Having a love-hate product

For some products and services it's easy to know exactly what you're going to get when you buy and there usually aren't a ton of surprises. Software and web applications don't fall into that category, so most intelligent businesses have trial versions and/or free trial periods so people can evaluate the real thing before buying. SportsLizard's Price Guide is no different - people like what they see when they watch the video on the homepage and read the sales copy, but they'll never know for sure until they try it out.

In our first month and a half I've done the best I could to "fool proof" the site by adding additional literature, tutorials, and features that make it hard to screw up. It's my opinion that anyone that spends a few seconds on the site and has an IQ over 20 can figure it out and see the value it provides. And most have - the feedback from the collecting community has been overwhelmingly positive, even more so than I initially thought it could be. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, not everyone feels that way.

Some people (many of them young kids), sign up, skip over the tutorials, try one price search that usually includes a bunch of misspellings or other blatant inaccuracies (you can't even Google something properly if you don't know the basics of querying/searching). Not only do many of them never come back, many of them find the need to tell me that "I shouldn't have the audacity to charge for such a product" or that "it's the worst tool they've ever used." At the same time, I've got the "wow, this is amazing" and "you're filling a huge need in the hobby" emails coming through. So what should I do?

Absolutely nothing. Read the negative comments, send them an "I'm sorry you didn't like the price guide" email, then delete the bad boys. It's true that for the 5,000+ subscribers we have that I'm getting more negative emails than I'd like, but I also know that we're meeting a need for a lot of collectors and that I'd be stupid to change. The majority of happy customers will never contact me, but when I couple the positive feedback from the hard-core collectors with the premium subscribers who have now been paying for over a month, I know we're on the right track. Sometimes it's real important to act on customer complaints. Other times you risk alienating the customers you really want by making adjustments for the ones you don't.

This definitely isn't unique to software or to the web - when I was an engineer we had one very unique product that solicited more hate mail than any in the history of the company. That same product also was a huge seller and had a more loyal fan base than any previous product in our history. From my brief experience, it seems like the more "out there" your product or application is from the norm (and lets face it, getting people to jump from a magazine to our price guide is pretty different), the more push back you'll get from some and the harder it'll be to hold ground and let the product do what it's supposed to do.

I contrast this with Detailed Image - our largest site - they get barely any complaints because there is no guesswork. They are an e-commerce site, and as long as people can place an order and receive it when they should, we never hear a complaint. If you go from one type of business to another, you have to realize the potential for varying reactions from your customer base or you'll go crazy trying to figure out what you did wrong. When in reality you're really doing something completely right. It's a different mindset, but it's necessary if you push the boundaries even a little.

On a side note - I haven't taken a vacation (that I can think of) since going to Orlando with my family in January 2005. Starting tomorrow I'll be camping up in beautiful Old Forge, NY for 3 days. It's only a 2.5 hour drive, but being up in the Adirondacks feels like you're in a different world. No cell phone, no laptop, no work - just my buddies and I with about 60 beers, some burgers, and a camp fire. Exactly what the doctor ordered :)