@caseykluver congrats on the revenue. That is more MMR than most startups see in the first 12 month. If you would have to choose between 1/growing the business by adding more clients at $550/month or 2/ by providing more services/value and increase the price, what would you do?
If 2/, what other value can you provide over time?
Report
Maker
@thomask Thanks Thomas! I would choose option 2. Right now we are priced very competitively compared to some of the other services. Using MOZ as an example again - for $99 you can only track 300 keywords, with our base plan at $29 you are able to track up to 550 keywords, we also pull fresh keyword data daily, where others pull weekly. When we first launched I was told by a few different testers(agency owners) that the price is too cheap for what we provide. But we also wanted the price to be low enough for people to give a new company a shot so we could gather a ton of feedback on our product before we really think about what it’s worth to others.
As far as future value we can provide over time, like I said above we have plans to include social and paid reporting also. By adding in social and paid ad reports we will eliminate the need for a full-service digital agency to have to subscribe to many different services to pull reports for inbound/seo/social/paid, etc. Most agencies who do this now spend a huge amount of time pulling these reports and aggregating them into one report that the client usually doesn’t understand. Accelerating these new features is a huge priority for us as our main goal is to be the best all-around reporting dashboard out there.
Report
@caseykluver raise your prices - I thought you are charging $550/agency/month - which would still be a good deal for them. In my experience, $500/month for a service that replaces 1/2 employee is a no-brainer. And I am sure you replace more than 1/2 entry level employee.
My thoughts on SAS pricing: If you have a small customer base (like all the digital agencies in the US), you have to charge a higher price that if you have large customer base (like e.g. every mom in the US).
Start with a high price, that establishes the value your provide - say $800/month, then discount aggressively (for the first 6-12 month) and offer long trial periods (90 days). This gives you time to make your customers happy (aka build more product that they ask for) and eventually they will LOVE you and pay way more than you initially expected.
Quick sidenote on "Agency's as customers". Agencies are great in using an inexpensive service and charging customers a hefty premium. Make sure that your (co-)branding is always on the reports. You want the customer to know that you provide the value. If an agency wants no co-branding, triple the price - they will still make money, but they will never give you credit in front of the client.
Report
Maker
@thomask I appreciate the feedback, thank you. I do agree with you, you make some really great points that I can personally attest to. Our agency was essentially losing money every month pulling reports before we created Agency Metrics.
That is certainly one of our immediate challenges right now, building more value and testing pricing/messaging to capture more value. Historically agencies are used to paying $50-150 for similar software, unless you get into the enterprise services which are more in line with $500+/mo.
I like where you’re going with that though, not talking about it as reporting software, but as employee replacement software. Amazing feedback, thank you!
How do you compare yourself to something like MOZ? What do you offer that they perhaps don't?
Report
Maker
@Percival Hey Sean, MOZ was one of the reasons we built Agency Metrics. As an agency, we used their tools in the past, and I definitely have a huge respect for what they’re doing over there.
Where MOZ is focused more on tools for marketers, we are focused strictly on reporting. Since MOZ launched MOZ Analytics there is some overlap in our product, such as rank tracking. Where MOZ only reports on the top 50 search results, we track keywords up to position 125. Additionally, our historical keyword tracker makes it easy to see changes over time(http://www.agencymetrics.com/in-...) for all keywords in a campaign, which is something most similar services including MOZ lack.
Getting back to the reporting, we really want to cut down the time it takes agencies to report progress to clients. Our biggest differentiator from other services is our branded dashboard(http://www.agencymetrics.com/das...), where agencies can brand their dashboard and actually give clients direct access to their reports where they can log in at anytime to check the status of their account.
Currently, our reports are mainly inbound and SEO focused, and we do have plans to eventually add in reports for social and paid ads, which is something no one really does well right now.
Report
Maker
As the owner of a digital agency, one of our frustrations from the get go was monthly client reports. Reports took forever to make and were usually a combination of multiple different industry tools, which resulted in multi-branded reports. Agency Metrics(www.agencymetrics.com) makes marketing reports easy and beautiful.
Have you done any paid marketing to acquire users? If so what was the CPA or CPL?
Report
Maker
@Percival We ran Facebook ads in February - March. CPA was $20.83, most of which were free accounts. Other than than the two months of Facebook ads, we haven't done any other advertising. We backed off to focus on some product upgrades.
We're in the process of mapping out a Q4 ad plan through AdWords and LinkedIn.
We've also done little marketing, and are creating a content strategy that we hope to roll out in the next month.
@Percival With the limited information you have on Agency Metrics, how do you think our business fits in with the 500 Startups portfolio?
How do you specifically interact with founders after acceptance? And how accessible are the mentors in the program on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis?
What is the success rate you’ve seen overall with other startups that entered 500?
Report
Maker
@Percival I would also love to hear from your perspective what your initial thoughts on Agency Metrics are, specifically any quick advice, first impressions, concerns, etc. @thomask gave some really great feedback for us above and would love to hear your take on us.
Ghosted.boo
Ghosted.boo
Ghosted.boo
Ghosted.boo