How fast is fast enough?

I have documented at least a couple times the effects of poor or non-existent response times from businesses and organizations here on this Island and elsewhere. To restate the obvious, if your primary means of interacting with those outside your organization is email, social media, or other channels, then you should strive to answer queries in a timely manner. If you don’t have people in a dedicated customer support role, it might be a good idea to set some kind of expectations in terms of when you can reply (Facebook does this for you via algorithm). This I think is polite and makes good business sense.

I’ve been looking for dev help since I came back to the Island, which as of this week was 2 years ago, and have largely failed to find people who fit my niche. This is due to my social awkwardness, bootstrapping, and the simple fact that the pool of talent is not that deep. It’s not difficult to find help off-Island, a simple Instagram message this week immediately lead to someone interested, but I like or have been more comfortable kicking off the work in person.

The positive side effect of this is self-sufficiency, and a return to learning to code, at least until I can afford to hire regularly remote.

But I can only do so much and when Sheryl had a new project arrive that might tie in nicely with our podcast work, I reached out to hire a popular dev team. I also got on a Zoom call with an American company who has a subscription product which is, I would realize, about 1/3 the price of the dev.

I started reaching out about a month ago about the possibility of doing some work. It was very casual and I was at first just looking for some advice, while at the same time seeing if they would be someone easy to work with. Many relationships start this way, a simple hello, questions, praise of their prior work, or even a request to have a short talk.

It took a week to get a reply. I chose the wrong method to reach out, and at the time I wasn’t in a rush.

Finding out that our timeline to get a quote was moved up a month, I emailed the dev and asked if they could meet the rough scope of work outlined in an email or recommend someone who could. They replied immediately and said yes they could do the work, in fact they had already finished a rough prototype of that exact product. How fortunate.

Over the course of a week, and after I wrote a very rough software spec., constant promises to reply to email were broken and I had to chase them to see if they were truly able to join the project. They kept promising to get back to me. They never did.

If you are busy, or uninterested, it’s best to set expectations or simply say no. Saying NO can be liberating. Or set up processes to deal with customer requests.

Yesterday, I reached out anonymously to the American company via their online chat window and asked if they could give me a written quote for their product. They cheerfully replied, yes, let me see if I can work that up for you, and less than 10 minutes later I had a quote and rough statement of work.

My needs were extremely simple and didn’t require a complex plan upfront. The work didn’t even need to start for months.

Which company will get the most repeat business and future recommendations?