If anyone here on HN wants it for free, just let me know via m@pmalerts.com and I'll give you an early adopter subscription (full product, free for however long it's around).
Wow. That's really generous. I could see myself one day using this, but don't have a use for it now. When I do, this is definitely a product I would happily pay for, and, if and when, will.
Super appreciate that sentiment. That's what I'm going for - 1) build something valuable, default to freemium 2) pave a clear path to free for those in need 3) have faith in voluntary reciprocation of value
It's always seemed strange to me that the normal SaaS flow forces users to blindly commit... I want you to fall in love without any coercion. It's more romantic that way
Awesome! I'm digging this. I also like how the features are tiered. You might want to make a chart showing what features are under what tier, but it's not overly confusing.
I'm super on the fence about my pricing page, to be honest. Would you rather have just a standard three-tier Personal / Startup / Enterprise plan (3 choices), instead of granular control that confronts you with a $numberOfFeatures choices?
Anyway to plug in sentiment analysis ? I would love for you to run this through IBM Watson or something so I can see if people are saying positive things about my brand
I'm admittedly overeager to build and am not very good at building financially sustainable projects, so I told myself I'd fund this feature with revenue from paying customers. ($0MRR right now)
In the meantime, you can use webhooks to push results into your own sentiment analysis flow. That's supported (and free).
This is really, really cool. And I love the home page! Being able to see results before signing up is great.
I'm not a potential customer right now, but the text on the pricing page "If you find a payment bug (incorrect charges, broken UI, etc), let me know and I'll give you the full version of PMAlerts for free, for life." would absolutely give me pause.
A simple addition if you're actually dealing with payment issues would be to add "I'll make sure your billing is straightened out ASAP - and never charge you more if you've been undercharged."
But ultimately, get your payment system functioning ASAP. I would not be comfortable putting my card info into a system that tells me ahead of time it might have bugs.
Maybe push the security aspect? Have a tier be “bug bounty” and add something like “PM alerts are for users only. Report a bug and get a free version, for life”
Ack! The onboarding flow only works with Twitter right now, but once you create an alert all platforms will be polled (though some will be polled via search engines until I can fund native search, like LinkedIn). I should add a disclaimer to the onboarding UI...
site:TLD filtering is sort of in place right now but it's not obvious... you can select the "Custom" platform and then use that site:tld syntax (or any syntax supported by Google). Lmk if you run into any issues there, that's a relatively new feature.
Language / geography filtering is on the backlog! hopefully to be funded by paying customers.
I find Google Alerts great, my only problem is that it picks spammy news/blog sites that keep reposting the same or similar content from press releases in various domains. Flagging as irrelevant doesn't help: There too many of these "blogs".
Oh I don't want to pretend to be original here. mention, brand24, awario, and lots of other "social listening" solutions exist. I'm just particularly interested in building SaaS products on top of a business model that's designed to redistribute wealth from megacorps to people-in-need, so I don't mind playing copycat until I can fund true originality :p
Nice work. Have you considered creating a page/blog post the explains how you've used your own tool to find paying customers? Doing that would provide a ton of value I think:
1. You'll (hopefully) find new customers
2. By using your own tool regularly, you'll gain invaluable insight into UX issues and new feature ideas.
3. Potential customers on your site would get to read through a play by play story about somebody successfully using your tool to drive business results. Basically a meta case study.
Thanks very much! And yes it is - I'm using PMAlerts to learn how to listen, and Karma is teaching me how to think and write (though it's a bit less mature)
Yes, for sure. If you'd like to help me nail down the MVP for this, feel free to send an email (m@pmalerts.com). Would love to have some company over there.
Thank you!!! Will address each of these, hopefully by the weekend depending on dayjob demands. Don't hesitate to let me know of any other friction points - I'm aiming for frictionless
EDIT: Question, I just tried the demo out on some very popular terms (e.g. "google", "Microsoft", etc) - it appears results are only returned for Twitter. If I unselect Twitter, "no results found".
And I guess it's also like youtube-dl in the sense that it needs to continuously fight updates and/or banning from the sites it wants to download from.
Have you considered open-sourcing the libraries that fetch content from these platforms? You could build an entire community that helps you maintain the code ...
I haven't, mostly because I'm scared of the liability. My code is pretty sketchy for everything but Twitter, and for that I use LinqToTwitter (.NET) which is already OSS (and amazing).
Yeah - the onboarding flow (insta-results) only supports Twitter. Other platforms are polled run on a recurring basis and take ~10 minutes to show results, so when you create an alert you'll see stuff from other places. I need to make that clear on the onboarding flow - it's a UX bug. Thanks very much for the feedback and love.
Twitter is legit, otherwise I plead the 5th. I do outsource this risk (and pay for that), so stability shouldn't be an issue unless there's a broad and deep crackdown on everyone who scrapes, which I think is unlikely given recent sentiment around the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559
But it is a risk. Serpapi.com is helping me a lot with that - give them a tinker!
I mean I hope that if I pay someone else to harvest my drugs and I don't know how they do it, then I have some level of plausible deniability, but that just went out the window
Everything "legit" scales along with the cost of API access
Everything else scales along with the cost of outsourcing that risk to services located outside of the US (like serpapi.com) who implement lots of proxies and workarounds
I'm not sure if there will be margins, so if it scales, it'll have to be very cost-consciously
If, like me, you clicked this expecting to find a tool that would aggregate posts from social media for their own consumption, not as a business intelligence tool, let me recommend https://fraidyc.at/.
