
LiveAgent: Over $250K monthly recurring revenue with a spin-off project - nicoserdeir
https://www.failory.com/mistakes/liveagent
======
ClassyJacket
"Do you want to grow your business? With GenM you can get free marketing from
an apprentice as part of their training. The student will work 40 hours per
month creating content, increasing SEO rankings, carrying out advertisement
campaigns..."

'The _student_ will _work_ '?

So they just straight up admit they're exploiting students as unpaid
employees? Students aren't supposed to work, they're supposed to learn.
Damnit, America.

~~~
dx87
According the the DoL, it looks like there's nothing wrong with what they're
doing. As long as they only work on the free marketing projects, it thier work
would just count as training.

[https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm](https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm)

~~~
lojack
It wouldn't count as training unless there is some formal training program put
on by the company. Additionally, the customers are paying money -- they're
paying $49/mo to receive the work of an apprentice.

This sort of stuff happens all the time. Its surprisingly common for unpaid
interns to operate in a grey area. Can't really say this company is doing
anything illegal without actually knowing what the program looks like for the
apprentices. Every company I've worked at has decided its better to just pay
them something, even if just minimum wage, to avoid risk of lawsuit. I also
just think thats the right thing to do.

~~~
gtirloni
It seems odd that apprenticeships would prohibit the apprentice from working
on activities that make money. I don't think that's the case anywhere. Maybe
there's some special apprenticeship model where that's forbidden? It wouldn't
make much sense since the purpose of most companies is to make a profit.

~~~
lojack
It doesn't explicitly forbid this, which is where the grey area tends to come
into place. The official policy is to consider:

> The extent to which the intern’s work complements, rather than displaces,
> the work of paid employees while providing significant educational benefits
> to the intern.

The argument would be made that since the company is charging for work from
unpaid interns to be fulfilled only by unpaid interns, it would be displacing
the work of paid employees as opposed to complementing them. Of course,
there's a lot more to it than just that going into the litmus test.

~~~
gtirloni
Yes, it's definitely a grey area. All it would be needed to have it not
"displace work of paid employees" would be for a paid employee to have
supervision responsibilities to review the final work, even if that would be
0.1% of all the work done. I think that's a valid concern, thanks for raising
that point.

------
lifeisstillgood
> including LiveAgent in software directories

Many many years ago I used to produce internal business plans for a big ISP -
and if you had to quickly justify a proposed purchase, you always needed some
competitor analysis so you had to go _find_ competitors to the product you are
looking at.

Yellow pages don't really cut it, but a great source was "Analyst reports"
where there would be some bubble diagram showing market share and competitors.

What I think i am saying is that in the B2B space, above a certain price tag,
the best thing you can do is to identify the biggest dogs in your niche, and
do all you can to have PR stories out there saying "$YOURCOMPANY, unlike
competitors bigdog and biggerdog ..." or better still (but harder)
"biggestdog, like competitors biggerdog and $YOURCOMPANY"

~~~
vonseel
You're talking about Gartner reports, although I'm sure there are other
companies which provide similar research data.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Yeah thanks - could not remember the name. Forrester was another who had
locked into this idea, but these days a google search for "competitor x"
probably will work as well.

Curious that google casually disrupts even that

~~~
rahimnathwani
I usually do either/both of:

\- Search for 'better than [x]'

\- Type '[x] vs' into Chrome's address bar to see what autocomplete provides

~~~
vonseel
I do that all the time, usually for software, although it can be a bit more
difficult for under-marketed things like open-source software without a
marketing budget.

------
nickpsecurity
Good interview as usual on Failory. He posts lots of them on Barnacl.es, too.
Gotta poke at this:

"On the other hand, no software is perfect and if somebody says, their
software is bug-free, they are lying."

Strawman to dismiss folks who argue for high-quality software. If they think
it doesn't exist, they probably didn't know about Cleanroom Software
Engineering and Praxis' Correct-by-Construction:

[http://infohost.nmt.edu/~al/cseet-
paper.html](http://infohost.nmt.edu/~al/cseet-paper.html)

[http://www.anthonyhall.org/c_by_c_secure_system.pdf](http://www.anthonyhall.org/c_by_c_secure_system.pdf)

There's a difference between accidentally being buggy because the problem is
that hard and intentionally leaving it buggy for faster iterations. They're
doing the latter. Which is fine in their situation. They could probably adopt
some proven approaches to increase their QA results on the cheap, though.
Easiest route is some slice of design/code reviews plus contracts (esp pre-
conditions) with contract/property-based testing and fuzzing. Catches all
kinds of problems.

------
blunte
I think the title (intentionally) suggests this was some amazing
overnight/fast success. While it is successful for sure, I think the fact that
it took four years to go from 20 to 250 is significant.

It's still good growth, but I expected it to have all happened in one year
based on the title alone.

~~~
morganvachon
Slightly off topic, but it's not the only thing fishy about the article. In
the "Backstory", he talks about his first (failed) venture and this really
stood out to me (emphasis mine):

> We were kids and we were _selling virtual server space for_ games like
> Counter Strike or _World of Warcraft_ to other kids.

Blizzard has never sanctioned third party or self hosted servers, if you're
hosting WoW on a private server you're breaking ToS and risking a hefty
lawsuit. I have to wonder if that contributed to the failure of his first
company, or if perhaps it was just a poor choice of game title to embellish
his story. Either way, it smacks of dishonesty.

~~~
fatnoah
I'm also surprised Salesforce hasn't tried to shut them down, considering it
has a product named "Live Agent" as part of its Service Cloud:
[https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=live_agent_intro....](https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=live_agent_intro.htm&type=5)

------
tmikaeld
I'm curious how LiveAgent's recent lifetime deal affected their recurring
revenue.

Probably lost some current users to that, but in the long-run, it probably
increased it by a lot.

Since they where smart enough to only offer two users and more users are set
at top-plan pricing.

------
kup0
Having worked in customer service for many years, I've used LiveAgent's chat
products at multiple companies and was not impressed with the actual software
itself.

