Roast my startup idea: SnapMetrics
Target audience: marketing agencies and freelancers who work with eCommerce brands.
Problem: they spend a lot of time manually checking on their accounts and campaigns.
Solution: automatically know exactly what needs your attention and why.
Landing page: https://snapmetrics.app
Example use:
- You run a marketing agency, managing multiple accounts
- You / your team needs to check on the accounts regularly to make sure everything is moving forward
- Ex checks:
— Which ads CTR is going down?
— Which ads CPR is going up?
— Are we advertising products that are running out of stock? - These manual checks take time and effort, that time and effort is better spent elsewhere like producing better work and learning new skills
Do you know of anything like this? what do you currently use to monitor your marketing metrics? What do you think of the landing page and explanations?
Update:
Shared the launch story and lessons learned here:
Trending on Indie Hackers
Hey Faisal! That's a cool idea if you can precisely boil down a pain point of the marketing agencies. I'd suggest working closely with a few marketing agencies, see what they want, and building a niche product for them (bottom-up) rather than looking at a broad market and building a product top-down.
Question: how this differs from online KPI dashboards such as AgencyAnalytics.com, DashThis.com, Geckoboards.com, Klipfolio? Asking also because I co-founded Octoboard.com 7 years ago with an exit in 2020, and we were selling similar type of services to Agencies back then. Agencies use these KPI boards to automatically send reports to their clients.
thanks for sharing Jari
found an early adopter agency recently and now working with them as you said, bottom up
do you think I should find more agencies now to do the same with them or after I have something with this agency first?
the key difference between the other companies mentioned is SnapMetrics automatically finds issues, not only with the ads but also with the online store (website analytics, orders, customers, products)
while most other tools only do reporting automation but the agency still needs to find issues on their own / setup custom rules for the issues
I can see that Octoboard now is actually doing something similar, I didn't find about them earlier which is interesting thanks for sharing
impressive profile btw, added you on LinkedIn, maybe one day when I have more to show we can talk more about it?
Absolutely, ping me some time, would be glad to chat! I agree, most KPI dashboards lack the depth. I remember AgencyAnalytics was the best back then, from the practical standpoint, not well known, but very well made. Might be useful to poke it a bit.
This sounds like a great problem to solve.
Have you connected with some freelance marketers to get their feedback, Faisal?
Yes, working with an ad agency to make it work for them
Do you know any marketers or agencies I can talk to?
Great idea to work directly with an agency.
I know a few great marketers and freelancers who work with e-commerce brands. They are on our platform Geeks and Experts. Feel free to schedule a free 1:1 coffee chat with some of them to get feedback.
I wish you all the best!
So my question is are they any active competitors out there offering such service? Cause for me it didn't sound something new. Secondly, what's exactly different about you that me (as a freelancer) gotta use your platform?
yes there are plenty of tools to help with reporting and dashboards (ex: Supermetrics, Google Data Studio, DashThis, AgencyAnalytics etc)
the difference is first most of them don’t give you the “issues”, only report on the numbers and you need to find issues on your own
and few of them focus on eCommerce marketing, which has unique needs that SnapMetrics caters for
are you a digital marketing freelancer? do you run ads for eCommerce brands?
I'm just a freelancer who's a product geek and would love to explore new products. But like I'm still not fully convinced. You said "most of them" that means some of them offers me what I want. Why would I switch to your platform?
good questions thanks for asking
there are usually a lot of apps in many categories, ex there are many productivity apps, project management, etc
each caters to different audiences even though basically they all do similar things
having competition is a good thing, it means there is a big market
so why use SnapMetrics vs other analytics tools?
right now because it’s made for eCommerce marketers and tells you exactly whats wrong so you can focus on fixing and improving rather than finding issues
How can you deliver better advertising results for your clients while spending less time checking accounts and preparing reports?
Are you asking because it doesn’t make sense or actually want to know?
What happens is when you do manual checking and reporting, you have human error and a lot of time spent
With automations your team gets all they need automatically and has more to do creative and optimisation
Which means better results
Hi Faisal! Thanks for sharing this - just wanted to offer up some thoughts after checking out the landing page and watching the demo.
I'll flat out say it, I feel like this may be interesting to sell to agency clients instead of the agencies themselves. For instance, as someone that has paid for digital ads work in the past with an agency, I don't want to get into the weeds of Facebook ads manager and see the underlying updates (this is what I'm paying the agency to do), but I absolutely want to keep a pulse on how the ads are doing overall to hold the agency accountable and ensure they are responding to the needs of the campaign. I feel like these alerts could provide a nice 3rd party check-in method for those clients to get the high-level updates they want, and it might be something I'd recommend to them to pay for to ensure they have some visibility into the project and can better collaborate with the agency.
A lot of agencies will just not reveal their methodologies and just expect the clients to trust them blindly, but this provides a way for clients to feel more empowered.
