Why would you *not* use my product?
https://www.emetti.com
I find folks are often friendly when you pitch a new product, but not always fully forthcoming. So, I’d like you to be cruel.
Our tool https://www.emetti.com puts a newsfeed on your website. You can see it in use on https://www.campnab.com and https://www.saltspringsoapworks.com
If you have a moment, please tell me what you think sucks about it. Why would you not use this tool? Any feedback is welcome—and appreciated. 🙌
I think the feed looks good. I wouldn't mind having dedicated page where I can integrate it but not sure if I would want the widget on the right as it may not be that useful to my users.
We’ve considered adding a dedicated page. Our main reason for putting that off has been how lost those pages can be. Personally, if we have a new feature/offer/etc., I want that front-and-center.
Can I ask what your product is? Also, how are you currently letting users know about changes to your product?
Sure, our product is browsee.io. Currently, we notify our users by a feature digest which we send out every once or twice a month. We had also experimented with once a week only to see email opens declining. So we have switched to once a month where the open rate is now somewhat constant.
I understand your point on user not being notified. Perhaps, something like "show a major update once to every user but don't show the bell if the user visits again and has already seen the update", could be a reasonable middle ground.
I find the notification frequency a confusing matter. With one of our studio’s clients, we have a rule of: No more than 1 email a month—and the offer/value has to be notable.
This seems to work well, but I have a colleague who finds their organization needs to send an email every day or two. He notes that any less than that leads to subscriber churn. (This is entirely paradoxical to me).
As for the sidebar, your notes on a middle ground are implemented, but not 100%, yet. The options are:
Again, they’re in place, and the organization can set them as they wish. However, they are sometimes a little wonky.
We’re also adding two new options specifically related to smartphone behavior, as it tends to obscure content there (which is bad):
I got a lifetime deal on https://www.getbeamer.com/ a while back and have been using that. In order for me to make a change you'd need to have a differentiatior so huge it overcomes the burden of making the change worthwhile to me. While the concept is useful, there seems to be a low ceiling to the value this provides and a fair bit of alternatives. It's not exactly rocket science to create a post type and display it on your website. I imagine that as soon as you have people to whom this is worth 100/m, they also probably have the resources to just build out something equivalent within a few hours to a few days. I see you have a roadmap for a bunch of stuff like chat and a help desk. This lowers my confidence in the product because most people who need those features will already have a provider that has likely invested millions more dollars into refining and integrating their products. When purchasing a small utility like this, I look for something deeply integrated I can set and forget that doesn't try to take over my tech stack.
All good points. How’s Beamer working for you? Are you using it regularly? Any shortcomings that cause problems?
We sell WordPress plugins, so we use it as a changelog every time we update or launch a plugin.
Beamer is meant to work for a single product, so we can only use it as a global feed of all of the updates to all of our plugins.
It would be cool if it were easier to filter down to a single product on pages related to that product.
This might be different now, but the way they handled translation was not great.
If you didn't translate a post into every language you enabled, it'd wouldn't show up in those languages.
It also based the language on the browser language, so if you have a multi-lingual site it won't necessarily match the language of the current page.
That meant we couldn't turn a language on in order to work on the translations without the content disappearing for everyone whose browser wasn't set to English by default.
Some of the styling could be better, but it's not horrible.
To me the general news feed use case doesn't make sense. News items are typically a paragraph + so a standard blog layout is more comfortable and a pretty standard part of most sites.
Where I see more opportunity is in cases like ours where we're communicating small, incremental, regular changes and people are often coming back to the site to check if there's a new version or whether a feature they wanted has been added yet.
Because it's part of a product release cycle, I think I will eventually switch to a tool like canny.io. They have a similar changelog/notification feature, but it's tied into the whole lifecycle of a feature from feature request, to roadmap to update announcement. I like that it's really focused on that feedback loop and not trying to take over my blog, my help desk, my project management flow, etc. and it's simple enough that it won't feel like another project to manage (in fact I might have less to manage by saving the time spent responding to feature requests and answering questions about whether a feature is planned).
Once we've grown to the point where it makes sense to implement something like that, there really isn't much competition that can do all of that and there's just enough going on that it wouldn't be worth our time to program a solution in-house.
I think there's a real opportunity in that space as most of the players are too basic (basically just a news feed anyone can replicate) or too complex (using PM tools like Trello or dedicated roadmap software like https://www.aha.io/ is a lot of management overhead when you're mainly just trying to communicate simple information to your users and gather feedback efficiently).
The ability to filter to a single product is something I want, too. I’m thinking of a discrete feed for each of our products (i.e. newsfeed, chat, etc.), and the ability to pull all of those posts into a collected newsfeed on the homepage.
We’ve built around multi-language, but haven’t used it yet. I get the feeling it’ll be a tough part that’s only used by some. How many languages are you translating into?
