Ed, you have the power of experience, and your suggestions are all good.
But I can't figure out why you even bothered to comment about her posting. If you had to "educate" every startup hipster on what is wrong with their self aggrandizing blog posts, you would never have time to produce anything. Were you afraid other founders would take her musing as "law" and ruin their lives? I think the less attention these interruptions get, the better chance they will die out of pop culture, and more production can get done. I can't believe i'm wasting my time writing this.
I am saddened that you even ask questions like this. The proper answer should be obvious. If you can't figure this out for yourself, you won't be able to tackle the much larger problems a startup brings :(
if you look at the blog as an attractor for a market segment, (i.e. startups), and you can make the startups believe you are similar to them (just like you are, we struggled to get traction, and here is how we did it & you can do it too, etc... - i.e. the topics of this blog post series), then when the times comes for those startups to buy a customer support app, the hope is they will remember groovehq and recall the warm fuzzy feelings and try it.
people buy from people they "like", and they "like" them because they sense they have something in common with them.
also the implied "we are helping other startups succeed by sharing our lessons learned" influences others whom are not directly in the target customer segment. and when they hear about someone who needs a cust support app, they can recall and recommend groovehq, because the thought has been planted. the lessons in the blog have not touched on the above influence directly (yet), but a main lesson that appears again and again is the need to do your homework, research, analyze and study current market leaders, and apply your hypothesis from what works for them to your own situation. not copy the methods directly, but apply a framework of concepts, customized to your product, customer segment, situation, etc.
this is just one set of topics, and it is getting attention, so their approach seems to be working. later, they could start a topic series about customer support, and since they already have an audience, the impact would be greater than the vanilla blog posts about customer service that they had written before. this secondary topic series could focus on what they didn't like about leading cs help apps like zendesk, etc. that would attract csr's that felt the same way about zendesk, form an association between like minds (i.e. they think just like me, so i like them), and increase mind share and curiosity about the app. a lead is created.
if you haven't had the experience of trying to sell your product or service through a website, (where you didn't speak directly to a lead / prospect / customer), you'd never know how hard it is to estimate and understand why people buy things. many times it has nothing to do with logical comparisons of features and benefits, instead it come from something their mother told them when they were 5 years old (i.e. pretty means you can trust someone, etc). and if people only bought the BEST product on the market, there would only be 1 product / company in each segment, and that's not true. consider how many Apple haters there are who use an Android phone. some people buy other brands simply because they hate the leading brand. so there is an opportunity for every company to fit in somewhere.
i hated this series when i first started reading it. now i digest it with a inquisitive eye that attempts to look behind the curtain to figure out their goals, strategy & tactics, to see how it can work for me. i'm not trying to learn directly from what Alex writes, but learn what he is doing and why it "appears" to be working in his favor at this current moment.
and in regards to transparency, i must comment on these blogs thru hacker news, because i was blocked from using disqus on their site, probably because my initial criticism of their approach was not aligned with their goal of getting everyone to "like" them. just my assumption, but why else would i have been "blocked"?
i need background story on who this guy is and where he came from, to better understand if his "insights" would be applicable to a hacker like me, or if it's only for top biz-school douchebags who already know VC's and are starting the game with $250k in the bank.
i.e. how did he get picked to be a founding member of BantamLive and how did that get bought by CC for $12MM?
i.e. start at the bottom rung of the ladder if you want real world hackers to learn something from this. otherwise it gives the impression that it's unreachable if you are starting from zip.
i tried to ask on the blog, but it appears my comments get deleted if they are not 100% supportive surfer-dude talk. so at least I'm getting an idea of what type of "transparency" is being given by these blogs. i hope i'm proven wrong when the next blog post comes out.
personally i have decided to wait until this is published in March 1st, then read reviews (if people can read through 608 pages that fast), before deciding to order this. the thought of reading 608 pages in this day of 140 character tweets makes me shudder. why couldn't this be turned into a pay per view movie? that would be faster to learn it all. with a companion login website to take notes & track your startup progress, like lean lauch pad is... just my incorrect personal opinion
But I can't figure out why you even bothered to comment about her posting. If you had to "educate" every startup hipster on what is wrong with their self aggrandizing blog posts, you would never have time to produce anything. Were you afraid other founders would take her musing as "law" and ruin their lives? I think the less attention these interruptions get, the better chance they will die out of pop culture, and more production can get done. I can't believe i'm wasting my time writing this.