The Aftermath · Debug Season · Pulse Beat
The week after was the worst and the best of the whole year. Six accounts closed. The angry man posted his four paragraphs on a forum, and for a day there was a small, hot fire of comments under it…
The week after was the worst and the best of the whole year.
Six accounts closed. The angry man posted his four paragraphs on a forum, and for a day there was a small, hot fire of comments under it, most of them harsh, a few surprisingly fair. Vikram read every one. He answered the unfair ones once, calmly, and the fair ones twice.
He had expected the money to go. It did, a little: three cancellations, a refund, a subscription not renewed. What he had not expected was the other direction. A programmer from Bengaluru wrote: I read your email. I'm going to put my whole team on Pagewise because of it. A journalist asked, politely, for an interview, and he said no, and she said she'd wait.
Seventeen new people signed up that week, which was a record. Most of them, when he asked, said some version of the same thing: I read how you handled it.
He wrote it on the sticky note, under the others: Honesty isn't a cost. It's the product. And then, underneath, because he was still himself: Also, test the deletes.