Hey dude--we're not a consumer service so rest easy! If you're running a business, you want a vendor that you can call (why folks running real businesses love Rackspace and hate AWS when things aren't working).
You keep digging this hole deeper. Some reasons why your message is just terrible:
- You are nobody to tell us (business owners) what we do or don't want.
- Can call and have to call are two very different things.
- Your reference to "real businesses" is prepotent and condescending. Also, I enjoyed the irony given you just admitted in another comment that Baremetrics is a sinking ship.
Run a business here, oh and we use Baremetrics too. To be 100% clear we never want to call you or Brian.
Listen to your customers here.
If there are people that want a call, offer the option, but please don't force it. And don't do sneaky updates to your terms which make this a requirement.
Just wanna chip in that we're also Baremetrics customers and that we also don't wanna call you.
usiegj00, don't make the mistake of assuming that most commenters here are just junior JavaScript programming trolling on a forum. Half your customers are reading this thread today.
> And don't do sneaky updates to your terms which make this a requirement.
Hmmm, doesn't a terms update require the customers to re-agree to the terms? So if they made the update to terms about requiring a call, and never requested customers re-agree to the terms, then technically the customer doesn't have to follow said terms, correct? The old terms are still in play, or the account must be canceled.
Of course the OP would say that, the Xenon crew (which acquired Baremetrics) used to be from Rackspace, and from that Corporate Development group that made acquisitions. So it's ex-Rackspace folks running the operations there now.
Wait. Are you in a leadership position at the acquiring company? Because you’re absolutely bungling this. You are displaying a cartoonish lack of communication and business sense. Just step away from your keyboard.
When running the business I run, I want vendors that I can call, but not vendors I have to call.
Being able to do everything important about a service myself is one of the criteria I use for selecting services, including cancellation.
And you most definitely can talk to AWS on the phone. With paid support (which I'm sure your real businesses are using, right?), you can get a call back almost instantly any time of day.
I genuinely mean no offence by this but this is one of the funniest possible responses you could have come up with. It's like something from a skit. I am dying of laughter here. This is great.
Please don't pile on like this, regardless of how you feel about cancellation policies. Maybe you don't owe a company better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.
It was truly, genuinely, not intended to be a pile-on. I thought he was at least partly being playful with that comment, since I could see myself doing that a little. Could be a misread on my part and I'll apologize in case it is. I didn't even vote him down.
Hi guys--Jonathan here at Bare. I've forced everyone's hand on this because... whelp... we've recently acquired the business and we ended up finding that we can be critical to Stripe Webhooks processing for folks on the older Stripe API. We literally will take down your invoicing on Stripe when a customer cancels. Then we have the unsavory task of working with customers that have canceled, did not complete their deprovisioning and then flame us for causing them outages. I love a lively debate but if you're a customer and love us, reach out to me NOW and I'll hear your feedback. If you're not a customer, then please, please if you never want to talk to your vendor, please go to ProfitWell or ChartMogul. Patrick and Nick are great guys and are crushing it and will gladly take your business. We are getting eaten from the bottom by platforms AHEM Stripe that are inspired by us, folks that clone us and you can see from our revenue transparency that we're the last in line for making money. That is going to change--by helping customers that really want to make more... make more. If you'd like to give me direct feedback, give me a ring at 855 252 6050. (I'm also a CISSP™, CREST CRT™ and Brown Cybersecurity dude--so if you've any legislation that speaks to this, let me know--for you folks quoting CA--we have business customers and they are over 13.)
In addition to the California law that has already been mentioned, would you care to comment on the Visa Product and Service Rules (which Stripe's TOS incorporates by reference) which state that if you process recurring payments, you must:
> Provide a simple cancellation procedure, and, if the Cardholder’s order was initially accepted online, at least an online cancellation procedure.
In California it is illegal to not allow online cancellation for services signed up for online. No exceptions, it has nothing to do with children.
If I were your customer I would make a point of taking every legal avenue to punish you for this behavior, and the reasoning here guarantees I wouldn’t think of touching your product.
If I can delete my entire GitHub account and screw everything and everyone connected to it with a single red warning prompt you can bet your ass it's possible to online cancel a service that may in some edge cases affect a customer.
Hiya--we're not a consumer service, so yeah, I'm asking people to call me. I'll respond a bit to this thread because HN is read by lots of folks, but it's also filled with trolls. Businesses talk to businesses. Especially when we're going to screw something up with low bandwidth communication. I'm a real dude and happy to chat to real folks running real businesses. Consumers should not be using our platform.
>Hiya--we're not a consumer service, so yeah, I'm asking people to call me.
Hey man, just wanted to let you know that you've accidentally placed free trial and mailing list buttons on your home page. Seeing as you're not a consumer service and all you probably want to take those down.
You've also accidentally integrated with the consumer service known as Stripe, who have the horribly consumerish feature of closing your account right in account settings. Might want to get on that before the Coalition of Serious Business finds out.
I’m not hung up on consumer vs business or legality. I’m trying to point out that you sticking to your guns in this situation sends the message that you don’t care about inconveniencing the people you’re doing business with. I understand these are soon-to-be-ex-customers who are about to have no value to you. But you have a chance here to leave them on good terms so they can recommend you to their friends. You are instead leaving a bad taste in their mouths.
