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.
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.
This probably speaks to a broader fit issue. SMBs attracted by the pricing likely don't get enough mentions to make it worthwhile, larger orgs that do get the mentions and that will pay extra probably want a more robust tool.
All of these things you mention, I have been thinking of too over the past year of building this out. Most of my time has been spent ensuring the code is strong and bullet-proof to work amazingly well and is reliable. Even if I get hit by a bus and can not touch the base for weeks or months on end.
There are a few things needing to be tweaked still, but it's almost all there.
Less time has been spent on the UX/LP/copy. Not an excuse, but just showing where I spent my time on this project.
Plans are to raise pricing once other features come online, a few bugs are smashed ( had one reported today with UK billing ), and a new LP/UX goes up. More then likely I will have to raise pricing slowly as milestones are hit.
Users already in the system will get grandfathered at their pricing, but pricing will go up so it can scale.
> ...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.
Perhaps add an enterprise tier that includes lots of buzzwords in its description on a dedicated page.
You're making light of my point, but you are underestimating how important that point actually is. Services that don't cost enough are perceived as highly suspect, because there's a widely-held (and not unfounded) belief that anything worth using is worth paying for. You're not just paying for the sunk cost + fractional profit; you're investing in a solution that will stand up to your board of directors wanting something to blame. Think: support contracts, data protection and privacy laws, corporate structure and insurance. The function that this tool purports to do is literally the full time job for a lot of people, so there's no way they can put such an important function on someone's cool side project. It's just not a good business move.
I don't know about 300 per seat cost, unless the idea is that there is only one seat per enterprise, that price could quickly grown into one where you have to go through some onerous procurement process.
I pulled $300 out of the air, but when you look at how expensive SaaS tools like Mixpanel get at scale, it's not even improbable. Welcome to corporate budgets, where the people making the decisions are not spending their own money and one of the top-3 decision dimensions is "will this get me fired?"
It's not my wisdom, but it is frequently cited on here (looking at patio11) that the reason software costs up to $500 or over $10k but very little in-between is that most managers can expense $500 without VP approval; $10k is the minimum realistic price of a product sold via an inside sales process.
right, $300 sounds reasonable for a single person having to use this, so maybe a member of a team, and teams decide on their own to get it. But if there is a decision like every analyst needs to have a way to track brands and there are 100 analysts then 300 starts to look like a procurement process, I suppose it could be fixed by offering a discount of multiple licenses of course.
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.