7 ms·

LiveAgent: Over $250K monthly recurring revenue with a spin-off project

87 points by nicoserdeir 8y ago

lifeisstillgood 8y ago
> including LiveAgent in software directories Many many years ago I used to produce internal business plans for a big ISP - and if you had to quickly justify a proposed purchase, you always needed some competitor analysis so you had to go find competitors to the product you are looking at. Yellow pages don't really cut it, but a great source was "Analyst reports" where there would be some bubble diagram showing market share and competitors. What I think i am saying is that in the B2B space, above a certain price tag, the best thing you can do is to identify the biggest dogs in your niche, and do all you can to have PR stories out there saying "$YOURCOMPANY, unlike competitors bigdog and biggerdog ..." or better still (but harder) "biggestdog, like competitors biggerdog and $YOURCOMPANY"
- vonseel 8y ago
  You're talking about Gartner reports, although I'm sure there are other companies which provide similar research data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner
  - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    Yeah thanks - could not remember the name. Forrester was another who had locked into this idea, but these days a google search for "competitor x" probably will work as well. Curious that google casually disrupts even that
    - rahimnathwani 8y ago
      I usually do either/both of: - Search for 'better than [x]' - Type '[x] vs' into Chrome's address bar to see what autocomplete provides
      - vonseel 8y ago
        I do that all the time, usually for software, although it can be a bit more difficult for under-marketed things like open-source software without a marketing budget.
- qnsi 8y ago
  Does anyone else has good tips on how to find competitors? I am doing this right now and I am struggling
ClassyJacket 8y ago
"Do you want to grow your business? With GenM you can get free marketing from an apprentice as part of their training. The student will work 40 hours per month creating content, increasing SEO rankings, carrying out advertisement campaigns..." 'The student will work'? So they just straight up admit they're exploiting students as unpaid employees? Students aren't supposed to work, they're supposed to learn. Damnit, America.
- dx87 8y ago
  According the the DoL, it looks like there's nothing wrong with what they're doing. As long as they only work on the free marketing projects, it thier work would just count as training. https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm
  - lojack 8y ago
    It wouldn't count as training unless there is some formal training program put on by the company. Additionally, the customers are paying money -- they're paying $49/mo to receive the work of an apprentice. This sort of stuff happens all the time. Its surprisingly common for unpaid interns to operate in a grey area. Can't really say this company is doing anything illegal without actually knowing what the program looks like for the apprentices. Every company I've worked at has decided its better to just pay them something, even if just minimum wage, to avoid risk of lawsuit. I also just think thats the right thing to do.
    - gtirloni 8y ago
      It seems odd that apprenticeships would prohibit the apprentice from working on activities that make money. I don't think that's the case anywhere. Maybe there's some special apprenticeship model where that's forbidden? It wouldn't make much sense since the purpose of most companies is to make a profit.
      - lojack 8y ago
blunte 8y ago
I think the title (intentionally) suggests this was some amazing overnight/fast success. While it is successful for sure, I think the fact that it took four years to go from 20 to 250 is significant. It's still good growth, but I expected it to have all happened in one year based on the title alone.
- morganvachon 8y ago
  Slightly off topic, but it's not the only thing fishy about the article. In the "Backstory", he talks about his first (failed) venture and this really stood out to me (emphasis mine): > We were kids and we were selling virtual server space for games like Counter Strike or World of Warcraft to other kids. Blizzard has never sanctioned third party or self hosted servers, if you're hosting WoW on a private server you're breaking ToS and risking a hefty lawsuit. I have to wonder if that contributed to the failure of his first company, or if perhaps it was just a poor choice of game title to embellish his story. Either way, it smacks of dishonesty.
  - fatnoah 8y ago
    I'm also surprised Salesforce hasn't tried to shut them down, considering it has a product named "Live Agent" as part of its Service Cloud: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=live_agent_intro.htm&type=5 https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=live_agent_intro....
  - sleepychu 8y ago
    Could they have meant the RTS Warcraft games?
nickpsecurity 8y ago
Good interview as usual on Failory. He posts lots of them on Barnacl.es, too. Gotta poke at this: "On the other hand, no software is perfect and if somebody says, their software is bug-free, they are lying." Strawman to dismiss folks who argue for high-quality software. If they think it doesn't exist, they probably didn't know about Cleanroom Software Engineering and Praxis' Correct-by-Construction: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~al/cseet-paper.html http://infohost.nmt.edu/~al/cseet-paper.html http://www.anthonyhall.org/c_by_c_secure_system.pdf http://www.anthonyhall.org/c_by_c_secure_system.pdf There's a difference between accidentally being buggy because the problem is that hard and intentionally leaving it buggy for faster iterations. They're doing the latter. Which is fine in their situation. They could probably adopt some proven approaches to increase their QA results on the cheap, though. Easiest route is some slice of design/code reviews plus contracts (esp pre-conditions) with contract/property-based testing and fuzzing. Catches all kinds of problems.
tmikaeld 8y ago
I'm curious how LiveAgent's recent lifetime deal affected their recurring revenue. Probably lost some current users to that, but in the long-run, it probably increased it by a lot. Since they where smart enough to only offer two users and more users are set at top-plan pricing.
kup0 8y ago
Having worked in customer service for many years, I've used LiveAgent's chat products at multiple companies and was not impressed with the actual software itself.

