9 ms·

Brandchirps – Simple Brand Monitoring

121 points by JamesGreene 7y ago

JamesGreene 7y ago
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.
- geuis 7y ago
  You should add some more description around the problem this is solving. This could be useful to a lot of people that don’t know it could be (like me). What are your data sources? How often does a notification happen?
  - brandchirps 7y ago
    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.
- pawelk 7y ago
  How do you monitor Facebook? Do you have a written contract with them? Last year Brand24 was cut off from monitoring FB and Instagram, the company page and CEO personal profile were also removed from the platform. It cost Brand24 some clients and revenue and AFAIK they still haven't re-gained access.
  - epoch_100 7y ago
    I run a similar service that's currently in private beta so I might be able to provide some insight. In short: closed platforms like Facebook are _generally_ out of reach for tools like these. (Reddit is a big exception because of its open API.) There are a ton of social media monitoring tools on the market, and so the gap this is filling is more news and general web content (i.e. pretty much the 'searchable' web).
leshokunin 7y ago
Interesting! Is this open source? Can it be self hosted?
- brandchirps 7y ago
  no, sorry.
john111 7y ago
You say you monitor the whole web. How is that possible?
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  I doubt such thing, considering especially some services may require an account in order to read messages, and some are unknown (for various reasons). Also, not all of the communications is done by web some are done using IRC, NNTP, etc.
  - corentin88 7y ago
    Even if it’s just http(s) requests that’s a lot of data to find & crawl. The bandwidth costs are probably insane.
    - epoch_100 7y ago
      Data ingress is usually free, which really cuts down on costs when scraping. If you can do everything in-memory, it's surprisingly cheap. The important bit is being respectful of robots.txt files and not overloading small sites with too many requests.
    - JamesGreene 7y ago
      I have a background in scraping from prior projects over the last decade. Bandwidth is not a concern for projects like this at a lot of hosting/VPS providers.
  - epoch_100 7y ago
    I think the "web" here is used to refer to the World Wide Web, which I believe is limited to `text/html` [1] — i.e. excludes IRC, NNTP, etc., which would probably just be classified as "internet communication" (as you mention). It would probably be better if the service were more explicit about what it scanned — after all, 'the web' means very different things to different people — but I think it's safe to say that "scrapable" html served over http(s) is the indended meaning. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
scottybo 7y ago
Would be good to be able to test it before subscribing
- brandchirps 7y ago
  Understandable. I decided to go with a super low price backed with a guarantee and option to self cancel to entice users in, rather than a free plan. My experience in running a prior SaaS showed me that free plans were not all that great at getting users to sign up. I understand that many may want a free plan before trying, but I decided to do something different with this SaaS on this turn.
gingerlime 7y ago
Interesting. Would be curious to try it out but wasn’t sure if there was a trial available. The copywriting is confusing and I think can be improved. For example you’re starting with a question “What Are You?”... do you mean who are you? It isn’t immediately clear who is you here. The reader or your service... reading the next paragraph it seems that you describes your service, but then you are mixing “your brand” which makes you refer to the reader... EDIT: some of the claims for covering the whole web seem a bit outlandish... I’ve used mention.io and notify.ly and both were very meh for us... F5bot was better on Reddit and HN and is free. Might be tempted to try this if there was a limited trial (limited in terms of time or items)
dalerus 7y ago
Looks interesting, I am looking for something like this, but without more details I am not sure I can order. What social networks? Is there a video demo, rather than just a screenshot of the results?
- brandchirps 7y ago
  Working on video, will post up once done. Thanks for letting me know!
peteforde 7y ago
Hi there, I just wanted to pass along some quick thoughts. First, as others have mentioned you absolutely have to provide some kind of usable live test so that people can interact with your tool. My suggestion for doing this with as little friction as possible is, instead of messing with limited accounts or trials, just provide a link to a live demo that is scanning a few interesting keywords. I recommend showing a household name like Apple alongside a much smaller company alongside the EFF, for example. Second, I really respect that you're trying to keep the price low, but I have grave concerns that you are making the wrong assumption about where your paying clients' pain points are. Specifically, the issue that would make people use this service is that it works amazingly well, is reliable and user friendly. If you achieve these baselines, the typical customer is going to be willing to pay more for this service than the competitors, not less. To be clear, a huge number of people could end up using this tool everyday as the main part of their job. Do you really think that their employers are going to care that your per-seat cost is $7 instead of $300? If anything, your service is so cheap that you might lose enterprise customers because it appears to be too cheap and there can be very legit longevity concerns. The API is great news until you consider that the CTO's job is to consider a) is this the best product and b) how likely is it to disappear or otherwise fail? Jobs get lost over integrations with services that go bankrupt. Long story short: I think that idea has amazing potential but you need to seriously reconsider your pricing because at best you're burning potential revenue and at worst you aren't charging enough to scale to be the company you could be.
