Hi there, I just wanted to pass along some quick thoughts.
First, as others have mentioned you absolutely have to provide some kind of usable live test so that people can interact with your tool. My suggestion for doing this with as little friction as possible is, instead of messing with limited accounts or trials, just provide a link to a live demo that is scanning a few interesting keywords. I recommend showing a household name like Apple alongside a much smaller company alongside the EFF, for example.
Second, I really respect that you're trying to keep the price low, but I have grave concerns that you are making the wrong assumption about where your paying clients' pain points are. Specifically, the issue that would make people use this service is that it works amazingly well, is reliable and user friendly. If you achieve these baselines, the typical customer is going to be willing to pay more for this service than the competitors, not less. To be clear, a huge number of people could end up using this tool everyday as the main part of their job. Do you really think that their employers are going to care that your per-seat cost is $7 instead of $300? If anything, your service is so cheap that you might lose enterprise customers because it appears to be too cheap and there can be very legit longevity concerns. The API is great news until you consider that the CTO's job is to consider a) is this the best product and b) how likely is it to disappear or otherwise fail? Jobs get lost over integrations with services that go bankrupt.
Long story short: I think that idea has amazing potential but you need to seriously reconsider your pricing because at best you're burning potential revenue and at worst you aren't charging enough to scale to be the company you could be.
Agreed on pricing, most low end smbs that have very little mentions may fit with this price point but if they have so little mentions is it even a pain point for them? Whereas bigger companies likely have the pain point with a lot of mentions, so they won't have issues paying due to how much bigger the pain is.
This probably speaks to a broader fit issue. SMBs attracted by the pricing likely don't get enough mentions to make it worthwhile, larger orgs that do get the mentions and that will pay extra probably want a more robust tool.
All of these things you mention, I have been thinking of too over the past year of building this out. Most of my time has been spent ensuring the code is strong and bullet-proof to work amazingly well and is reliable. Even if I get hit by a bus and can not touch the base for weeks or months on end.
There are a few things needing to be tweaked still, but it's almost all there.
Less time has been spent on the UX/LP/copy. Not an excuse, but just showing where I spent my time on this project.
Plans are to raise pricing once other features come online, a few bugs are smashed ( had one reported today with UK billing ), and a new LP/UX goes up. More then likely I will have to raise pricing slowly as milestones are hit.
Users already in the system will get grandfathered at their pricing, but pricing will go up so it can scale.
> ...your service is so cheap that you might lose enterprise customers because it appears to be too cheap and there can be very legit longevity concerns.
Perhaps add an enterprise tier that includes lots of buzzwords in its description on a dedicated page.
You're making light of my point, but you are underestimating how important that point actually is. Services that don't cost enough are perceived as highly suspect, because there's a widely-held (and not unfounded) belief that anything worth using is worth paying for. You're not just paying for the sunk cost + fractional profit; you're investing in a solution that will stand up to your board of directors wanting something to blame. Think: support contracts, data protection and privacy laws, corporate structure and insurance. The function that this tool purports to do is literally the full time job for a lot of people, so there's no way they can put such an important function on someone's cool side project. It's just not a good business move.
I don't know about 300 per seat cost, unless the idea is that there is only one seat per enterprise, that price could quickly grown into one where you have to go through some onerous procurement process.
I pulled $300 out of the air, but when you look at how expensive SaaS tools like Mixpanel get at scale, it's not even improbable. Welcome to corporate budgets, where the people making the decisions are not spending their own money and one of the top-3 decision dimensions is "will this get me fired?"
It's not my wisdom, but it is frequently cited on here (looking at patio11) that the reason software costs up to $500 or over $10k but very little in-between is that most managers can expense $500 without VP approval; $10k is the minimum realistic price of a product sold via an inside sales process.
Interesting. Would be curious to try it out but wasn’t sure if there was a trial available.
The copywriting is confusing and I think can be improved. For example you’re starting with a question “What Are You?”... do you mean who are you? It isn’t immediately clear who is you here. The reader or your service... reading the next paragraph it seems that you describes your service, but then you are mixing “your brand” which makes you refer to the reader...
EDIT: some of the claims for covering the whole web seem a bit outlandish...
I’ve used mention.io and notify.ly and both were very meh for us... F5bot was better on Reddit and HN and is free.
Might be tempted to try this if there was a limited trial (limited in terms of time or items)
I wanted a simple and easy social media listening tool that was cheaper than Brand24, Brandmentions, and Awario.. but scanned more sources than TalkWalker and Google Alerts.
It became very convenient to find discussions about my brand, my competitors, and my industry so I could drop in and engage with potential customers after I built this tool.
