Brandchirps – Simple Brand Monitoring
brandchirps.com
brandchirps.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
2. You could use https://privacy.com/ if cancellation policy is a concern
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.
One difference in my data and other similar services is that I do not limit the amount of results I collect. Higher priced competitors limit you to XXX results a day, or XXXX a month. So you automatically miss out if there is more data than your limit. Since I don't limit the results we collect, you can see more of your keyword universe. You just need to filter and add negatives ( if you wish ) to get the true results you want if you are getting some that match your keyword, but don't match your intent.
Some people will want to see all the data, some will only want specific quality. We leave that option to the user. Thus we allow you to use negatives and filtering.
The only problem I have with your other statements is:
1. You assume because I have no reputation on this site, that something must be off for you to pull out your wallet. What about my reputation elsewhere? With this being a new launch, you can not just gauge by my brand name alone or my handle here alone. You know nothing of my background either.
2. You feel my attitude towards establishing a working relationship is wrong. What if your thinking about it is wrong? You do not know my past history with SaaS, business, or networking in general. I have a lot of data as both an employee and business owner that proves free trials ( without credit card ) hardly moves the needle in converting free users to paid. Just because you feel relationships should work one way, does not mean my process is now invalid and wrong.
3. When was the last time you pulled out $7, got frauded and could not get the money back from the product owner/service, Paypal, or your credit card/bank? I am going to assume just about never unless you actively decided not to pursue and just let it be. In today's time you as the consumer will just about always get your money back from Paypal or your credit card/bank if you ask. In the 20+ years I have been online I have never had a merchant keep my money unless I was out of bounds on their terms/policies. If you are paying with a credit card ( which my service only takes ), you have protection in place pretty much.
Also, I had the wrong idea for what SHOWHN was. That is totally on me. I misunderstand what SHOWHN was used for and it's backstory. I had to talk to one of the moderators to understand a bit more and properly use the system.
I came into this thinking I would show what I built. It was a mod here that discussed with me that a lot of SHOWHN is about sharing free/beta products and getting feedback and product users that can improve the product.
In that sense, I was using SHOWHN wrong. Which is entirely on me. I just wanted to show my product, not really drive free user into it that would help with feedback.
So most of this miscommunication lies on me and the wrong expectation.
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.
Bandwidth is not a concern for projects like this at a lot of hosting/VPS providers.
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 ?
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.
A lot of our competitors that are paid ( not all, but the majority ) are way more expensive. Most start at $49 or $99 for largely the same feature set. Again, not all, but most.
For free alternatives like Google Alerts, you are missing things like Sentiment Analysis ( coming soon with us ), missing alerts ( I have had a Google Alerts account for years and I am not getting all the data it should be finding ), there really isn't any kind of reporting ( ours is set to launch very soon ), you can only deliver results as RSS feed or send to 1 email while we allow you to send email results to up to 3 emails ( we also do RSS and Json ), I don't think there is an "export data" option in GA either, etc.
We have a lot more coming out soon. We aren't a fit for everyone, but someone looking to step up from more than what Google Alerts offers as a free product, we would be in the running.
In my mind, a lot of people running Google Alerts as their only source of info tend to be single users or very small agencies. We would like to be able to offers those users and agencies a bit more in feature set that might be useful to them, but still at a nearly free price point that isn't limiting.
We would also like to get some of the bigger agencies to try our product as well and see they can get most of what they are use to, at a lot cheaper price possibly.
While it may be a stretch for the larger agency to come to us now, we would like to get the smaller agencies on board and work our way up to everyone.
Thanks
In regards to pricing. I would say it's very reasonable, you could probably charge more (after I'm grandfathered in of course) :)
I see you had a 7 day refund policy, that was enough to give me confidence. If you can't afford the very low price, then you don't have a brand worth protecting.
Can't wait to try the service, let me know when it's fixed :)
Giving you free access for life later tonight in finding the bug!
Thanks
What is your tools response time? If someone mentions my product on Reddit, how long before I'm alerted by your tool?
