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Hey Tiffany - Patrick from ProfitWell here. I know you wrote this to Josh, but just jumping in here to address the ProfitWell side. :) 1. You're 100% right. W

Hey Tiffany - Patrick from ProfitWell here. I know you wrote this to Josh, but just jumping in here to address the ProfitWell side. :) 1. You're 100% right. We don't have a live demo. We're working on a solution for you here, but it's been delayed for some other cool features. Happy to share when we launch something for you. I know a call can be annoying, but it wouldn't be a sales person. Most metrics demos are from our product/engineering team. :) 2. As for pricing - we don't typically hear it's confusing, but it's 100% free forever. We make money through our add-ons. There's definitely something here to get better at though, so I'll take this back to the team to make it rock.

joewee 8y ago
Do you sell user data in any form?
- dsacco 8y ago
  The silence is deafening. I’ll answer for Patrick; here is ProfitWell’s privacy policy: https://www.profitwell.com/privacy-policy https://www.profitwell.com/privacy-policy The short answer to your question is, “Yes.” The long answer is: > INFORMATION SHARING 1. With Third Parties: We may share your information with third-party business partners... ... 2. With Service Providers: We may share your information with third parties who provide services on our behalf...to which these services may include: Payment processing Providing customer service Sending marketing communications Conducting research and analysis Providing cloud computing infrastructure ...which also means, “Yes.” In particular, “research and analysis” is not clarified (nor would a clarification outside the formal ToS be legally binding). As long as there is a defensible interpretation of these clauses, they can freely sell all of your information. This also might be of interest to you: > We will respond to your request within a reasonable timeframe. In certain circumstances we may be required by law to retain your personal information, or may need to retain your personal information in order to continue providing a service. There is a legitimate reading of this clause which allows ProfitWell to retain your data indefinitely because they’re providing a service to someone.
  - mkarnicki 8y ago
    If I understand correctly, finishing the last citation with: "[in order to continue proving a service] to you." would at least resolve the problem of retaining user data indefinitely, but I also totally agree with the free interpretation of "Conducting research and analysis". Also, because Profitwell is available to customers in Europe, it will soon have to align with GDPR requirements (which also includes the right to being forgotten), even if it's not a European company or otherwise face fine risks.
    - pccampbell 8y ago
      Re: privacy/terms - hope the other comment I just made clears some things up. Happy to answer any questions if not, of course. Re: GDRP - you're absolutely right. We'll be required to align with GDPR in just over a month. We're all set from an engineering perspective and rolling through all the fun documentation, agreements, compliance records, and trainings from a legal perspective now.
  - pccampbell 8y ago
    Let's back up a second. The silence isn't because I/we don't want to talk about this, it's because it was 2am here in Boston and I was sleeping at that point (coincidentally after leaving the office around 1130pm pouring over our new GDPR paperwork). The short answer is 100%, absolutely no - we do not, have not, and will not ever sell your data. We say this pretty clearly at the top in our terms and services, which you didn't link to (found here: https://www.profitwell.com/terms-security https://www.profitwell.com/terms-security). For context, there's a difference between a privacy policy and a terms of service. I'm not a lawyer, but from my understanding the reason here we structured things this way (as a lot of BI/analytics providers do) is because one handles the actual handling of data, especially pursuant to EU/International/US law, and the other handles the actual service of that data. For instance, we will share your email address with our email service or with our payment processor. The terms are inclusive of the privacy policy. From a terms perspective, we don't access someone's account unless given permission for QA, analysis, and the like. We do aggregate data for research purposes, but there needs to be a minimum of 30 companies in that data set and if you'd like to opt out of that we're more than happy to sign/put together custom Ts&Cs, which we do with almost every company that requests one. Additionally, with GDPR the nature of our privacy policy is going one step further beyond EU/Swiss Privacy Shield compliance to offering up DPAs and a whole host of new functionality to make sure we go beyond the requirements. Apologies if I'm coming off any bit passive aggressive/defensive. Just trying to explain and sometimes the legalease can be tough to sift through. I started my career working in network security/intelligence, so I personally take this really seriously and we put a lot of work into all of this fun stuff (pen tests, training, our policies, etc.), so I take it too personally when hearing someone misinterpret how we work. We can always make this clearer, as we tried to do with the pre-amble to our terms, but happy to do what some other companies have done and really refine the plain speak of our terms and privacy policy (especially since they're shifting a bit with GDPR). Assume you meant the best here with your comments though, so hope this clears this up at least a bit. From a monetization perspective, we do offer a service to _someone_ - our customers. We sell Price Intelligently, ProfitWell Retain, ProfitWell Recognized, and ProfitWell Premium. All of these products are feature and performance based - and more than paying the bills for us to continue to invest in building the company without a drop of funding (which is intentional to keep us independent). The reason we set up our monetization this way is that frankly we don't think there's a whole lot of value in taking your data and putting it into a bunch of graphs. I know that's trivializing BI/analytics, but that's the crux of the industry right now. Plus, doing willingness to pay and pricing analysis supports this - hence why most BI companies have to go upmarket to survive/grow. Instead, metrics are the gateway. The world we're building is one where ProfitWell can show you the one graph (or few) that you need to look at - not the 60 you need to sift through to truly understand if there's a problem or not. Then we're going to help you see exactly the metric you should worry about (and the ones you shouldn't worry about) before offering up resources to help you fix it or a product that takes care of that metric for you with 0 work on your part through what we call an anti-active usage product (like ProfitWell Retain). This just feels like the right move to best serve our customers and the greater community.
- pccampbell 8y ago
  Hey Joewee - wanted to answer this directly here in case the other longer, more in-depth comment gets a bit buried - short and long answer is no. We have never and will never sell user data. We monetize through a bunch of products that help optimize different pieces of your business - pricing through Price Intelligently, churn through ProfitWell Retain, revenue recognition through ProfitWell Recognized, etc. I explained this in depth in response to one of the comments here, but the crux of this is that metrics are the gateway, which allow you to see the problems in your business. We then offer resources or products to help with those problems.