Since you are targeting global customers, just FYI in a lot of European jurisdictions a written “expression of will” is enough. So nobody is buying this obligation to call ruse.
Uh, no, sending meat sounds over air is the worst form of communication ever, packed with ambient noise, other noise, aggressive compression, low volume, intermittent radio signal and heuristic commutation that works only every other time.
Only a fool would go get a lawyer instead of making a phone call. Especially, if you have employees who you can tell to make the phone call too. I suspect if you did get a lawyer the first thing they'll suggest is they call the number to get it cancelled and will ask if you called the number.
I'm not talking about a customer getting a lawyer involved. I'm talking about a DA looking into whether Baremetrics is violating CA law by not having an online-only cancellation option to corresponding with its online-only registration system.
> we ended up finding that we can be critical to Stripe Webhooks processing for folks on the older Stripe API. We literally will take down your invoicing on Stripe when a customer cancels.
What does this even mean? Are you saying that if you remove a customer’s Stripe integration, it prevents them from being paid by their own customers?
I think what they mean is this: if you're dissatisfied with invoice PDFs generated and sent by Stripe, it's fairly common to disable the sending and use an integration [0] to generate/send them out instead. And then if you cancel that integration, oops, your customers no longer get their invoices.
Hmm, interesting. They must know that I (we) are not using this, because I didn't even know this feature exists and our customers are happy getting sent Stripe invoices.
"I don't start new businesses: I let other fellows start them. They put all their money and their friends' money into starting them. They wear out their souls and bodies trying to make a success of them. They're what you call enthusiasts. But the first dead lift of the thing is too much for them; and they haven't enough financial experience. In a year or so they have either to let the whole show go bust, or sell out to a new lot of fellows for a few deferred ordinary shares: that is, if they're lucky enough to get anything at all. As likely as not the very same thing happens to the new lot. They put in more money and a couple of years' more work; and then perhaps they have to sell out to a third lot. If it's really a big thing the third lot will have to sell out too, and leave their work and their money behind them. And that's where the real business man comes in: where I come in." -- George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House, 1916
This quote is so uncanny in its relevance to investors/entrepreneurs and the topic at hand. At first I couldn't believe it was not satire. The character continues:
"But I'm cleverer than some; I don't mind dropping a little money to start the process. I took your father's measure. I saw that he had a sound idea, and that he would work himself silly for it if he got the chance. I saw that he was a child in business, and was dead certain to outrun his expenses and be in too great a hurry to wait for his market. I knew that the surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some. I explained my idea to some friends in the city, and they found the money; for I take no risks in ideas, even when they're my own. Your father, and the friends that ventured their money with him were no more to me than a heap of squeezed lemons."
Actually--they borrow their own money from their foreign subsidiaries to have full use of the cash in the US. Expect the incoming US president to suggest changes that allow Apple, Facebook, et al to allow this openly rather than through construction.
Thanks - Cooper and team really built a legion of passionate users, and it's been great working with them. It's a virtuous cycle when you work on a product that people care about enough to encourage you to keep building and refining.
I know what you mean, he's built a following just by being nice, listening well, and happily giving advice. I've really enjoyed working with him personally.
Wow, thanks everyone! I'm incredibly lucky to have such talented, motivated, and kind people around me.
I remain really interested in startups and growing companies that are part of the "integration economy" - those that have, as a core part of their business, the publication and/or consumption of APIs - those that make the whole equal more than the sum of the parts.
DocuSign, RightSignature and EchoSign have broken away from the rest of the market--it's really tough to create a lightweight contracting experience that is usable by 99% of the internet population. That plus a long lead time to enough adoption to pay bills and you've got a space that I bet will look roughly the same in 3 years' time.
You are right that now most people have experienced an electronic signature--even at the grocery checkout counter. But walk into your bank, apply to your local retailer or call the plumber and you'll be writing on paper. The general estimate is that we are at 1% adoption today. We also believe that in ten years nobody will be demanding more paper in their lives and business workflow.
Kinda crazy that we've stayed rooted to such an inefficient and archaic practice, eh?
We launched with an Ask HN in 2008. Now established (self-funded) and if you check it out you'll see the execution is pretty elegant (esp. the tech). :-) Hah! It's actually the best product I've ever had the chance to work on.
Hackers that want to find success might find some inspiration from Daryl. He's dope.
Really tho--if you have a passion for CS, but studied Physics, you have the capacity to excel. I fell in love with the ordered-ness of computers and self-taught myself programming in my teens. I went to college and studied Physics knowing I would likely not continue as a career physicist. During college I found that between my basic programming knowledge and physics requirements I had covered a large portion of the CompSci major (except for the upper division classes). I tested out of some and then took the others to end up with CompSci + Physics degrees.
Since graduating, I've benefited from my CompSci degree in areas like data structures, runtime complexity and parsing--but the rest of my CompSci skills were self-taught before or afterwards ("the Internet" was not in my CompSci curriculum).
I believe I've benefited more from my Physics training. Specifically--the Socratic method of looking at root causes in a systematic and problem-simplifying manner. And I've never been daunted by a hard problem or one that needs theoretical analysis for an elegant solution.
Given all of the above, some of the best programmers I've met have no degrees--so passion and willingness to self-learn trump all.
