4 ms·

Here is my advice, and take this however you please. 4.5 years ago I built a similar service for small businesses/brands to monitor their twitter, blog, etc. me

Here is my advice, and take this however you please. 4.5 years ago I built a similar service for small businesses/brands to monitor their twitter, blog, etc. mentions and manage the conversation around them and reply to them. It was called StartPR. We thought incorrectly that small businesses and startups would pay for this service. We had maybe 50 people pay us $15/month, no one would pay for the higher plans, because they were buying radian6 or sproutsocial. Small companies don't have the volume of conversation to "see" value in something like this. Larger companies understand the value. But larger companies expect to pay MORE, and get MORE features. Distribution and sales to people in this price range are tough. Most of the people we interviewed were using some sort of dashboard (netvibes at the time) paired with RSS feeds of the search terms they were using.

jlees 14y ago
We had the exact same problem (also around 4 years ago). The large companies which have the volume of tweets to need a service like this don't care too much if there is fancy machine learning behind it, but do care if there's sufficient marketing/brand knowledge to deliver the exact things they want to see in the right format. The two angles that worked out best were finding larger organisations which wanted to deliver this kind of "cut through the noise" information to consumers (e.g. picking out reviews), and delivering broader "market intelligence" (e.g. showing what's being tweeted about car buying in a certain area for a car dealership, vs. just monitoring that dealership's name/accounts). Good luck.
- illdave 14y ago
  Hi guys, thanks for the feedback and for sharing your experiences - really appreciate it. I've got a few plans for how to make Recon more useful for larger brands and it'll be interesting to see what the uptake is like (and the size of brands that start using the app). I like the market intelligence idea, definitely something I'll be thinking about. Thanks again.
  - brianbreslin 14y ago
    also look into my buddy's company loudpixel.com big brands at executive level care about reports more than anything.

jlees 14y ago

We had the exact same problem (also around 4 years ago). The large companies which have the volume of tweets to need a service like this don't care too much if there is fancy machine learning behind it, but do care if there's sufficient marketing/brand knowledge to deliver the exact things they want to see in the right format. The two angles that worked out best were finding larger organisations which wanted to deliver this kind of "cut through the noise" information to consumers (e.g. picking out reviews), and delivering broader "market intelligence" (e.g. showing what's being tweeted about car buying in a certain area for a car dealership, vs. just monitoring that dealership's name/accounts). Good luck.

illdave 14y ago
Hi guys, thanks for the feedback and for sharing your experiences - really appreciate it. I've got a few plans for how to make Recon more useful for larger brands and it'll be interesting to see what the uptake is like (and the size of brands that start using the app). I like the market intelligence idea, definitely something I'll be thinking about. Thanks again.
- brianbreslin 14y ago
  also look into my buddy's company loudpixel.com big brands at executive level care about reports more than anything.