joewee 8y ago

Do you sell user data in any form?

dsacco 8y ago
The silence is deafening. I’ll answer for Patrick; here is ProfitWell’s privacy policy: https://www.profitwell.com/privacy-policy https://www.profitwell.com/privacy-policy The short answer to your question is, “Yes.” The long answer is: > INFORMATION SHARING 1. With Third Parties: We may share your information with third-party business partners... ... 2. With Service Providers: We may share your information with third parties who provide services on our behalf...to which these services may include: Payment processing Providing customer service Sending marketing communications Conducting research and analysis Providing cloud computing infrastructure ...which also means, “Yes.” In particular, “research and analysis” is not clarified (nor would a clarification outside the formal ToS be legally binding). As long as there is a defensible interpretation of these clauses, they can freely sell all of your information. This also might be of interest to you: > We will respond to your request within a reasonable timeframe. In certain circumstances we may be required by law to retain your personal information, or may need to retain your personal information in order to continue providing a service. There is a legitimate reading of this clause which allows ProfitWell to retain your data indefinitely because they’re providing a service to someone.
- mkarnicki 8y ago
  If I understand correctly, finishing the last citation with: "[in order to continue proving a service] to you." would at least resolve the problem of retaining user data indefinitely, but I also totally agree with the free interpretation of "Conducting research and analysis". Also, because Profitwell is available to customers in Europe, it will soon have to align with GDPR requirements (which also includes the right to being forgotten), even if it's not a European company or otherwise face fine risks.
  - pccampbell 8y ago
    Re: privacy/terms - hope the other comment I just made clears some things up. Happy to answer any questions if not, of course. Re: GDRP - you're absolutely right. We'll be required to align with GDPR in just over a month. We're all set from an engineering perspective and rolling through all the fun documentation, agreements, compliance records, and trainings from a legal perspective now.
- pccampbell 8y ago
  Let's back up a second. The silence isn't because I/we don't want to talk about this, it's because it was 2am here in Boston and I was sleeping at that point (coincidentally after leaving the office around 1130pm pouring over our new GDPR paperwork). The short answer is 100%, absolutely no - we do not, have not, and will not ever sell your data. We say this pretty clearly at the top in our terms and services, which you didn't link to (found here: https://www.profitwell.com/terms-security https://www.profitwell.com/terms-security). For context, there's a difference between a privacy policy and a terms of service. I'm not a lawyer, but from my understanding the reason here we structured things this way (as a lot of BI/analytics providers do) is because one handles the actual handling of data, especially pursuant to EU/International/US law, and the other handles the actual service of that data. For instance, we will share your email address with our email service or with our payment processor. The terms are inclusive of the privacy policy. From a terms perspective, we don't access someone's account unless given permission for QA, analysis, and the like. We do aggregate data for research purposes, but there needs to be a minimum of 30 companies in that data set and if you'd like to opt out of that we're more than happy to sign/put together custom Ts&Cs, which we do with almost every company that requests one. Additionally, with GDPR the nature of our privacy policy is going one step further beyond EU/Swiss Privacy Shield compliance to offering up DPAs and a whole host of new functionality to make sure we go beyond the requirements. Apologies if I'm coming off any bit passive aggressive/defensive. Just trying to explain and sometimes the legalease can be tough to sift through. I started my career working in network security/intelligence, so I personally take this really seriously and we put a lot of work into all of this fun stuff (pen tests, training, our policies, etc.), so I take it too personally when hearing someone misinterpret how we work. We can always make this clearer, as we tried to do with the pre-amble to our terms, but happy to do what some other companies have done and really refine the plain speak of our terms and privacy policy (especially since they're shifting a bit with GDPR). Assume you meant the best here with your comments though, so hope this clears this up at least a bit. From a monetization perspective, we do offer a service to _someone_ - our customers. We sell Price Intelligently, ProfitWell Retain, ProfitWell Recognized, and ProfitWell Premium. All of these products are feature and performance based - and more than paying the bills for us to continue to invest in building the company without a drop of funding (which is intentional to keep us independent). The reason we set up our monetization this way is that frankly we don't think there's a whole lot of value in taking your data and putting it into a bunch of graphs. I know that's trivializing BI/analytics, but that's the crux of the industry right now. Plus, doing willingness to pay and pricing analysis supports this - hence why most BI companies have to go upmarket to survive/grow. Instead, metrics are the gateway. The world we're building is one where ProfitWell can show you the one graph (or few) that you need to look at - not the 60 you need to sift through to truly understand if there's a problem or not. Then we're going to help you see exactly the metric you should worry about (and the ones you shouldn't worry about) before offering up resources to help you fix it or a product that takes care of that metric for you with 0 work on your part through what we call an anti-active usage product (like ProfitWell Retain). This just feels like the right move to best serve our customers and the greater community.
pccampbell 8y ago
Hey Joewee - wanted to answer this directly here in case the other longer, more in-depth comment gets a bit buried - short and long answer is no. We have never and will never sell user data. We monetize through a bunch of products that help optimize different pieces of your business - pricing through Price Intelligently, churn through ProfitWell Retain, revenue recognition through ProfitWell Recognized, etc. I explained this in depth in response to one of the comments here, but the crux of this is that metrics are the gateway, which allow you to see the problems in your business. We then offer resources or products to help with those problems.