Subscribe
Sign in
Snitcher — See which companies are visiting your website
22
Replies
@copypastaa Hey Sylvain! We're actually gathering the data ourserlves, not using any partners for this (except for Google Analytics).
That's correct! I'm not a designer, neither is @ducovisbeen so we 'borrowed' a few elements from Intercom's excellent design to speed up the process. Looking into changing this soon though!
2 months old and already worth $24 a month? I run a very small business with little traffic that will one day grow, but with every tool bleeding us dry at over $20/mo we'll never get there. Would still be helpful to get this information but not at that cost. I'll give you $3/mo for my hundreds of monthly visitors :)
@astrism Hey Grant! If we could offer our service for just $3/mo we would, but unfortunately we would go bankrupt since the server costs are way higher, let alone operational costs :)
Also, I believe the $24 price point is actually very cheap. If you can use our data to get even a single sale, then that's more than worth it for most businesses.
@jerrebm @astrism Just out of curiosity couldn't the pricing be based on the amount of data needing to analyzed? If Grant and I are dealing with 100s or even a couple of 1000 visits per day we aren't going to be the reason for your server overhead. 2nd question. With Google offering cloud computing for startups for almost nothing, Amazon pricing for EC2 hosts, why are your server costs so high? What about using auto scaling to offset this?
@ryanmtaylor @astrism Hey Ryan!
1. We actually originally planned on using such a business model, but after testing with an initial alpha user base we quickly came to the conclusion that this wasn't the best strategy for our users since there's such a diversity in the value of leads to businesses.
Some companies require us to identify thousands of leads per day of which only a few are likely to convert into a paying customer, whereas others only need to identify a few hundred per month but having most of them as highly valuable leads. It's also very dependent on the price of the product or service the company in question is selling.
So we ended up excluding the companies that required a lot of leads to be identified for a relatively low-priced product using that pricing strategy. Instead, we have chosen to base our pricing on features, which we've had much better results with so far.
2. We're actually hosted on Google's App Engine platform with multiple modules (some auto scaling, some manual). The reason our hosting costs are high, is because our algorithms are very resource incentive. Since we chose speed of development over code quality, this will go down over time as our dataset grows and our code gets optimised.
Having lead the development of a similar product, albeit with its own web tracking capabilities, and having identified many thousands of visitors manually (while we optimised our automatic identification process), I thought I would lend a few insights:
1) Google Analytics data
Using Google Analytics data seems like a no-brainer, since you get tracking history on sign-up, can give visitor data backwards and it is obviously a nice shortcut, development-wise. However, you end up with only two matching criteria: Hostname and Service Provider.
That's far from enough and both are unfortunately very often completely wrong in Google Analytics, making the data quite unreliable. Feed a sales agent incorrect data and you are on track to wasting a lot of his or her time.
Fact:
You need visitors IP address to identify visitors efficiently and you can't simply rely on reverse lookups (IP->hostname->FQDN->WHOIS data) and hostname/domain WHOIS data as matching criteria.
You will need several matching methods to automate visitor identify just somewhat decently - and you need manual reviews in place.
2) Filtering out Internet Service Providers
Needless to say, a visitors company information isn't useful, unless the data reveals the actual visitor. Most of your competitors unfortunately serve loads of garbage visitor data in the form of internet providers contact information instead of the actual visitors contact information. The first screenshot on your front page seems to put Snitcher in the same category. At least 3 out of 6 leads in that lists are either ISPs or hosting companies and another is a school (most likely a student). There is a very slim chance that any of those are actual visitors.
That said, your low prices might counter the less-than-ideal data quality for some.
Note: We are not selling our product and might not ever launch it to the public, so we aren't really a competitor.
@iamlasse Hey Lasse! Thanks a lot for the sharing your insights! That's really helpful. We've also come to the conclusion that it's best to add our own tracking pixel but are still working on this.
The screenshot shown here is actually an older one. We do have much better filters in place which have removed a lot of the ISP's and public places, although it's nearly impossible to get rid of all of them at the moment. Still will be a lot easier when we have our own pixel in place though!
@jerrebm i'm testing this service and the dashboard is saying "No Leads Selected" after connecting Google Analytics so I'm confused with the onboarding process you guys have.
What can I do when no information is shown on the dashboard?
@johntheoak Hey Joao, Sorry, this is a bug due to the heavy load we're currently experiencing. We're doing our best to get this fixed. All your leads should be showing within an hour!
I tried it for my website and it worked fine! Not many leads found, but for those, which were found, quite helpful insights. Thanks
@jerrebm and @ducovisbeen would love to hear the story behind this?
How was the development process?
What hurdles did you come across while building that you could've avoided if you had taken a different path?
@bentossell Hi Ben!, we started working on this about 2 months ago because we thought it was cool to build something like this. It has been quite a challenge to get all the data in the right place and achieve high match rates. It's also been a struggle do this while staying within Google Analytics' API limits. So far so good though! We've also got some very cool features planned for later :)
@bentossell I might add to this: We started out with a completely different interface that turned out to have a terrible UX :) So we lost quite some time changing this.
@ducovisbeen @jerrebm You mentioned you're working on adding a tracking pixel. Is this to be added to your site or inside emails?
@adamowenit Hi Adam! Alright, happy to help you set it up once you're ready to test it out :)
Census