Getting Satisfied, by Jeffrey Veen

Getting Satisfied

Lane comes bounding into the bar and doesn't even order a drink. He just sits down and starts talking.

"So, we have this idea," he says to me, all excited and waving his hands.

"Uh huh," I reply as casually as I can muster.

"We want to replace every 'contact' page on the web."

"Who is this 'we'."

"Me and Thor and Amy."

"Shouldn't that be 'Thor, Amy, and I?'"

"PAY ATTENTION! This is a big idea. Every contact page. On the whole web. You know why? Because every time you have some problem with some company and you go to their contact page and then fill out some form or send them an email you get back that stupid 'Dear customer, thank you for your note' nonsense. Have you noticed that people post to their blogs full of wonder and amazement when they actually have some problem resolved by an ACTUAL person from some company? Shouldn't that be the STANDARD response? Should that be what people EXPECT?"

"Well, sure," I say. "But companies can't keep up. So they outsource support and then I've got to deal with someone who doesn't really care about the product trying to help me by reading from a script."

"YES! So what do you do then?"

"Well, I don't even bother with that anymore. I do a search and look for someone else who had the problem and happened to write about how they resolved it."

"AAAHHAAA!!!" People at other tables are glancing at us now. "That's it exactly! And you know the best places for that to happen? In forums. Where experts and geeks and novices all get together and swap workarounds and hacks and people build up reputations. So we'll take all the best features of these forums and let anyone make one for any product or service and let companies participate as well and even claim their products' boards. We're going to call it 'Satisfaction.'"

"That's really cool."

"I know! Will you be one of our advisors?"

"I'd love to. Want a beer?"

"Duh."

Congrats to the whole team at Satisfaction on announcing their funding and launch last week. And while the conversation above may not perfectly match reality, the level of excitement certainly does. I can't wait to see what the team does next.

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 18 September 2007 at 9:55 AM. It was filed under Business, Personal. | View blog reactions

Comments

1. On 18 September 2007 at 10:54 AM Eric Meyer wrote:

Actually, Lane was fine: "Me and Thor and Amy", as a variant of "Thor, Amy, and me" is preferred to using "I" in that circumstance---unless you think that Lane, had he been the only person planning to replace all the contact forms on the web, should have answered "I" instead of "me".

(Oh, and major congratulations to the Satisfaction people!)

2. On 18 September 2007 at 11:49 AM Just Some Guy, You know. wrote:

I can't imagine why the US dollar is slipping. Investing in a company that is counting on internet users to provide free tech support for them?

I hope GoogleAds helps pay the bills. I certainly won't.

3. On 18 September 2007 at 1:11 PM marrije wrote:

That's an excellent story, regardless of whether it's true or not. And I happen to think this is going to work very well. Hurray for Lane et.al.!

4. On 18 September 2007 at 2:15 PM Otis wrote:

Cool story! I met a guy in LA doing something similar: http://www.faqqly.com.

5. On 18 September 2007 at 4:19 PM JGaetano wrote:

Hey, the dot-com bust called, they want their lack of a business plan back.

Good luck guys, it's a whole new paradigm.

6. On 18 September 2007 at 5:42 PM Mike D. wrote:

Funny. All I'm thinking as I read this entire post is "it's actually 'me' and not 'I'" and then frickin' Meyer's gotta go ahead and steal my grammatical thunder with the first comment. Bah!

7. On 18 September 2007 at 9:52 PM Thor Muller wrote:

Wow, Jeff, you actually evoked Lane's cadence and energy perfectly in this post. Thanks for all the support.

8. On 19 September 2007 at 6:37 AM fons wrote:

So how does this compare to http://answers.yahoo.com/ ? Even Google retired its service because they couldn't compete with Yahoo...

9. On 19 September 2007 at 4:37 PM lane wrote:

What can I say? I'm excitable.

For various and sundry responses to the points raised here, check out the Metafilter thread.

And Jeff, we've got to sit down for another design session soon...

10. On 19 September 2007 at 4:40 PM lane wrote:

Ahem. This Metafilter thread:
http://www.metafilter.com/64669/Get-Satisfaction

11. On 17 October 2007 at 9:56 PM Simon Rumble wrote:

They just spammed me. I just got an email from "The Survival Food Store" to the unique address I used to register on Satisfaction. They've either sold their mailing list or been cracked.

Not the customer service experience I was expecting.

12. On 18 October 2007 at 8:56 PM Simon Rumble wrote:

Looks like they had a bit of an exploit that exposed real email addresses:
http://getsatisfaction.com/satisfaction/topics/satisfaction_have_spammed_me