So long and thanks for all the fish

[appwebmobile]

(As I was typing all of this I see a post was added) I both agree & disagree! I’m not talking about coding capabilities as a negative! I actually say it’s miles ahead and I don’t know flutter.

Adalo is doing AMAZING things which is why I chose to put my “app eggs” in their basket. I also have a website builder & hosting as the other half of the soon to launch business…by myself, getting tired and getting old! BUT, dealing with people is NEVER easy especially at scale! It’s what wore me out the most and I was a “people person” all my life!!! I meant to only describe the REALity that I’ve seen make or break these kinds of efforts… on this kind of scale (from a lay man’s perspective) by these kinds of companies. It’s customer service and/or the confusion and feeling that comes from not having it if that’s what is felt by said target market / customer base!!! For example, this long thread confuses and fires people up as I can now see replies that add me, while I am saying the opposite.

One of the other platforms that I mentioned are miles ahead of all others in terms of the “feeling” of having (and actually having it) customer service. It’s partly a “psychology thing”… it seemed so easy, “laid back” and organized that I rarely even used it! BUT I KNEW THAT IT WAS THERE, it was built in to “where I was working” and changed the whole experience “in those terms”!!

That’s also why I think that platform is miles behind in design / UI / UX / components / etc. They have some of their staff tending to paying customers while they inch slowly ahead but it’s very thorough (and very well balanced) in every OTHER way. Not easy on Adalo’s part or the other platforms. Balance is the everything TO everything in every one of our situations. Not easy just necessary!!!

They were miles ahead in that way, but Adalo is miles ahead in functionality / design / UI UX. I also feel with their new funding, they are going to improve on what they initially built for all of us to “get very far”. The kind of balance that it takes to get people interested, keep people using it, so you can tend to them while building more and more each day would be treacherous. ON THE OTHER HAND, people are building very real businesses for them and for other clients that THEY need to answer to or lose their reputation trying to appease while it advances. Stop and reimagine that feeling of this and not being able to do anything about it or even get an answer for 18 hours or never at all. This has and does happen!

I’m not going to post it to have some of the less respectful members of the community give a snarky reply (unlike everyone in this post so far)… but I’ll send an email or take a call! AT THE END OF EVERY DAY, customer service is at the top of all lists in my opinion. And being ignored (or overlooked or lost in the mix) only makes anyone angry so more balance in customer service / ticketing / learning is probably already in the works I imagine, but I don’t know that either. I don’t have energy left to read every single post in the entire system on top of everything else. IS THIS A PRIORITY VERY SOON so that customers can FEEL good about their decision??? That answer alone, will probably cater to MANY frustrations that I see.

[Jacob_Lange]

I’m fairly new to Adalo (been in 7 months) and i support everything they are doing 1000%. I have much experience in code. And I just want to say, that if some don’t feel Adalo is not worth it… because of support… have no idea what they are missing out on. I went from spending months coding/programming a site/native app, to literally a fraction of that. I can whip out an app that does exactly what I need it to in 4 hours time. Of course that is excluding design. I’m mainly talking functionality at this point. And if not… guess what… your app has its own API Key so you can literally get any result you want. Research research research. In the word of coding there is no instruction manual. Research!!

Do research outside of the Adalo Community. You will be surprised how much you can find simply by googling your question. Or even go to YouTube and google your question. You are bound to find something. And if not get creative try to find a work around don’t just wait for someone to tell you what to do. You are the app maker your know what you want. Just gotta find it. That to me is the best part!

As far as functionality goes, be careful with how much conditions you run. This will ultimately slow your app down. Be mindful with how you set up your conditions this I find also has an effect on app speed. Lists lists lists. Too many lists on one page and too many lists that auto refresh WILL slow your app down. Try to get creative with designs. Let things flow. Modals are a life saver! Use them!

Like Adalo staff have said in previous posts… Adalo is a startup and we are part of that start up. If you start a business today it won’t be perfect tomorrow. You will have to work for years to build it up and make sure it delivers. Time is the key. I’d rather Adalo spend years making everything perfect then to give us crap.

All this is coming from a coder/designer who can code what he wants exactly how he wants. And at this point since going along with the no code movement, I’m proud to say I’m apart of it. And I’m proud to say I’m apart of Adalo.

Although Ive tried and still use Bubble as well. I think Adalo has the potential to be the best no code app builder out there!

Keep up the great work Adalo, take your time get it perfect! That means more to me than speed!

[ben1]

@msmurfitt I will look to find your ticket in our queue. Can you please DM me the email you submitted the ticket with?

