ► You know, like that I can classify like, you know, my Apple TV app in the latter category,
00:18:52 ◼ ► for sure. Nobody is asking for Apple TV app. Whereas there are certain features or behaviors
00:18:57 ◼ ► that people are asking for. Like every single week, I see new people asking for these same
00:19:02 ◼ ► things. So I just I know that those are features that are probably worth doing. Whereas the thing
00:19:07 ◼ ► someone asked for twice is probably not. We are sponsored this week by the Intrazone from
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00:20:36 ◼ ► interesting to this point of like using support as a way to understand how to improve your app
00:20:42 ◼ ► is the way that I structured my FAQs where it's right now it's just a webpage. You know,
00:20:48 ◼ ► if you open WidgetSmith, if you hit the support button, you'll see this. It just has a collection
00:20:53 ◼ ► of questions that are just and then if you tap on it, you tap on one, it expands out and shows you
00:20:58 ◼ ► the answer I wrote. I instrumented that with it just used the main WidgetSmith analytics thing
00:21:04 ◼ ► that I wrote, whatever months and months ago, which is a very basic private ultra private
00:21:10 ◼ ► analytics system that I wrote for WidgetSmith. And I instrumented it such that anytime someone taps
00:21:15 ◼ ► on one of the questions to get the answer, I get a essentially a counter that gets incremented inside
00:21:22 ◼ ► of my analytics system. And what's interesting about that is that now I have a sense of what
00:21:29 ◼ ► questions people are getting answered, or at least we're interested in asking when they went to the
00:21:36 ◼ ► frequently asked questions. And it's been really fascinating to me. It's like, I think intuitively,
00:21:43 ◼ ► I had a sense of some of the things, but having it in actual like tabular data form has been really
00:21:48 ◼ ► helpful. So for example, the second most popular question that's tapped on is how do I remove
00:21:54 ◼ ► widgets I no longer need? Which immediately jumps out to me, it's like, my UI is broken.
00:22:01 ◼ ► If that's the second most popular thing that people are curious about is how do I delete a widget?
00:22:06 ◼ ► It's like, you know, it's like, I use the standard sort of like swipe from right to left along the
00:22:10 ◼ ► table cell to get to expose the delete button. But I, for you, you know, slightly aesthetic reasons,
00:22:16 ◼ ► I hadn't put the, you know, sort of like edit button in the top corner to put it at the table
00:22:20 ◼ ► view into editing mode. But apparently not having that is causing a significant number of people
00:22:26 ◼ ► to be confused. And having that as the, you know, it's like, in this, you know, this tabular list of
00:22:32 ◼ ► what questions are most sort of interesting to people is really interesting as a result. I don't
00:22:38 ◼ ► think I would have guessed that that would be the thing that was causing that much confusion. It's
00:22:42 ◼ ► like the number one thing, I think is something that I would have guessed where it's essentially
00:22:46 ◼ ► the how do I add my widget to the home screen, which is the kind of like, slightly convoluted
00:22:52 ◼ ► way that iOS requires you to do it where you set it up in Widgetsmith, then you go and you long
00:22:56 ◼ ► press on your home button on your home screen, you get the plus you search Widgetsmith, you tap it,
00:23:00 ◼ ► you know, it's like, that really so much I can do with that, like I could do a little bit of
00:23:03 ◼ ► onboarding potentially, but in general, I'm okay with that being the number one frequently asked
00:23:08 ◼ ► question, but the number two should definitely not be how do you how do you delete your old widgets.
00:23:15 ◼ ► And so instrumenting your frequently asked questions or having some kind of actual hard
00:23:19 ◼ ► data analytics is something that I would strongly recommend you try if you go down this road,
00:23:25 ◼ ► this road, because it's been really interesting to have in real like, real numbers that I can go in
00:23:31 ◼ ► and check regularly. And I can see trends over time of how many people were interested in that
00:23:36 ◼ ► question. And obviously, I'm not collecting like, did that solve their problem? That's a much more
00:23:40 ◼ ► nuanced thing to measure. But if you tap on a question, you probably wanted to know the answer
00:23:45 ◼ ► to it. So either it's a really like click baity, interesting question that people are super
00:23:49 ◼ ► interested in. But more likely, it's people that was the problem that they were having or something
00:23:54 ◼ ► that they were once they saw that they were like, Oh, I can do that. And they were interested. And
00:23:59 ◼ ► similarly, like the third most popular one is what do the icons on the weather widgets mean?
00:24:06 ◼ ► It's like, okay, I can definitely do do a bit more about that and making sure it's a bit clearer in
00:24:12 ◼ ► the app about you know, what we know what the different you know, weather icons mean inside
00:24:16 ◼ ► there, at least, you know, or surface that in a better place in the app, because that shouldn't
00:24:20 ◼ ► be something that causes a lot of confusion. But apparently, it does. I love the idea of clickbait
00:24:25 ◼ ► support. Seven shocking tips for net worth feet. Yeah, that's, this is actually it's a really good
00:24:32 ◼ ► idea to to instrument this like that. I never even thought about that. But I actually, you're
00:24:38 ◼ ► kind of convincing me I've never had like an FAQ in the app, really. Or and this is actually a
00:24:45 ◼ ► really good idea. I might steal this idea. By all means, it's just an HTML page. So it's pretty easy
00:24:51 ◼ ► to, to adapt to. Yeah, because like, you know, a lot, you know, I do get a lot of similar questions,
00:24:57 ◼ ► you know, over time. And, and I do interpret those usually as, as, you know, feature requests, or,
00:25:08 ◼ ► I've gotten over overcast entire run of whatever it's been seven or eight years now, is how do I
00:25:13 ◼ ► mark a podcast as played? Because overcast doesn't really have a way to do that without like, just
00:25:20 ◼ ► listening to it until the end. Because I thought since the beginning, why do you need to do that?
