Last year I participated in a Lifetime Deal (LTD) promotion to offer Preceden to the AppSumo community. Maybe I’ll dive into my experience there in another post, but I wanted to share an interesting thing that’s happening now, a year after the deal ended.

AppSumo has a policy that says something like this: you have to treat AppSumo customers like your other customers. For example, if after the AppSumo deal ends, you launch a big new feature, you can’t give it to the rest of your customers for free, but try to charge the people who paid for the lifetime deal to get them on a subscription. And it makes sense too… the spirit of these LTDs is that the people who buy it will not be subject to a ton of upsells afterwards.

Where this gets interesting is that Preceden has a policy that requires non-subscribers to log in at least once a year to keep their account and timelines. I set this up a few years ago so that if you signed up for Preceden back in like 2012, used it for a day or two, that your account and timelines would not just sit around forever in Preceden’s database, potentially with sensitive information (imagine the timeline of a messy divorce, for example). More often that not, these users forgot they signed up and have data in Preceden, and are happy that Preceden removes their old account.

I actually asked about this specific policy while preparing for the AppSumo LTD, and they confirmed, it’s fine for it to apply to LTD purchasers.

But now, here we are, when purchasers are running into this policy: imagine you purchased a “lifetime deal” on AppSumo for Preceden, but haven’t logged in for at least a year. You’re not an active, paying subscriber, so you’re treated like other Preceden users that are subject to the “you need to log in at least once a year to keep your account active” policy. You get a 60-day notice saying your account will be deleted if you don’t log in.

Confused, you write into support:

hello at preceden

not sure what you are writing to me
I am pretty sure I had a longtime license via sumo
please check

And:

Hi there,

I have a lifetime plan, so what does the email below mean for that?

Thanks

And:

I got an email that “Your inactive Preceden account will be canceled soon.” Will you also deactivate Appsumo lifetime accounts?

I empathize with these people, but at the same time, I’m treating them like other Preceden users. And more importantly, I don’t think it’s good either to have to keep these accounts and their potentially sensitive data around… forever… whatever that means. If they never log in, should their accounts and timelines really still be around in the year 2040? 2060? While it is a “lifetime deal”, in practice that seems tricky and even bad to do, at least for a SaaS like Preceden.

Another benefit to this policy for these purchasers is that it reminds them they have a Preceden account. Many AppSumo purchasers (for the Preceden deal and others) buy optimistically, imagining some future use for the product. These emails can serve as a reminder that they purchased it, and maybe help nudge some back to the product to discover value that they might not have otherwise gotten.

I could except these AppSumo purchasers from the inactive user policy, but it doesn’t seem like a good move, for them or for me.

If anyone has any strong thoughts here, I’d be interested to hear.

About once a year I get an email from someone working in a security and compliance department at a large organization asking that I fill out a detailed security questionnaire to help them assess the risk of their employees using Preceden.

I received one recently from a large, well-known company in Europe. In addition to an NDA, they asked I fill out a lengthy security questionnaire.

Here’s a sample:

It’s tough because they would wind up being one of Preceden’s largest customers and the deal would move the needle on Preceden’s revenue in a big way.

But, because I’m the only person working full time on Preceden and these security questionnaires come up so infrequently, it just hasn’t made sense for me to go through the process of getting a formal security certification which can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take months of work to complete. I know there are services like Secureframe these days that can help businesses get and stay compliant, but it would still be no small project to complete and it would come at the expense of lots of other product and marketing initiatives — and likely my sanity as well.

Maybe one day I’ll pursue a security certification and get all this paperwork in place, but not today.

For better or worse, I still handle all of Preceden’s support requests.

At one point I did have help (thanks Liesl!), but these days support takes at most an hour per week, and all requests fall into two buckets:

1. Things I can deal with in 30 seconds (like refund requests)
2. Things that only I can handle, like bug fixes

As a result, there hasn’t been a pressing need to outsource support.

But even though support only takes about an hour per week, I’ve had this bad habit of checking support frequently at night and on weekends. It’s been common for me to pull up the Help Scout app on my phone right before bed, which I think we can all agree is a bad idea.

So, lately, I’ve been trying not to check support after 5pm. It helps me focus on my family after work, and not get sucked into thinking about things right before bed. It’s been a good decision, mostly.

But yesterday around 4pm I rolled out an update to fix a small bug. I tested things on my end, though not thoroughly, because it seemed like a low risk update.

