San Francisco, CA - Yammer
The people who use Yammer regularly tell us that they have better access to information, get less email, collaborate better within and across departments, and feel more valued.
We're growing in revenues and customers rapidly. We really need strong engineering talent but keeping our hiring bar high.
We're going to win because we can move more quickly than our competition:
- weekly releases
- deep in-house analytics team
- not wedded to specific technologies
- only as much process as necessary
- open and transparent communication across teams and from executive management
- constant learning
Is the primary problem that you're out of ingredients and don't realize it, or that you see a bunch of ingredients and aren't sure what to do with them?
Both are actually pretty frequent, but with a grocery store a block or so away, the latter is more of a problem. The current instance is chicken broth, a baguette, and spinach (and I returned home this afternoon to discover that somebody had bought more spinach), which are probably just going to get used for separate dishes.
Also, the "powered by" link is taking up a column of space the whole height of the page. I was clicking on one of the fields, and it redirected me to the Wufoo home page.
If you can add inline CSS to the "powertiny" link element ... specifically, position:absolute;right:0;bottom:0; it should get it out of the way.
Cindy here - if you were a beta user or ever asked a KISSmetrics question, you probably talked to me.
We at KISSmetrics did not come to our pricing decision lightly. After over 6 months in beta, we looked at the data and identified our happiest, most engaged customers - the people who were asking questions, making suggestions, and generally getting the most value out of the product, and priced it in accordance with the amount of value they were getting.
We did have some very dedicated early-stage startup customers in our beta, and we have worked with them to make sure they can continue to use us. (It's amazing what asking nicely will get you!) We will be publicly announcing startup programs in the future, but we wanted to focus on our existing beta customers first - the product wouldn't be here without them.
(We also have no problem with it if several startups want to split a KISSmetrics account - 1MM events could easily support a dozen early-stage startups.)
Feel free to email, ask questions, rant - calvarez at kissmetrics.com
Thanks for the reply Cindy (yeah, I think we corresponded once or twice). I'm relieved to hear this decision was based on some hard data and I can see how the pricing model might be good for KISSmetrics. Obviously, it's not quite so good for me and the rant really came out of my surprise about the pricing.
I think some sort of "startup" plan would not only be good for a sizable-percentage of your beta testers but also good for KISSmetrics. After all, if a company isn't profitable enough to justify $149/month on analytics but wants to improve their conversion ratios (and hence profits) they will likely go to, and stay with, a competitor.
I'm a subscriber to your blog and I love your work. I was late to the beta test run so I missed out. I've been waiting on the sidelines for the big launch and whilst I think the pricing is pretty decent and fair (after all, it is pretty close to our pricing at Trafficspaces - http://www.trafficspaces.com/plans/), I instinctively predicted this sort of backlash, especially because there was no free entry plan, however limited.
Having said that, I'm sure your decision was well thought out. After all, you are in the funnel optimization business.
A quick shout out to Neil Patel - a very smart chap.
You have paying customers - great! Ask them why they're paying for your service. Ask them to describe the value they're getting. Then (minimally) clean up those words and use them on your website. No one can market your product better than the people who are using/loving it.
You can, but we'd really like to talk with you to understand more about what you're trying to do (if it's a valid use case for you, it probably is for others, and we want to make sure we get it).
Email calvarez at kissmetrics.com and I can help you get started.
