Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I was in the KISSMetrics beta and will probably pay for it, without complaint. It is a pretty simple decision: am I likely to get 5% or more lift out of them? (Assuming a baseline of somewhere near $3,000 in sales a month.) Answer: yeah, based on my experience with funnel optimization, I think that is likely. I will also continue to recommend them to clients.

I yield to no one in empathizing with cash-strapped startups. However, the broader economy has many companies which do business on the Internet and which have actual money. Not "whine about the difference between $10/mo and $20/mo at their particular size" money, which the CrazyEgg team has probably seen more than I care to speculate. Not even "replace low-paying day job with sales" money. I'm talking "Have (teams of) full-time employees whose only job is to do analytics" money and "Pay $150 a day for the hotel room that their high-priced consultant stays at without batting an eye" money.

It makes a lot of sense, especially for a product which you're going to sell in a high touch fashion, to say "We're going to focus on that sort of customer. Folks who perceive $20 or so of value a month from their funnel optimization are welcome to check out our competitors."

I think the point of the guys blog post / rant is not so much the price in general, but that he felt the product targetted at the start-up community. Not that I have taken too much notice but I was under the impression that is where they were targetting it and I wouldn't be surprised if most of their beta testers were from that community and expecting the $10 per month pricing that they are more familiar with.

Personally I would never create a business that targetted other businesses that really have no money, it has never seemed a great business plan, but I would not do a beta marketing of "hey you, try this, you'll love it" to then offer a product they cannot afford.

I'm sure they will have no problems finding customers, but more of a problem finding beta testers for their next product.

You realize you're responding to a solo founder of a standalone startup that sells bingo card creation software, right? I have mad respect for Patrick (he's sitting right next to me at the moment), but if you were under the impression that being a Bingo Card Mogul meant Cristal and Rolex watches, uh, no.

How much more credible a testimonial can you get than "I built my business in 5 hours a week, I sell bingo cards to school teachers, and I easily expect to recoup the investment I'm making in KISSmetrics"?

For what it's worth: I sell enterprise software at a price point several orders of magnitude higher than Patrick's, at a company with more employees than most established YC companies, and KISSmetrics isn't worth it for me right now, because I'm simply not prepared to feed it the data it needs or to make the decisions it's expecting me to make.

I don't take it personally that KISSmetrics is pricing me away from paying for it. In fact, I appreciate it; it's preventing me from wasting time.

I don't think they can't charge that, nor find customers happily willing to pay it. The issue is that if you're going to break from the norm in your industry (and analytics for startup companies, oh yes, they did) then it would be nice to give people a heads up before reeling them in for a free beta. In this example, the guy actually invested time writing code to integrate with it. There's a learning curve associated with beta testing a product and without giving any indication of price ahead of time, it's a reasonable assumption that it will be ballpark what it's competitors are, not 10X that. This is not a complaint about the price they chose, it's a complaint about spending a great deal of time and money marketing to startups (god, did I see them everywhere) and then flipping to a point where they could not afford them. I do believe that someone who has made his money not off a disruptive product or social media network, but carefully analyzing metrics and conversions (like Patrick) could benefit from it, and perhaps that's who it's for, but that's not how it was marketed. In his case, he clearly feels he can make > $200 a month by using it. But what if it cost $1000 or $1M? The point is you have no idea and they clearly aren't concerned with ballparking where there competitors are. I've always been nervous about signing up for a "free" beta that my business can become dependent on without knowing the price. This just convinces me to continue doing that.

I actually don't have a lot of opinions about funnel tracking, so I'll keep this simple and limit it to what I do have an opinion about:

If $200/mo is a lot of money to you, you either shouldn't be spending a lot of time on funnel tracking, or you don't have a business. $200/mo is below the noise floor in company with just four people at ramen wages in the Bay Area.

Thanks Patrick, I'm sure it was one of your blog posts that put me on to KISSmetrics so I'm interested/glad to hear that you're going to stick with them. Perhaps you'd do a review in 6 months time to see if their pricing plans vs the effect to your conversion ratios really has balanced out? (I'm not being snide, I'd be genuinely interested how it works out)

I agree with how market positioning is so important to a startup, and yeah I kinda respect KISSmetrics for having the guts to do this. My anger really came because I felt they'd cut off the bottom of the ladder where those of us who can't justify $150/month on analytics where standing. And this was a surprise because nothing until the pricing announcement indicated that this was the direction they were going to take.

Feel free to ask me about that in six months. I'm always grateful for blog post topics.

It is intrinsically hard to attribute improvements in conversion rate to a single cause, except in an A/B test. It will be sensitive to changes in the traffic mix, seasonality, strategic decisions, etc etc.

I'd love to read a blog post about bingo cards' seasonality. For real.

5% would only be the break-even point, though (for 3000$). At that point, you still haven't made any extra money, but invested time into adapting their solution.

Also, if you make 3000$/month, you are already rich (if it comes from automatic sales), so your attitude to spending might differ from somebody who is just starting out.

Thanks, that was kinda the point I was making when I said KISSmetrics needed to make you $200 on the $149 plan... you'll have invested your own time into this tool so that needs to be accounted for.

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