

Launching Recon.io (my side project) out of beta - illdave
http://recon.io/blog/launch

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brianbreslin
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
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.

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illdave
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
also look into my buddy's company loudpixel.com

big brands at executive level care about reports more than anything.

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AznHisoka
I hate to be that guy, but here's what I think

1) Most individuals here who want to monitor just 1 campaign don't have a
strong brand. So there's very little value added with your app. They'll search
for their brand on Twitter once a week to see the handful of mentions they
get.

2) The BIG brand names already are using a platform like Hootsuite or
SproutSocial to take care of everything social-media related. Which allows
them to monitor their brand throughout the entire web(not just Twitter). As
well as view analytics on their followers. And schedule messages.

IMO, your app is simply automates the process of searching for a brand name on
Twitter. The categorization of the mentions into support questions,
complaints, etc is not a huge value add, as most users will want to view all
of their mentions, and don't care what bucket they fall under.

~~~
illdave
Hi, thanks for the feedback (and don't worry about being _that_ guy - it's
important to have critical feedback too).

I agree that there's a specific size of brand that would find Recon useful -
huge brands will have a big social media team working (almost) around the
clock, and small companies might not get many mentions, but I do strongly
think there's a huge number of companies that fit right in the middle that
Recon is perfect for. Have a look at how 37signals have been thinking about
this problem, for example: [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3317-behind-the-
scenes-twitte...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3317-behind-the-scenes-
twitter-part-1)

That 37signals post also highlights a problem with companies of that size that
Recon solves - there's so much noise. You could manually search for your brand
name throughout the day, or set up an alert that sends you everything that
mentions you - but you'd waste so much of your time just sifting through
information.

Thanks again for the feedback though - I do appreciate hearing it.

~~~
AznHisoka
Have you asked DHH if they would pay to use your product? People gripe about
things all the time but it doesn't mean they'd pay for a solution.

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twog
Woah. This is eerie! I literally just tried to buy recon.io this morning for
my sideproject, only to find out it was taken. Now I see it on HN.

Love the design of the landing page and the easy access to the demo. Very
cool.

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hamoid
I don't know if there is any plan to ever launch for Spanish speaking users,
but the name sounds similar to a vulgar word in Spain. Not sure if US-Spanish
speaking people would recognize it though.

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charlieirish
Congratulations on the launch Dave! It's clear that you're a follower of
patio11 as I can see his influence throughout the site. I'm working on
something similar: <http://livelystocks.com> \- I bought it and I'm now
redeveloping it to provide realtime stock news.

I would love to see a 'conversion post' on how you did at that price point on
the front page. Well done on launching!

~~~
illdave
Hi Charlie, thanks for the kind words - and funny you should mention patio11,
I met him last month - great guy! And yep, learnt a ton from his blog posts,
newsletter and podcast - still loads of things I want to add in.

Good luck with LivelyStocks, if you need a beta tester - give me a shout:
dave@recon.io.

~~~
charlieirish
Thanks Dave - I've just sent you an email.

For those that don't know (unlikely!) patio11, read more on his blog:
<http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/>

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ruswick
Mine is congruous with the general sentiment: the base plan is overkill
(price-wise, that is) while the top-tier plan is insufficient. Most users that
would conceivable want to track a single campaign will be individuals with
projects or very small businesses. Neither of these groups would be likely to
acquiesce to a ~$250-a-year service. The top tier is probably too feature-
sparse and large companies will demand more.

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napoleond
This is really cool! I wish I had a reason to use it; my "brands" aren't quite
there yet.

As far as the pricing goes, how is a "campaign" counted? Does that correspond
1:1 with Twitter accounts? I bet you could charge way more for established
brands, even if they only want to monitor a single account... maybe you could
price by number of mentions or something similar?

~~~
illdave
Hi - thanks very much! A campaign is one keyword being tracked and analysed
(although it also does other things, like check for journalists tweeting about
their industry, and not necessarily their main keyword).

Working out how to charge was actually a pretty interesting issue - I did
originally think about splitting it down by number of mentions, but I couldn't
find an elegant way to do it. The problem is, most people won't know how many
times their brand is mentioned in a month, which could make it awkward as a
customer. I quite like the simplicity of the campaigns method - it'll be
interesting to see what the customer feedback is like.

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marketmonkey
This looks awesome. It's also perfect timing to recommend to some clients that
I have.

Is there an 'agency' option available where we can monitor more than 8
campaigns? Or even rebrand/white-label it?

~~~
illdave
Hi, thanks very much - if you shoot me an email at dave@recon.io, we can have
a chat about an agency option.

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nishankkhanna
Little bug: Your signup buttons go to the login page instead of the signup
form on this page:

<http://recon.io/pricing>

~~~
illdave
Thanks for the headsup - fixed :)

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YPetrov
Good luck with that! Question: How do you go about classifying the sentiment -
are you doing anything interesting or?

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kordless
On Android Chrome. Page won't scroll. Two finger scroll sorta works. Is that
stock bootstrap?

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danoprey
What happens to us existing users now all plans are paid?

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illdave
Hi Dan, the campaigns will stop running for older campaigns, but if you give
me a shout at dave@recon.io I'll set you up with a free month of Pro.

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simon20121116
It looks great Dave. Congratulations.

~~~
illdave
Thank you!