No. Once you have submitted the ticket, you can reply to the “ticket received” message, and your replies will come to us, in that thread. You can also reply to any of our messages back and forth to you, and the same will happen.

[Yongki]

Jacob_Lange,
And if not get creative try to find a work around don’t just wait for someone to tell you what to do. You are the app maker your know what you want. Just gotta find it. That to me is the best part!

+1

[appwebmobile]

Sounds like we’re saying the same thing Jacob and I’ve had the exact same approach over my last 20 years. Researched and self-taught ALL of the way through except I’m not a coder (other than html / css / very little php). Many times the devil’s advocate is mis-understood and this is where posts start to overlap kinda like FB so I’m out (of the thread I mean, still in with Adalo for the ride)!!

Good luck Adalo, I hope I made the right decision and still think that I did for the second time back. I myself, like some of the community, got a little frustrated along the way and meant only to help improve (I think I just speak differently than most maybe I dono :))?.?. I came across Adalo after I was running out of energy and riddled with anxiety over the last 20 years of this, so it is great, I just didn’t know it until lately lol. Customer service is and always will be king and I have a great idea / suggestion for you to consider but I won’t post it!

At the end of the day, if an app (web app in my case as I want nothing more to do with being controlled or reliant upon Google and Apple) leaves “our users” saying it’s slow or they lost all of their data…I hope theirs a way to quickly reach out to get a resolve! And I don’t even know if this will be a problem just yet…that’s just around the corner for us. Launching / testing with real customers, hopefully in a week or so.

I just hope that “the reason” at the time does not cost us everything BUT, knowing we will have someone to reach immediately, almost immediately or know where to look for server status and / or issues for a resolve, feels warm and fuzzy if you have $10,000’s of time, work, reputation and opportunity at stake. Honestly my market that I’m launching for, will not care but I have to risk that somehow and try not to be too emotional along the way. I THINK that’s what the original poster was trying to relay?!!!? Good things can come from those that are honest as well as well as simultaneously supportive! I’ve seen tons of and still have unanswered questions with no reply from support@ or the forum but I still love you lol. Tell me you love me too lol! Ohhhh, I tried to use humor is that not accepted here??

You can support the platform while being honest from “your” perspective at the same time. The whole premise of Adalo is that it’s a “no-code” platform. So I guess a “no-coder”'s experience and input is probably pretty important? I respect all you coders btw! That’s just my $.02 I guess… But this is getting too long and will start overlapping sooo!

Good luck to all!

[ron]

Hi all,

Allow me to chip in the thread.

I have been a paying customer with Adalo for 4 months. My experience is 7 out of 10. I use Adalo to build some apps and it was successful in the process. It took me a long time to learn and from the help of the community, i managed to get early adopters support from the experts in the community.

Overall besides the performance that Adalo is constantly improving I have no issue except the support.

Going back to this thread, the reason for leaving Adalo is the support level from @Torrsy .

I didnt really have a good experience with the support either but I know Colin and his team is trying their best to get my question answered.

Recently my issue was with the new IOS 14.5 which requires app makers to have privacy policy in place with an update on the build which would prompt the user to allow the app maker to track or not to track the data processed in the app. I didnt get a good reply and requested the cs team to give me 10mins of zoom so that i can share this important problem that affects almost all the appmakers.

The reply i received was the CS team trying to justify my case and dont even allow me to show my serious case regarding app transparency. Note* I have provided alot of screenshots and explained again and again this is an important issue to resolve and I was simply pushed away.

Thus my experience rates at 3 over 10 for Adalo customer service support. Till today Colin has not got back to me on this issue and it is simply hanging in the air.

I explained my case, as long as you select collect data, you must comply to the app transparency policy Apple Developer Documentation

I got a not so friendly reply and eventually I gave up.

In my mind, I was wondering, what are the priorities on Adalo’s kanban board. Isn’t this a top priority to resolve because the only way to get the approval for ios is to select No, we do not collect data from this app. Which is not the case. We collect basic data such as email and name.

The best gift from your paying customer is to solve problems with your product together. It is not the case for my experience. Totally disappointed with leaders who build good products but with fixed mindset. Even with Series A funding with this mindset, the company may not grow to its full potential because CS team seems to be selective, evasive and definitely do not have good listening skills.

Hope this helps.

[James_App_Maker]

@ron

Totally disappointed with leaders who build good products but with fixed mindset.

Thank you for all your negative feedback. It’s very sad reading all these posts.

I suggest you read this if you haven’t already.