What did you want to do with styling that you couldn’t? (I know this is a challenging one, as allowing even font control can lead to some pretty messy layouts.)
My take on the newsfeed, over a blog, is that it allows for short updates that don’t necessitate a full blog post (e.g., shipping problem, sale, intro to a new feature). In my experience, this is why some company blogs get ignored—stories are too short to warrant creating a full page. Plus, links to them get buried at the bottom of the homepage. (FWIW: I think blogs are highly useful, but more suited to long-form content.)
canny.io does sound more suitable for you, given what you describe. The notion of tying the entire product development cycle together makes a lot of sense.
Not a bad idea, definitely unique, but here's why I wouldn't use it:
I could see this perhaps working for something uptime-related (like web hosting or a popular SaaS product) but honestly otherwise I'm not sure of the use case.
(I still feel bad being so direct - I hope I wasn't too cruel!)
Don’t feel bad about being direct. That’s what I asked for. :-)
You make a number of good points. The SEO one is particularly notable, as I know that’s a problem with the newsfeed.
Out of curiousity, how do you currently engage with your product’s audience: Email lists? Social? Blogging?
The SEO one is really the dealbreaker for me. That's such a huge driver behind regular blog content for most of our sites/clients.
We use email & blogs, mostly. Don't really do social at all!
That’s a fair criticism. I’ve thought the same. I think it’ll come down to the organization and their growth/content strategy. Some topics are ripe for SEO. Other updates just need a few words (e.g., “Canada Post is on strike, so all shipments will go by FedEx”).
My hunch is that most who use the newsfeed will be posting content that wouldn’t see much search traffic, anyway. Plus, I think it can be a supplemental tool in some ways. I.e., Write a long, SEO friendly post for your blog; then point people to it, from the newsfeed.
... because I would prefer having newsfeed as an organic part of the site, not like appendix or popup.
Hope it helps!
This is good. Thank you!
Some questions:
Thanks—I appreciate the feedback and insights. :-)
No problem! May I ask you a question too (by email or somehow else)?
Of course. You can reach me at: karj@smashlab.com
Thanks a lot! I've sent you email so if you don't want to have your email here you can delete or edit your response :)
No worries—that email is all over the place. :-)
I responded to your email, but probably not with any usable insights. Sorry about that. I’m happy to answer additional questions, if you have them.
No worries! I was glad to talk to you, it's a really cool and new experience for me.
It shouldn't be the first thing I see on the landing page (I am talking about mobile). They are the landing page for a good reason. I would like to see how it affects website speed.
Overall it seems a good product, I like the design and the idea. Your pricing seems too low to make it work. There are not many websites out there that need 100k requests per month.
Was the newsfeed automatically opening when you loaded the page on mobile? (It shouldn’t be, as it’s set to require a user prompt to load on mobile.)
Pricing is in flux. At this time it’s low as the tool is still early. As such, we’d like to see more users sign up, so we can refine and improve it. In time, we’ll add more features. Then, we’ll test pricing and add new tiers.
On the two websites you linked it was automatically loading. On yours it isn't.
I understand that you want to get more users, but at the end of the day you want users that want to pay too. And asking people to pay for something that they had free is harder than make them pay right away.
My suggestion is to reduce the free plan and add a low priced tier. Something like $19 per month for up to 20k requests and free up to 5k. If you get 20k requests your website is making money and you can easily afford to pay $19 so if you don't do it you don't find the product valuable. This is my reasoning at least.
I’ll look into this more. We don’t want the newsfeed to obscure the website on mobile. Just need to sort out what’s going on, here.
Thanks for the pricing notes. We’ll think on this more. :-)
Hi Eric.
I love the website, the product looks cool.
I would though review the offer.
Do A/B on a 3 and 4 tier approach
Ideally your best offer will go to tier 2 and you'll average with 100 tier 2 customers 20k MRR.
We’d considered doing something like that, but figured we’d hold off on adding Tier 3 until we had more to offer.
I gather you’re suggesting the higher tiers as an anchoring strategy. Do you think folks will actually pay that much for this service? I feel like we’re not quite there yet.
I would take ideas from the competition i.e. "getbeamer" and improve on them. And yes I was talking about such a strategy and putting your best features in the more rounded offer, which is the ideal one you want to sell.
I like what Beamer has done, and our product is awfully similar to it. That said, our vision for it came from a different place—and I still want to follow that, instead of following what they’re doing.
We started out building an SMS notifications tool for ski resorts to send updates (road conditions, powder alerts, special offers) to skiers. We began with the notifications, but needed a place to link those SMS messages to. This led us to build the newsfeed.
A big part of what’s driving this is what we need to support our other products. For example, https://www.campnab.com gets a lot of requests for new features, and questions from non-technical users. I’d like to use Emetti for more of this. (We used Intercom on another product, but it wasn’t right for us—and became costly.)