Does this idea suck? recently sold my last project and need something new.
Credit Karma, for marketing!
Marketing services and brands are launching all the time. What if there was a marketplace/directory for all of them (or most)
Browse by category, filter, look at reviews all in one place. Could charge a yearly access fee if it's valuable.
Would love to hear thoughts. Useful?
It would be a long game but I would start with a very tight niche within marketing services, maybe an emerging one that has less coverage, and then build out from there.
Yes, I'm thinking of just catering to e-com at first.
You're right, a long game, but value compounds nicely
Good idea. There a few players that come to mind.
Clutch.co and Goodfirms.com. We used both when we were running a custom development shop. We paid around $500 per mo and went up to $1K per mo for a while. It was the best marketing money we ever spent. Goodfirms didn’t yield much.
All in all, if you can get the eyeballs, dev shops and marketing firms will pay. If clutch had doubled their price, we would have complained, but ultimately paid whatever they wanted.
Seems like a good opportunity to take a little slice. Doesn’t need to be a winner take all sort of thing.
What were you paying 500/1k a month for? What was biggest value?
Where do you think clutch falls short?
Back when we had a custom dev shop, we were paying Clutch $500 per month to be a featured vendor in a specific category (ex. Mobile App Developer Atlanta cost $500/mo).
On Clutch, they essentially just create curated lists of companies and rank them. The rankings are based on reviews that they facilitate with your clients. You just make the intro and Clutch takes to them directly. You also get 'points' or whatever for filling out your profile. If you don't keep updating your profile and getting new reviews, you fall down the charts.
Where they make their money on landing pages of service providers (ex. https://clutch.co/developers/atlanta). In that page you will see the top of the list is sponsored, not the top ranked. In a tiny box in the top right corner you can see the box to change how the list is sorted.
In short, the lists kind of fool people into calling the sponsored companies rather than the top ranked. Either way, when we sponsored we usually got about a 10x return on the money.
The only area I would say they fell short on was when they tried this connection service where you paid a fee for an intro to a curated client. The issue was that your into was not exclusive. To me it seemed like a scam and a great way to blow $300 and two hours of your time for someone that might be interested. I would rather sponsor an entirely new category for $500 per month.
Like I said, the return on the money was amazing. If I was still in that business Clutch would still be getting my money every month.
As for the biggest value, they validated us and got us warm leads. As the only sales / marketing person on that team, Clutch was gold to me.
Another company you may want to check out is Setup. They are based in Atlanta, although not a sass platform at all, connect big brands and marketing agencies. They might just be worth looking at as you research this space.
Dude this is so helpful, appreciate it.
It sounds like they have a pretty solid moat in place and you would need a good chunk of eyeballs to make this interesting.
Happy to help. Let me know if you want to hop on a call or discuss it further.
There’s definitely room for this — clutch.co is one example.
I don’t know about a paid subscription to access it, but there’s definitely something to explore imo.
Agree! i didn't realize how large clutch.co is ( 30 mil in rev)
A fresh and more niche version of clutch is exactly it
Never heard of clutch before, but they seem to cater to Fortune 500-type companies. 65% of their traffic comes from search across a long-tail of pages. They also own a few other websites (themanifest.com, visualobjects.com) that are similar review/ranking websites for different industries.
Clutch gathers the reviews themselves - many over the phone from what I can tell. This is unique and helpful content that has led to their high search rankings. Great way to get in-depth and useful reviews, but might pose a challenge for an indie hacker project to replicate.
Love their business model though. Do the heavy lifting to create reviews and case studies that don't exist anywhere else, rank on google, and charge agencies a subscription to boost their rankings on clutch. Track clicks sent to the agencies to prove value.
If you want a great intro to growing this type of business, 37signals/Basecamp posted a blogpost about selling Sortfolio years ago. It was/is a directory site for web designers that was making $17k-20k MRR when they sold it. Looks like the new owners have let it wither though. There used to be a lot more of the large featured company posts at the top of every page.
Yep, definitely something there IMO.
I've talked to a lot of SMB owners who need help with ads / online marketing, but just don't know where to find it. And to be honest, I couldn't help them find it easily either... nowhere I know of to direct them to (aside from trying upwork or fiverr, which never really worked that well).
Clutch doesn't cater to that market very well, and I agree a fresh & more niche version of clutch is a really good place to start.
Yep, I feel the same way.
So this will only be in the domain of marketing? For anyone looking for marketing services, they can find what best suites their needs on the platform? 🤔
Exactly, browse around and see options
Have you seen Martech 5000 database? Is it similar to it?
nope i'll have to check it out
Hm, I see 2 problems here:
a) Competition (Clutch)
b) Figuring out how to distinguish yourself, even if you go niche
Maybe a good idea would be to make a "data-driven" directory for a specific niche? For example, Clutch only allows you to see user reviews for a company.
But what if you go way more comprehensive...displaying the 'latest news' for the company, the # of employees (per their LinkedIn), the growth in employees, what people on Twitter say about it. Maybe even try to scrape their clients sites and use tools like the SemRush API to see how well they perform over time.
You may even turn this into a standalone tool for researching the marketing agency you wanna hire.
Still, treat all of this as hypotheses :) Maybe the original idea of niching down on itself will work well. There's def a potential.
Which problem does it solve?