Turns out that my fix caused all timelines using custom fonts (ie, not the default Proxima Nova) to throw an internal server error. And a lot of users use custom fonts.

I didn’t check support before signing off for the day yesterday, and then due to me trying to check support less frequently, I didn’t check it again until this morning, where I was greeted with two dozen support requests about Preceden being broken including:

• “Hello, I have an urgent request, we are getting into a meeting and see one of our timelines is throwing an error.”
• “I need access to my timelines! When will they be working again? or when will someone be able to help me?”
• “Why am I unable to access my timelines? I can see them on the dashboard but when I click into them to access and/or edit I receive an error message!”
• “Hello, we cant open our timelines. We always get HTTP 500 Error. Could you check this please? We have a meeting today and would like to use our timeline. It would be great if you could fix it today.”

Not great.

I quickly fixed the issue and posted an update, though due to the duration of the issue it was no doubt very frustrating to many of Preceden’s customers.

The question is what to do to avoid it in the future. A few options:

• Don’t ship in the late afternoon.
• Check support once in the evening around 8pm to see if anything is on fire.
• Hire someone to check it for me on nights and weekends, and give them a means of notifying me if there’s a big problem.
• Hire someone to handle support/documentation, and their responsibilities would include checking it periodically on nights and weekends.

I’d like to avoid hiring someone if I can help it. I can’t think of the last time this happened and I don’t want to make a big change because of an isolated incident, but also do want to avoid it happening again.

Checking once in the evening might be my best option for now. We’ll see.

I’m a big fan of the Proxima Nova font and have been using it on Preceden for years:

Proxima Nova: have my babies.

— Matt Mazur (@mhmazur) November 22, 2013

For a long time I was loading Proxima Nova on Preceden via Typekit (a hosted web font service) for $49.99/year, but at some point I decided to self-host it to avoid the third party request which improved Preceden’s performance metrics.

Turns out this is not such a good idea because I recently received this email from the licensing department for Mark Simonson, the creator of Proxima Nova:

Hello,

I’m writing to you from Mark Simonson Studio, the creator of the Proxima Nova that you’re using on preceden.com.

Unfortunately we cannot locate an appropriate license for this use in our records. We know that font licensing can be confusing so we are here to help ensure that you have the proper license for these fonts.

If you did purchase a web license from one of our distributors, please let us know. If you send us a copy of your receipt and/or license, we will update our records accordingly.

If you do not have a valid license for these fonts, we kindly ask you to purchase one, which you can do here: licensing-assistant.marksimonson.com/s/…

Let me know if you have any additional questions-we’re here to help!

Thank you so much!

I had stopped paying for Typekit at some point (now called Adobe Fonts) so inquired whether I could simply resume paying for Adobe Creative Cloud, which would give me access to Proxima Nova. He responded:

Hello Matt,

Thank you for getting back to me.

The issue here is that your use is only covered by your Adobe CC subscription if you load the fonts according to Adobe’s guidelines: helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/font-licensing.html#server

By self-hosting the font files, as is the case now, you are not covered by your Adobe CC subscription and are required to hold the appropriate license.

Please keep in mind that when you self-host the font rather than using it according to Adobe’s guidelines, we, as a foundry, unfortunately do not receive any payment for our work.

You can switch to Adobe Fonts, but as our team already witnessed this infringement, we kindly ask you to purchase the correct license : licensing-assistant.marksimonson.com/s/….

Thank you fo your cooperation and understanding, and please let me know if you have any questions!

Fair enough.

After some additional back and forth, I learned that they use some service to check for high-traffic sites that self-host Mark Simonson’s fonts. They seem to have reliable monthly traffic numbers for the sites too, which matters when you purchase a license, since it’s based on your monthly traffic.

I went ahead and purchased a $450 license a cover the prior year of usage. Part of me wanted to ignore it to see whether and how it would escalate, but I do still love Proxima Nova and have gotten a lot of value out of it, so was fine paying its creator and avoiding further drama.

As far as switching over to Adobe Fonts, you can purchase a yearly subscription to InCopy (the cheapest product in the Adobe Creative Cloud suite) for $59.88 + tax which gets you unlimited access to Proxima Nova and other fonts, assuming you load it properly and don’t self-host it.

In the end, they said thanks, and closed my case:

Hello,

Thank you so much for purchasing the appropriate font licenses – we really appreciate it!

We can consider this matter closed and we’ll update our records accordingly.

Thanks again!

One of a million little things you gotta deal with running your own SaaS 🤣.