My company's first SaaS app. Thoughts?
peterpings.com
2013 will hopefully be a move away from B2C stargazing, bread-and-butter client work (app development etc) and a move towards scalable software services.
peterpings.com
My site[0] first launched almost 18 months ago and had a fair bit of buzz, but I never did the marketing-to-tech-blogs side of things. There are a few new things I want to push out first (company blog, etc.) but do you think your service would be suitable for it?
[0] https://openexchangerates.org
Btw - great work on the site, looks lovely.
That said, as I've elaborated in another post, it's quite closely tied to the iTunes API right now so if you're not an iPhone/iPad app it won't work for you. We can work on that though!
Ideally I'd love to see a "successful campaign" case study, which would show the emails somebody sent out for their product, and some of the resulting press they got from it (I understand it would vary based on the quality of what they're selling, but it'd be nice to see their email virtually reprinted on LifeHacker or TechCrunch etc.)
Best of luck and I'll check back in a month or so to see if I can make use of it!
From this HN post it's pretty clear that there's some demand for an "any app" approach. We will get to work :)
Totally agree about the case studies and when there are some noteworthy ones you can bet we will show it off on the homepage. Typical chicken/egg issues preventing that right now though!
Also, love the design. Clean, crisp and very simply and elegantly tells your story. Well done.
On the Publisher list page you say:
"We send your notification via online forms, emails, twitter and exclusive partnerships."
This sounds like you are doing it manually.
Good service though :)
For each publisher it breaks down to one of these methods:
1) submission via their online form. we do this automatically via POST.
2) if their form has a captcha, we queue it for manual submission by a human being (most don't have a captcha though - it's just the big guys)
3)email. the majority of sites encourage submissions via an email address.
4) twitter - worst case scenario is we tweet their account for you
5) publishing partner. similar to (3) email, except the publisher can set their preferred time to receive.
All of the above except (2) is automated. I'd guesstimate that for about 95% of the publishers we support, the submissions are all handled by the software. We want to build it as scalable as possible.
This is the first step!
Any chance that you can personalize a few of the emails sent? I might want to add or remove a few things only for some blogs.
The most important question I raise with submission services (like your PeterPings and AppLaunch) is that followed traffic would not be targeted.
"Why A Link from TechCrunch Will Not Make You Rich" - this excellent article by Rob Walling better describes this issue: http://j.mp/VXJoDp
I'd answer by saying that we are not a "make you rich" service. For that, we'd be charging a lot more!
Distributing your information to various sites just increases the chances of you being discovered. The more you put yourself out there, the more you're likely to be reviewed or mentioned or shared. This is PR 101. It's not going to turn you into a millionaire overnight, but it's just one of those things you should be doing.
That article leaves out an important dimension: time. Sure, one blog post isn't going to net you hundreds of sales. But over a long enough timeline, could it net you dozens of sales? What if you multiplied that by 150+ different sites? This is long tail / long term.
Peterpings takes the time/effort out of this thing that you should be doing, so you have more time to dedicate to product development, or a more creative marketing campaign!
I'm curious about how you time all of this. Do the 170 invitations get sent out simultaneously (Bar the manual captcha ones), or is it more staggered?
e.g. Could the big fish like Techcrunch and such expect to be notified first normally, or is it a blast to everyone?
I'm also curious what your plans are to keep your service's reputation with the bloggers on the receiving end intact (The fact it is paid for, and not too cheap, really helps this I imagine), but anything else you have in mind? e.g. Do yous do any kind of filtering of the submissions?
the way Peterpings works is you set a time that you want your notification to be delivered and it delivers in the publisher's local time.
So if you say "I want publishers to see this at 9am on Monday" - the UK blogs will see it at their Monday 9am, and the US blogs will see it at their Monday 9am. And so on.
Delivery time is super important, as me and my co-founder have experienced many times first-hand.
As for reputation, you're right in that there is a natural filter, that being cost. Beyond that we have thought about narrower targeting / filtering but in the end it has to be up to the blogger. The more blogs we introduce, the more tools we will create for those bloggers - for example to only receive a certain genre of app notification (e.g. games). And we will always be transparent about the number of blogs that your notification goes to. Nobody wants to know that they are sending something to a blogger who doesn't want to receive it.
The filtering tools sound great too, it's great to see yous already have plans for that area. Looking forward to seeing how it progresses, best of luck!
Only nitpick - it looks like you charge transactionally (pay as you go.) Wouldn't that make this NOT a SaaS app?
Best of luck! Might give it a shot with my product.
Reason being, in order to pre-populate the templates for a customer, we search the iTunes API and grab data about their app (screenshots, name, price etc).
I guess to support "any" app including web apps, there could just be a manual override for this step. I'll put it on the ideas list!
At launch we support iPhone / iPad apps.
but Android is definitely in the works - after all some of our publishers are Android-only.
if you have a suggestion of who to include, let me know at yongfook @ peterpings.com