- yoshyosh 7y ago
  Agreed on pricing, most low end smbs that have very little mentions may fit with this price point but if they have so little mentions is it even a pain point for them? Whereas bigger companies likely have the pain point with a lot of mentions, so they won't have issues paying due to how much bigger the pain is.
- MobileVet 7y ago
  This, so much this. Decades of entrepreneurship validate this point. Also, kudos for sharing this insight in a constructive manner.
- 7y ago
huhtenberg 7y ago
This needs a free trial. No trial = no interest. As important, the trial should not require a credit card, because this is just some random site with no established reputation that may or may not employ shady cancellation practices.
- perakojotgenije 7y ago
  Less than 7$ monthly is cheap enough to qualify as almost free trial. At least it was for me.
  - brandchirps 7y ago
    Thank you. This was my thoughts and direction for this project as well. To see how it goes.
- kirubakaran 7y ago
  1. It is just $7 2. You could use https://privacy.com/ https://privacy.com/ if cancellation policy is a concern
  - notdang 7y ago
    this service is available only for US residents
    - kirubakaran 7y ago
      Ah sorry, I didn't think about that.
- brandchirps 7y ago
  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.
epoch_100 7y ago
OP's tool looks great, and this is definitely _not_ a winner-takes-all kind of market. I agree that the lack of a free plan/trial makes it difficult to try out and assess. Plug: if you're tentative to buy in to try it, though, I'm building another tool like this that's in private beta right now. Feel free to contact me (info on profile) if you'd like to try it out for free!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
epoch_100 7y ago
Strong agree. I think there's also something to be said for non-enterprise customers, though, and I think they're an underserved market. Take folks like indie authors, journalists, and small startups. They want media monitoring for themselves/their product, but don't want to shell out as much $$$ for an enterprise-grade tool with enterprise-grade pricing. Of course this is a smaller market than the enterprise one, but it's a niche that I think exists and could be catered to. Full disclosure: I'm also working on a tool similar to Brandchirps that's in private beta, though I haven't launched it yet. Anyone who wants to try out the private beta can email me.
- javajosh 7y ago
  I disagree that a smaller market, it's probably a much larger market
- carole1 7y ago
  I think the lower-end market is already well-served by free tools like Google Alerts and F5Bot. At least those work well for me.
  - brandchirps 7y ago
    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.
- dang 7y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22090296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22090296.
justinmarsan 7y ago
Unlike other commentators I don't think you need a free trial, but I think you need a couple of free searches per day for example. Let me try my brand and maybe a competitors, see the results and then if I try to get one more, or if I want to export the results or whatever let me know this and many other nice things are available for registered users. Also I'd like to know how I'll be alerted, will I get an email for every single mention or is there the possibility to have hourly/daily/weekly digests ? Either way I think this is a good alternative to the other services out there and I could probably see myself using that on a side-project soon as the fairly low price isn't a barrier to me at all ! $7 is like free except you get money, unlike the limited free trials that get very expensive for the lowest plan available. Nice work, bookmarking and eager to see actual results !
- brandchirps 7y ago
  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.
kinard 7y ago
I just tried to sign up and received an error. I'm based in the UK, I've emailed you the details. In regards to pricing. I would say it's very reasonable, you could probably charge more (after I'm grandfathered in of course) :) I see you had a 7 day refund policy, that was enough to give me confidence. If you can't afford the very low price, then you don't have a brand worth protecting. Can't wait to try the service, let me know when it's fixed :)
- brandchirps 7y ago
  Hey, replied to your email and let you know I appreciated the finding. Giving you free access for life later tonight in finding the bug! Thanks
manceraio 7y ago
Really interesting idea. This was on my side project ideas list. Happy that someone implemented. I like the project and I could help. This needs a better landing and UX. Congrats on the launch!
- brandchirps 7y ago
  Thank you. Totally get the landing and UX. 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.
gorbog 7y ago
How can they crawl the entire web ( or a big portion of it) everyday without spending tens of thousands of dollars in server / bandwidth costs? I know there are lots of open source crawlers like Stormcrawler and all, but the cost of running it at web scale everyday is prohibitive isn’t it?
- melenaos 7y ago
  I suppose they query Google.
  - ikeboy 7y ago
