Would you pay for this? — Track competitor websites with StrongStack
I’ve been working on this for about two weeks. StrongStack helps founders track competitor website changes.
Some website updates affect value propositions and ultimately purchase decisions. Maybe you can learn from your competitors’ best moves and capitalize on mistakes.
Looking for brutally honest feedback.
Is it clear what this does?
Is this something that you would pay for?
Any feedback helps.
Idea is clear. I've thought of doing this myself too! :-)
Thanks for the feedback!
When you had the idea, were you trying to solve your own problem? Or someone else's?
I thought to do this for the business that I am building. Next thought was that this functionality itself could be productized.
I really like this idea. In a competitive world where small changes can mean a lot I think it's a modern tool for marketers, growth hackers, etc. From my POV. rather SaaS (or in addition to) I can see a lot of value for the rising number of D2C brands and eCommerce.
From a value proposition and brand POV. I would focus on FOMO. If a competitor goes on sale or a retailer goes on discount etc, and you don't know about it then you can lose huge amounts of sales.
The D2C idea is genius. I'm thinking of all the mattress companies in that space. It seems like others flood the market once a D2C concept is proven.
And I agree with you on FOMO.
I went after eCommerce at first but decided against it after reading about @KevinSahin and @Daolf experience building PricingBot. There seems to be some hidden dragons in that space such as mapping between product pages across multiple sites. And I wouldn't be eating my own dog food (a user of the product).
I love that you mentioned D2C. I shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. These tend to be focused companies with lots of viable alternatives.
Thanks so much for the feedback!
I think this is pretty cool!
The copy is very clear and straightforward. I get the value prop immediately. I somewhat agree with the other comment talking about how the hero image doesn't add value. But my guess is that you're at the stage where stock photos are good enough. (This is where I'm at)
My project is the writing app/note-taking/wiki space so there are a million competitors. This type of tool I would buy once I'm up and running at a steady pace. I'm still building my project and it's not generating money so I couldn't justify paying for it this early on as it would probably just be a distraction to look at competitors all the time.
When it does come time for me to look into tools like this, I would look for all of the features you list for tracking website changes. I'd also look for things that track the social media activity of competitors as well. Something that collates all activity of a competitor into a report just to get the gist and high-level of what they are doing. My goal would be to spend as little time looking at competitors as I need to.
Thanks for checking it out Ryan!
There's a lot of good feedback here.
Thanks again. Please let me know if I can offer any feedback or be a soundboard in the future.
You're welcome! Happy to help out.
Focusing on the most competitive markets is probably a good move. When there are a lot of competitors, it's a bigger pain to watch competitors. Your tool could act like a scout watching for changes so that customers can focus on their own stuff more. That feels like the real value prop to me.
While writing this I also had the idea that it would be cool if there was a way to add sort of a "competitor search engine." Something like paste in a site URL, then automatically get a list of closely related competitors. It would help to discover competitors you didn't know you had.
That's a great idea. SimilarWeb has an API for finding similar websites.
Adding it to the roadmap. It'll be good for removing friction. If someone enters their domain, the "competitor search engine" could suggest competitors to track in one click.
Pre-made collections/industries aimed at a similar target. But the "competitor search engine" gives users more control. And it's more flexible (it should work for almost any established site)
If you're interested, the mockup for collections is second in this list below. Just realized that competitor search would make curating these collections a lot easier.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dhgwl7PUFPFK6XKRcjknCuTUjULjaXnPOaJEf3lwBvY/edit?usp=sharing
Nice mockups - jogs even more ideas! I don't want to bloat with feature requests... But I'll throw these out there and you can decide if it's a good fit or not.
Collections are a good first step, but it'd be even better if it could be broken down by feature. For example, an email marketing platform might have drop-in forms, broadcasts, import/export subscriber lists, tagging, automations, and email sequences. The actual feature lists there could probably be extremely detailed. Each tool will check some boxes and not others. If I was an email marketing tool, I may be focusing on certain features only like broadcasts and tagging. Instead of just a collection of all email tools, I'd like to get a list of email tools that do broadcasts and tagging. This translates to any tool domain. If it's a writing app, maybe it's main feature is grammar suggestions. Then I'd want to quickly find competitors in the writing tools with grammar features space and ignore the ones with some publishing focus.
This could possibly be a curated thing - people analyze a bunch of websites and categorize features across categories of apps or it's a community-driven thing. It becomes a trade-off of cost (curation is expensive) and quality (community may not be 100% accurate). Perhaps there's a happy medium where you come up with some tool that makes it easier to identify what features someone else.
