tylerrooney

It's ironic that one of the product shots includes a child using a $599 laptop while wearing $549 headphones.

I worked at Amazon 2005-2008 as a Software Dev Engineer. To hammer home company culture, there were two awards which could be awarded at the Quarterly All-hands meeting * The "Just Do It" Award which recognized someone just fixing some obvious problem at was in front of them but not responsibility * The "Door Desk" Award for frugality, named in honour of the basic door-frame-four-leg desk everyone worked on.

In many ways, the Door Desk award was for simplicity. I remember, one time, someone got an award for getting rid of some dumb operations room with some big unused LCD TVs. When you won these awards, you rarely got any kind of reward. It was just acknowledgement at the meeting. But that time, they literally gave the guy the TVs.

I realize this article is one data point but I'd offer that I have a completely opposite data point.

1. We accidentally turned off our main Intercom in-trial campaign for a segment of users during an AB test and were surprised how much lower the conversion was. We re-ran the test ensuring both sides had our Intercom in-trial campaign on. It increased in-trial conversion by 25%.

2. We do pay a lot for Intercom (10 person support team, tens of thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of leads) but we also use it a god damn ton for new customer campaigns, activation, churn prevention, reactivation, etc and by in-app, email, and mobile notifications. Replacing all of this would not be cheap.

3. Intercom can definitely be a crutch for bad UX. But you'll only know of those problems if you're actually getting this feedback. It's then on you to have the internal process for addressing common questions or requests in order to reduce the volume of help requests for specific topics.

We have a staggering number of customer who pay us through PayPal because they don't have a credit card or a debit card which clears through Mastercard/Visa (which is the standard in most countries).

Perhaps someone who runs their own company can answer this question for me: If you don't use PayPal, how do you receive payment from customers who don't have credit cards?

Are your customers exclusively in North America? Or do you just write those customers off (which is a valid option if PayPal integration would be that painful)?

Adding PayPal as a payment option has been an enormous pain for us but a non-consequently amount of our revenue comes from customers either without credit cards or with cards which always fail on international transactions. I see no alternative to PayPal for these customers.

Yes, the 100K is based on a back-of-the-envelope, but for a startup with zero revenue every development and design hour we can spare helps us focus on the real task at hand: figuring out our market fit and making a great product.

This is less about supporting this browser or that browser and more about making sound business decisions and putting our users’ needs first. We’d like to think they would rather see requested features over support for a browser they don’t use.

I think you could just use Chrome Frame if it was absolutely required but it's just never come up.