Topic: Building a Bitcoin business - best practices suggestions (Read 2184 times)

Back to the OP (before the pointless hijack on page one).

Building a business is straight-forward.  Building a successful one is harder.

1: Have a product or service that people want or need.  Appropriate price/quality points.
2: Have a selling point - why they should buy from you.
3: Make sure you can source and supply with a positive margin.
4: If things go wrong, make sure you know how to fix it.  If the customer is unhappy or becomes a bad debt, how much will this hurt.
5: Stay on top of regulatory issues (taxes/licensing as applicable).

Building trust is hard, destroying it is easy. 

We are a small startup,
We offer 24/7 customer service.
All emails are responded to within about an hour (give or take)
We have 4 employees.
If you other "start-ups" can't handle 6 hours a day in emails, then you deserve to fail as you are obviously to busy and don't care about your start-up.
Seriously, I see people waiting days for an answer from bitcoinexchange.cc, let alone a week or more for payment. That is absolutely absurd. I see all sorts of retarded (for lack of a better term) "businessmen" in this community that are more than likely some idiot drug addict who wants to make millions for about an hour of work every couple a days.

Bitcoin is severely lacking in Customer Service and real Businessmen.

If you want to see an example of how a company should handle its customers,
https://bitcoinbux.com
This is not a plug, this is the first time I am mentioning the lack of service with other exchanges^^^, But I am a bitcoin user too and it makes me pretty angry when I see the way people treat other peoples money as a side job that they might get around too. Why the hell even start a company in the first place if you are not going to try to make it the best that it can be???

Too the bitcoin "start-ups", work harder, we are breathing down your neck and nipping at your heels.

I try not to use a chemistry analogy on this board, for fear of bringing the mole out.

Awesome! We now have three wings to our vast corporate connivance or conspiracy or company or committee or enterprise or virtual entity or fictional multi-personality person or legal but not actually a human being person or whatever clever name our lawyers come up with for something that can do what we can do yet cannot be persecuted for doing so:

1) The testing industry. Provides all useful or necessary testing of any and all things any customers wish to have tested, possibly in proportion to how much the customers wish to invest in the testing industry.

2) The dumbing-down and/or ergonomics industry. How dumb is dumb enough? In a free market, should dumb organisms be eaten? Is it dumb to eat organisms? Which organisms should be eaten, and if so which if any other organisms should be served as appetizer and/or dessert? And similar questions of ease of being used and how eager customers should be to be used, and whether customers are as usable as they can possibly or potentially be and all that good useful stuff.

3) By documentation, do you mean passport, DNA sequence, number of fingers and toes, number of eyes, colour of eyes and so on or something more along the lines of which bylaw number in which jurisdiction does or does not apply with or without the application of whoozit versus whoozit whichyearwasthatagain and so forth?

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4) The source code. Either that IS the documentation or there isn't anything TO document other than the excuses for avoiding fully documenting aka making up excuses for obfuscating?

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-MarkM-

This is where properly designing your business and product/service comes into play.  If you sell something that's difficult to figure out or unreliable, then you will get inundated with support requests.  Test the product or service highly before releasing it, make it easy to use and provide all the necessary documentation.  I suppose this marks the difference between amateurs and professionals.

Okay, lets whip out some litmus or phenethalene and check the ph of:

- Which cares more about their customers, Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates?

- Which cares more about you, Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates?

- Did you, before googling as a result of this message, know who Linus Torvalds is?

- Did you, before googling as a result of this message, know who Bill Gates is?

- Which is your operating system of choice: Mac, Linux, BSD, BeOS, Solaris or other (specify)?

- Do you care about that built it in his garage chap, I forget his name, does iPods now I think?

- Have you ever heard of Steve Jobs?

- Who do you care about more: Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates?

- Do you care about Steve Jobs? (If so, how much? More than Linus or Bill?)

Maybe the rest of the obvious questions could be left to the reader, depending on the previous answers, but just in case certain combinations of answers might correlate with readers' talent at projecting trends or deducing patterns maybe I should go on?

-MarkM-

P.S. Am I incorrectly recalling the other ph test (the clear or pink liquid not the red/purple/blue test) or does the CSI television franchise tell us correctly it also detects blood? (Is what does detect blood such a deep secret they lie in the show or something?)

Nobody is saying customer service is useless, but small one man startups cannot afford to spend 6 hours a day answering emails and questions.

Doesn't matter how much he wants to be the nicest supportive person on earth, he will not have the time.

Customers need to chill the fuck out and wait however long it takes to get a reply instead of jump to SCAM SCAM SCAM if you don't receive an email reply within 2 hours.

I would note that in the example given the forum is quite distinct from "the company's own forum", or even a forum.

So let us consider exactly what kind of a forum this specific forum-in-question is.

Is it:

- A forum whose administrators are aware of techniques criminals might use to evade being detected as such?

- Aware of the pitfalls to which customers allowed untutored and unaccompanied into a scam site's own special forum just for those people lucky enough to be their customers can fall into?

- A marketing arm of an umbrella association of some kind whose primary goal is to get you to buy into at least one of the companies who all maintain a presence on the forum and use it as a common pool of customers?

Etc...

