Hi guys, please don’t take this the wrong way, I know you have all hands on deck developing the product, but…
I bought the product through Appsumo, I’m on tier 3, but to be honest, I’m wondering why you don’t answer questions on Appusmo? I mean, there are people who are interested in your product (since it’s still available for Appsumo Plus members) and would be happy to spend money if they could get simple answers to their questions. You could put that money back into development.
It’s too bad you’re not paying attention to these people and the extra money they’re making, isn’t it?
Thanks @onay for asking this question because the community deserves an answer to it and thanks @thisthatjosh for offering help but let me give some context about this.
While we see great demand on the open source and the lifetime deal side of Activepieces, we’re still searching for the best way to build a growing company out of this great base.
We have two options, either to scale our team and burn, which means we take a steep risk to either grow or die, or on the other hand stretch our runway until we figure out how we can create a balanced company that grows usage and revenue altogether.
Burning cash quickly doesn’t look like a healthy path for Activepieces. We love that many users loved what we built and we don’t want it to die. So we choose to operate at a minimal capacity at this stage of the company.
This means most of our resources will go to (1) improve the product to meet the community’s expectations and (2) build and sell enterprise additions.
If we had the option to disable new questions on the AppSumo page and keep a search functionality, we’d have chosen that instead of leaving questions unanswered. However, I go every week or two and answer the ones left unanswered.
To make this a bit helpful, most of the questions on AppSumo fall in these categories:
Pieces: Questions about specific pieces or their triggers or actions. These answers can be obtained much faster through our Pieces page and the Feature Requests category here.
Limitations: We wrote definitions of the limitations on the Pricing page so they can check what each of them means.
Use cases: Some users want to confirm if their case is doable on Activepieces, this is a consultation role rather than answering product questions. A better way is to jump right into our free tier and do a proof of concept of it, and ask specific questions on the community instead.
Our status and growth: Some users want to know how fast we’re growing and if development is active, but these things are reflected on many places like our announcements on Discord and here.
We wish we have much more capacity to answer more questions but we also encourage everyone to check out the existing resources to get their questions answered.
Sorry to everyone who wasn’t treated as they deserve, I hope you’ll see the impact as an ever improving product and a sustainable company being built on top of it!
@ashrafsam , I suggest you post a brief introduction as to why you don’t answer questons as often as peeople would like, based on what you’ve said above and put in points 1 to 4 with links to the sections mentioned in each point.
It might be worth posting it as a reply to one of the most recent aproprate questions and also on the founder’s message perhaps at the top as a latest update.
Thank you for your detailed response @ashrafsam. I completely understand and know how much energy and effort goes into customer service. @BharatKaravadra 's suggestion is not bad. At least this way you have a detailed excuse when people don’t get answers. You should think about that.