What makes Brandchirps different? It does 90% of what other big boy tools do, but for a lot cheaper. Your use of my product also directly supports a small family business that invests their lives in helping others, not some VC portfolio that only cares about cashing out.
You should add some more description around the problem this is solving. This could be useful to a lot of people that don’t know it could be (like me).
What are your data sources? How often does a notification happen?
Notifications are daily, but we are adding selections for this for those that want instant or weekly, etc.
List of sites and data sources are to large to post here.
As far as the problem solving, I will reprint what's on our home page.
I’ll tell you why I needed this same service first, in hopes you can see why you should want it too.
I wanted a tool that could reliably and completely scan the internet for mentions of my company’s brand name so I could react to both positive and negative news and conversations quickly.
Later, I learned to do the same for my competitor’s brand names to jump in and promote my brand based on their conversations.
Currently, I track mentions of keywords in my industry to further expose my brand to even more potential customers.
Why Brandchirps Over Another Similar Tool?
Good question.
Most other similar alternatives don’t monitor the whole web. Most will only monitor specific platforms like Twitter. We monitor the web and multiple social networks.
Many others will limit how many records they will pull for you every month ( 5 keywords, but only 3,000 records per month collected ). We do not limit the number of records we find on your keywords.
A lot of them are very expensive ( starting at $99 a month vs our $6.97 a month ), don’t offer an API, or just don’t work very well. We offer plans starting at $6.97, and an API, and we ensure our service is easy to use & battle-tested to run daily.
How do you monitor Facebook? Do you have a written contract with them? Last year Brand24 was cut off from monitoring FB and Instagram, the company page and CEO personal profile were also removed from the platform. It cost Brand24 some clients and revenue and AFAIK they still haven't re-gained access.
I run a similar service that's currently in private beta so I might be able to provide some insight.
In short: closed platforms like Facebook are _generally_ out of reach for tools like these. (Reddit is a big exception because of its open API.)
There are a ton of social media monitoring tools on the market, and so the gap this is filling is more news and general web content (i.e. pretty much the 'searchable' web).
I built something a prototype of this a year ago. But I ultimately decided that I couldn't ever see myself making close to as much money from it as I already do. I won't be sad if this service proves that wrong.
I just told customers to sign up for Google Alerts for the general web, and then I scraped new content from a bunch of sites like Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Product Hunt, Hacker News.
The idea was to order everything by how many people might be seeing it and how many people were interacting with it (dis/liking).
Since most things posted on social media basically go unnoticed, I crawled things in a way that you would only see stuff any reasonable business would care about. Because of that, even for a website like Reddit, I could get all the content for an hour in only a couple thousand hits -- bandwidth wasn't anything crazy.
As a business, this gave you the ability to prioritize what you should pay attention to and where -- without giving you a bunch of noise.
With the way web hosting servers are set up, and specific companies that sell this hosting, bandwidth for crawling/scraping is basically $0 at most popular companies.
As important, the trial should not require a credit card, because this is just some random site with no established reputation that may or may not employ shady cancellation practices.
Running free trials in the past in other projects ( either as an employee or owner ) with no credit card has proven this audience of people hardly upgrades to a paid user. There is a %, but it's so slim and small that it is almost not worth it. There are a lot of reasons why for this that I have surveys and first hand data on. It was just not the right fit in my mind right now.
A lot of these users sign up and stay free forever, or sign up multiple times to bypass the time gate ( free for 7 days ), or sign up and hardly use the product and stay inactive. All bad things for a developer or owner to stack against metrics. When this happens, it's hard to compare the "do we have a bad product, or are the users just freeloaders" questions to improve the product. At least at the very beginning of a launch.
Nothing against these users, but as a MVP type product where I am trying to gauge demand and fit, it just was not in the cards.
People signing up for free is one thing. People pulling out their wallets is another.
I totally get people want to validate before they purchase though, but I need "wallet" data to see if I am going in the right direction for several metrics and thoughts I have in my head atm.
I will keep this in mind once I am able to see demand and fit better as it is a valid concern you bring up.
We publish several installable products. I've been looking for a way to track all mentions for all product names. It's not critical, but it is definitely something that we can use.
But I am not sure if we are going to get something relevant or just some random flotsam from SEO spamfarms and such. That is, you made something that may potentially have a value for us IF we can gauge the quality of the results for our products. No way in hell I'm going to pull out a wallet and subscribe just to valid if your service is any good.
Basically, you have no reputation and you expect us to pay you to check if you are any good. That's a firm No. In fact, it's not a matter of money, it's a matter of your general attitude towards establishing a working relationship being wrong. You are throwing the baby with the bathwater.
Unlike other commentators I don't think you need a free trial, but I think you need a couple of free searches per day for example. Let me try my brand and maybe a competitors, see the results and then if I try to get one more, or if I want to export the results or whatever let me know this and many other nice things are available for registered users.