Google Alerts, I have it and it doesn't pick up a lot of social data. For instance, I have never seen Reddit data come across on my Google alerts for terms I monitored with it. Could be me, but if Google Alerts did everything Brand24 or Mention or BrandMentions did, I would have not needed to code this.
So you would need to combine Google Alerts and F5Bot and maybe another tool to get more data.
I also don't remember things like Sentiment Analysis ( coming soon ) and other features available on Google Alerts and F5Bot.
Syften, at the time I was building and launching, only covered a few select communities and not the whole web. Maybe things have changed lately since we launched, but they were only at the time, select communities which seemed focused on Dev or tech discussions.
We do our round-trip about every 3-4 hours at the moment while testing things out. Our plan is to reduce that time from 3-4 hours to within 1 minute for sites like Reddit.
We are just ironing things out and evaluating demand, then tweaking things like that later on to much faster times.
I was really honored that all of you took interest in this project to leave your comments and thoughts.
Wanted to verify this would work before putting more time/money into more. Looks like people are taking interest so will probably hit up a UX guy in the next few weeks.
I decided to go with a super low price backed with a money back guarantee and option to self cancel to entice users in, rather than a free plan or free demo/trial.
My experience in running a prior SaaS showed me that free plans were not all that great at getting users to sign up compared to those that signed up directly without one. The difference was tiny.
I understand that many may want a free plan or demo before trying, but I decided to do something different with this SaaS on this turn.
I decided to go with a super low price backed with a guarantee and option to self cancel to entice users in, rather than a free plan.
My experience in running a prior SaaS showed me that free plans were not all that great at getting users to sign up.
I understand that many may want a free plan before trying, but I decided to do something different with this SaaS on this turn.
I'm really interested in knowing how you did it, plan to blog post about it ?
One of which is "what promotion strategy works best" for a SaaS launch as well as one that covers how we do, what we do.
I've invested in a few services that submit your SaaS to directories and also been featured in those "producthunt" alternatives.
What works and what doesn't is pretty surprising.
Best way I can describe it is "publicly allowable URLs on the web" which would include blogs, forums, social networks, websites, and more. If we can pick up the HTML/RSS/ATOM/Json/text.. then we try to get it.
We don't scrape any sites that disallow it in their robots txt and we don't scrape material only available behind logins and paywalls.
My experience in running a prior SaaS showed me that free plans were not all that great at getting users to sign up compared to those that signed up directly without one. The difference was tiny.
I understand that many may want a free plan or demo before trying, but I decided to do something different with this SaaS on this turn.
I am planning to possibly put up a video though to show everyone how it works.
Of course this is a smaller market than the enterprise one, but it's a niche that I think exists and could be catered to.
Full disclosure: I'm also working on a tool similar to Brandchirps that's in private beta, though I haven't launched it yet. Anyone who wants to try out the private beta can email me.
We are looking to fill the gap for those who need a little more than what Google Alerts and F5Bot provide, but at a cheaper price than the next widely known competitor that typically charges $49 to $99 a month atm.
...which is why I've been building a similar tool [0] that's currently in private beta. So a bit of a plug: if anyone is looking for an alternative or just wants to try something different, feel free to send me a message. Contact info is in my profile.
And if anyone from Brandchirps wants to chat about this market and our respective projects, please get in touch. I sent you all a message and would love to talk.
[0] It's not public yet, but here are some screenshots to give you a sense of the similarities+differences between these tools: https://imgur.com/a/Sxpt2An
Here's the Rust library I built that powers the core of my project, if it's any help: https://github.com/milesmcc/ieql
Relatedly, because I feel like my tool relies so much on open-source software and public archives, I give 10% of my service's revenue to various open source projects. Tools like these are only possible at this price point if they're built on the shoulders of giants (i.e. tons of open source software and publicly available web archives).
Edit: Appears to be Bulma
Plug: if you're tentative to buy in to try it, though, I'm building another tool like this that's in private beta right now. Feel free to contact me (info on profile) if you'd like to try it out for free!