Definitely a contributor! These are favorable times to have a solid business model and a bunch of healthy growth. Capital was pretty cheap and allows us to try to build a long term, sustainable biz!
Same thoughts here. They use fairly aggressive email marketing, which is difficult to unsubscribe to.
I clicked the 'unsub' link in the footer of this particular marketing email and hit: 1) an SSL warning from Chrome, and 2) a 404 on accepting the SSL warning.
The word you're looking for is: "communicative." Seriously, for a relatively new company, they've done a great job of getting the word out about their stellar product.
Candidly, I was using the funding as an opportunity to introduce our mobile offering via email to our users. That sounds sneaky, but we've invested a lot of effort into our platform and want as many devs to be aware of it as we can! Definitely sent too much email today, tho... sorry, lesson learned. - Patrick Moran, VP, Marketing, New Relic
If you can send me a private message (email plightbody at newrelic dot com) with the email you got hit with, I will find out why you received that email. I'm guessing some sort of partnership connection, but it's never good if you believe you are receiving unsolicited emails.
> I'm guessing some sort of partnership connection, but it's never good if you believe you are receiving unsolicited emails.
I've yet to know a "partnership connection" email solicited in any way, shape or form, for what it's worth. Even when the partnership is tight (example: I recently received an email from Radiohead's Thom Yorke. I bought In Rainbows when it was released 6 years ago, and the mail got sent to the address I provided back then [my recollection is fuzzy, but it was likely necessary to get a/the download link]. The connection is strong, but I still consider it to be spam.)
Spam really doesnt bother me that much. My co-founder also received an unsolicited email too. We both clicked unsubscribe on each of ours and both received the same original email about 15 minutes later.
agreed. We have multiple email segments for our 300,000+ users and prospects and while its more complex than this, we fumbled our Marketo settings and people with more than one New Relic account in our system got... more than one email... :(
It stinks because our intentions were to get people excited about what's to come... instead you want to strangle me with my power cord.
Last week I was standing behind a couple guys wearing New Relic shirts and I overheard a conversation like this:
Larry) We just got a brand new 9TB storage array for the intranet
Moe) Wow 9TB is really huge!
Larry) I know right, but the graphics department needs like 3TB and keep asking
for more, don't they know that 9TB is huuuge?
Moe) Man that's insane, the marketing guys are already over a terabyte!
What are we going to do?
Larry) I dunno man, we'll probably have to tell them no.
I'd guess they need the money to buy a larger filer.
Pretty sure that wasn't anyone from New Relic. Our storage requirements are quite a bit more sophisticated... plus we don't have anyone named Moe or Larry :)
They send me so many emails. It's a joke, I probably put in a fake number but I hear they also call a lot of people. Offer a free 'data t-shirt', make you install their product and call/email you constantly.
Check out tracelytics.com (or AppNeta.com, as Tracelytics was bought by AppNeta.com last year).
Cheaper, full visibility from load-balancer, web-server, DB server, NoSQL server, and of course, App-Server (RoR, Python, PHP [Drupal and also via Acquia], Java, etc)
Agreed. We have 100 dyno's running and it was around $7k a month! This effectively doubled our dyno cost. We turned it off as it wasn't really telling us anything we didn't already know.
If you are worried about cost, just run it on a subset of your servers. 10-20% of your servers should be enough to gather most information you need... unless you are using new relic as the only aggregator of server status/monitoring... and that should be heroku's job.
We were battling a specific type of Heroku error (H12) that really required all of our dyno's to be monitored. We turned NR off and went with a (much) less expensive service that ended up telling us exactly the information that we needed across our entire cluster of machines. Hopefully with this extra cash, NR can improve their service because I honestly wasn't that impressed. It didn't live up to the hype at all for me.
They sent me an email saying that they were able to offer reduced rates. I decided to follow up and they offered $80/mo which was still expensive but less than the ticket price. I said I'd subscribe at that price but had to wait because we were having an issue with their gem when used with Turbolinks.
Regardless, they switched my account to the paid plan right away. I then got at least one email a day asking me to put in my credit card number, despite the issue with Turbolinks. They were so damn annoying trying to get my credit card number that I told them to forget it, to revert my account back to the free plan and that I'll revisit once they fixed the issue and we had more time to deal with it. That's when the had the audacity to say that I needed to pay a 3 month penalty since I was canceling a yearly agreement. Something I never agreed to in the first place. They didn't charge me the penalty in the end but just mentioning it was ridiculous.
I totally lost faith in that company. The product is good to great, but their pushy sales tactics are borderline disgusting.
i agree.. they sent me so many follow up emails i had to unsubscribe. i can't understand how a supposedly modern software service would not understand what is appropriate email frequency.
Ugh... as a marketing guy trying to build an awesome, lasting brand, I hate these comments. We talk about it a lot internally and do a lot of coaching to make sure we're not too aggressive. It is a balance though - growth and aspirational goals to be a meaningful long-term business coupled with wanting to be a healthy participant in our community... Sounds like on occasion we've failed.. Please know we're listening to feedback like this - it doesn't mean we're going to stop contacting people who use our product, but it does mean we care, and will work to REFINE our commercial tactics.
So I just saw Lew speak and I wanted to share this awesome anecdote about the origin of the name. Lew was in a meeting with a VC and before the meeting he asked him what the name of the new venture was. Thinking on his feet, he plugged his name into an anagram finder online.
Just a tiny FYI, We occasionally buy billboards at discounted rates, but not near $100K. We have one up right now that cost about $8,000 on the 101 in San Francisco. Sounds like you've seen it!
- Because we can raise it now at a good valuation and the future is uncertain