Also I'd like to know how I'll be alerted, will I get an email for every single mention or is there the possibility to have hourly/daily/weekly digests ?
Either way I think this is a good alternative to the other services out there and I could probably see myself using that on a side-project soon as the fairly low price isn't a barrier to me at all ! $7 is like free except you get money, unlike the limited free trials that get very expensive for the lowest plan available.
Nice work, bookmarking and eager to see actual results !
Will keep a free trial in mind or some sort of demo.
Alerts can come as RSS feed or Json that you can ping when you need, or you get a daily email that lists a partial digest of your new results that you can click through to our site to get more data.
I doubt such thing, considering especially some services may require an account in order to read messages, and some are unknown (for various reasons). Also, not all of the communications is done by web some are done using IRC, NNTP, etc.
I think the "web" here is used to refer to the World Wide Web, which I believe is limited to `text/html` [1] — i.e. excludes IRC, NNTP, etc., which would probably just be classified as "internet communication" (as you mention).
It would probably be better if the service were more explicit about what it scanned — after all, 'the web' means very different things to different people — but I think it's safe to say that "scrapable" html served over http(s) is the indended meaning.
I was just curious how a tool like this is built. I'm not saying I want to know every intricate detail, but how would one crawl the entire web over and over for such a cheap price ?
A lot of it is because I have been involved in prior projects that involve scraping for the past decade. I have built up a lot of code, skill, API access, libraries, and thoughts on crawling and scraping different websites.
Also, this won't stay almost $7 forever. But I wanted to test the waters and see demand. I also don't think it will go much higher either so "cheap" will be relative to each person.
Readit News
First, as others have mentioned you absolutely have to provide some kind of usable live test so that people can interact with your tool. My suggestion for doing this with as little friction as possible is, instead of messing with limited accounts or trials, just provide a link to a live demo that is scanning a few interesting keywords. I recommend showing a household name like Apple alongside a much smaller company alongside the EFF, for example.
Second, I really respect that you're trying to keep the price low, but I have grave concerns that you are making the wrong assumption about where your paying clients' pain points are. Specifically, the issue that would make people use this service is that it works amazingly well, is reliable and user friendly. If you achieve these baselines, the typical customer is going to be willing to pay more for this service than the competitors, not less. To be clear, a huge number of people could end up using this tool everyday as the main part of their job. Do you really think that their employers are going to care that your per-seat cost is $7 instead of $300? If anything, your service is so cheap that you might lose enterprise customers because it appears to be too cheap and there can be very legit longevity concerns. The API is great news until you consider that the CTO's job is to consider a) is this the best product and b) how likely is it to disappear or otherwise fail? Jobs get lost over integrations with services that go bankrupt.
Long story short: I think that idea has amazing potential but you need to seriously reconsider your pricing because at best you're burning potential revenue and at worst you aren't charging enough to scale to be the company you could be.
Also, kudos for sharing this insight in a constructive manner.
All of these things you mention, I have been thinking of too over the past year of building this out. Most of my time has been spent ensuring the code is strong and bullet-proof to work amazingly well and is reliable. Even if I get hit by a bus and can not touch the base for weeks or months on end.
There are a few things needing to be tweaked still, but it's almost all there.
Less time has been spent on the UX/LP/copy. Not an excuse, but just showing where I spent my time on this project.
Plans are to raise pricing once other features come online, a few bugs are smashed ( had one reported today with UK billing ), and a new LP/UX goes up. More then likely I will have to raise pricing slowly as milestones are hit.
Users already in the system will get grandfathered at their pricing, but pricing will go up so it can scale.
Thanks again for your thoughts.
Perhaps add an enterprise tier that includes lots of buzzwords in its description on a dedicated page.
It's not my wisdom, but it is frequently cited on here (looking at patio11) that the reason software costs up to $500 or over $10k but very little in-between is that most managers can expense $500 without VP approval; $10k is the minimum realistic price of a product sold via an inside sales process.
The copywriting is confusing and I think can be improved. For example you’re starting with a question “What Are You?”... do you mean who are you? It isn’t immediately clear who is you here. The reader or your service... reading the next paragraph it seems that you describes your service, but then you are mixing “your brand” which makes you refer to the reader...
EDIT: some of the claims for covering the whole web seem a bit outlandish...
I’ve used mention.io and notify.ly and both were very meh for us... F5bot was better on Reddit and HN and is free.
Might be tempted to try this if there was a limited trial (limited in terms of time or items)
It became very convenient to find discussions about my brand, my competitors, and my industry so I could drop in and engage with potential customers after I built this tool.