For anyone curious about the services being used to support platform polling, I'm using serpapi.com for the Custom and LinkedIn options on PMAlerts. I highly recommend experimenting with this service - lots of potential gets unlocked as soon as you work around arbitrary scraping limitations that Google throws up. Plus, Julien from serpapi is awesome and super accessible.
I will signup as well! If I can I always looking for a ways to avoid Google products and support smaller business and creators. I think its time for changes.
Nice work! I'd love something that alerted me to mentions in Discord servers. Not sure if that's doable without having a bot in every server.. but I'd pay for that.
Hmmm... I could have a setting for PMAlerts integrations (slack, teams, discord, zoom) that configures it to not only feed alert results into the app, but to listen to that server's contents for you and only you. A bit tricky with privacy implications, but technically feasible. I'll have a think on it - thanks for the love.
Cool, just signed up! Transitioning my Zapier-powered twitter alerts over. Love the thought you've put into this, like ability to hide results authored by certain usernames.
Woohoo! Email is m@pmalerts.com if you need anything (a bit behind at the moment, but I generally aim for responses within a day). Would love to connect + learn more about your use-case and general needs/challenges in this space.
When trying to set up an Hourly alert on a free account it says "Please _register_ your account to ...". Apparently, it's a $10/mo feature, so you may want to reword the message to explain that and also link respective part of the price list from the message itself.
Ack, thanks for the heads up RE the "register" copy. Just pushed a fix.
Edit: RE the Upgrade button - once that 0 goes to nonzero, it should work. It's poor design on my end, I'll improve the UX asap. Thanks for trying it out, and for the feedback :).
109 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 96.5 ms ] threadIf anyone here on HN wants it for free, just let me know via m@pmalerts.com and I'll give you an early adopter subscription (full product, free for however long it's around).
Most SaaS companies onboarding workflow these days is:
- Describe what they're about - Ask for a sign-up before you even have the chance of using/interacting with the product
I'm admittedly overeager to build and am not very good at building financially sustainable projects, so I told myself I'd fund this feature with revenue from paying customers. ($0MRR right now)
In the meantime, you can use webhooks to push results into your own sentiment analysis flow. That's supported (and free).
Watson is very expensive after all.
Alternatively you can use an npm module to determine basic sentiment https://www.npmjs.com/package/sentiment
I'm not a potential customer right now, but the text on the pricing page "If you find a payment bug (incorrect charges, broken UI, etc), let me know and I'll give you the full version of PMAlerts for free, for life." would absolutely give me pause.
A simple addition if you're actually dealing with payment issues would be to add "I'll make sure your billing is straightened out ASAP - and never charge you more if you've been undercharged."
But ultimately, get your payment system functioning ASAP. I would not be comfortable putting my card info into a system that tells me ahead of time it might have bugs.
Maybe push the security aspect? Have a tier be “bug bounty” and add something like “PM alerts are for users only. Report a bug and get a free version, for life”
I'm giving it a try on one of our projects.
For now something is not quite right, whatever I search for, I only get results for Twitter and when I uncheck Twitter, I get nothing.
It'd be also cool to search by language (or would site:pl work to filter by TLD?)
site:TLD filtering is sort of in place right now but it's not obvious... you can select the "Custom" platform and then use that site:tld syntax (or any syntax supported by Google). Lmk if you run into any issues there, that's a relatively new feature.
Language / geography filtering is on the backlog! hopefully to be funded by paying customers.
Thanks for trying it out!
If you're curious about how PMAlerts addresses this and other Google Alerts shortcomings, I wrote a small piece about that here: https://www.karma.fm/p/0SZfbtW/9-reasons-why-you-should-stop...
1. You'll (hopefully) find new customers
2. By using your own tool regularly, you'll gain invaluable insight into UX issues and new feature ideas.
3. Potential customers on your site would get to read through a play by play story about somebody successfully using your tool to drive business results. Basically a meta case study.
https://www.karma.fm/p/BcMEfxQ/frequently-asked-questions
But it's not presented as a formalized case study and doesn't provide the value you're proposing (to me or others). I'll do it!
I'd also recommend making the faq table of contents into clickable links.
I absolutely liked your copy.
Is karma.fm one of your side projects too?
I'd be interested in the Zettelkasten and second brain examples under "How can Karma help me?"
1. Please let me sign-up from the pricing page. At least on my phone I couldn't find a direct link or button.
2. The "Save Upgrades" button is annoyingly sticky on my iPhone.
3. Email doesn't autofill.
Otherwise registering and adding an alert was smooth. Well done!
Love the homepage.
EDIT: Question, I just tried the demo out on some very popular terms (e.g. "google", "Microsoft", etc) - it appears results are only returned for Twitter. If I unselect Twitter, "no results found".
Just an FYI in case that's not intended behavior.
I know that one of my sites is mentioned on one of the services that is not twitter, and not seeing it in the preview results gave me pause.
Nice site otherwise, best of luck!
But it is a risk. Serpapi.com is helping me a lot with that - give them a tinker!
Everything else scales along with the cost of outsourcing that risk to services located outside of the US (like serpapi.com) who implement lots of proxies and workarounds
I'm not sure if there will be margins, so if it scales, it'll have to be very cost-consciously
Also, "Purchase Upgrades" button is not clickable - https://i.imgur.com/uIyrIFv.gif
PS. I'm curious to see how well it works, but from what I saw so far - well done, break a leg. Saying this as a user of Talkwalker and F5Bot ;)
Edit: RE the Upgrade button - once that 0 goes to nonzero, it should work. It's poor design on my end, I'll improve the UX asap. Thanks for trying it out, and for the feedback :).