    If that's the case just use Google alerts.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  I built something a prototype of this a year ago. But I ultimately decided that I couldn't ever see myself making close to as much money from it as I already do. I won't be sad if this service proves that wrong. I just told customers to sign up for Google Alerts for the general web, and then I scraped new content from a bunch of sites like Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Product Hunt, Hacker News. The idea was to order everything by how many people might be seeing it and how many people were interacting with it (dis/liking). Since most things posted on social media basically go unnoticed, I crawled things in a way that you would only see stuff any reasonable business would care about. Because of that, even for a website like Reddit, I could get all the content for an hour in only a couple thousand hits -- bandwidth wasn't anything crazy. As a business, this gave you the ability to prioritize what you should pay attention to and where -- without giving you a bunch of noise.
- JamesGreene 7y ago
  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.
generalpass 7y ago
Any plans for any sort of affiliate program? There are some podcasters whom I suspect would promote this.
- brandchirps 7y ago
  Yes. Plans are in the works, but only after a few small issues have been fixed and a few more benefits added.
epoch_100 7y ago
Props to OP for launching, it looks like this tool has some real potential. I think low-cost web monitoring is a great idea and caters to what is otherwise an under-served market. ...which is why I've been building a similar tool [0] that's currently in private beta. So a bit of a plug: if anyone is looking for an alternative or just wants to try something different, feel free to send me a message. Contact info is in my profile. And if anyone from Brandchirps wants to chat about this market and our respective projects, please get in touch. I sent you all a message and would love to talk. [0] It's not public yet, but here are some screenshots to give you a sense of the similarities+differences between these tools: https://imgur.com/a/Sxpt2An https://imgur.com/a/Sxpt2An
- ksahin 7y ago
  Are you using an open-source web crawler like Stormcrawler / Apache Nutch or are you using Google queries as others suggested?
  - epoch_100 7y ago
    No Google queries, but also only very limited web crawling (i.e. _only_ to fill in gaps for Reddit and HN). There are a plethora of freely available archives of web content released almost hourly, so it's possible to scan a large slice of the web without too much resource expenditure. Feel free to message me for more technical info, happy to share whatever. Here's the Rust library I built that powers the core of my project, if it's any help: https://github.com/milesmcc/ieql https://github.com/milesmcc/ieql Relatedly, because I feel like my tool relies so much on open-source software and public archives, I give 10% of my service's revenue to various open source projects. Tools like these are only possible at this price point if they're built on the shoulders of giants (i.e. tons of open source software and publicly available web archives).
    - ksahin 7y ago
      What public available web archive are you referring to? I know CommonCrawl but it's a monthly archive.
eldorad0 7y ago
Hey, I was just curious how a tool like this is built. I'm not saying I want to know every intricate detail, but how would one crawl the entire web over and over for such a cheap price ?
- lyjackal 7y ago
  My guess would be scraping search engines. Still doesn't seem very cost efficient
- JamesGreene 7y ago
  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.
daolf 7y ago
Awesome Idea and good execution. I'm really interested in knowing how you did it, plan to blog post about it ?
- brandchirps 7y ago
  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.
sergiotapia 7y ago
I'll pay for this - but I would like a demo or something, right now I don't know how well it works or even how it works. We can definitely use this at work.
- brandchirps 7y ago
  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.
  - sergiotapia 7y ago
    Specifically: not looking for a free trial or demo for my domain. Just examples for an example company, what I would get if I purchased.
    - brandchirps 7y ago
      Got it. Will take note and pull something up in the next few days for you. Thanks for letting me know more info on your request.
brandchirps 7y ago
Thank you everyone. I will try to address all concerns later today once I am back in my office. I was really honored that all of you took interest in this project to leave your comments and thoughts.
xwdv 7y ago
FYI this is easily the kind of tool that can be making $20k, $30k or $40k a month if you price it correctly and find enough quality customers.
- brandchirps 7y ago
  I hope I can help that many people with this service. Thanks!
rubyron 7y ago
I use Google Alerts for this sort of thing, and was surprised to not see it mentioned on your site when discussing alternatives. What makes BrandChirps better than GA?
- brandchirps 7y ago
  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
ryanmccullagh 7y ago
This looks interesting, but I'd love a free trial to try out the service.
- brandchirps 7y ago
  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.
carole1 7y ago
How do you plan to compete with free alternatives like Google Alerts or F5Bot, or other low-cost options like Syften? What is your tools response time? If someone mentions my product on Reddit, how long before I'm alerted by your tool?
- brandchirps 7y ago
  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.
fenwick67 7y ago
One thing that might hook me is if you said which sites are scraped.
- JamesGreene 7y ago
  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.