87 points by nicoserdeir 8y ago

> including LiveAgent in software directories Many many years ago I used to produce internal business plans for a big ISP - and if you had to quickly justify a proposed purchase, you always needed some competitor analysis so you had to go find competitors to the product you are looking at. Yellow pages don't really cut it, but a great source was "Analyst reports" where there would be some bubble diagram showing market share and competitors. What I think i am saying is that in the B2B space, above a certain price tag, the best thing you can do is to identify the biggest dogs in your niche, and do all you can to have PR stories out there saying "$YOURCOMPANY, unlike competitors bigdog and biggerdog ..." or better still (but harder) "biggestdog, like competitors biggerdog and $YOURCOMPANY"

vonseel 8y ago
You're talking about Gartner reports, although I'm sure there are other companies which provide similar research data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  Yeah thanks - could not remember the name. Forrester was another who had locked into this idea, but these days a google search for "competitor x" probably will work as well. Curious that google casually disrupts even that
  - rahimnathwani 8y ago
    I usually do either/both of: - Search for 'better than [x]' - Type '[x] vs' into Chrome's address bar to see what autocomplete provides
    - vonseel 8y ago
      I do that all the time, usually for software, although it can be a bit more difficult for under-marketed things like open-source software without a marketing budget.
qnsi 8y ago
Does anyone else has good tips on how to find competitors? I am doing this right now and I am struggling

ClassyJacket 8y ago

"Do you want to grow your business? With GenM you can get free marketing from an apprentice as part of their training. The student will work 40 hours per month creating content, increasing SEO rankings, carrying out advertisement campaigns..." 'The student will work'? So they just straight up admit they're exploiting students as unpaid employees? Students aren't supposed to work, they're supposed to learn. Damnit, America.

dx87 8y ago
According the the DoL, it looks like there's nothing wrong with what they're doing. As long as they only work on the free marketing projects, it thier work would just count as training. https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm
- lojack 8y ago
  It wouldn't count as training unless there is some formal training program put on by the company. Additionally, the customers are paying money -- they're paying $49/mo to receive the work of an apprentice. This sort of stuff happens all the time. Its surprisingly common for unpaid interns to operate in a grey area. Can't really say this company is doing anything illegal without actually knowing what the program looks like for the apprentices. Every company I've worked at has decided its better to just pay them something, even if just minimum wage, to avoid risk of lawsuit. I also just think thats the right thing to do.
  - gtirloni 8y ago
    It seems odd that apprenticeships would prohibit the apprentice from working on activities that make money. I don't think that's the case anywhere. Maybe there's some special apprenticeship model where that's forbidden? It wouldn't make much sense since the purpose of most companies is to make a profit.
    - lojack 8y ago

blunte 8y ago

I think the title (intentionally) suggests this was some amazing overnight/fast success. While it is successful for sure, I think the fact that it took four years to go from 20 to 250 is significant. It's still good growth, but I expected it to have all happened in one year based on the title alone.

morganvachon 8y ago
Slightly off topic, but it's not the only thing fishy about the article. In the "Backstory", he talks about his first (failed) venture and this really stood out to me (emphasis mine): > We were kids and we were selling virtual server space for games like Counter Strike or World of Warcraft to other kids. Blizzard has never sanctioned third party or self hosted servers, if you're hosting WoW on a private server you're breaking ToS and risking a hefty lawsuit. I have to wonder if that contributed to the failure of his first company, or if perhaps it was just a poor choice of game title to embellish his story. Either way, it smacks of dishonesty.
- fatnoah 8y ago
  I'm also surprised Salesforce hasn't tried to shut them down, considering it has a product named "Live Agent" as part of its Service Cloud: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=live_agent_intro.htm&type=5 https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=live_agent_intro....
- sleepychu 8y ago
  Could they have meant the RTS Warcraft games?

nickpsecurity 8y ago

Good interview as usual on Failory. He posts lots of them on Barnacl.es, too. Gotta poke at this: "On the other hand, no software is perfect and if somebody says, their software is bug-free, they are lying." Strawman to dismiss folks who argue for high-quality software. If they think it doesn't exist, they probably didn't know about Cleanroom Software Engineering and Praxis' Correct-by-Construction: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~al/cseet-paper.html http://infohost.nmt.edu/~al/cseet-paper.html http://www.anthonyhall.org/c_by_c_secure_system.pdf http://www.anthonyhall.org/c_by_c_secure_system.pdf There's a difference between accidentally being buggy because the problem is that hard and intentionally leaving it buggy for faster iterations. They're doing the latter. Which is fine in their situation. They could probably adopt some proven approaches to increase their QA results on the cheap, though. Easiest route is some slice of design/code reviews plus contracts (esp pre-conditions) with contract/property-based testing and fuzzing. Catches all kinds of problems.

tmikaeld 8y ago

I'm curious how LiveAgent's recent lifetime deal affected their recurring revenue. Probably lost some current users to that, but in the long-run, it probably increased it by a lot. Since they where smart enough to only offer two users and more users are set at top-plan pricing.

kup0 8y ago

Having worked in customer service for many years, I've used LiveAgent's chat products at multiple companies and was not impressed with the actual software itself.