
Brandchirps – Simple Brand Monitoring - JamesGreene
https://brandchirps.com/
======
peteforde
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.

~~~
generalpass
> ...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.

~~~
peteforde
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.

------
gingerlime
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)

------
JamesGreene
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
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
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.

------
gorbog
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
I suppose they query Google.

~~~
ikeboy
If that's the case just use Google alerts.

------
huhtenberg
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.

~~~
brandchirps
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.

~~~
huhtenberg
We publish several installable products. I've been looking for a way to track
all mentions for all product names. It's not critical, but it is definitely
something that we can use.

But I am not sure if we are going to get something relevant or just some
random flotsam from SEO spamfarms and such. That is, you made something that
may potentially have a value for us IF we can gauge the quality of the results
for our products. No way in hell I'm going to pull out a wallet and subscribe
just to valid if your service is any good.

Basically, you have no reputation and you expect us to pay you to check if you
are any good. That's a firm No. In fact, it's not a matter of money, it's a
matter of your general attitude towards establishing a working relationship
being wrong. You are throwing the baby with the bathwater.

~~~
JamesGreene
Results will come down to the term you pick and the negatives you bundle with
that term. We also offer a filtering option so that if you do still get a
bunch of data you do not want to see, you can filter in live time for results
you do want like "only containing terms of X" or "only domains of X", etc.

One difference in my data and other similar services is that I do not limit
the amount of results I collect. Higher priced competitors limit you to XXX
results a day, or XXXX a month. So you automatically miss out if there is more
data than your limit. Since I don't limit the results we collect, you can see
more of your keyword universe. You just need to filter and add negatives ( if
you wish ) to get the true results you want if you are getting some that match
your keyword, but don't match your intent.

Some people will want to see all the data, some will only want specific
quality. We leave that option to the user. Thus we allow you to use negatives
and filtering.

The only problem I have with your other statements is:

1\. You assume because I have no reputation on this site, that something must
be off for you to pull out your wallet. What about my reputation elsewhere?
With this being a new launch, you can not just gauge by my brand name alone or
my handle here alone. You know nothing of my background either.

2\. You feel my attitude towards establishing a working relationship is wrong.
What if your thinking about it is wrong? You do not know my past history with
SaaS, business, or networking in general. I have a lot of data as both an
employee and business owner that proves free trials ( without credit card )
hardly moves the needle in converting free users to paid. Just because you
feel relationships should work one way, does not mean my process is now
invalid and wrong.

3\. When was the last time you pulled out $7, got frauded and could not get
the money back from the product owner/service, Paypal, or your credit
card/bank? I am going to assume just about never unless you actively decided
not to pursue and just let it be. In today's time you as the consumer will
just about always get your money back from Paypal or your credit card/bank if
you ask. In the 20+ years I have been online I have never had a merchant keep
my money unless I was out of bounds on their terms/policies. If you are paying
with a credit card ( which my service only takes ), you have protection in
place pretty much.

~~~
JamesGreene
I will add this to your credit. I totally understand the mentally behind this.
I just do not agree with it is all.

Also, I had the wrong idea for what SHOWHN was. That is totally on me. I
misunderstand what SHOWHN was used for and it's backstory. I had to talk to
one of the moderators to understand a bit more and properly use the system.

I came into this thinking I would show what I built. It was a mod here that
discussed with me that a lot of SHOWHN is about sharing free/beta products and
getting feedback and product users that can improve the product.

In that sense, I was using SHOWHN wrong. Which is entirely on me. I just
wanted to show my product, not really drive free user into it that would help
with feedback.

So most of this miscommunication lies on me and the wrong expectation.

------
justinmarsan
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
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.

------
john111
You say you monitor the whole web. How is that possible?

~~~
zzo38computer
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
Even if it’s just http(s) requests that’s a lot of data to find & crawl. The
bandwidth costs are probably insane.

~~~
JamesGreene
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.

------
eldorad0
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 ?

~~~
JamesGreene
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.

------
rubyron
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
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

------
kinard
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
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

------
carole1
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
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.

------
brandchirps
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.

------
dalerus
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
Working on video, will post up once done. Thanks for letting me know!

------
manceraio
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
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.

------
sergiotapia
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
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
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
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.

------
scottybo
Would be good to be able to test it before subscribing

~~~
brandchirps
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.

------
xwdv
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
I hope I can help that many people with this service. Thanks!

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

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

------
daolf
Awesome Idea and good execution.

I'm really interested in knowing how you did it, plan to blog post about it ?

~~~
brandchirps
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.

------
fenwick67
One thing that might hook me is if you said which sites are scraped.

~~~
JamesGreene
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.

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

~~~
brandchirps
no, sorry.

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

~~~
brandchirps
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.

------
epoch_100
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.

~~~
carole1
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
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.

------
epoch_100
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
Are you using an open-source web crawler like Stormcrawler / Apache Nutch or
are you using Google queries as others suggested?

~~~
epoch_100
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
What public available web archive are you referring to? I know CommonCrawl but
it's a monthly archive.

~~~
epoch_100
CommonCrawl is monthly, but they also release several news archives daily (and
the news archives contain a surprising amount of content). Plus, there are
lots and lots of RSS feed archives floating around.

------
epoch_100
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!

