JamesGreene

It's always crazy what others can find that you might have skipped or overlooked.

That's what I love about SHOW HN!

Everytime I show a community or ask for feedback from a customer, things are brought up I would have not thought about on my own.

After I posted here yesterday, some leftover code was causing an error I did not spot and someone from HN was able to find it and point it out.

Thanks~

At the moment, my costs are extremely cheap because of a number of factors and building it as a MVP.

As it grows in size and features, I plan on raising the price ( current customers are grandfathered in ) and going after larger customers.

Thanks!

Thanks!

I will add this to your credit. I totally understand the mentally behind this. I just do not agree with it is all.

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.

Results will come down to the term you pick and the negatives you bundle with that term. We also offer a filtering option so that if you do still get a bunch of data you do not want to see, you can filter in live time for results you do want like "only containing terms of X" or "only domains of X", etc.

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.

Yep, different tools work for different people and their different needs.

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.

Thanks peteforde,

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.

With the way web hosting servers are set up, and specific companies that sell this hosting, bandwidth for crawling/scraping is basically $0 at most popular companies.

Notifications are daily, but we are adding selections for this for those that want instant or weekly, etc.

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.

I do have some blog ideas in the works.

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.

Running free trials in the past in other projects ( either as an employee or owner ) with no credit card has proven this audience of people hardly upgrades to a paid user. There is a %, but it's so slim and small that it is almost not worth it. There are a lot of reasons why for this that I have surveys and first hand data on. It was just not the right fit in my mind right now.

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.

Thanks.

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.

We only mention 1 competitor on our website and I didn't even want to list them. I only did that so people could understand the query or flow I was discussing, like "competitor alternative" or "competitor vs" type questions for that copy.

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