Adalo is rotten

I agree with you @Victor. As community leaders, we could be spending our precious time working on our personal apps or our client’s apps, but we don’t want other makers to learn the hard way of learning everything by yourselves and not knowing how to do anything in Adalo. There are ~ 200,000 makers using Adalo/the Forum, it’s very hard for me, @Victor @Erik, and other makers to answer every single post in the forum. Also, @anon78309838 is for the most part is answering all the support tickets …

[ron]

@James_App_Maker Thanks for sharing.

FYI, my background is a professional coach. I coach companies for transformation.
There are simply too much excuses from Adalo.

The founders need help for sure. They may know how to build great products, they may not have the skills to run it efficiently. The founders need professional mentorship for sure. Not from me, from someone that has been there done it before. Using successful framework to run this company.

Do you really think these issues are unsolvable ?

1. Use Moscow prioritisation for each issue What is MoSCoW Prioritization? | Overview of the MoSCoW Method
2. Seek help and work with professional software company to adopt best in class automated customer service system with AI capabilities, so that you know what to answer and who to answer. Let the AI do the job. For top priority cases, then the CS intervene and get involved.
3. Don’t let the customer get upset with your product and say: oh there are 200,000 of you and only 2 of us. To me this is totally nonsense to the core. Just because you don’t know how to solve it, does not mean this cannot be solved.

Give a man 6 hours to cut the tree, he will spend 4 hours sharpening the Axe. In Adalo case, the team is trying to cut the tree in 6 hours with a non-sharpened Axe.
4) Get real and bring your customer happiness. Apply the 80-20 rule. Make 80% happy and 20% within acceptable satisfaction. Let’s do a poll. Measure with NPS score. Let’s see out of 200,000 users how many are at 80% and 20%. You know the result, I dont have to speculate.
5) Startup is to serve, treat FEEDBACK AS A GIFT, stop been defensive.

[James_App_Maker]

Just for your information, Adalo is in the process of hiring more employees + a team member from the support team was on vacation for 2 weeks.

So the past 2 weeks might’ve been a bit hard on support.

[ron]

Again you missed my point. Its fine. Appreciate your prompt reply. Love your attitude. 10/10.

[Yongki]

Hi @ron ,

I can understand all your words and learn more from that.

Feedback is hard for some people, letting go of emotional is also difficult after putting so much effort and hope for the best.

Around 20 years ago, I have crossed path to what is called no code today, and that experience was not much different than today, because the pressure for technical innovation are beyond imagination, once a small thing slip away, it can take a lot of effort to make it right, so sometimes it doesn’t make sense why they are behaving like that.

Layers of layers of code packaging that make up no code will need careful and personalized attention which otherwise can cause more trouble.

This is less happening in code solution where most of the things are already in tiny bits of logic and were given to the developers to decide what to do or not do.

But your reply make valuable input.

[Torrsy]

Wow, things have started taking a turn here

@pushingpandas You raise a couple of interesting functional points that I wasn’t aware of initially. For our application to succeed on the Adalo platform, we will need sound and GPS. These two features are vital to the success of our application. There are indeed competitive applications that provide many features missing in Adalo, but the same can be said as a positive for Adalo’s UI/UX experience.

While this is outside the scope of the original topic of conversation, the more I persist with application development on this platform, the more I am presented with differences between what I see in the development environment and what I see on the actual device. It’s quirks like this that cause high frustration levels because I know it’s nothing I’ve done. And to be blunt, I see more of these quirks on this platform than others I have used.

@James_App_Maker I’m not sure how this video is relevant to the conversation at hand? We are all here for the same thing, no-code app development.

@appwebmobile It sounds like you have invested a significant amount of money and effort into your application. I hope everything comes to fruition for you. At least someone in this conversation gets me

@ron The only reason I’ve come to Adalo from a competitive product is to publish on the App Store. It appears there are some hurdles encountered along the way, and this does not fill me with joy. To be perfectly honest, the more I read about people with publishing issues, the more I am inclined to stick with what I have and continue with the status quo.

@ron I’ve was made aware of the Moscow method a while ago. My mentor at the time suggested I use the system, and it saved my project. While I may be a little lapsed and sticking to the system, it still weighs heavily on my decision-making.

I think too many people see negative feedback as something to be feared. As a business owner, it allows you to see things from a different perspective. We (my company) go out of our way to ensure customer satisfaction is at its peak; in some cases, we would spend more time trying to make a customer happy than we would fixing the actual problem. But, as we are all aware, you cannot make all the people happy all the time no matter what lengths you go to.