Hope this helps! Curious to hear your thoughts about it!
thanks Adam, I tried selling and working with businesses (the brands directly), the problem I found is that the owners are usually very busy and they would rather hire a competent agency / in-house marketer to take care of this stuff
They only care about growth and profitability, they don't want to be checking analytics or worry about KPIs going up and down
Of course there are always the smaller brands where the founders are still very involved but they are difficult to sell to (hard to find, reach, educate and convince...)
And in general, eCommerce brands are very hard to sell to... their emails are always public and so they get A LOT of people approaching them to sell them things all the time, promising the same things
Agencies are much easier to find online, they are approachable, they understand the value in these tools and want ways to automate and improve their work
Hello. do you already have contacts with potential customers? I can imagine that agencies pay the price, however, it is advantageous if you already have a few on hand.
It's been super slow to get traction here, I got in touch with over 500 people (cold approach on LinkedIn and cold email)
Got 13 positive responses and now working with one agency on making the product better for them
Hey Faisal,
Do you have competitors who solve the same problem?
Are they successful (by that I mean do they have plenty of PAYING customers)?
If the answers to both of these questions is "Yes" then fantastic - you've got a viable business idea and the only thing that will stop you from succeeding is not marketing it correctly.
However, if the answers to either of these questions is "no" then it's not viable and you need to find a solution and problem that has existing demand.
Best
Chris
Direct competitors who do the exact same thing of automating the health checks on ads, I only found one and it's doing great (plenty of customers etc).
But in-direct competitors are plenty, people use tools like Supermetrics and Google Data studio for example to achieve the same thing.
Perfect!
Do you have a concrete and objective differentiator?
Yes, the differentiator is focusing on a niche - eCommerce marketers
So the app has specific features they need
Sounds good to me then Faisal
The example use case presented on the page is relevant and shows how the tool can provide value to its target audience. Overall, the page seems well-designed, with clear explanations of the problem and solution, as well as easy-to-understand visuals.
some feedback:
I have an agency that can help with:
development
reach out and I would be happy to help!
Increase your ad performance by Identifying ads with declining CTR
Maximize your ROI by tracking ads with increasing CPR
Keep your inventory in check by avoiding advertising out-of-stock products
Highlight the benefit
Above the fold tries to tell what your product does, not how it helps a user concretely.
So like the old "don't sell a drill, sell the hole in the wall" example, your above the fold says:
Cut the marketing speech and focus on how you make your customer's life better: talk about the hole! And make sure there is a simple, dumbed down version of it in the first thing that the customer sees when they open up the website.
Hi @jehna, how about this:
Headline: Deliver better advertising results for your clients
Subheader: Spend less time checking accounts and preparing reports, and deliver better results for your clients
Still no
You're still describing what it is that you are doing. It's like airlines saying:
When the point is that the person wants to go on a holiday, not to sit in an airplane. Airlines sell you the destination (and miles, but that's another story), not the airplane.
Instead tell me what is the problem that your client has? Check out the elements of value pyramid from below link and think what it is that you're really selling:
https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-elements-of-value
thank you this is very helpful, not sure how to proceed though
from the elements of value, the problems I am solving are:
# functional
# emotional:
# life changing:
what do you think?
Now we're getting there!
Focus on those things in parentheses, like:
Still checking your ad accounts manually? Save time on the boring stuff so you can focus on the creative side of marketing
Is your team spending time on writing reports or on doing creative work? Cut on the boring stuff and focus on what delivers most value
(This assuming your customer is a marketing agency – and that their creative people are the ones doing the reporting too. So maybe small-mid size ad agencies? Bigger ad agencies might have analytics people who enjoy spending time on doing reporting)
Thanks Jehna you are super helpful!
What do you think of this:
Manually checking campaigns and reporting taking too much time?
Save time on the manual work so you can focus on delivering better results to your clients
The target audience are small- mid size agencies, and the owners are usually not the one doing this work, their team is, so they are not bothered by it being "boring" but they do want their clients to get better results with less time (so they can serve even more clients)
Love it thank you!
Update: shared the launch story with lessons learned here
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/snapmetrics/snapmetrics-launch-story-and-lessons-learned--NSWulKwzPjZ8yXHmPoL
I love the concept of SnapMetrics! Streamlining the monitoring process for marketing agencies and freelancers is a fantastic idea. It sounds like a game-changer for those who need to stay on top of their accounts and campaigns without getting bogged down in manual checks.
As for the landing page, it's clean and concise, making it easy to understand the value proposition. Keep refining and iterating based on user feedback to make it even better!
If you haven't already, check out hacksocial.ai – it's an AI-powered platform that can help you with your social media interactions by generating engaging AI-assisted replies. It might be a great way to connect with your target audience and grow your user base. Plus, their upcoming "Steering Wheel" feature could help you include or reference SnapMetrics in your AI-generated responses for more personalized interactions.
Keep up the great work and best of luck with SnapMetrics! 🚀