Keep Two Thoughts

Personal essays


Customers - Essay from Newsletter 159

Forming relationships with my readers

A transition

I was interviewed for a podcast last week. I tried to tell interesting stories but I was never sure whether it was an interview or a conversation and the topics seemed to jump.

It often happens that when you’re in the middle of something you can’t see the shape of the whole, so I could be wrong.

Anyway, at one point the interviewer asked me how long I came to work on iOS and I told the story of how I’d made a niche for myself of writing about Java on the Mac and was editor of the java.net site when two people from Apple took me out to lunch and told me that if I wanted to work on the Mac, I had to learn Objective-C.

Don’t worry - this is not a technical post about programming - it just starts there.

In any case, I learned Objective-C and a year later the iPhone was released. Unfortunately, you couldn’t initially write apps for it. No matter, I loved Objective-C and wrote a book on using it to develop for the Mac.

A year after that, you could write apps for the iPhone, you just couldn’t talk about it publicly. Bill Dudney and I developed a class for the Pragmatic Studio for the Mac and figured we’d adapt it for iPhone once the NDA dropped.

And so I was lucky enough to have gotten a good piece of advice and had fortunately listened to it and was well-positioned when the iPhone became available as a platform for third party developers.

There was a gold rush for iPhone developers and Bill, I, and Mike and Nicole (the owners of the Pragmatic Studio) were selling pick axes.

We taught a bunch of classes over a number of years. It was a first class operation. The students were always well taken care of - as were the instructors. On the last day of the class there was always an envelope sitting on the front desk with my name on it with a check for my instruction fee. I never had to wait to be paid nor ask to be paid.

It was an exceptional gig.

My Customers

But it ended. Mike and Nicole decided to go in another direction and they started to produce and sell online videos and they hit it big with their first offering. It just didn’t make sense for them to spend the time, money, and effort to do in person one-offs when they could work from their home studio and produce videos.

I understood but I was sad. It had been the ideal arrangement for me. I only had to focus on preparing the material and presenting the material. Those are the parts I love.

I didn’t have to work on any of the details for running the class, I didn’t have to sell the course, and I didn’t have to collect money or pay vendors. I got to do the fun parts.

Every year Apple releases things at their developer conference and every once in a while a topic is big enough that people might want a new book or course.

That year Apple released one of those topics and I wrote Mike and Nicole saying I’d like to develop a class on it and I’d like to write to the folks that had taken my class over the years to let them know.

“Sorry,” they said, “those are our customers. We have a relationship with them and don’t feel right about sharing that list.”

As you know by now, I’m the worst person in the world at marketing. But I knew that these were people who actually would like to know about new material from an instructor they’d learned from in the past.

It was a big lesson for me. Those customers weren’t my customers. I thought of them that way.

Well maybe not as my customers, but as my students. We’d had a relationship. It turned out, I didn’t have the rights to that relationship.

Books

While I was doing public and private training for Mike and Nicole, someone contacted me about writing the book that accompanied the Stanford University iPhone programming class.

They paid me a flat fee and, as per our agreement, I released the book myself for free on the Apple Books store.

Two years later they paid me the same fee to update the book to match the updated online classe. It had been another one of those big topic years and a rewrite was called for.

Money-wise, these had been great and welcome deals. I now had published books with half a dozen publishers. But like the training, I didn’t have a relationship with my customers.

When I moved publishers or even when I stayed with the same publisher, I had no way of reaching out to let them know I had written a new book.

So I decided to sell my own training and publish my own books and see how it went.

The upside is that I now am connected in some way to my customers. The downside is that, like any relationship, I need to take time away from creating and presenting the content.

Good days

Our relationships with companies is different than our relationships with people.

Often I get an email that talks to me like I’m some big company and complains about something or other.

When I reply and they can see I’m just a guy trying to make things right, the tenor of the conversation often changes.

I love that people take the time to point out typos. Usually, they’re very kind and say that I wrote this and I probably meant that.

Often it’s something as simple as me using “it’s” when I mean “its” but usually it’s something in my code sample where I’ve changed the name of a method in the sample project and forgotten to make the corresponding change in the book.

And then there are conversations like the following that make me smile. One reader wrote, “Almost done with the first chapter. Great read so far. I’m slowly progressing from knowing how to use async to why.”

That made my day. It’s exactly what I had planned to do - and often do - in my books. Start with the how and progress to the why.

The same person later posted three weeks later that he had only gotten to chapter 3 so far but it had caused him to go back and rewrite some of the code in his current project.

I wrote back that as much as I liked the material in chapter 3, I thought he’d really love what was coming next in chapter 4. As he worked his way through chapter 4 he found a couple of typos which he submitted for me to fix and just the other day he replied, “You weren’t wrong about chapter 4, but 5 was a real gold mine. I only have the last section left, but I know I’ll revisit this book many times.”

I spent more than a year writing this book and I’ll never make enough money to justify the effort, but comments like that make it all worth it.

Not so good days

I love engaging with readers about the content and the pedagogy. As I’ve said before, I love when a reader takes a moment to reply to this newsletter to share a story or a reaction.

Sometimes I have to engage with my customers about sales issues. It’s not my favorite activity but they usually appreciate my help and I feel better.

For example, from time to time I get an email from someone saying that they bought the book and they can’t download the free updates. It’s usually an issue where they are trying to log in with a different email account but it’s usually easy enough for me to resolve it by resending their original receipt.

I recently had someone contact me because they had purchased the book twice accidentally - they had pressed the Buy button a second time without meaning to.

I resolved that and refunded them their money.

This weekend I got an email about a sales issue that I’d never seen before.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and although I know better, I check my email.

Saturday at 3 am, I read an email from someone who bought my book but hadn’t had time to read it and they wanted a refund.

Wait, I’ll share it with you.

“On March 14 I purchased a digital copy of your Async Cafe book thinking that I’d have some time to read it while on paternity leave, however I was sorely mistaken with how little time I actually have to read the book while taking care of my new child. I was curious if I could please get a refund for this in order to use the money towards diapers and formula.”

Take a moment to consider how you’d reply.

OK

I have to say, my first reaction was to think, “I never knew that was possible.”

I have an iPad filled with magazine subscriptions I haven’t read and video subscriptions I haven’t watched. I have cancelled some of them and continued with others, but it never occurred to me to contact the creators and say, “hey, I haven’t watched any of the videos, can I have my money back?”

My second reaction was to think, “WTAF”. I decided to sleep on it and see what I thought in the morning.

I usually fall right back to sleep but I tossed and turned for an hour thinking of the explanation I’d give this person and what it was they needed to understand.

I spent more than a year writing this book and I’ll never make enough money to justify the effort.

And paternity leave? I wish I had benefits that allowed me to spend time on things important to me outside of work.

And then I fell asleep. Clearly, I’m not a “don’t go to sleep mad” kind of person.

I woke up the next morning and I knew that none of my reasons mattered to this person.

Either refund them the money or don’t.

Although it is likely not a good precedent, I decided to refund their money.

I did so and replied to their email with the short email, “OK”.

I felt good and moved on.

I can go back to creating content which is what I really like.

The person receiving the refund never sent me a simple thank you.

It still feels better that I can have a direct relationship with my readers. Even this reader.

Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 159. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe


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