I often think of how business is evolving. This morning I was getting 500 errors back from my AWS database service and was trying to clear it up via the support forum and an email to customer support. They were gracious and replied saying they were on it which was nice.
I turned to Twitter next and immediately I got a near realtime view that the Northern Virginia servers were having issues and lots of people were seeing the same thing I was. A realtime view of the exact problem I’m having confirmed by others around the world. That is pretty remarkable. Instead of having to rely on the AWS Health Service page where it still says everything is operational I can reach out to Twitter to lots of smart people working on the same things I am and get answers.
Now I’m sure it’s a very bad day for the AWS engineers today and they will probably clear it up pretty quickly. But the take away from this for me as a business owner is that I can’t sit behind a status web page saying that everything is ok. I can’t say one thing in the forums and deliver another. Customers will find out and know whether your product delivers or not and whether you really care or not. When someone asks on Twitter someone will gladly respond. Ideally I’ve made a product that delights them and they respond positively.