Why New Relic Is Raising $80 Million Now | Hacker News Reader

Why New Relic Is Raising $80 Million Now

blog.newrelic.com

70 pointsdpaluy64 comments

They seem to have missed the most important reason:

- Because we can raise it now at a good valuation and the future is uncertain

Definitely a contributor! These are favorable times to have a solid business model and a bunch of healthy growth. Capital was pretty cheap and allows us to try to build a long term, sustainable biz!

Patrick Moran - VP, Marketing, New Relic

They sent me, a customer, an email announcing the funding. Congrats to them, but why are you emailing me...

Not entirely sure but perhaps to reassure you that they're doing ok and will be around for a while?

Ditto, seemed a very odd thing to notify us of but then they do seem to be quite spammy in general.

Same thoughts here. They use fairly aggressive email marketing, which is difficult to unsubscribe to.

I clicked the 'unsub' link in the footer of this particular marketing email and hit: 1) an SSL warning from Chrome, and 2) a 404 on accepting the SSL warning.

hmm, I was able to unsub just fine. Did you try again just incase it was a hiccup with their servers?

Doh! I'll check that out. I'm New Relic's Director of Product Management and work closely with the marketing team. Apologies.

They are. I had to unsubscribe and send three emails to their representatives before they stopped sending me emails.

The word you're looking for is: "communicative." Seriously, for a relatively new company, they've done a great job of getting the word out about their stellar product.

They sent me, a non-customer, an email too.

If you can send me a private message (email plightbody at newrelic dot com) with the email you got hit with, I will find out why you received that email. I'm guessing some sort of partnership connection, but it's never good if you believe you are receiving unsolicited emails.

> I'm guessing some sort of partnership connection, but it's never good if you believe you are receiving unsolicited emails.

I've yet to know a "partnership connection" email solicited in any way, shape or form, for what it's worth. Even when the partnership is tight (example: I recently received an email from Radiohead's Thom Yorke. I bought In Rainbows when it was released 6 years ago, and the mail got sent to the address I provided back then [my recollection is fuzzy, but it was likely necessary to get a/the download link]. The connection is strong, but I still consider it to be spam.)

Spam really doesnt bother me that much. My co-founder also received an unsolicited email too. We both clicked unsubscribe on each of ours and both received the same original email about 15 minutes later.

I was wondering the same thing.

In fact, they sent me that email thrice...

I got five!

I work at a lean startup. Sometimes the "email guy" is whoever has a free second.

oh man, so sorry. :( - Patrick VP, Marketing, New Relic

No worries, it was the first time that happened and if I got $80M in funding, I'd probably want to tell everyone thrice as well ;)

That was questionable, but the dupes were the real WTF.

Did you use a + address? That cuts both ways, you know.

agreed. We have multiple email segments for our 300,000+ users and prospects and while its more complex than this, we fumbled our Marketo settings and people with more than one New Relic account in our system got... more than one email... :(

It stinks because our intentions were to get people excited about what's to come... instead you want to strangle me with my power cord.

ahhh... some days...

Patrick Moran VP, Marketing New Relic

Candidly, I was using the funding as an opportunity to introduce our mobile offering via email to our users. That sounds sneaky, but we've invested a lot of effort into our platform and want as many devs to be aware of it as we can! Definitely sent too much email today, tho... sorry, lesson learned. - Patrick Moran, VP, Marketing, New Relic

Last week I was standing behind a couple guys wearing New Relic shirts and I overheard a conversation like this:

  Larry) We just got a brand new 9TB storage array for the intranet
  Moe)   Wow 9TB is really huge!
  Larry) I know right, but the graphics department needs like 3TB and keep asking
         for more, don't they know that 9TB is huuuge?
  Moe)   Man that's insane, the marketing guys are already over a terabyte!
         What are we going to do?
  Larry) I dunno man, we'll probably have to tell them no.

I'd guess they need the money to buy a larger filer.

Or, y'know, they got the shirts at a conference.

This was in front of the New Relic office at 2nd and Minna, fwiw.

9TB, huge? My NAS in my home office holds 12TB and that's just Virtual machines, snapshots and random work related data + some music/movies.

We were trying not to crack up laughing. Days like that make standing in the Senor Sisig or Special Xtra lines well worth it.

Pretty sure that wasn't anyone from New Relic. Our storage requirements are quite a bit more sophisticated... plus we don't have anyone named Moe or Larry :)

I think they have a RC helicopter manufacturer to pay off.

You made my day!

I still haven't gotten mine! but it's only been a week.

I was promised a book or a t-shirt. Haven't received anything after several months :(

You should follow up. I received a shirt and it's really nice.

We buy them through amazon. They did suspend our prime account though! No more free shipping for us!