As a customer, I'm sort of expecting the updates to be a feed I see when I log in. It would be cool if the updates were grouped by company in said feed. Then add a method to process/dismiss updates as seen. Sort of like the notifications in indiehackers.
Another thought is if you're scanning websites for changes, could you also offer a service like pingdom where it checks if a customer's site is up? This is a bit unrelated to the competitor scanning, but it seems like you're already doing the most of the work there. It just becomes a question of who the scanning of a website is for.
One thought I'm wrestling with here about the search engine is if you're getting richer data about the websites to present as potential competitors to a customer, is that done in bad faith? It almost seems like it can become a tool with a lot of data about software tools, like an app comparison website. If you're collecting that data and presenting it to competitors, those software tools may not want you to do that. Yes, it's the free and open web so anyone can collect that data. But what happens when a customer is being presented as a competitor to another customer? This is a tough question that I don't really know the answer to.
Forget bloating. It’s a lot of good stuff here. Please keep it coming!
Your first point makes me think about an ultra premium service where StrongStack could save customers even more time with human-reviewed changes. Ultra premium customers continue to get updates but they also get ‘change notes’ for each update within 24 hours. The ‘change notes’ could deliver the extremely detailed information that you talked about. Because of increased value and human intervention, maybe this goes for $297/$997 a month. Another spin on 'change notes.' They could be summarized and published on a weekly/monthly basis and used as content marketing.
Great point with collating site updates. I went for this idea in the fourth mockup in the google doc for SendGrid. The first mockup does this at the collection/industry-level for email marketing companies. (Users get a feed of website changes for MailChimp, SendGrid, EmailOctopus, Mailgun and more) The ability to dismiss/mark as read is a great idea. I’ll add that to the plans.
Your last point is one of the biggest questions that I’ve been struggling with. This dilemma also becomes iffy when it's time to do direct outreach. Pitching to more than one company in a competitive industry? I’m looking at companies like www.mailcharts.com for guidance. Over 10,000 companies use them for competitor email monitoring. This competitive dynamic touches on the FOMO that @nomis_mikah talked about. Companies that use MailCharts have a one-way mirror into companies that don’t. I'm almost certain that companies are using this tool on each other. @wjakub mentioned that he tracks competitors manually. StrongStack is like a souped up Wayback Machine. None of this answers the question but I’m looking for models on how to navigate this. Please let me know if you have any ideas.
Oh yeah, if there was a market for an ultra-premium service like that, that would be killer. You could definitely use the "change notes" as content marketing. Another thing you could do is a site scan when someone signs up or submits their email, then periodically send them emails with possible competitors. Kind of like you're watching the space for them. That could be another part of a service or something you do to nudge people out of an email list to become a customer.
As for the dilemma - I think it's something that's going to always be there and never go away. There will always be the question of "Do I owe some duty to my customers?"
The best way to think about it is that you're just building a tool. People can pay for your tool or they don't. It's simple. This is the case for mailcharts. You're right that companies that pay for it have a one-way mirror into companies that don't. But the companies that don't have options. They could pay for the tool, or they could manually do the tracking themselves, or hire someone to do that work.
The way I like to frame B2B software in my head is that your customers are hiring you to do a job. Just instead of hiring you as an employee, they are hiring you as a tool/service/consultant. Since you've built software they will pay for, you've made it so you don't have to spend any time on the tasks they assign you. This allows you to "work for" many companies at once. Everybody wins in this situation because the company gets the task done at a much better price than hiring someone to do it and you have lots of time to make the tool better and can be "hired" by many businesses at once.
So basically, I feel like the dilemma of offering information to competitors of your customers is just something that exists but it's natural for it to exist. If the competitors weren't using your tool, they could hire someone else to do that same work whether it's another tool (which will probably exist) or a person who manually does it.
A way to feel better about it is that you're democratizing competitor research. Hiring people to track competitors is expensive and something larger companies could afford. Small companies probably couldn't. They would either do it themselves or not at all. But if there's a cheaper option, they can make the decision if the cost/time-saved ratio is right for them.
I like your framing of B2B markets. And I think it even applies to B2C. B2C jobs may be different (signalling or self-esteem) from B2B jobs (saving time or money). Not to go too deep but I think the B2B starts to resemble B2C when selling to larger organizations. Purchases might become more about not losing your job or looking foolish than value. Nobody gets fired for buying IBM.
