It's great to see someone from a company pop up in a discussion to help out a user, but this is absolutely not the way to run a company. It leads to the Google approach to support, where you can only get a non-automated reply only if you raise enough stink by on social media, or happen to know someone who works there.

Now, each individual case where an employee unexpectedly helps out is great, but this is NOT 'how you run a company'. You should focus on getting your general customer service and support lines to be good.

I've never dealt with this company before, or even heard of them until today, so their normal lines of support might be great. This isn't meant to be a specific criticism of Charge.

However, it does seem odd to me that a phone company appears to give no contact phone numbers on their web site. That's not a good sign!

Phone support is a hard thing to do well. And we have a pretty high bar for support. So I know this sounds like a dodge, but we really are waiting until we can confidently roll out strong phone support to push it.

For now, whenever a customer has a problem that can't be solved via email, one of the founders will call.

Obviously that doesn't scale, so we need to figure out phone support, but we're aiming for what I call "Zappos-level" quality and that's easier said than done.

When you have a page advertising "features for nerds", you damn well better be active in the Hacker News conversation about it....

Company phone numbers usually only lead to an automated phone tree and maybe if you stab zero enough time (since it's likely not an option anywhere in the tree itself), some very underpaid person at the very end doing "support" who barely speaks English, can only read from a prepared script, and doesn't have the authority to help you with anything important.

I just expect this from any tech company today. It's not like you're going to get assistance from anyone at Google, for instance. I tried forever when someone was abusing our open source trademark and then doxxed me on blogspot. But all the "official" channels were completely ignored. I think my unlisted home phone number and old office address is still posted there with a call for people to harass me for DMCAing pirated commercial software they had hosted on random locker sites that used my GPLed code in violation of the license to package it.

Best advice!

That's not scalable when it tries to sell to everyone, however.

really depends on the product

It's how you run a company that has a high-margin (aka "premium", "expensive") product with a small userbase.

This is your expected outcome when you are wealthy.