> Our sacred cow was excellent US-based phone support. That is quite expensive. If there were bugs in our product, users would call in, and our call center costs would increase because we'd have to have more people working. So every week in our team meeting, we would look at summaries of calls, and take on engineering work to address the most common class of problems. That let us scale up the business and still provide friendly and competent phone support, because we were reducing the problems that people called in about.
> Because we had that "sacred cow", every obscure bug that we spent months fixing not only made the product better and were intellectually stimulating to finally figure out, but had a concrete impact on how costly it was to deliver the service.
> What most companies would do here to reduce costs is simple. Don't fix DERP bugs, just charge for it. Don't fix "black screen" bugs, just hide the phone number on your website so people can't figure out to call.
> Our sacred cow was excellent US-based phone support. That is quite expensive. If there were bugs in our product, users would call in, and our call center costs would increase because we'd have to have more people working. So every week in our team meeting, we would look at summaries of calls, and take on engineering work to address the most common class of problems. That let us scale up the business and still provide friendly and competent phone support, because we were reducing the problems that people called in about.
> Because we had that "sacred cow", every obscure bug that we spent months fixing not only made the product better and were intellectually stimulating to finally figure out, but had a concrete impact on how costly it was to deliver the service.
> What most companies would do here to reduce costs is simple. Don't fix DERP bugs, just charge for it. Don't fix "black screen" bugs, just hide the phone number on your website so people can't figure out to call.