As owner of a small company, I've made mistakes and screwed up several times. Sometimes it's been my fault, sometimes it's been a coincidence of bad luck (hardware problems, backup failing etc.) - you probably know what I mean. And to keep your goodwill in your customers hearts, you have to credit them in some way, for the disruption you have caused them. And that ain't easy.

Last week 37signals had a big outage in their Campfire product, and yesterday they posted on their blog (http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2010/12/campfire-outage-explanation..., the explanation of the root causes of the trouble, sincerely apologized and gave every customer of this particular product one month free usage.

Kudos to 37signals - it's this kind of gestures that builds up the trust in your customers hearts!