John Fairbairn wrote:3. I haven't got time to do everything myself. One of my daughters looks after the site (and dealings with Anders, which is why I'm always a bit hazy on what the latest situation is), but she is not a go player, and I feel a bit reluctant to burden her with the sort of queries that come with a site. For example, a recent buyer apparently bought the Winter 2013 edition then complained that he wanted games from 2014. These niggles also tend to come back to me for resolution, taking time I can ill afford.
John, you may or may not know already that that buyer was me. I just wanted to clarify how your new website works, because I was using it for the first time (my previous copy was still on disc). I'm sorry if the question caused undue stress.
We were (are) working on a book of game commentaries and wanted to double check some of Younggil's intuitive statements about recent fuseki trends against a database of games from 2014.
I first went to
http://www.gogod.co.uk/ to update GoGoD. That site is dead. Most of your existing customers probably have it bookmarked like I did and now think that you've just disappeared or gone out of business. I've since updated all of your links at Go Game Guru, but other webmasters probably don't even know you have a new site. Do you still have control of gogod.co.uk? You could plug a major leak by just redirecting it to your new website and that can't hurt sales.
After some more digging, I found your new site and ordered GoGoD. We thought the games from 2014 were already included. It turned out that they weren't so we couldn't use it for the intended purpose. So we just let it go for the time being and got back to work while waiting for an update.
Shortly afterwards, Alison sent us an email saying "Dear Subscriber, We are pleased to announce that the Summer edition of the GoGoD database is now available on our website gogodonline.co.uk". Great! I logged into our account and tried to download the update, but there was no way to do so. At this point I realised that your website might require a new payment for every download and I replied to Alison's email to clarify this.
Since getting an answer we've ordered GoGoD from you again, and have paid you twice in as many weeks.
Why am I wasting time telling you this story? Because sometimes it's helpful to be able to see things from a customer's perspective. A lot of really good ideas can come from customer feedback if you pay attention.
You might think I'm an idiot. Perhaps I am compared to you. However, the fact that I don't automatically have perfect knowledge about how your website works doesn't make me an idiot. It just makes me normal.
You're not the only one who's busy or who feels stressed. Unfortunately, a lot of people these days have to deal with hundreds of emails per day. Most people doing 'knowledge work' are really busy and stressed. A lot of them are probably your customers (or would be customers). They don't have time to figure out how your website works or read every page on it. They expect you to follow certain conventions and provide important information up front.
If you don't make things clear and straightforward for customers (which isn't that easy and is always a work in progress), they'll probably do one of two things:
1. Leave and probably never come back, or
2. Send you an email asking for clarification before buying.
Does that make them annoying idiots? No, it makes them normal. Your website is a lot less important to them than it is to you. If it's confusing, the vast majority of people will just move on. The people who email you are actually doing you a favour, by letting you know that your website is confusing and giving you a second chance to make a sale.
If you're receiving too many of these kinds of emails, the way to fix it is to listen to what they're saying and gradually improve your website. The hive mind is actually really smart about certain things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HUI know that GoGoD is in part a hobby for you and that the Go market is relatively small. I know probably better than most people how hard it is to make money doing something Go related. I've offered before to work with you and to take care of the web development, marketing and customer service side of GoGoD (the parts of the process that you seem to dislike doing). That offer is still open if you ever change your mind. We already deal with the daily onslaught of emails, so a few more is neither here nor there. We already have a website about Go which people visit to buy Go related products.
If you don't want to work with us for whatever reason, there are probably other people here who'd be willing to team up with you (as Bantari suggests). It's important to work with someone who's knowledgeable enough about Go to answer questions (Mace Lee seems like another obvious person to team up with, though I imagine that has occurred to you already too). I briefly tried hiring a non-Go player to help with answering emails at one stage, and it didn't work out well at all. It ended up being more stressful and making more work for me.
Also, I don't think piracy deserves the attention that you sometimes seem to give it. Yes it's disappointing, but it's totally outside of our control and worrying about it just leads to a useless and distracting feeling of weltschmerz. It's better for all of us to focus on what we can do and to focus on making things better for the customers who
are paying for things. Forget about piracy.
Anyway, I guess I'll leave it at that because I already fear that this will come across in a more preachy way than I'd intended and may not be well received. I know that things aren't easy, but I'm another one of your customers who'd be very disappointed if GoGoD stopped.
