How we screwed up last week & continuous product deployment – Seasalt.ai Updates (10/7/2024)

Hello Friends of Seasalt.ai

This is a newsletter from Xuchen Yao , CEO of Seasalt.ai , a product builder who talks to our beloved customers every single day (including weekends).

I decided to write the newsletter myself because I realized it’s equally important to communicate what you wanted back to you. Here we begin –

Apology

Depending on where you are, around 9/30 (Monday) and 10/1 (Tuesday) last week, we had a big surge of user complaints of “wrong invoice”, “inaccurate charges”, “so many problems with your paid plan!”.

I want to explain why this happened, apologize for what happened, and express my gratitude to users who stayed.

I made a horrible mistake when updating our pricing plan, and it triggered at month’s end when the system started to automatically charge some customers with the wrongly calculated amount. The root causes were:

1. We introduced a brand new annual plan to our pricing plan
2. The newly added pricing plan increased the upgrade/downgrade combinations from 6 to 20 such as “upgrade from Standard Monthly to Premium Yearly” or “Downgrade from Premium Yearly to Free”.
3. There were 2 combinations that we did not get right
4. Thus some users had a billing error

Our team worked tirelessly until 2am to address all the mistakes. We also kept writing apology emails and refunding users. Eventually most users except two forgave us.

Among all this, the only good news to the users is the new annual plans: one can enjoy a 2 months discount if they decide to pay for a year. We want to roll this out more carefully in the next few weeks before the 11/1 billing cycle.

I also had backslashes from our engineers: Xuchen, why do we update so frequently? Every week? Is this even following Scrum?

It’s because I hear from our users (YOU) every single day and I cannot afford not updating YOU every week.?

At Seasalt.ai, I adopted the Continuous Product Discover & Delivery principle, paced at 1 week per release. Each full cycle of feature release is about 4 weeks:

I spent 1 week discovering pain points from users, another week defining it with PMs. Engineers spend one or more weeks developing it, and finally we release it every Thursday.

Once you get this rolling, it’s addictive to both product builders and users because there’s always something new. Eventually we converge to the following development cycle:

I call this “the chaotic good product development matrix”. It keeps our users happy and our product exciting. Every Thursday is an excitingly new day.

Again, I want to thank the users who went through the chaotically bad week last week with us. It’s you who kept us going!

Finally, a few users told me that they enjoyed watching the video tutorial for setting up a phone assistant. We published it to our wiki, where you can find how to set up call forwarding to a Voice AI agent on Android/iPhone, or for your businesses using US/Taiwan/Singapore telecom carriers: https://wiki.seasalt.ai/seachat/inbound-voice-agent/tutorial/

Feel free to drop me an email or book 30 minutes with me with any product feedback!

Thank you for your time and I’ll say you next week!

Xuchen Yao

CEO, Seasalt.ai

Talk to me