Comment by jhund | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhund | Hacker News Reader

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I'd like to recommend https://intigi.com as an alternative to Google Alerts. I'm one of the co-founders. We started building Intigi 2 years ago because we were frustrated with the limited query abilities of Google Alerts. Intigi is currently positioned for Marketers, however it's incredibly useful for anybody who wants to track online information:

Intigi gives you the power of Lucene indexed search on the newest articles on the web. You can subscribe to Intigi curated sources, or add your own RSS feeds or Twitter home timeline, and then filter results using powerful Lucene queries (fields, boosting, phrases, slop, wildcards, stop words) and other filters (social signals, word count, publishing date, presence of image or video). Intigi delivers results once per day or once per week via email, or you can view results in realtime through the web interface.

Disclaimers: I'm one of the co-founders and it's a for-pay product.

Can I make a suggestion?

I think your product looks really cool, but doing a 30 day trial on a product like this doesn't make sense to me. I may not even be able to validate the products usefulness in 30 days.

What I would suggest is that, as a marketing professional, I have a TON of topics I'd like to monitor. Why not let me monitor 1 topic forever and then force me to pay if I want more?

I guess I'm more interested in why this isn't a freemium product. What was the thought process?

I'm another Intigi cofounder. Great point on the freemium approach.

The reason we haven't pulled the trigger on this to date is twofold. First, we're a bootstrapped startup and we've been cautious about our burn rate (e.g., scaling infrastructure before we've achieved product/market fit and a sustainable revenue model). Second, for some time our product wasn't fully self-service. We were concerned about the support issues that would come with a significant growth in our user base, especially free users, potentially outside our target market.

We've now progressed beyond these two issues, and will launch a freemium model soon, with 1 or 2 interests and cached results that are updated once or twice per day.

I'd appreciate any other feedback, and happy to answer questions by email at mjfern@intigi.com.

I'll send you an email. I happen to also work at a bootstrapped startup but we're at ~25 peeps so I can share a tip or two :).

I'll share some details of how we weathered the support issues :).

Sounds great. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Intigi user. Big huge "less than three" at those guys. Use the product.

Thanks, Austin! Really appreciate the great feedback and support for Intigi.

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