121 points by JamesGreene 7y ago

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.

geuis 7y ago
You should add some more description around the problem this is solving. This could be useful to a lot of people that don’t know it could be (like me). What are your data sources? How often does a notification happen?
- brandchirps 7y ago
  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.
pawelk 7y ago
How do you monitor Facebook? Do you have a written contract with them? Last year Brand24 was cut off from monitoring FB and Instagram, the company page and CEO personal profile were also removed from the platform. It cost Brand24 some clients and revenue and AFAIK they still haven't re-gained access.
- epoch_100 7y ago
  I run a similar service that's currently in private beta so I might be able to provide some insight. In short: closed platforms like Facebook are _generally_ out of reach for tools like these. (Reddit is a big exception because of its open API.) There are a ton of social media monitoring tools on the market, and so the gap this is filling is more news and general web content (i.e. pretty much the 'searchable' web).

leshokunin 7y ago

Interesting! Is this open source? Can it be self hosted?

brandchirps 7y ago
no, sorry.

john111 7y ago

You say you monitor the whole web. How is that possible?

zzo38computer 7y ago
I doubt such thing, considering especially some services may require an account in order to read messages, and some are unknown (for various reasons). Also, not all of the communications is done by web some are done using IRC, NNTP, etc.
- corentin88 7y ago
  Even if it’s just http(s) requests that’s a lot of data to find & crawl. The bandwidth costs are probably insane.
  - epoch_100 7y ago
    Data ingress is usually free, which really cuts down on costs when scraping. If you can do everything in-memory, it's surprisingly cheap. The important bit is being respectful of robots.txt files and not overloading small sites with too many requests.
  - JamesGreene 7y ago
    I have a background in scraping from prior projects over the last decade. Bandwidth is not a concern for projects like this at a lot of hosting/VPS providers.
- epoch_100 7y ago
  I think the "web" here is used to refer to the World Wide Web, which I believe is limited to `text/html` [1] — i.e. excludes IRC, NNTP, etc., which would probably just be classified as "internet communication" (as you mention). It would probably be better if the service were more explicit about what it scanned — after all, 'the web' means very different things to different people — but I think it's safe to say that "scrapable" html served over http(s) is the indended meaning. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

