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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat OT: I am trying to get traction for my latest project: Ping Brigade (https://www.pingbrigade.com/). I have had a few visitors, but it seems that the price point is wrong. So far I have had very little conversion from free to paid accounts. Do you figure it's a matter of getting more exposure or changing the price points and getting better exposure?

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How do you compare to all other monitoring services and why would one want to pay you $8/mo and not, say, Pingdom?

Bonus question - How reliable your monitoring infrastructure is? If I don't have an answer to the question within few seconds of landing on your page, you won't get me to stay. The competition in monitoring segment is fierce, and your service simply does not stand out.

Ah. Fair enough. The infrastructure is pretty damn reliable: the web stack and database are running on two separate, shared-nothing nodes that run checks independently and concurrently. All the monitoring nodes are separate geographically, and usually with separate providers to avoid total system downtime.

As for the pricing: Pingdom charges $10/mo for similar service, though they do have more features (and a terrible UX, IMHO). Others in this space offer free plans (with crappier service/no reliability/single node) or more restrictions under $8/mo. For example Binary Canary starts at $5/mo, but for only 10 monitors.

I guess I need to include all this info somewhere visible.

As others have mentioned, take a look at Pingdom, find out where they're getting links from (e.g. using http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/) and try and copy their marketing strategy. Seems the least hassle way to me - but I'm still so new to this marketing lark :)

$8/month seems like a fair price to me when taking into consideration the problem you're solving. Maybe try running a special on AppSumo.com. I'm sure a majority of their users are in your target audience.

I got in touch with AppSumo a little while ago and never heard back. The products they usually promote seem to be in the right category.

May be a partnership with web hosting companies will drive traffic? Affiliate marketing in those area probably will help.

Thanks for the advice. I'll look into this.

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