After launch: support, refunds, piracy and version two
Where the phrase passive income stops being accurate. Refund generously, ignore most piracy, and build version two from what buyers struggled with.
The launch is over and the quiet part begins. This is where the phrase passive income stops being accurate, and where a product either compounds or slowly dies.
Support is the real cost
Every buyer is a person who may need something. Access lost, a question the product should have answered, a situation you did not anticipate. The volume is not large but it never stops, and it is the part people do not budget for.
- Answer the same question twice, then fix the product. A recurring question is a defect in the material, not a support task.
- Keep a note of every question. It is the specification for version two and the raw material for your sales page.
- Make recovery self-service. Access links, receipts, re-downloads: anything a buyer can do without you, they should.
- Set an expectation and meet it. A clear reply time beats an instant reply you cannot sustain.
Sorting the questions
Not all support is the same work, and treating it as one queue is why it feels endless. Four kinds, each with a different response.
- Access and receipts. Pure friction, no judgement needed, and all of it should be automated away rather than answered. Every one of these you answer by hand is a design failure you are paying for weekly.
- The product did not explain something. Answer the person, then change the product. This is the only category that shrinks when you work on it.
- Their situation is outside what you covered. Answer honestly, including when the answer is that this product does not cover it. Collect these: a cluster of them is the next product.
- They want you to do it for them. A real signal, and the answer is a price rather than a favour. People asking this are telling you a service exists.
Refunds
Refund generously. It costs less than the alternatives and it is the right thing to do with a product somebody could not try first.
- A clear, easy refund policy raises sales enough to pay for the refunds, because it is what makes a cautious buyer click.
- A payment dispute costs you the money, a fee and your standing with the payment provider. A refund costs you the money. Choose the cheaper one.
- Refund without interrogation, but ask one optional question about why. The answers are the most honest feedback you will get.
- If one thing causes most refunds, the page is promising something the product does not deliver. Fix the page before you blame the buyers.
The arithmetic of arguing, illustratively. A product at 120, and a buyer who wants their money back. Refund and it costs 120. Refuse, and a fair share of those people raise a dispute with their card issuer instead: that is the 120 again, plus a dispute fee in the region of 15 to 25, plus the time, plus a mark against the account that matters if it happens repeatedly. Refusing is more expensive on average than agreeing, before counting what the person says about you afterwards.
Version two
Build it from what buyers struggled with, not from what you wish you had included. Those lists overlap less than you expect, and only one of them is evidence.
- Read every support question and every refund reason. Group them. The largest group is version two.
- Fix the thing people get stuck on before adding anything new. A product people finish sells itself; a longer one does not.
- Give the update to existing buyers for free unless it is genuinely a different product. It costs nothing and it is why they recommend you.
- Raise the price when the product is better, and tell people why.
Grouping is the step that gets skipped, and it is the whole method. Forty questions sorted by what they are actually about will usually collapse into four or five clusters, one of them much larger than the rest. That cluster is not a feature request; it is the place where your product stops working for people, and fixing it improves every future sale rather than adding to the pile.
A product that gets a little better each year, sold to a slowly growing audience, is the thing people were describing when they said make it once and sell it many times. It is just not passive, and it was never going to be.
Work to do
- Start a single file of every buyer question and refund reason, from today.
- Sort this month's questions into the four kinds above and automate away everything in the first one.
- Write your refund policy in plain words and put it where the buyer sees it before paying.
- Find the question you have answered more than twice and fix it in the product this week.