I dropped the contact form and put up my email

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I recently changed how people contact me, from a form to just my email address.

It started with a small thing that had been bugging me. People come in through a form, but I reply by email. Once someone writes through the form and we move to email, the next time they want to reach me, they're not sure which one to use. The form again? Or just email me?

Either way, I read all of it and reply to all of it myself. So instead of having two ways in, it's simpler for everyone to just email me from the start.

Forms do have an upside. You can set the fields, so people fill in what you need. But mine was just a free text box where anything was fine, so it didn't really change much.

Also, the form went to contact@, a company-style front-desk address.

contact@ and the form. When I really think about it, I'd just copied how a company or a team does things. A front desk, a form, a shared address. All of it assumes there's an organization behind it. But in my case, there's nothing behind it. It's just me.

A company builds all of this so people will trust it as a real organization. Working alone, I can't have that kind of trust, because there's no organization behind me in the first place. If anyone is going to trust me, it won't be the company. It'll be me.

Instead of hiding behind a company-like front, it's probably more honest, and maybe just better, to show that messages go straight to the person who made the thing.

This matches my own experience as a user, too.

A while ago I contacted a furniture maker's support. The person who helped me was so good that it really moved me a little. The strange thing is, the product itself hadn't changed at all. But that one exchange changed how I saw the product. I had written in about a bug, and by the end, I liked it more than before.

It goes the other way, too. When I was a student, I once sent a long, detailed bug report to a service. It was completely ignored. No reply, no way to know if anyone had even read it. I was let down, and I stopped using it.

How a company handles a message like this is, I think, often a dividing line. Whether a real person actually dealt with you quietly decides whether you keep using something, or slowly move away.

This reminds me of when I worked at a company.

At a big company, a huge number of messages come in every day, so there were several filters before anything reached the engineering team. Customer support took them first, the business team answered what it could, and only the clear bugs that no one else could solve reached the developers. And even the final reply was sent back by customer support. In the end, developers and users almost never dealt with each other directly. That makes sense, but it's probably one reason a developer's priorities drift away from what users really need.

With Kosshi at its current size, I'm the developer, and I talk with users directly. So I get a much clearer picture of which features people want, and what's actually breaking.

Of course, handling all of it myself is a lot of work.

Looked at this way, having feedback come straight to the person who makes the thing might actually be the biggest advantage of working alone.

So I changed the contact page. I put my name on it, and made it clear that the email comes straight to me.

If you notice anything, I'd be happy to hear from you by email.

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