Launching Recon.io (my side project) out of beta

by illdave • 14 years ago

40 27 14 years ago

danoprey• 14 years ago

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

illdave8• 14 years ago

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.

nishankkhanna• 14 years ago

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

http://recon.io/pricing

illdave8• 14 years ago

Thanks for the headsup - fixed :)

napoleond• 14 years ago

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?

illdave8• 14 years ago

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.

charlieirish3• 14 years ago

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!

illdave8• 14 years ago

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.

charlieirish3• 14 years ago

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/

xoail• 14 years ago

Ping me if you need beta tester for your site. I do day trading too.

charlieirish3• 14 years ago

Hi xoail, I'd love to but you don't have any information in your profile! Can you add something to your 'about' section and I'll be in touch. Many thanks Charlie

simon20121116• 14 years ago

It looks great Dave. Congratulations.

illdave8• 14 years ago

Thank you!

marketmonkey• 14 years ago

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?

illdave8• 14 years ago

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

AznHisoka2• 14 years ago

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.

illdave8• 14 years ago

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...

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.

AznHisoka2• 14 years ago

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.

twog• 14 years ago

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.

brianbreslin2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

illdave8• 14 years ago

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.

YPetrov• 14 years ago

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

kordless• 14 years ago

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

hamoid• 14 years ago

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.

ruswick• 14 years ago

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.

Launching Recon.io (my side project) out of beta

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