Me: NO IT DOESN’T
Reader: So why is that the title of your post jackass?
Me: I want people looking for "Typepad sucks" to find out that they don’t suck.
The other day I wrote that I hated Typepad due to some frustration with their new features. How spoiled am I? They give me double the storage and double the bandwidth and I’m complaining about how it’s hard to do something that the new features weren’t really designed for. I’ve already deleted that post but it must have caught someone’s eye.
The product manager at Typepad emailed me and was like: "I heard you are having issues, get at me dog." He didn’t say it like that but that’s how I thought of the email in my mind. Receiving an unsolicited email from a product manager about a complaint is unheard of. My brain could almost not comprehend it. Was this a company that actually cares what the lowly customer actually thinks? Can you imagine getting an email from a company’s product manager saying they heard you’d had a complaint and we’re curious if they could make it better? He even apologized about the unsolicited email. Good manners and everything… Wow.
So I emailed him back and suggested we chat over IM due to the nature of my complaint. He writes me back and we have a discussion on IM. All of a sudden there is a human on the other end of the line. This was not elevator music and some annoying woman’s voice saying they value your call. This was a person trying to make his product better by initiating contact with me.
I tell him my problem, he adds it to the list of things to do and says they’ll try to make it better. I tell him about other complaints and he tells me they’ve already fixed a bunch of them. I also tell him a thing or two he didn’t know and he plans on looking into them. I ask him about transparency and he suggests they’re trying to become more transparent with the stuff they’re working on.
You might think this isn’t feasible to do with bigger companies and you’re probably right. Then again Typepad isn’t exactly small either. How many times have you been asked for your input from the product manager of a company? Probably never…
I don’t want to tell you how the product manager found me because I don’t want his feed(s) to lose value by people trying to chime in. If you’re a tech nerd you’ll know how he found my post. The point is, they’re listening very well. THEY GET IT! They understand that blogs are not just about publishing, but rather they’re also about listening.
So.
Typepad doesn’t suck.
In fact it’s pretty sweet.
It’s great for lazy nerds like me who don’t want to write a whole bunch of code or design a site from scratch. I’d install Movable Type or WordPress on my own server but then why bother? Just use Typepad!