AdGrok (YC S10) Simplifies Keyword Bidding And More On Google AdWords
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
1. Write an angry blog post insulting New York, New Yorkers, and ibanks.
2. Ride the popularity wave as a heated discussion rages about whether New York is the greatest place on earth or an over-priced, roach infested pit of assholes and prima donnas.
3. Get on Techchrunch.
4. Profit.
As an ex New Yorker, the only thing I can say is "Why didn't I think of this myself!".
1. Recognize an under-served market segment with huge potential.
2. Build a product which fills that segment's need
3. Profit.
Our views on the East Coast tech scene are completely orthogonal to those goals.
I ask that seriously. Obviously their goal is to build a great product, and to get people to use it.
They posted that article on the AdGrok blog because it drove a shit-ton of traffic and it received a ton of inbound links. Why wouldn't they capitalize on that?
As far as the product is concerned, it's fantastic. I've been using it in private beta for a few weeks. I would bet on these guys in a heartbeat.
Startups drive traffic and signups any way that they can, and their company name was hitting mainstream media before they even launched.
Maybe antonio can give us some signup stats to go with the wave of traffic? I'd certainly be curious about the effect it had, even if it was very general (up 4000%, etc.)
The amount of press we got on those posts was completely unexpected (cf. my follow-up post about our imploding blog server). A happy bonus maybe, but we'd rather people love us (or hate us) based on the product.
and as marketing plans go for unknown products, it's not bad.
But then I noticed they also purchased adgrock.com, too. Good planning there.
We also got adgork.com.
Ha!
That's confusing to me. Who is the user? I'll assume they mean AdGrok users. What websites does it give info for? I'll assume just the ones the user owns, not their competitors who also use AdGrok, right? If so, why does it "sit on a webpage", and "pops up anytime the user is on a page that is being advertised?" Doesn't make any sense to me. [Edit] Isn't this just the functionality you'd expect in the AdGrok interface? [/Edit]
You can see a video demo here:
The devil is in the details on a tool like this, but it could certainly be useful (and a quick flip to Google) if executed correctly. Wish you guys the best and would love to be an early beta user.
The devil is most certainly in the details in a product like this, which is why we welcome any and all feedback from beta users. You've got first dibs on our product pipeline, so any feature you need we can push out very quickly.
Sign up here: https://adgrok.wufoo.com/forms/adgrok-beta/
Cheers, Antonio.
I would hate to sign up for something, get used to it and really like it, and get hit with some absurdly high price.
Perhaps putting the cost upfront might prove to be useful.
Besides, your biggest competitor - clickable.com - buries their price two or three menus deep, which smacks of sleaze.
Please don't follow their lead. Looks like there is a lot of promise here.
We're taking a somewhat Radiohead position on it.
What would you be wiling to pay for it?
I'll tell you our thoughts on it so far:
A tiered pricing structure, with a fixed monthly subscription fee. Probably starting somewhere around $20 for the smallest budgets, and going up from there. We'll set the tier price points wherever there seems to be obvious market segmentation.
Really big power users, or agencies who are white-labeling our product, might get a more industry-standard percent-of-spend deal.
Our view is that Mom-and-Pops might be wary of a percent-of-spend pricing model. That said, the small SEM shops of dubious quality, who are our real competition, commonly use a percent-of-spend pricing model. So we might have to go with that just to make it comparable. Even if that were true, we'd charge nowhere near the 15-20% of spend many SEM shops charge.
So, worry not. You're not going to get used to our product, and then get screwed by us on price. We'll leave the first-dose-is-free business model to the enterprising young gentlemen around the 16th Street BART station in the Mission.
Regards, Antonio.
Btw, feel free to hit me directly with any customer/pricing ideas at antonio@adgrok.com.
Ive often wondered how I would feel if I wrote a post that p*d the hell out of a lot of people. Looking at the marketing result I'd say I'd be smug happy as hell.
Memo: if i'll ever be in this situation give HN users a pass to skip my web app private beta queue since they're likely to be more useful than random people
We're putting you at the head of the line.
Granted, HN users probably are the best beta users.
You should expect a beta invite today, or tomorrow at the latest.
Regards, Antonio.
In the medium run this will only benefit Google.
Edit -- after watching their video, their in-browser funnel visualization is cool as hell. Probably not scalable to larger merchants, but amazing for small sites. Props -- that's a great idea.
To answer your question: from a business POV, it's no different than Clickable (EfficientFrontier and Co. are way out of most SMBs' price range). We think our approach is a lot better: by putting the tool in the browser, we make campaign management painless. We also have more automation that Clickable, so, through time, the GrokBar becomes a sort of marketing autopilot.
You can use the tool to drive traffic to any page, doesn't have to be a product page. In keeping with our bottoms-up approach (as opposed to the top-down, Google-centric approach of every other SEM tool on the market), we thought looking at individual product pages would be most useful for e-commerce sites, which is why we focus our demo on that.
But again, there's no reason to limit use to there. In fact, in v2.0 (which should ship in the coming days) you can tag arbitrary pages, and look at aggregate stats for that tagged group (e.g., a category of products like 'women's shoes' or the like).