As my love of vinyl LPs grows, I’ve looked for ways to ensure that I get exposed to new music. In January, I discovered VinylMePlease on ProductHunt, and I was instantly hooked: what appeared to be a team who was passionate about music, knew more about vinyl than I did, and who’d put a fair amount of thought into which record to send out each month. Sold.

Last month, my first VinylMePlease shipment arrived. Packaging was great, and the music was from an artist I’d heard before but not spent a ton of time listening to (Father John Misty).

Fast forward to this month’s selection, a limited edition pressing of J Dilla’s Donuts. I’d never heard of the artist (this is a mildly embarrassing admission on my part, but at least that oversight’s been remedied thanks to VinylMePlease) or the album, but after Tori pointed out how excellent it was, I listened to it on Spotify and was impressed. It is, indeed, excellent.

Then last Thursday, I saw this tweet from VinylMePlease:

I hadn’t seen the email yet, so I bounced over to Inbox and dug it up. Turns out, there’s a problem with the upcoming album:

Whoa. First reaction after reading that email wasn’t frustration over the delay in getting a clean pressing, dismay over the defect, or even annoyance with anyone for not catching the issue sooner. My reaction? Awe. These guys are 100% committed to me getting a quality product and loving my experience with VinylMePlease. End result? I’ve since switched from a renew-every-3-months plan to an annual subscription.

The album arrived today; enclosed with the package was an insert that explained a bit more about the defect and what VinylMePlease is doing to resolve the issue.

When you’re at a startup, shit happens. Things go wrong, hiccups happen. You can try to avoid dealing with the issues, in the hopes that only a few people will care enough about them to get really worked up. Or you can pass the buck, and make it someone else’s issue to deal with. Or you can play the underdog card, and tell people how it’s tough to be a small startup, and hope that they’ll understand when you hit the inevitable bump in the road.

But when you have confidence in your product and a real passion for your users, you’ll follow VinylMePlease’s lead: you’ll show your users that nothing less than a superlative experience is the standard you expect, and you’ll do everything in your power to make it right. Down that path is more work, more money (re-pressing all of those replacement discs and shipping them won’t be cheap; that may or may not come out of VinylMePlease’s coffers, but it’s coming from somewhere), and more time.

But your users don’t forget. When I first signed up for VinylMePlease I was worried that they’d pick records I didn’t know or didn’t like. Now I don’t care. If they work this hard to fix the whoosh on J Dilla’s Donuts, they’ll work hard to ship me great records. Can’t wait to see what they pick for April. (And if you own a turntable, you should request an invite.)

Disclaimer: I’m not an investor in VinylMePlease, and other than a few great interactions on Twitter, don’t know the team at all. I just admire a team working hard to execute on a good user experience, and wanted to give them props for a job well done in the midst of what I imagine has been a pretty stressful month for them.