Let's talk about community & support.

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#1

Hi,
I’ve been an enthusiastic user of Remnote for about a year now, and (though I’m very picky about paid services) went pro without thinking twice.

The product often has bugs (small and large).
This reflects a philosophy prioritizing growth/features over stability.
IMO - that’s fair for the stage Remnote is in.

What is frustrating though, is it feels the support does not rise to meet the demands of the growing app.
Specifically- with Bugs & Feature requests.

Currently - there are no less than 4 locations for bugs (similar for features):

  • Discord (help/fea channel) - bugs/messages often get lost
  • Remnote forum - not very active
  • Remnote beta forum - same + currently requires testing regular version as well
  • Github - >600 issues, hardly any non-OP replies in recent ones.

Problems with this:

  1. Bug disappearance - bugs often lost in discord (how will it scale?), and the forum / github issues are a ghost town of mostly single-posters with no user or team replies.
    Maybe some are fixed? Can’t know - no feedback.

  2. Confusion - Multiple sources of truth means more confusion for users, and tracking complexity for the team.

  3. User frustration - It can be disheartening for a user - to invest time and energy reporting bugs -only to see them lost in the discord or forgotten on the forums.
    This also decreases motivation to for members to be active in reporting / providing feedback.

  4. No roadmap/status - it is unclear what features are being developed and when, and what bugs are chosen to be fixed, currently in progress, etc.

Solutions:
(PoT == point of truth)

  1. Single PoT - Bugs - there can be multiple places to report bugs, but a mod could consolidate them all into a single, public tracker, with a backlink to where it was suggested.

  2. Single PoT- Features - since features are more of a discussion / require votes - they should probably not exist in multiple places.

  3. Duplicate consolidation - duplicate (either feature reqs or bugs) create more clutter than necessary.
    They also lower responsivity by creating more work. A good moderator could consolidate similar bugs/requests.
    This also brings people with similar issues together to discuss/solve them.

  4. Ticket status - closing inactive or irrelevant tickets (with option of user input) is a great way to reduce workload, clutter, and give google searchers an idea of where the issue stands.

  5. Larger QA / Moderation team All the above require manpower- perhaps now (after the seed round) is the time to hire more moderators & QAs for both community support and bug /tracking?

I raise these issues not to complain, but because I’m genuinly invested and want the product to keep getting better!

And while growth is important - I believe this is not only good, but necessary, to keep existing users over time.

But maybe it’s just me :wink:
I’d love to hear other’s impressions on problems and solutions.

23 Likes
#2

The only approved location for feature requests is the forum.

1 Like
#3

Also there is a roadmap on the remnote help section. It’s a little bit hidden though, just found it by accident

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7 Likes
#4

I think you raised interesting points:

  • multiplicity of places to report brings confusion for ‘us’ and probably more work for the team
  • there is currently no way of knowing which points or bugs are considered for future updates. The general roadmaps are high-levels trajectories that don’t really answer that.

However, I’ve very please with the fact that the RemNote team has integrated core changes demanded by the community. One example is abandoning forced capitalization for concepts, changing the cards’ schemes with arrows etc. I was very surprised with that :slight_smile:

This leads me to think that the problem you raise is almost entirely a communication issue.

1 Like
#5

It would be really nice if there’s a changelog of versions in the discord. I’m lurking in the Obsidian and Logseq discord, and they have changelog channels.

7 Likes
#6

Absolutely. I’ve seen a few bugs I reported magically fixed after a few days., and realize the team works hard to develop and maintain remnote.

But in these cases there’s often no feedback to the reporting user or for archiving (where someone googling can reference for regression etc).

In other cases smaller bugs can just get lost in the discord (or github) without being addressed.

My point is not about the amount of bugs fixed or features implemented- rather that it seems the channels of communication for these are not organized to be beneficial for the community, nor the team.

As you say, it’s absolutely about communication :slight_smile:

10 Likes
#7

I thought this was a well-summarized piece on the state of Remnote. Personally I don’t even log bugs or feature requests anymore until the existing ones are being actively fixed and I don’t even visit this forum anymore to see what’s the update on those bugs since they don’t seem to be attended to. If it wasn’t for Discourse’s email digest, I would not even have seen this post.

6 Likes
#8

Couldn’t agree more.

I get the sensation that Remnote is having funding issues. It appears that they want to grow and expand, but the application itself is not stable enough to roll out in mass.

I am also optimistic for Remnote’s future, but again - I couldn’t agree more, they need satisfy existing customers and bugs before expanding demographics or features.

1 Like
#9

Your post resonates with me and you put into words everything that bothers me about using remnotes.

I believe we should look at the big picture and the larger point of the author here rather than find exceptions.

In my opinion it requires a fundamental rethink that the remnotes team should do and communicate @Karthikk

2 Likes
#10

If fact, the opposite is true, going by the the 1.4 livestream: the funding is there, it’s just the vacancies aren’t getting filled. There is even a $2000 incentive for anyone who can refer someone who will fill a vacancy. Presumably, the most crucial one at the moment would be “Talent Sourcer”.

3 Likes
#11

Most excellent! I apologize for my misconception of the situation. I will keep the incentive in mind. I am hoping for the best for Remnote, for, I am using it for Law School - So I need it to work and for at least a couple of years - I invested in the Pro Plan.

I look forward to any updates. Take care for now.

