First off, I want to make it clear; I've found some amazingly helpful and professional members of the DNN scene in the last 3 months. This is not a generalized slag.    

'Whats up' with the number of developers who can perhaps program good modules, but fail in the business side of things? Primarily, customer support among a number of devs (and you know who you are) is the pits. 

You -cannot- ignore customer emails. You -cannot- give half-formed, casual emails in response to someone who has just trusted part of their business processes to you. Ok, well obviously you can, but what kind of business model is that? I think programmers trying to do it all as a one-man show are spreading the butter too thin, and for some reason it's really standing out in the DNN scene as compared to some other circles i've seen.

I understand the one-man show thing, its a fun and interesting experience and really rewarding for those people who need to keep busy. I personally thrive on it. There comes a point though, when you have to spend some of your incoming earnings from Snowcovered on expanding customer support. Whatever that means for you, it could be dedicating one day a week to your inbox emails you've mentally labelled 'noob' and really try to help them out.

I am seeing situations where people are literally begging the in the forums of certain vendors for some info, anything, about the next release of modules. Offering to pay money for a beta. Things like this, and not even a response from the vendor.

I don't expect the kind of support that can be offered from companies like Telerik in a small private business. I learned early though that the customer is everything.   If you spend half your day 'wasting time' on some customer who just doesn't get it, or has a gimped install etc., yes you're losing programming time, but you're gaining a long term income source.

I guess I could walk around all day telling people opinions on how to improve their businesses, and just as easily tell random people on the street why their fashion sense is horrible, so I'm not going to drag this on much further. I would like to say once again that a minority of companies (people) in this little DNN - micro economy have really impressed me, mostly by friendly, patient support.

They will get my future business. The rest of you need to shut down VS for a while and look at the big pic.

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Well, just like trying to get employees to shape up, negative vibes never really solve anything.   Positive reinforcement works best.  Maybe a DNN Whitelist would be a better option.   I have no problem outing the true pros in the scene, but I would have a problem with crapping on someone because they have an overloaded business (story of my life).

In a moment of shameless self-promotion: we are ready and geared up to assist any DNN developers with their support needs.  We provide operators who aren't programmers but are nonetheless skilled with DotNetNuke, at lower cost than offering your support in-house.

Helping companies with their support is what we do

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Shane Miller