scottybo 7y ago

Would be good to be able to test it before subscribing

brandchirps 7y ago
Understandable. I decided to go with a super low price backed with a guarantee and option to self cancel to entice users in, rather than a free plan. My experience in running a prior SaaS showed me that free plans were not all that great at getting users to sign up. I understand that many may want a free plan before trying, but I decided to do something different with this SaaS on this turn.

gingerlime 7y ago

Interesting. Would be curious to try it out but wasn’t sure if there was a trial available. The copywriting is confusing and I think can be improved. For example you’re starting with a question “What Are You?”... do you mean who are you? It isn’t immediately clear who is you here. The reader or your service... reading the next paragraph it seems that you describes your service, but then you are mixing “your brand” which makes you refer to the reader... EDIT: some of the claims for covering the whole web seem a bit outlandish... I’ve used mention.io and notify.ly and both were very meh for us... F5bot was better on Reddit and HN and is free. Might be tempted to try this if there was a limited trial (limited in terms of time or items)

dalerus 7y ago

Looks interesting, I am looking for something like this, but without more details I am not sure I can order. What social networks? Is there a video demo, rather than just a screenshot of the results?

brandchirps 7y ago
Working on video, will post up once done. Thanks for letting me know!

peteforde 7y ago

Hi there, I just wanted to pass along some quick thoughts. First, as others have mentioned you absolutely have to provide some kind of usable live test so that people can interact with your tool. My suggestion for doing this with as little friction as possible is, instead of messing with limited accounts or trials, just provide a link to a live demo that is scanning a few interesting keywords. I recommend showing a household name like Apple alongside a much smaller company alongside the EFF, for example. Second, I really respect that you're trying to keep the price low, but I have grave concerns that you are making the wrong assumption about where your paying clients' pain points are. Specifically, the issue that would make people use this service is that it works amazingly well, is reliable and user friendly. If you achieve these baselines, the typical customer is going to be willing to pay more for this service than the competitors, not less. To be clear, a huge number of people could end up using this tool everyday as the main part of their job. Do you really think that their employers are going to care that your per-seat cost is $7 instead of $300? If anything, your service is so cheap that you might lose enterprise customers because it appears to be too cheap and there can be very legit longevity concerns. The API is great news until you consider that the CTO's job is to consider a) is this the best product and b) how likely is it to disappear or otherwise fail? Jobs get lost over integrations with services that go bankrupt. Long story short: I think that idea has amazing potential but you need to seriously reconsider your pricing because at best you're burning potential revenue and at worst you aren't charging enough to scale to be the company you could be.

yoshyosh 7y ago
Agreed on pricing, most low end smbs that have very little mentions may fit with this price point but if they have so little mentions is it even a pain point for them? Whereas bigger companies likely have the pain point with a lot of mentions, so they won't have issues paying due to how much bigger the pain is.
MobileVet 7y ago
This, so much this. Decades of entrepreneurship validate this point. Also, kudos for sharing this insight in a constructive manner.
7y ago

huhtenberg 7y ago

This needs a free trial. No trial = no interest. As important, the trial should not require a credit card, because this is just some random site with no established reputation that may or may not employ shady cancellation practices.

perakojotgenije 7y ago
Less than 7$ monthly is cheap enough to qualify as almost free trial. At least it was for me.
- brandchirps 7y ago
  Thank you. This was my thoughts and direction for this project as well. To see how it goes.
kirubakaran 7y ago
1. It is just $7 2. You could use https://privacy.com/ https://privacy.com/ if cancellation policy is a concern
- notdang 7y ago
  this service is available only for US residents
  - kirubakaran 7y ago
    Ah sorry, I didn't think about that.
brandchirps 7y ago
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.

epoch_100 7y ago

OP's tool looks great, and this is definitely _not_ a winner-takes-all kind of market. I agree that the lack of a free plan/trial makes it difficult to try out and assess. Plug: if you're tentative to buy in to try it, though, I'm building another tool like this that's in private beta right now. Feel free to contact me (info on profile) if you'd like to try it out for free!

