Building a Bitcoin business - best practices suggestions

[Cryptoman]

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

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.

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[markm]

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

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.

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-

[Phinnaeus Gage]

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.

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?)

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

[WiseOldOwl]

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.

[PatrickHarnett]

It seems to me that the biggest hurdle to more people adopting BTC is the issue trust.  How does one know if a merchant is reputable?  We all know that when we go to Amazon.com and send them money, the product we ordered shows up like clockwork in a few days.  There is no question as to the soundness of the transaction. 

With this being said, does anyone have good ideas on how to foster such trust in a newly launched BTC business?  Do you start by doing very small transactions in order to build up a rep?  Do you participate in the forums extensively so people are comfortable with your organization? 

Any ideas are welcome.....it seems like a very difficult problem, and one that has yet to be really addressed.

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.