[Edit: Substantially rewritten in light of #2, below.]
Thank you. It looks like Postdesk started a public controversy while leaving out two critical pieces of information:
1) William's actual e-mail, which expresses his disappointment in a reasonably polite fashion. Normally, this sort of e-mail should merit a polite response and a refund.
2) The allegation that William send the email to the entire engineering team (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152203). This changes the context of Karp's remarks significantly, because it means that Karp had to weigh two things: The feelings of a disappointed customer, and the morale of his already-stressed engineers.
In this case, I actually sympathize a bit with Karp. He needs to take care of his customers, but he also needs to take care of his people. That puts his remark "...we have no interest in customers that will go out of their way to discourage our entire team..." in a rather different light. That's not an easy situation to resolve well.
I wish that Postdesk had provided more facts (and less editorial comment) in the original article.
Im sorry but this doesnt hold water when tumblr has 40 million in vc funding. If they were bootstrapped then yes maybe. But if his team is stressed out maybe they could start hiring people. Instead they are causing situations like this to happen.
Also im sorry but i dont care how stressed out you are. As a ceo you have a responsibility to treat your customers with respect. Especially since what the customer was asking was so simply and basic and straightforward. Its not like the emailer sent a nasty mean email calling everybody names and asking them why the service isnt working in harsh ways and being disrespectful.
He sent a very polite email to the people working there. Theres absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. Its part of doing business and doing customer service.
The response frankly was absolutely ridiculous. At the very least the response could have been more polite and simply said we apologize and are working on it.
Given Tumblr's explosive popularity, there's no way that they aren't a giant ball of stress right now. It's certainly nice to have $40 million, but that's of little use in the short term: As Fred Brooks famously pointed out, adding more programmers to a late project makes it later.
So the people who understand Tumblr's systems are almost certainly working nights and weekends and going slowly insane. And there's no relief for them: If Tumblr hires more staff, their current engineers will still have to deal with all the crises and train the new people.
It's the CEO's job to deal with disappointed and angry customers. But it's also the CEO's job to deal with programmers who are working 70 hour weeks and who are just about ready to snap and move to a commune. Startups can be full of bad craziness.
In a perfect world, customers would talk to the CEO and the customer support team, and not try to directly contact the engineering team. That's not to say that Tumblr handled this especially well. But again, it's not an easy situation.
Thank you. It looks like Postdesk started a public controversy while leaving out two critical pieces of information:
1) William's actual e-mail, which expresses his disappointment in a reasonably polite fashion. Normally, this sort of e-mail should merit a polite response and a refund.
2) The allegation that William send the email to the entire engineering team (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152203). This changes the context of Karp's remarks significantly, because it means that Karp had to weigh two things: The feelings of a disappointed customer, and the morale of his already-stressed engineers.
In this case, I actually sympathize a bit with Karp. He needs to take care of his customers, but he also needs to take care of his people. That puts his remark "...we have no interest in customers that will go out of their way to discourage our entire team..." in a rather different light. That's not an easy situation to resolve well.
I wish that Postdesk had provided more facts (and less editorial comment) in the original article.