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

epoch_100 7y ago

Strong agree. I think there's also something to be said for non-enterprise customers, though, and I think they're an underserved market. Take folks like indie authors, journalists, and small startups. They want media monitoring for themselves/their product, but don't want to shell out as much $$$ for an enterprise-grade tool with enterprise-grade pricing. Of course this is a smaller market than the enterprise one, but it's a niche that I think exists and could be catered to. Full disclosure: I'm also working on a tool similar to Brandchirps that's in private beta, though I haven't launched it yet. Anyone who wants to try out the private beta can email me.

javajosh 7y ago
I disagree that a smaller market, it's probably a much larger market
carole1 7y ago
I think the lower-end market is already well-served by free tools like Google Alerts and F5Bot. At least those work well for me.
- brandchirps 7y ago
  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.
dang 7y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22090296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22090296.

justinmarsan 7y ago

Unlike other commentators I don't think you need a free trial, but I think you need a couple of free searches per day for example. Let me try my brand and maybe a competitors, see the results and then if I try to get one more, or if I want to export the results or whatever let me know this and many other nice things are available for registered users. Also I'd like to know how I'll be alerted, will I get an email for every single mention or is there the possibility to have hourly/daily/weekly digests ? Either way I think this is a good alternative to the other services out there and I could probably see myself using that on a side-project soon as the fairly low price isn't a barrier to me at all ! $7 is like free except you get money, unlike the limited free trials that get very expensive for the lowest plan available. Nice work, bookmarking and eager to see actual results !

brandchirps 7y ago
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.

kinard 7y ago

I just tried to sign up and received an error. I'm based in the UK, I've emailed you the details. In regards to pricing. I would say it's very reasonable, you could probably charge more (after I'm grandfathered in of course) :) I see you had a 7 day refund policy, that was enough to give me confidence. If you can't afford the very low price, then you don't have a brand worth protecting. Can't wait to try the service, let me know when it's fixed :)

brandchirps 7y ago
Hey, replied to your email and let you know I appreciated the finding. Giving you free access for life later tonight in finding the bug! Thanks

manceraio 7y ago

Really interesting idea. This was on my side project ideas list. Happy that someone implemented. I like the project and I could help. This needs a better landing and UX. Congrats on the launch!

brandchirps 7y ago
Thank you. Totally get the landing and UX. 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.

gorbog 7y ago

How can they crawl the entire web ( or a big portion of it) everyday without spending tens of thousands of dollars in server / bandwidth costs? I know there are lots of open source crawlers like Stormcrawler and all, but the cost of running it at web scale everyday is prohibitive isn’t it?

melenaos 7y ago
I suppose they query Google.
- ikeboy 7y ago
  If that's the case just use Google alerts.
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
I built something a prototype of this a year ago. But I ultimately decided that I couldn't ever see myself making close to as much money from it as I already do. I won't be sad if this service proves that wrong. I just told customers to sign up for Google Alerts for the general web, and then I scraped new content from a bunch of sites like Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Product Hunt, Hacker News. The idea was to order everything by how many people might be seeing it and how many people were interacting with it (dis/liking). Since most things posted on social media basically go unnoticed, I crawled things in a way that you would only see stuff any reasonable business would care about. Because of that, even for a website like Reddit, I could get all the content for an hour in only a couple thousand hits -- bandwidth wasn't anything crazy. As a business, this gave you the ability to prioritize what you should pay attention to and where -- without giving you a bunch of noise.
JamesGreene 7y ago
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.