And thanks for your thoughts on that dilemma. I can copy your response into a FAQs section lol. You summed it up very well. It’s about alternatives. If you’re going to do it, would you rather do it efficiently or inefficiently? “Democratizing competitor research” is gold btw. 🙏
Right on!
Thanks for the great exchange. Best of luck! I'll be following along.
Yessir 👍 Thanks for taking your time and offering great feedback.
I have one remark: for me, your hero image doesn't add any value.
Personally, I like to see what the product has to offer the first few seconds I'm on a landing page. Your title is very clear and I quickly understand what your service is about, but your hero image doesn't make me say "yeah, I need this".
This may be coming from the fact that you don't have a finished product to show, if it's the case, I would simply do a quick mockup and put it here to show what value your product will bring to your customers.
Hope this helps
This is very helpful. And you're right, the product isn't finished but I could prioritize working the interface into the landing page.
Here are some early mockups: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dhgwl7PUFPFK6XKRcjknCuTUjULjaXnPOaJEf3lwBvY/edit?usp=sharing
I'd love your feedback.
Your early mockup would do the job for me! I personally like the "Collection updates" and the "Update summary".
Really appreciate that. This is my first time getting another pair of eyes on those mockups. I almost scrapped them but now I have some feedback to work with. 👍
No worries :) I'm sorry I can't give you a more detailed/constructive feedback because I would have no interest in using your product for the moment.
Good luck!
Hey, congrats on the product.
I wouldn't personally use it, as what I do is not affected by my competitor's website changes much. I see how this would be very useful in certain settings, but for me:
Feedback on the site - the pricing panel and following 2 panels, I'd maybe cut out the Join waitlist panel as it distracts me from the primary conversion point (Start trial).
Hope this helps,
J
This really helps Jakub. I'm rethinking the positioning. Perhaps I'll forget about targeting individual consultants. I'm wondering if agencies would have similar feedback.
Great landing page and copy on Luma btw. I like how you guys start with the problem and walk potential customers through steps. How many competitors/viable alternatives does Luma have?
No worries Dru. I've got around 4 years of agency experience, I think you have two avenues to explore there: Selling to agencies for monitoring their competitors and selling to agencies with a monitoring service they can use for their clients.
I'm not sure the first avenue is something agencies would pay much/anything for, however you could target the second avenue and offer their competitor tracking as a free extra included in the package. You may need to focus on agencies that work in specific niches initially, for example, e-commerce might be a good starting point - I can see agency clients liking an extra like comp. monitoring.
Thank you for the feedback on our landing page, we're keeping the design side basic and focus on the product, I'm glad you like our approach to explaining the product though!
We have around 1-3 close competitors and around 2-5 satellite competitors (include some of our functionality, but are further away with other stuff they offer).
Thanks for this. Your insight on agencies saved me tons of time. Luma's lack of close competitors along with your ability to occasionally review changes by hand, pushes me towards more competitive markets such as form builders, CRMs and podcast hosting. Markets with 10 or more close competitors.
It may be a good idea for you to set up a form with a few questions you can send out to people (message me, I'll fill it out) to get a more normalised feedback on the markets you are considering.
Hey Jakub. Thanks again for this idea and offering to fill it out.
Here's the form: https://forms.gle/Hyc6bT8UhX2kYdZw6
No worries mate, the permissions need adjusting - only your org has access right now. Will make a note to fill out this week!
Here's a much shorter version: https://forms.gle/y6h947GJergZtVg87
Oops. Just adjusted the permissions. Thx again.
😮 This is such a good idea. I'll send the form your way once it's up. Thank you
What is different than distill.io and other tracking / monitoring services?
Great question. I've used distill, watchete, fluxguard, sken.io, ChangeTower, versionista, visual ping and a few others.
In my opinion, the best solution at the moment is pagescreen.io but they don't provide context around what changed beyond showing you before and after images.
These tools act as Swiss army knives for uptime monitoring, compliance/regulation updates and e-commerce arbitrage. This makes it difficult for them to make design concessions specifically for tracking competitors.
An example of a design concession would be organizing domains around collections or industries. Here are some early mockups of what I mean: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dhgwl7PUFPFK6XKRcjknCuTUjULjaXnPOaJEf3lwBvY/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks for taking your time to give feedback. If you have any thoughts on the mockups, please let me know.
Landing page doesn't work for me :/
Hey Shayan. Thanks for trying to check it out. What happens when you visit the url?