I submitted Brandchirps 7 months ago to SHOW HN, but didn't provide a usable way for you to try the product out ( I only had a paid sign up at that time ). My bad, I didn't read the rules entirely.
That caused some issues and I asked the HN mods to allow me to repost, this time with a free trial and updates!
So the free trial is here: https://brandchirps.com/amember/signup . Pick the 14 day free trial ( you will have to sign up through Paypal, but just cancel once signed up ).
I ALSO provided a video for those of you that don't want to sign up, but maybe want to learn more. It's on the front page https://www.brandchirps.com/.
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So what makes Brandchirps different?
I'm still trying to nail this down. I don't mind admitting that, but here goes the reason why I built it:
1. I was tired of using TalkWalker and not getting ALL the results I should have been. TalkWalker has a paid plan that more than likely fetches more results but its a yearly commit of $9,600. Brandchrips fetches more alerts than TalkWalker.
2. Google Alerts ( free ) didn't provide a lot of extra functionalty I needed. Things like sentiment analysis, metrics, CSV data export, etc. Brandchirps offers all of this in both of our 2 plans.
3. Many other paid services ( Mentions, BrandMentions, Awario, etc ) limit the number of total mentions/alerts you can get monthly. Brandchirps is unlimited in the number of mentions we grab for you monthly.
4. Pricing. Ignoring free alternatives, most of the paid services start at $49 or $99. Some have lowered their price since, but you get less keywords ( 2 or 3 ). The $49 plans competitors offer have 5 keywords. The next highest plan is typically $89 to $99 and offers 10-15 keywords at our competitors. Brandshirps offers you 5 or 20 keywords at either $6.95 or $15.95
5. Some services do not monitor daily for you. The ones that do, many only monitor once a day ( lowest tier plans ). Brandchirps monitors multiple times a day.
6. Many paid competitors treat data exporting, history of results, API, as paid "add ons" or only on higher tier plans. Brandchirps offers it on both our plans, starting at $6.95 a month
7. Some of the lower end/less known competitors are getting their data from Common Crawl, which only crawls part of the internet and can offer real-time monitoring. We do not use Common Crawl as we want full results in as fast as real-time as possible.
8. Alerting wasn't full featured at many similar services. I decided that for even our $6.95 plan, I wanted RSS alerting, JSON alerting, and up to 3 emails with a daily summary to alert me. This covers a lot of ground as multiple people can be alerted via email, RSS can be used in feed readers and Slack, and JSON could be implemented in custom builds for those that need it.
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I guess it boils down to, I wanted a way to provide a better value plan for those that didn't want to spend almost $100 monthly to get basic Brand/Keyword monitoring.
In the recent weeks, we added on the ability to hide/delete results you may have took action on already. And we are adding in ( in the coming weeks ) the ability to "star" or "favorite" results so they do not get deleted/removed after 365 days.
My goal is to help service small business and freelancers for now and then move up once everything is proven.
Once I am able to redesign the site and add on a few more features, I plan on raising prices and trying to attract higher end medium sized and entrprise clients.
I'd love to get some feedback. Sorry you have to sign up through Paypal and cancel ( it's free for 14 days ), but that is how my current billing system is setup.
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.
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.
A lot of it is because I have been involved in prior projects that involve scraping for the past decade. I have built up a lot of code, skill, API access, libraries, and thoughts on crawling and scraping different websites.
Also, this won't stay almost $7 forever. But I wanted to test the waters and see demand. I also don't think it will go much higher either so "cheap" will be relative to each person.
I know a lot of people are asking for this, but it would literally fill up this whole page listing all the URLs.
Best way I can describe it is "publicly allowable URLs on the web" which would include blogs, forums, social networks, websites, and more. If we can pick up the HTML/RSS/ATOM/Json/text.. then we try to get it.
We don't scrape any sites that disallow it in their robots txt and we don't scrape material only available behind logins and paywalls.
I wanted a simple and easy social media listening tool that was cheaper than Brand24, Brandmentions, and Awario.. but scanned more sources than TalkWalker and Google Alerts.
It became very convenient to find discussions about my brand, my competitors, and my industry so I could drop in and engage with potential customers after I built this tool.
What makes Brandchirps different? It does 90% of what other big boy tools do, but for a lot cheaper. Your use of my product also directly supports a small family business that invests their lives in helping others, not some VC portfolio that only cares about cashing out.
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~