generalpass 7y ago

Any plans for any sort of affiliate program? There are some podcasters whom I suspect would promote this.

brandchirps 7y ago
Yes. Plans are in the works, but only after a few small issues have been fixed and a few more benefits added.

epoch_100 7y ago

Props to OP for launching, it looks like this tool has some real potential. I think low-cost web monitoring is a great idea and caters to what is otherwise an under-served market. ...which is why I've been building a similar tool [0] that's currently in private beta. So a bit of a plug: if anyone is looking for an alternative or just wants to try something different, feel free to send me a message. Contact info is in my profile. And if anyone from Brandchirps wants to chat about this market and our respective projects, please get in touch. I sent you all a message and would love to talk. [0] It's not public yet, but here are some screenshots to give you a sense of the similarities+differences between these tools: https://imgur.com/a/Sxpt2An https://imgur.com/a/Sxpt2An

ksahin 7y ago
Are you using an open-source web crawler like Stormcrawler / Apache Nutch or are you using Google queries as others suggested?
- epoch_100 7y ago
  No Google queries, but also only very limited web crawling (i.e. _only_ to fill in gaps for Reddit and HN). There are a plethora of freely available archives of web content released almost hourly, so it's possible to scan a large slice of the web without too much resource expenditure. Feel free to message me for more technical info, happy to share whatever. Here's the Rust library I built that powers the core of my project, if it's any help: https://github.com/milesmcc/ieql https://github.com/milesmcc/ieql Relatedly, because I feel like my tool relies so much on open-source software and public archives, I give 10% of my service's revenue to various open source projects. Tools like these are only possible at this price point if they're built on the shoulders of giants (i.e. tons of open source software and publicly available web archives).
  - ksahin 7y ago
    What public available web archive are you referring to? I know CommonCrawl but it's a monthly archive.

eldorad0 7y ago

Hey, I was just curious how a tool like this is built. I'm not saying I want to know every intricate detail, but how would one crawl the entire web over and over for such a cheap price ?

lyjackal 7y ago
My guess would be scraping search engines. Still doesn't seem very cost efficient
JamesGreene 7y ago
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.

daolf 7y ago

Awesome Idea and good execution. I'm really interested in knowing how you did it, plan to blog post about it ?

brandchirps 7y ago
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.

sergiotapia 7y ago

I'll pay for this - but I would like a demo or something, right now I don't know how well it works or even how it works. We can definitely use this at work.

brandchirps 7y ago
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.
- sergiotapia 7y ago
  Specifically: not looking for a free trial or demo for my domain. Just examples for an example company, what I would get if I purchased.
  - brandchirps 7y ago
    Got it. Will take note and pull something up in the next few days for you. Thanks for letting me know more info on your request.

brandchirps 7y ago

Thank you everyone. I will try to address all concerns later today once I am back in my office. I was really honored that all of you took interest in this project to leave your comments and thoughts.

xwdv 7y ago

FYI this is easily the kind of tool that can be making $20k, $30k or $40k a month if you price it correctly and find enough quality customers.

brandchirps 7y ago
I hope I can help that many people with this service. Thanks!

rubyron 7y ago

I use Google Alerts for this sort of thing, and was surprised to not see it mentioned on your site when discussing alternatives. What makes BrandChirps better than GA?

brandchirps 7y ago
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

ryanmccullagh 7y ago

This looks interesting, but I'd love a free trial to try out the service.

brandchirps 7y ago
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.

carole1 7y ago

How do you plan to compete with free alternatives like Google Alerts or F5Bot, or other low-cost options like Syften? What is your tools response time? If someone mentions my product on Reddit, how long before I'm alerted by your tool?

brandchirps 7y ago
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.

fenwick67 7y ago

One thing that might hook me is if you said which sites are scraped.

JamesGreene 7y ago
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.