While this conversation has turned into a robust and lengthy back-and-forth, I certainly see it as a positive outcome from the customer side of the conversation. And I would hope the supplier side (Adalo) can take a positive from this as well? I said this before, but while a single post is not definitive, I think we can all agree that the overall level of customer satisfaction is not at an acceptable level. Or maybe, there are just a few vocal unhappy people?

NOTE: As my first lengthy reply disappeared when my browser crashed, I apologise if I have overlooked anything, or my replies may be a little curt as this is the 2nd time I’ve typed up this wall of text.

[appwebmobile]

I appreciate your words @Torrsy ! You are the only one that even replied to my positive negativity ! I even tried a little humor and still got ignored lol. It’s a good thing I’m confident or my feelings might be hurt. Actually, I myself wasn’t being negative unless a recipient is too delicate!! I gave many kind words and only spoke of honesty!

200k or 20 customers…we will still need communication quickly and need to know it will be there especially if performance is slow or data being lost mysteriously and we will have unforgiving customers to answer after launch.

Food for thought: I pay the electric utility company every month and they have over 200,000 customers but I can call them if I “need to”. My internet provider has even more customers and we pay close to the same…also a phone number. Water utiilities…same. I have watched internet companies ignore their customers like no other service I’ve known for 20 years now. And almost always, if you say anything about it, you get ignored even more like you are negative or ignorant to the process. Compare the infrastructure of the utility companies to an internet company. Why has this been so hard to understand and has not gotten any better for 20 years is my question. I’ll say it again, this platform is great but you still need to figure out communication with paying customers just like the rest of the world. I’ll have to answer mine!! I feel if I say something wrong I’ll be ignored and that’s scary.

Thanks Torrsy! I tried to be positive and honest…it’s that honest part that is never popular. I’m still not being negative, I respect all of you while walking down this two-way street! Again, unless everything runs flawlessly after our investments, CS is numeroUno! We ALL need to know it will be there. If more help is being hired, that might have been a good thing to communicate waaaay up at the top of the thread. Good day!

[anon78309838]

Ok I’ll bite

I will start by saying that everything in this thread is positive in my eyes. Feedback is important and hearing it directly and honestly is the best way it can be delivered, so thank you everyone for helping us improve our product and process. We are listening!

Like always, I tend to only reply in these threads at a much later stage after I have let it run it’s course and let the feedback sink in. Here’s my take;

1. Yes, we have a lot of room for improvement in support.
   I think you will struggle to find a company that doesn’t. There are always ways to improve in some form or another. Sometimes, as a company, we are aware of the specifics and sometimes we are not. Threads like these can certainly help shed light on the ones we may not be aware of. We have several ways in which we track these kpi’s in our feedback loop. The forum is only one of many.

2. Yes, we are improving
   There are a lot of things happening internally to address most of the issues outlined in this thread. We could do a lot better in communicating these internal changes outwards to you and I have made an internal note to address that. I’m sure everyone can relate to having a full plate in their job and sometimes some aspects are overlooked in favour of trying to achieve the bigger goal. Communication has certainly been overlooked here. We will address that!

3. Yes, we can improve the product
   Each and everyone of us will have a differing opinion about what should be prioritised and what shouldn’t. This is human nature. One person’s trash is another persons treasure.
   We try our best to make data driven decisions in what we believe would benefit the majority. We alone have that data available to us to make those decisions and we do implement prioritisation processes for this. Of course there will be disagreements and complaints, that is part of the process.

Are we constantly trying to improve this process and learn from it? you bet we are!

But please understand that this is not an overnight thing. We are a young company and still have a lot of growing to do. We might not be right for you right now, we may not be ready to handle your app idea, we may not have the feature you need or want, and that’s ok. We would love to have every feature available to everyone that wants it but I think we can all understand that is not possible. We would end up with a bloated product that would be hard to understand and use.

Ultimately I think everyone has the best of intentions and it can be hard to get those intentions across and heard and that doesn’t feel great. We know, we experience that too.

We are a bunch of hard working individuals behind the curtains here, all trying our best to deliver a product we all truly believe in. We hope we can do that for you and thank you for your trust in us to do so.

[Torrsy]

@appwebmobile I saw the humour and had a little smile to myself. At my age, I’m too old and tired to take offence by people’s posts I just noticed your name was Mike. I knew we had something in common

@anon78309838 I appreciate your post, Colin. This would have to be the best customer support reply I think I have ever received if I was an angry customer, I think this email would have genuinely been helpful. I have to say 10 out of 10 for your reply.

