Today i'm launching my startup after more then a year of development. I quit my job last year to make web and mobile apps and Nearby Buzz is my first big project. Love to get some feedback and see what you guys think!
This is one of the few useful products I've seen showcased in HN over the years (congrats!), based on concept - I haven't tested the implementation, but you've picked a great market.
One piece of feedback is that your pricing is way too low. Start at $99/month. Get rid of the free plan, as it accomplishes nothing for you. Most businesses are either mom and pop stores that will get by with the free plan, or businesses with more than 1 location. And the mom and pop businesses probably aren't the type of ppl that will write influential reviews that will recommend you to other users.
Agreedo on increase in the pricing and removing the free tier. Free tier is where you will spend all of your time in support with not much to show for it. Maybe not $100/mo as that will prevent most of the mom and pop shops, maybe move the free tier to $20/mo and the real deal to $99/mo. Pricing is hard.
This seems like a very good pricing model. If he wants mom-and-pop customers to get a free taste, he can just make the first 30 days at the $20 level free.
Glad you like it! I thought about the pricing for a long time and since my costs are low I figure I could offer low priced plans and undercut any competition but maybe that thinking is wrong. The free plan is designed to give people a good taste of the product but it's missing key things like email alerts that make it really useful, I could see mom and pop shops upgrading just to get that feature. I like to keep the free version to give business owners a good incentive to sign up where I can hopefully upgrade them but maybe that is more trouble then it's worth. $99/month is a bit much but $40/month might be a better price.
One thing to remember about pricing, its nothing to do with your costs. Charge based on the value to provide and the customers ability to pay. I agree about removing the free plan, i'd have 3 plans, 1 at $35 for the mom and pops, one at $99 for your main bread and butter and then one at $499 a month for enterprise, where you offer premium phone support, training, and other general perks that enterprises love.
Give a 30 day free trial of the $99 plan and then make them pay after that. As others have said, people on the free plan will cause you 90% of your support problems and you're making no money from them.
This app looks like it will generate a lot of value and save a lot of time for businesses. So look at it from that perspective, not based on what your costs are. If you're saving just 5 hours a month in a mom and pop business, i'd argue that $35 a month is easily worth it to them.
I think i'll go this route. Would of loved to do freemium but based on how things went yesterday it will just suck up too much work to support properly.
"You agree that you will not, and will not assist or enable others to: cache, record, pre-fetch, or otherwise store any portion of the Yelp Content, or attempt or provide a means to execute any "bulk download" operations, other than storing Yelp business IDs which you may use solely for back-end matching purposes;"
It looks like you're storing Yelp Content. Or maybe reviews aren't "Yelp Content" specifically? Or did you get a written waiver for this service?
Or does no one ever give a toss about these TOS, and just complain on twitter when they get API access revoked?
"The API is made available by Yelp Inc. ("Yelp") to enable you to access valuable local information and present Yelp Deals or Yelp Certificates on your website or mobile properties, including mobile apps ("Your Site") that encourages the visitors to Your Site (the "Users") to purchase certain Yelp Deals or Yelp Certificates (collectively "Yelp Voucher(s)") by directing them to Yelp's website or mobile properties, including mobile apps ("Yelp site")."
The entire purpose of the Yelp API is explicitly to get you to direct people to their site and/or to sell Yelp Deals.
Do people really not read these TOS before launching services, or do they think they can skate around the edges until they're big enough to get noticed/acquired before the API police cut off access?
If OP believes in the idea, has domain expertise in it, and has some validation, why not pursue it? Everything comes with risk.
The alternative is waiting years, potentially NEVER to find a perfect, 100% risk-less (which doesn't exist, btw) startup idea that will help him become very rich.
This is exactly why this product doesn't exist yet - I looked at building this exact app 18 months ago.
Yelp expressly forbids this, and without Yelp, you don't have a product. That said, I think it's stupid that Yelp disallows this and hope that OP succeeds.
I've had numerous discussions with folks about projects that all involve LinkedIn data. People always seem to assume they're the first people to have idea X. After digging in about 18 months ago, I saw how limiting the LinkedIn API was, and that basically none of the functionality people wanted to do was possible. technically possible? yes, for a while. Legally? It's outside their terms of use, and you'd either get shut down or sued.
