An Ode to Fucking Up.

While there are many advantages to being a small start up with the “Move fast and break things” mentality, there are also disadvantages. One of which is that you are going to fuck up. Repeatedly.

I find I judge a company more by how they handle their fuck ups, rather than just if they fuck up or not. After all, to err is human… and also corporate.

Of course over the last 4 and a half years me and BugMuncher have had more than our share of fuck ups, some of which I’ve previously written about. Today I’d like to focus on two particularly epic fails, which also happen to be the first I ever made with BugMuncher, and the most recent.

Mass-emailing 101

It was some time in August 2011, I had just launched BugMuncher, and had my first few customers. I wanted to email them all with information about a new update to the then feature-lacking BugMuncher. I logged into BugMuncher’s database, ran a quick query to export the email addresses of everyone who signed up, and copied them into a new email in Gmail.

I wrote the email, hit send, and carried on with my life. I pretty quickly received a reply, and while I don’t have the actual email, I remember it went something like this:

I couldn’t believe it, I’d pasted the email addresses into the to field, rather than the bcc field, meaning every recipient of the email could view every other recipient’s email address. It was such a rookie mistake, and one I had many times laughed about when other people had done it. There’s probably a lesson about karma in there. I could take some solace that this was very early on in BugMuncher’s time line, and so the email only went out to about 10 people.

When a company fucks up I want three things from them:

1. They accept responsibility.
2. They apologise.
3. They explain what they’re doing to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

So that’s what I did - I responded to this person straight away apologising for my mistake, and letting them know that I would be using Mailchimp to handle all my mass-emailing in future to make sure this doesn’t happen again. And then of course I signed up to Mailchimp.

One thing I didn’t do, which I wish I had, was to send this apology to everyone I emailed, instead of just the one person who noticed.

The Accidental Bait-and-switch

And now my most recent fuck up, which happened just last week. As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve been experimenting with BugMuncher’s pricing structure recently. When I change a plan’s price, there are three things I need to update:

1. The pricing page
2. The plans in the database
3. The subscriptions in FastSpring - BugMuncher’s payment gateway

I’d changed the pricing a little while ago, people had been signing up, and everything seemed ok. But then last week I received this email from a customer who had just subscribed to the middle ‘Start Up’ plan:

I knew straight away what had gone wrong, I’d entered the wrong price in FastSpring, causing them to be overcharged. And so I sent the following response:

I realise now that this response doesn’t cover point three of how I think an apology should look: the steps I’ve taken to ensure this doesn’t happen again. When it comes to data entry there is always the possibility of user error, but you can be sure I’ll be double checking all prices in future.

When it rains, it pours

Having had no one subscribe to the Start Up plan in the nearly two months since the pricing changed, the beginning of November had seen two new Start Up subscribers, and sure enough, the other had also been charged the extra $10.

The other subscriber had paid in Euros, which meant they had also been charged VAT, and I’m guessing this is why they didn’t notice the accidental $10 overcharge. I emailed them straight away informing them of my error, corrected their subscription price, and gifted them a free month.

So there’s a couple of my fuck ups, not quite on the same scale as dieselgate, yet both made me feel like a complete idiot, and served as good learning experiences.

- Matt