Out of curiosity, what is the average time for staff to reply to a support ticket? Is there any internal KPI for ticket response times? Do you record satisfaction or outcome metrics from each ticket?

EDIT: In all likelihood, this is just me and my ability to overlook the obvious, but I wasn’t fully aware of the ticket system until it was mentioned earlier in this thread. Previously when I saw people saying write a ticket, I thought they meant to make a support forum post. Again, this is likely my innate ability to overlook the obvious, but I’m just curious how many other people might have overlooked the ticket system.

[Torrsy]

After 36 replies and 200 views I’m absolutely astounded no one has commented on the title of this topic. I guess Douglas Adams is an acquired taste

[anon78309838]

@Torrsy

Out of curiosity, what is the average time for staff to reply to a support ticket? Is there any internal KPI for ticket response times? Do you record satisfaction or outcome metrics from each ticket?

We certainly track these kpi’s and currently the average time to first response is 4.7 business hours. Very much well below our target. And yes we do send out a customer satisfaction survey for each ticket after it has been closed and our current CES Score sits in the top 10% of companies in comparison according to Hubspot.

I guess Douglas Adams is an acquired taste

I certainly got the reference. One of my all-time favourite book series. I’m a big H2G2 fan!

[appwebmobile]

Great response @anon78309838 ! Again, I do not envy dealing with this many personalities and wish you guys the most patience, empathy, respect and understanding while you do it! I also try not to step out of my lane but what I was talking about in one of the many posts was (Customer communications platform | Intercom).

Great example: In all of my experiences with sooo many companies / platforms, this was the best and I think pshycologically and out of respect for their time, I rarely even used it but it was beyond peaceful to know it was there after launch (I and the others that I saw, never got “ramped up” because of the balance it created). MOST IMPORTANTLY, it was placed right in the same place I worked in the builder so there was no way you could miss or overlook anything as far as customers / notices / support / forums / Announcements! UNIFIED in the place where we work 12-17 hours per day sometimes 7 days per week!

It still included help files / docs / pages / etc. I, still did everything the hard way but… It still shows the forums as another option but if support was needed it was quickly there and the staff would even throw you hints as to how one could accomplish something “correctly” so that the customer does not end up going down a 2 month rabbit hole to find out…it was the wrong hole to take or that one piece of the bigger puzzle is non-existent, taxing performance or possibly expensive to finish (aka the native app issues I saw in some of the posts or audio or gps which I know nothing about yet). I want nothing to do with giving more control to Google or Apple. Hopefully web apps eventually become more and more like native apps but I don’t expect the makers of the phones will program their phones that way…

Bad example: There were other companies that spoke or posted well but in reality had an arrogance to them like they were just passifying the peasants. That was clear to see and the most disgusting thing I’ve seen, which caused a ton of stress and anxiety, especially being a nice guy by nature!! I absolutely will not mention them here but meant as an example, as I imagine that option could be easy to become dealing with 200k people / designers / Picasso’s

It’s hard for a no-coder to see, know and remember everything throughout all of the posts as well. The other platform that uses that system did it very well and saved MUCH pain, time & money. I think they strategically traded speed in development for customer satisfaction and I can say that every post I see or saw speaks very positive about them even though they’re miles behind you on UI / UX / design capabilities. I only mention it in hopes that you guys would take it as a positive attempt for a customer to share some wisdom that would catipolt Adalo’s awesome platform to the top with no real competition left… staying at the top. I think this would be a great move on sooo many levels. So much so to step out of my lane and say so out loud. Just my opinion… Anyway, great response and good luck with us all! .

[kmm]

Great response @anon78309838. I don’t think anybody expects Adalo to be perfect. Reading this thread it seems like the main pain points are:

1. Irregular or unclear comms from support that doesn’t solve the customer’s problem in a timely manner.

2. Showstopper bugs with existing functionality that prevent customers from shipping their app.

3. Product gaps (a distant third imho)

If you didn’t have showstopper bugs then the support issues wouldn’t be so problematic. But as a paying customer I’ve got to feel confident that my questions will be answered to the point where my showstopper problem will be solved OR I’ll understand how to work around a product gap.

Product gaps are the nature of the beast and we know you guys are working to address them.

[miticobeppe]

This is the most serious problem that Adalo has at the moment in my opinion.
All developers are practically stuck releasing their own apps. (how many of you don’t collect data? 1 of 10?)

Adalo Do something fast! It is too risky to release your apps saying that you are not collecting data!