What makes Brandchirps different? It does 90% of what other big boy tools do, but for a lot cheaper. Your use of my product also directly supports a small family business that invests their lives in helping others, not some VC portfolio that only cares about cashing out.
What are your data sources? How often does a notification happen?
List of sites and data sources are to large to post here.
As far as the problem solving, I will reprint what's on our home page.
I’ll tell you why I needed this same service first, in hopes you can see why you should want it too.
I wanted a tool that could reliably and completely scan the internet for mentions of my company’s brand name so I could react to both positive and negative news and conversations quickly.
Later, I learned to do the same for my competitor’s brand names to jump in and promote my brand based on their conversations.
Currently, I track mentions of keywords in my industry to further expose my brand to even more potential customers.
Why Brandchirps Over Another Similar Tool?
Good question.
Most other similar alternatives don’t monitor the whole web. Most will only monitor specific platforms like Twitter. We monitor the web and multiple social networks.
Many others will limit how many records they will pull for you every month ( 5 keywords, but only 3,000 records per month collected ). We do not limit the number of records we find on your keywords.
A lot of them are very expensive ( starting at $99 a month vs our $6.97 a month ), don’t offer an API, or just don’t work very well. We offer plans starting at $6.97, and an API, and we ensure our service is easy to use & battle-tested to run daily.
In short: closed platforms like Facebook are _generally_ out of reach for tools like these. (Reddit is a big exception because of its open API.)
There are a ton of social media monitoring tools on the market, and so the gap this is filling is more news and general web content (i.e. pretty much the 'searchable' web).
I know there are lots of open source crawlers like Stormcrawler and all, but the cost of running it at web scale everyday is prohibitive isn’t it?
I just told customers to sign up for Google Alerts for the general web, and then I scraped new content from a bunch of sites like Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Product Hunt, Hacker News.
The idea was to order everything by how many people might be seeing it and how many people were interacting with it (dis/liking).
Since most things posted on social media basically go unnoticed, I crawled things in a way that you would only see stuff any reasonable business would care about. Because of that, even for a website like Reddit, I could get all the content for an hour in only a couple thousand hits -- bandwidth wasn't anything crazy.
As a business, this gave you the ability to prioritize what you should pay attention to and where -- without giving you a bunch of noise.
No trial = no interest.
As important, the trial should not require a credit card, because this is just some random site with no established reputation that may or may not employ shady cancellation practices.
A lot of these users sign up and stay free forever, or sign up multiple times to bypass the time gate ( free for 7 days ), or sign up and hardly use the product and stay inactive. All bad things for a developer or owner to stack against metrics. When this happens, it's hard to compare the "do we have a bad product, or are the users just freeloaders" questions to improve the product. At least at the very beginning of a launch.
Nothing against these users, but as a MVP type product where I am trying to gauge demand and fit, it just was not in the cards.
People signing up for free is one thing. People pulling out their wallets is another.
I totally get people want to validate before they purchase though, but I need "wallet" data to see if I am going in the right direction for several metrics and thoughts I have in my head atm.
I will keep this in mind once I am able to see demand and fit better as it is a valid concern you bring up.
But I am not sure if we are going to get something relevant or just some random flotsam from SEO spamfarms and such. That is, you made something that may potentially have a value for us IF we can gauge the quality of the results for our products. No way in hell I'm going to pull out a wallet and subscribe just to valid if your service is any good.
Basically, you have no reputation and you expect us to pay you to check if you are any good. That's a firm No. In fact, it's not a matter of money, it's a matter of your general attitude towards establishing a working relationship being wrong. You are throwing the baby with the bathwater.
2. You could use https://privacy.com/ if cancellation policy is a concern
Also I'd like to know how I'll be alerted, will I get an email for every single mention or is there the possibility to have hourly/daily/weekly digests ?
Either way I think this is a good alternative to the other services out there and I could probably see myself using that on a side-project soon as the fairly low price isn't a barrier to me at all ! $7 is like free except you get money, unlike the limited free trials that get very expensive for the lowest plan available.
Nice work, bookmarking and eager to see actual results !
Will keep a free trial in mind or some sort of demo.
Alerts can come as RSS feed or Json that you can ping when you need, or you get a daily email that lists a partial digest of your new results that you can click through to our site to get more data.
It would probably be better if the service were more explicit about what it scanned — after all, 'the web' means very different things to different people — but I think it's safe to say that "scrapable" html served over http(s) is the indended meaning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
I was just curious how a tool like this is built. I'm not saying I want to know every intricate detail, but how would one crawl the entire web over and over for such a cheap price ?
Also, this won't stay almost $7 forever. But I wanted to test the waters and see demand. I also don't think it will go much higher either so "cheap" will be relative to each person.