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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
F5Bot, from memory, only does a few services correct? You won't get general web data.
Google Alerts, I have it and it doesn't pick up a lot of social data. For instance, I have never seen Reddit data come across on my Google alerts for terms I monitored with it. Could be me, but if Google Alerts did everything Brand24 or Mention or BrandMentions did, I would have not needed to code this.
So you would need to combine Google Alerts and F5Bot and maybe another tool to get more data.
I also don't remember things like Sentiment Analysis ( coming soon ) and other features available on Google Alerts and F5Bot.
Syften, at the time I was building and launching, only covered a few select communities and not the whole web. Maybe things have changed lately since we launched, but they were only at the time, select communities which seemed focused on Dev or tech discussions.
We do our round-trip about every 3-4 hours at the moment while testing things out. Our plan is to reduce that time from 3-4 hours to within 1 minute for sites like Reddit.
We are just ironing things out and evaluating demand, then tweaking things like that later on to much faster times.
Understandable.
I decided to go with a super low price backed with a money back guarantee and option to self cancel to entice users in, rather than a free plan or free demo/trial.
My experience in running a prior SaaS showed me that free plans were not all that great at getting users to sign up compared to those that signed up directly without one. The difference was tiny.
I understand that many may want a free plan or demo before trying, but I decided to do something different with this SaaS on this turn.
I am planning to possibly put up a video though to show everyone how it works.
I decided to go with a super low price backed with a money back guarantee and option to self cancel to entice users in, rather than a free plan or free demo/trial.
My experience in running a prior SaaS showed me that free plans were not all that great at getting users to sign up compared to those that signed up directly without one. The difference was tiny.
I understand that many may want a free plan or demo before trying, but I decided to do something different with this SaaS on this turn.
Wanted to verify this would work before putting more time/money into more. Looks like people are taking interest so will probably hit up a UX guy in the next few weeks.
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.