I know of at least one other Chicago startup (no affiliation) that's been doing this exact thing for a year or two. I'll refrain from name dropping them in OP's announcement thread, but I did notice that any mentions of Yelp fell off their site a while back which leads me to believe Yelp may have come knocking.
Good idea, great ability for companies who can make or break on reputation to track what people are saying across all manner of review sites. Have you thought about integrating into any other social media monitoring aggregators like HootSuite? Any plans to let people reply to reviews through your software?
Judging by you picking Founding Farmers in your example I'm thinking you might be based in DC- if that's so and you ever want to talk shop with a techie Business Analyst who's worked with big data and social media I'd love to buy you a cup of coffee and pick your brain sometime.
For social media platforms like twitter the user can reply, retweet or favorite directly. Posts from google plus have links directly to the posts and such. Love to do some of the features of hootsuite but had to start limiting the scope to get something to launch. I am in DC! Send me an email at hello(at)datafocusllc(dot)com.
One thing that is probably worth clarifying that this is geared towards physical businesses. It wasn't at all obvious until I tried to sign-up (to see if I can use it for software products).
Any thoughts on how to do so? I did notice several people signing up for websites and not physical locations. Seems kinda of weird to have messaging for "this must be a physical location!"
A lot of companies need exactly this. For example you see Reddit threads where someone badmouths a company which results in a lot of negative "buzz" around it, and it seems to take the company a really long time to figure out the origin so they can take some [hopefully] constructive action (e.g. apologise, tell their side, etc).
I cannot help but wonder if your prices are far too low. $20 for your top end plan seems insanely cheap and unsustainable. I'm not sure exactly what price the market will bare in this case, but I also cannot see you being able to make this a full time job on just $20/month. You'd have to have 166 clients and $0 in running costs just to bring in a $40K/year salary (all pre-tax).
I think if it did kick off a natural area of improvement would just be adding additional social networks, in particular link-sharing sites (Reddit, Digg, 4Chan, HN, etc).
I think you're taking my example too literally. Note the $0 in running costs. It will take significantly more than 166 to see a workable single employee salary.
The price as it stands likely isn't sustainable no matter how good the product is. Unless he plans running in part time, but this doesn't seem like the type of project that can be run part time (a lot of moving parts that could potentially break).
Really you're paying for integration into a dozen different platforms.
From a design standpoint, great job on the site! I love all the little interactions and attention to detail. I also like the overall scope of the service and will use it personally. Awesome job and good luck in your future!
Design looks great, though I've encountered a bug. When I click "Get Started" the signup modal displays. Clicking the browser's back button after this removes the signup form, but leaves the modal in place. Continuing to hit the back button appears to toggle display of the signup form. Hitting the 'x' in the top right corner will dismiss the modal.
Tried to signup, just to check it out and give feedback, but seems to be US only for the moment.
I'm ok with only US, especally in a beta phase, but it would be nice if that was stated, at least on the signup page.
Positive:
Like the idea, it looks simple to use, like the Freemium offering and the landing page is clean and clear.
Good point. I did have to limit it to US only, natural language processing can get really hard, especially if you don't speak the language. Using natural language processing to extract keywords from reviews. Actively looking on how I can add more areas, hopefully add more countries in the future.
I just registered the infamous Amy’s Baking Company restaurant without any verification. Even though it is all public information I'm looking at and I can't do any harm, it feels as though I shouldn't have been allowed to do this. Can each business only be registered to a single account?
I've actually heard this before; for locations such as Amy's Baking Company you really do get an inside look into the day to day operations of the business. During the preview you can only have one location but when I complete the product users can have unlimited locations. There would be a fee for every additional location.
Zomato is a source nearby buzz can retrieve reviews from but I agree. It would be nice if there was an API that would make it easy for it to digest custom data.
Congratulations on launching! It's well polished and very nice. We're doing something in the same market but a slightly different take on it so we're definitely interested to see the space grow.
I work with a local biz with ~70 locations, just signed up and would consider switching over from a competitor based on your pricing / UX - what's the best way to get in touch w/you?
One piece of feedback is that your pricing is way too low. Start at $99/month. Get rid of the free plan, as it accomplishes nothing for you. Most businesses are either mom and pop stores that will get by with the free plan, or businesses with more than 1 location. And the mom and pop businesses probably aren't the type of ppl that will write influential reviews that will recommend you to other users.