I would say don't ignore the haters, anticipate them. When we showed off our early work on Eve last year, we prepared for every possible comment and criticism we could think of. What we did is write a series of documents such that whenever anyone brought up an argument against us, we replied and pointed to a well-researched post refuting their point of view. It actually worked to talk people down from "This is the dumbest thing ever" to "oh, I can see why you did that. Good luck".
This works (being good at understanding, anticipating and addressing criticism) until you realize it's turtles all the way down and at some point the returns of keeping up with the criticism become diminishing. One has to realize that:
1) People like to criticise for the sake of critising, there's never gonna be a scenario where you don't have haters unless nobody likes or uses your product/company.
2) People are often irrational and emotional, there's only so much you can do with logic and reason when one just wants to vent and shout.
3) People don't understand that you have to make compromises to be able to run your service/product/company and those compromises mean you can't please the entirety 100% of uses cases they come up with. As far as they are concerned your product/company should do everything all the time at no cost.
By all means, don't ignore criticism and the haters, but keep a level head and understand that it won't always take you somewhere to argue about it.
I would say the key is to understand the other side. Sometimes it's not hidden in the actual rhetorics but instead it's an actual perception of something/you which is making them be aggressive.
For every person who says something out loud, there are a dozen who are silently saying the same thing in their head. You have to have a good response to the objections.
I feel like that makes it really easy to wall off constructive criticism. If you're looking for bad comments you will see more of them. Human communication in general is hard, consider:
"Your product sucks!"
... could mean
"Your product is not optimized for my low powered device and I received a subpar, if rare, experience because of it! Please optimize for my device in the future and I will happily become a recurring customer and tell my friends about it!"
Well, once you're researched and understand the the other side of the argument, presumably you should be in a good position to determine whether the argument has merit, and additionally whether it makes sense to make a change in response to it (because merit does not imply the change would be right for your product). Sometimes the right response is "Yeah, I understand. It would be great if we had something that addressed your needs, but that's just not something we have the ability to focus on right now given the other priorities we have. If that means you choose something else, that's unfortunate for us, but we wouldn't want to be serving you in a substandard way anyways. Maybe at some point in the future we'll be the right fit."
Sometimes respecting your customer is realizing they shouldn't be your customer, for the benefit of both of you.
"researched and understand the other side of the argument"
This assumes the process of "research" can accurately depict not only ALL of the customer's needs and requirements but also their emotional and physical state, put simply you're suggesting research and "understanding" can accurately place your perception of the world 1:1 with their perception of the world.
I agree with your point though that some customers are "beyond saving". However the idea from $BIG_COMPANY_X that "I know the problem domain so well and the customers don't know whats best for them!" seems endemic in tech (i.e. Google Plus) and leads to inferior products smelling of our own bull shit.
Customer feedback is important. Communication is important. Sometimes we think we are sufficiently communicating when we are not. Sometimes we think we have sufficiently "researched" and we have not.
Well, yes. But if you have an answer tailor made for the specific critique, then presumably you've heard it before, and have looked into it, and hearing it again (barring an upswell in reporting that type of complaint you weren't anticipating) doesn't really change the facts of the matter (as long as it is the same, and you aren't just misidentifying it). If your research didn't include talking to people that experienced the problem (even if just beta testers), then you didn't research it very well. But, truth be told, most of us have probably fallen prey to that sin before.
Most of the time you understand what their criticism is despite the foul language. So just respond to them as if they had made the nicest comment ever.
It's surprising how fast people go from rage to sage in these matters.
To play devil's advocate, how would you value the return on investment on that pre- and post-work? Would it have been more valuable to simply sift the feedback for what felt useful and actionable?
I would imagine having good answers to people's questions is a byproduct of thinking through the approach you're taking with your product / company. And writing it would have value beyond just replying to people's issues, it could be useful institutional knowledge for future employees to help them more deeply understand the product / company. Being explicit with your reasoning also empowers employees to determine where the reasoning may break down as time and context change (vs thinking the leadership has it all figured out).
I can see that value, although as a new venture, I'd still be somewhat skeptical that this would be the very most important thing the team could be doing. Institutional memory doesn't provide a whole lot of value until you have an operational business.
Although, to undercut that point, if you're prepping for pitches, I can see the value, for sure.
But what I'm still not seeing is why bother trying to anticipate beforehand.
You and the original author must also not forget that most startups do suck and will invariably fail, and the critiques are aware of that. I still remember fondly when I got my first life-long free email address from USA.net ...