-MarkM-

^^This.  One thing that always frustrated me about MyBitcoin was their total absence from the forum.  Nobody really knew who "they" were.  You don't necessarily even have to tie the business to a real person.  As long as you have a friendly presence on the forum and answer customer inquiries promptly, then you will get Bitcoin business.  I think the folks at Tradehill provide a great example.

you do not need to reveal your name or identity but you do need

prompt replies to any and all questions via forums email or whatever else you have or use
be very transparent, tell them what you are doing, keep your logs of what you do public and often.
be very clear to the conditions for refunds/returns
NO ADVERTISEMENT(to clarify, you can advertise your product elsewhere, but do not advertise for revenue. exceptions are webs of trust links and your own products/offerings)
other stuff

I don't give a damn about the car mechanic who doesn't give a damn about me, whether he fixes my car or not.

I'm not referring to advertising execs, sales reps, or good looking "talking heads" - I'm talking about businesses that demonstrate that they sincerely care about me.

You seem to think I'm endorsing gimmicks, empty promises, and slick ad campaigns but that couldn't be farther from the truth. I'm saying that a business owner that doesn't care about his customers once they've spent their money will have customers that don't care about him.

So you probably don't give a damn about the car mechanic who actually fixes your car, you care about the fawning smilie-face that engages you on the way into the Wal-Mart or Canadian Tire and convinces you to use their car-service offering so they can try to get mechanics as cheaply as they get fawning smilie-faces?

Do you even actually investigate the conditions the (powers behind and maybe oppressing the) marketing smiliefaces who talk you into buying this that or the other thing impose upon their suppliers / back room workers who actually do the real work?

-MarkM-

If a car mechanic fixes my automotive problem but I don't feel like he gives a damn about me as a customer, I'll happily pay him ... and never return.

If a car mechanic fixes my problem and I leave feeling like he sincerely cares about me, I'll think of him first if something else goes wrong, if I buy another vehicle and it needs work, if I have some other issue I'd be willing to pay to have him look at, etc. and I'll sing his praises to anyone who will listen. A good mechanic who practices good customer service doesn't need to sabotage someone's car to get repeat business.

If they came back it would imply that my fix of their problem did not work.

They have a problem, they call me in to fix the problem, I am out of work unless they have another problem or I didn't really properly finally all fixed now fix their problem afterall.

I hope you aren't thinking I should therefore arrange some more problems, if not for past customers then maybe for potential future ones?

-MarkM-

Let me see if I understand you correctly; you're actually proud of the fact that your customers never come back?

And FYI, every business that has customers is a "customer service business".

Well gee, you don't imagine that I actually have any customers any more, do you?

For one thing, once I automate things for them they figure hey what do they need me for anymore. Programmers, like doctors (or health workers maybe in general) goal is to put themselves out of work. But unlike doctors or health workers in general, we programmers will put everyone else out of work too if need be to accomplish our goal!

Are you implying that customer service businesses cannot be trusted because their secret agenda is to steal your customers? If so yes, this is a  big problem with customer service reps, leading to the whole war over the customers crap, how do you make the customer respect you more than they respect your service reps, when will your secretary walk off with your customer list to a competitor or start up as a competitor and so on and so on and so on.

So how can a customer service business gain credibility? Hmm...

-MarkM-

We like dealing with bitcoin companies that have a voice on the forum. Why? Because we know if there are issues most likely they will fix it and fast. Quality customer service gets our business.

MarkM,

Automated services are great and, once I get a good BTC SCI installed, my BitBrew site should be totally automated as far as the customer is concerned for purchases.

However, I put up a Contact Form and stress customer service because:

• If someone has a question, I want to answer it.
• If someone has a concern, I want to address it.
• If someone has a problem, I want to fix it.
• If someone has a suggestion, I want to consider it.

Ignore the fact that your customers require your personal attention at your own peril.

I am biased as I come from a programming background.

So my take on a business for a free open source do it yourself at home person to person currency forcused business is if you want customer service feel free to provide it, I run the thing on a server because I don't want a human to have to run it I want a computer to be able to run it. The whole point is to teach computers to do the crap that humans do not want to do, and for a lot of people making money is something they do not want to do but the people who keep telling us they are the great makers of money usually screw us over, we learn in history that they do not actually make useful (to us)  money,  they are not reliving us of the work of making money they actually provide us with the job of turning over our money to them and getting screwed.

So the whole point of a business model in which the business is done by computers is so humans do not have to do that crap.

If you want customer service write a program that will service you the way you want to be serviced! Frankly I don't even care if you want the computer to service you with a dildo, there are dildos for that purpose and there is software for that purpose.

So all this screaming about customer service often seems like more of the same refusal to learn, refusal to chip in and help, gimme gimme gimme mentality that already gives us plenty enough hard time in our quest to develop automated systems to free humans from having to do much of anything other than keep improving the automation.

So if you want customer service, awesome, please do provide customer service! Whichever apps seem to you to lack enough customer service are maybe the ones you should first devote the most of your customer-servicing time to.

Part of why we develop open source is so we can also say hey look if you find using my server to run the app for you bothers you due to my not letting your computer-illiteracy or whatever drag me away from working on automating things please just go ahead and run the stupid thing yourself on your own desktop or server.

If your business involves anything other than just only bitcoins, then you can gain credibility by doing it successfully without bitcoins first, then add in bitcoins once we have all seen that your business works fine with USD and or GBP or whatever normal folk where you live already use.

Because if your business is not viable without bitcoins, what the heck reason is there to think it will work with bitcoins?

Bitcoins are not a magic software-pill that turns business failure into business success.

So first be a viable working successful business.

THEN add bitcoins.

-MarkM-

Why would a small business need a full time support staff of 10 people?

If your business has that many issues requiring hands on intervention on a daily basis, it's doomed for other reasons.