Customer support as relationship-building mostly doesn't work

A founder wrote candidly that building customer relationships through support didn't pan out the way they hoped. The thread became a useful collection of hard-won lessons. One commenter noted that when you tell a customer 'I can't reproduce that' or 'I won't build that feature,' they don't feel the effort behind your answer, they just feel the no. Another observed that most 'helpful' support approaches are actually costly in ways that don't show up in customer satisfaction scores.

The pattern here connects to a broader founder frustration visible in HN threads regularly: the activities that feel most virtuous, talking directly to customers, providing detailed support, being transparent about product decisions, often produce worse outcomes than more transactional, scalable approaches.

The thread didn't land on a clean answer, but the consensus was that setting expectations early and being explicit about what level of engagement customers should expect matters more than the actual support quality.