#12

Hey @SuperSpasm,

I really love your perception and your ability to communicate them precisely. This post couldn’t have come at a better time.

The past two weeks I have been focusing entirely on this problem :slight_smile: and I can confidently commit that I now have a solution to deal with these communication hiccups.

On a higher level this is what you can expect from us:

  1. Bug reporting will happen from inside of the app and will be monitored, attended to and coupled with our internal bug tracker. Someone from the team will be in-charge of handling communication and closing the loop (users should be informed when their respective bugs get closed, hopefully). This new system will automatically collect metadata that would be necessary for the engineers to replicate the issue thereby reducing the need for users to fill up forms with technical information. We are also looking at easier ways to report bugs like visual feedback from within the app - screenshots, video annotations etc., that might be possible from within the app.
  2. Feedback, feature requests, roadmap and changelog would all be handled by a separate system (like Canny.io). We will be explicitly informing our community that this will be the only place that the team will keep track of and this system will be integrated with our internal processes as well, thereby making sure we build a better user centric product. It should be possible to make these requests from within the app as well through a widget.
  3. Support - We will likely use a modern support platform like Intercom, freshdesk or Zendesk that integrates with the other two systems.

We are in the testing phase currently making sure everything works well together, and will begin implementing everything soon. :wink:

Thanks for the wonderfully thought out post, it validated my concerns and also aligned with my solution design.

14 Likes
Add a debug log (which users can access)
#13

I really hope this happens soon. I’m lurking in discords of Obsidian and Logseq, and I notice there is so much more interaction there than in Remnote’s discord. I think partly the regular release of updates gets the community very excited and gets people to talk a lot more. Which begs the question, where are the promised faster shipping of updates? It has been months since the last one.

3 Likes
#14

I think the changelog should also be posted in Remnote website where you can see the backlinks of issues similar to how logseq does it. It will be great to see the graph of these updates in the long term.

But of course, an update first.

1 Like
#15

Very well and constructively summarized! Thank you.

#16

The problem is support is all over the place discord , here, reddit etc it need to be in the one place.
I see people posting in reddit when they should be coming here first.

1 Like
#17

I would like to see more openness from RemNote showing progress made, change logs, roadmap, accepted feature requestes etc I think people aren’t seeing progress so it needs to be easier to access.

4 Likes
#18

Any update on this @Karthikk ? I didn’t see anything in the roadmap about this.

For now it seems discord posts still largely fly by unnoticed, and many forum posts still have 0 replies.

I still find many small bugs / potential improvements, but TBH It’s quite discouraging to continue providing feedback.

3 Likes
#19

I think the silence speaks volumes here.

I can understand that @Karthikk himself can’t always be available, but both the discord and the forum seem less responsive than ever to bugs.

What good is saying you’re committed to better communication, if your actions consistently say otherwise?

2 Likes
#20

Hey! I appreciate you holding me responsible for this :slight_smile:

There definitely has been a delay on setting this up, the main reason being me here. When I had committed to this, I had already researched into the right tools and also laid down the basic processes for the team. But I did so as an external consultant for the team. Soon after, I joined full time closing down my consultancy practice as the Chief of Staff (from December; November was pretty stressful due to all the big decision making and subsequent logistics involved). I had to then quickly onboard and take over a lot of the administrative, legal and financial responsibilities of the Company; so that I could facilitate Martin’s attention towards engineering. I have been having some time in the past two weeks and have resumed the project.

What’s happening now:

  1. The single source of truth for all feedback/FR will be possible through a third party that we have integrated with and wouldn’t need users to create separate accounts on the forum/discord/github anymore. This will also allow us to showcase our immediate roadmap, and convey changelogs better. We will be extensively monitoring, organizing and using these feedbacks for all our product roadmap decisions.
  2. The equivalent for bug reports will also be through another third part service that we have already launched silently for a small subset of users :stuck_out_tongue: (mods and RemNote mentors). Users can swiftly make bug reports through the web app itself, and submit screenshots, annotations, video/audio recordings - without having to leave the app. The backend of all these reports will be handled by the me and Gabriela (our dedicate user support person). Again, this will be directly monitored, organized and funneled to the engineering team through a tight feedback loop. We are hoping that this will improve the number of reproduceable bugs that users report and also not have to worry about being on top of all community discussions that happen in multiple platforms. Less monitoring, more time fixing.
  3. We have also been silently using Intercom for support (for the past 1.5 months) and been improving our efficiency there. We were also able to successfully onboard an experienced engineer who will focus on providing tech support, on top of Gabriella. We will be closely monitoring the ticket closing and success rates and hope to share some of this data publicly, once the new engineer successfully onboards and Intercom is launched publicly to handle support tokens.

Status:

  1. For the feedback tool, we are just held back by some engineering glitches (we would like to allow SSO for users so that there’s no friction for users to submit feedback). We hope to have this resolved before the next sprint is over (1-2weeks) and launch to everyone immediately after.
  2. Setup is almost done, and one could expect to see a “Report Bugs” button as part of the Help Pop-up in a matter of days.
  3. This might take a little longer as we would like to officially release only when we feel confident enough to handle tickets with a fast resolution time. Maybe (2 -3 weeks)

Apologies for the delay. Our team has been growing steadily every month and the reason for silence is mainly because of the rapid changes happening internally. Really appreciate your persistence and patience. I am excited for this project to go live myself!

4 Likes