- Patrick Moran VP, Marketing New Relic

They send me so many emails. It's a joke, I probably put in a fake number but I hear they also call a lot of people. Offer a free 'data t-shirt', make you install their product and call/email you constantly.

New Relic needs competition not funding. Their prices are ridiculous and there's nobody to keep them honest because they're the only game in town.

Check out tracelytics.com

Have you looked at http://www.datadoghq.com/

Just had lunch with the founder of http://hostedgraphite.com yesterday. Check it out!

If you are running a JVM or CLR stack, check out AppDynamics - much deeper visibility, more deployment options, more depth in feature-set etc.

PS: I work for AppDynamics

We love http://plus.amon.cx/

Check out tracelytics.com (or AppNeta.com, as Tracelytics was bought by AppNeta.com last year).

Cheaper, full visibility from load-balancer, web-server, DB server, NoSQL server, and of course, App-Server (RoR, Python, PHP [Drupal and also via Acquia], Java, etc)

AppNeta + Tracelytics = Network Performance Management _AND_ Application Performance Management. End-to-end.

Disclaimer: I work for AppNeta.

They should use some of that money to decrease their absurdly high subscription price when you run 10s of dynos on heroku

Agreed. We have 100 dyno's running and it was around $7k a month! This effectively doubled our dyno cost. We turned it off as it wasn't really telling us anything we didn't already know.

If you are worried about cost, just run it on a subset of your servers. 10-20% of your servers should be enough to gather most information you need... unless you are using new relic as the only aggregator of server status/monitoring... and that should be heroku's job.

We were battling a specific type of Heroku error (H12) that really required all of our dyno's to be monitored. We turned NR off and went with a (much) less expensive service that ended up telling us exactly the information that we needed across our entire cluster of machines. Hopefully with this extra cash, NR can improve their service because I honestly wasn't that impressed. It didn't live up to the hype at all for me.

Mind noting which service? We're a New Relic customer but oh yeah, frigging expensive.

I'd like to know which service you're using as well.

New Relic has the most aggressive sales staff I've seen after CDN providers. With their absurdly high prices, I'm surprised they need any funding.

i agree.. they sent me so many follow up emails i had to unsubscribe. i can't understand how a supposedly modern software service would not understand what is appropriate email frequency.

turned me off totally.

Count me in as another lost customer. They were even calling me to try and upsell their service to the point where I started avoiding their calls.

The whole thing just felt so high pressure, spammy that I'd rather not deal with them anymore.

Ugh... as a marketing guy trying to build an awesome, lasting brand, I hate these comments. We talk about it a lot internally and do a lot of coaching to make sure we're not too aggressive. It is a balance though - growth and aspirational goals to be a meaningful long-term business coupled with wanting to be a healthy participant in our community... Sounds like on occasion we've failed.. Please know we're listening to feedback like this - it doesn't mean we're going to stop contacting people who use our product, but it does mean we care, and will work to REFINE our commercial tactics.

patrick@newrelic.com VP, Marketing New Relic

Oh yeah, I got so annoyed with them.

They sent me an email saying that they were able to offer reduced rates. I decided to follow up and they offered $80/mo which was still expensive but less than the ticket price. I said I'd subscribe at that price but had to wait because we were having an issue with their gem when used with Turbolinks.

Regardless, they switched my account to the paid plan right away. I then got at least one email a day asking me to put in my credit card number, despite the issue with Turbolinks. They were so damn annoying trying to get my credit card number that I told them to forget it, to revert my account back to the free plan and that I'll revisit once they fixed the issue and we had more time to deal with it. That's when the had the audacity to say that I needed to pay a 3 month penalty since I was canceling a yearly agreement. Something I never agreed to in the first place. They didn't charge me the penalty in the end but just mentioning it was ridiculous.

I totally lost faith in that company. The product is good to great, but their pushy sales tactics are borderline disgusting.

So I just saw Lew speak and I wanted to share this awesome anecdote about the origin of the name. Lew was in a meeting with a VC and before the meeting he asked him what the name of the new venture was. Thinking on his feet, he plugged his name into an anagram finder online.

Lew Cirne=New Relic.

5. They need to keep pushing tweets into my timeline that I always ignore.

5. We want to give fellow nerds awesome t-shirts for free.

That's a business goal I can get behind. Or inside, I guess.

They still owe me gift cards for referrals. Though I did get two t-shirts from them. (which were quite nice!)

email garrett@newrelic.com or zoe@newrelic.com and they will hook you up!

Patrick Moran VP, Marketing New Relic

Thanks, Patrick - I went ahead and shot them an email. My ticket ID is #30057.

To put up $100,000 billboard signs next to the 101?

Just a tiny FYI, We occasionally buy billboards at discounted rates, but not near $100K. We have one up right now that cost about $8,000 on the 101 in San Francisco. Sounds like you've seen it!

- Patrick Moran, VP, Marketing New Relic

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