00:25:25 ◼ ► Just delete it. But really, that's something people want to do. And so I, you know, as I'm
00:25:31 ◼ ► reimagining parts of the parts of the UI, now, I'm going to try to fit that in somewhere in some
00:25:35 ◼ ► useful way. But as you said, no one finds things on swipe actions. I know that from from Instapaper,
00:25:42 ◼ ► even. And I know that from from many, many years of having TableView based apps, that if the only
00:25:49 ◼ ► way to delete something is to swipe to delete it from a TableView, nobody will ever find it,
00:25:52 ◼ ► because only nerds know about that. Apparently, maybe I'm sure it's different now. But there's
00:25:57 ◼ ► still a lot of people who don't know about that. So you know, that that's why I've had to like, add
00:26:02 ◼ ► delete buttons, you know, anything, anything in a UI that is only accessible via a gesture of some
00:26:08 ◼ ► kind, you will have a lot of people who never know that feature is there or who have trouble finding
00:26:13 ◼ ► it. So that's why like, there's lots of every time I get like, an unsolicited redesign for overcast,
00:26:21 ◼ ► which, yeah, I know your intentions are good. Thank you. But but I'm really not interested.
00:26:26 ◼ ► But every time I get one of those, they always, you know, get overly clever with, oh, I'm gonna
00:26:32 ◼ ► I'm gonna hide, you know, so and so behind behind a painter gesture or a mode or a swipe. And no,
00:26:36 ◼ ► I know I've tried things like that. Trust me, that can't work here. But anyway, now this is this is
00:26:42 ◼ ► good. I, yeah, I think I'm gonna steal your system. And I did want to give one little tip before we go
00:26:48 ◼ ► of, you know, if if you're going to have some kind of, you know, messaging or ticketing or email based
00:26:54 ◼ ► system, I strongly suggest just start with email if you're the only person answering it, some kind of
00:26:59 ◼ ► you know, web based or you know, ticket based support management system. Those are fine. In
00:27:05 ◼ ► certain ways, they're they're great. If you have a multiple person team answering support, maybe like
00:27:10 ◼ ► you and somebody else or, you know, somebody else entirely that's not you and you want to be able to
00:27:13 ◼ ► like check in on how they're doing. That's different. But if it's just you answering, I
00:27:17 ◼ ► strongly suggest start with email, because it's probably fine. And you can probably do it without,
00:27:23 ◼ ► you know, adding anything to your setup and without getting more complicated. And people like
00:27:27 ◼ ► it. I as a customer hate filling out other people's ticketing systems. Now you can do something like
00:27:31 ◼ ► where they email in and then the system manages it. And you know, to them, it just looks like
00:27:35 ◼ ► email. Even that I kind of hate you, then you get those two auto responses, please respond above this
00:27:40 ◼ ► line, please leave this ticket number and the ticket and all this stuff. And it's just it kind
00:27:43 ◼ ► of it's cumbersome. So I suggest start with email if you can, chances are you won't have the support
00:27:48 ◼ ► volume where you'll need more than that anyway, unless you're hiring multiple people in which case
00:27:53 ◼ ► yeah, there's other benefits. But I would also say that you don't have to go through too much
00:27:57 ◼ ► effort to set up a new email for for a business domain, depending on how your how your email is
00:28:03 ◼ ► hosted. Like mine's hosted at fast mail, which again, I love not a sponsor, but I love them.
00:28:07 ◼ ► I've been with them forever. And fast mail is a thing where on any of their paid plans,
00:28:12 ◼ ► you can add I think any number of domains that you own. And then you can host aliases of any email at
00:28:19 ◼ ► that domain that just land in your regular inbox. So this is how I have all my stuff. I have domains
00:28:29 ◼ ► domains just filtering into my main fast mail email account. And then in Apple's mail app,
00:28:39 ◼ ► sending and receiving from. And so if you add them there, then mail will do the smart thing where
00:28:50 ◼ ► you'll be replying from that same alias. So it'll it'll match it up automatically for you. And you
00:28:54 ◼ ► can change it if you want to. But that's that's the default behavior. So it's very nice. So this
00:28:57 ◼ ► is a very easy way to get started. Yeah. And I think for most people, I think you're absolutely
00:29:02 ◼ ► right. That's and that's the right place to start. And I think structuring your support so that you
00:29:07 ◼ ► email is there at the end, that's the final step, putting in front of that something that is more
00:29:12 ◼ ► frequently asked questions based, giving you a sense just releasing that load from you. And if
00:29:17 ◼ ► you are going to go down that road, I will highly recommend make your frequently asked questions
00:29:20 ◼ ► something that you can update remotely. So like, in my case, it's just a website, I've definitely
00:29:25 ◼ ► gone down the road of embedding it in the app. And then that's just a nightmare. You only want to have
00:29:30 ◼ ► to do an app, an app update in order to change, add a new question. Like if you get a lot of
00:29:34 ◼ ► people asking a question, you just add it to the website. And then it's just instantly deployed to
00:29:38 ◼ ► everybody. So you want something like that in front, email in the back, and I think you'll be