Ask HN: Would you pay for this service?

[plax512]

Hi,

So I'm thinking about offering this service to startups and small businesses- competetive research and analysis. So would you pay lets say $40/month for a comprehensive analysis on your top 3 competitors every month or quarter? Thanks!

[smartwater]

You have to ask the right questions to get the right answers. You shouldn't be asking us, "Would you pay for this?", you should be asking yourself, "Can I convince people to buy this?"

Whether you make any sales is completely up to you and your ability to sell. Businesses buy competitive analysis all the time. Typically after a well articulated value proposition. All the details you left out in this post, the specifics of the service you're providing, is what makes or breaks a deal.

[plax512]

You are absolutely correct. Great point. And sorry, I wanted to keep the post short. Here is what I would offer:

For $30/month, you will get reports every quarter consisting of evaluating a company's top 3 competitors, in what they are doing in terms of marketing, what new milestones they have reached in terms of growth and revenue, what sort of complaints they get from customers concerning what, and a little more such as outreach and giveaways they do, and their projected success in the future.

[smartwater]

Generic value propositions don't give the buyer confidence, it doesn't jump start their imagination, it doesn't do anything for you or them.

You're not being specific enough to even peak my interest. Depending on who you're selling to, the metrics you provide need to make sense to them. An internet marketer might want to know exactly what you're monitoring (Google News, Facebook, Backlinks, Newly Created Pages) but the CEO would need it presented in a different way, in order to provide him with the value you're promising. That way you don't have the marketer trying to interpret data that he himself might not fully understand.

The demons are in the details.

[plax512]

Like how so? It's essentially competitive analysis as a service... There are known templates in which these are formatted. I would simply do one for a company every quarter, and list each source in the back. You're telling me I'm not being specific enough, yet you are doing the same. It goes both ways I guess

[smartwater]

Don't describe it as if everyone should already know what you're talking about. You're not going to sell anything to anyone that way. And you definitely won't sell a service based on "known templates" and doing what everyone else is doing.

I know exactly what they offer, but you are the one selling right now. You can't just say, "I'm selling what everyone else is selling, wanna give me $30/month?"

What makes you different? Why are you better? What are the benefits? What value does it provide and to who?

In B2B, you could charge $200 a month and it wouldn't make a difference -- it's not their money that they are spending. A lot of little things, such as export to PDF, are much more important. Know your customer and know your product.

[esw]

Honestly, I'd be somewhat skeptical of the value of a report produced for $40. That price implies that these are at least mostly automated checks.

[tagabek]

I have to agree with esw. What you are offering could potentially be worth millions to larger corporations. If you can actually produce valuable reports, I don't think $40 is anywhere near enough.

[marvvelous]

Those questions would be answered by a landing page that shows you what you'd be paying for. There's much better tools for data extraction and automation available today than in the recent past and this market sounds like a great category for disruption.

Startups often neglect competitor analysis because it's not available cheaply. If you could get 85% of the value automatically that's worth paying for.

[plax512]

Hmmm... I was planning on doing the research manually, but if you want to share any examples of sites that have gotten better at data extraction, I'm all ears. I will do research as well on that.

thanks!

[TheCoelacanth]

At that price, it doesn't seem like you would be able to provide much value by doing it manually. If you factor in some overhead, you would have to be spending less than an hour on each report to pay yourself a decent wage. If I'm running a business, I'm not going to pay someone to do research that I could do myself in less than an hour, even if it is really cheap. With B2B services, it's probably a better idea to provide substantial and demonstrable value than it is to have a really low price.

[raphar]

Perhaps a way to promote your services and showing the concrete value you could provide, would be publishing a monthly newsletter. There you'd show the kind of analysis you are capable of. You could do this also as a way to attract traffic if the topics are interesting enough. (Hosting, seo tools, analytics, project managers...). Those are generic topics and you could sure find an interesting (niche) subgroup enough to be useful & atract posible customers.

[source99]

WHY WHY WHY?

What's the point of this service?

What are you really selling? I see that it is a report but are you trying to help startups? In what way specifically?

WHY are you creating this service? If its simply because you think its a good idea or you will be good at it, it will be very difficult to sell it without a better reason.

[AznHisoka]

I agree. The service is also very vague. Competitor analysis in what? SEO (ala SEMRush?), Competitor analysis in PPC? Competitor analysis in website audience(ala Quantcast?) Competitor analysis in the form of consulting?

[plax512]

it would mostly growth-related data-- you will get how the company has grown over the quarter in terms of users and revenue, what new marketing strategies they have undertaken, new products or features they have released, complaints current users are giving to them, and their overall strengths and weaknesses, as observed objectively by me. The point is to allow you "to keep an eye on your competitors" because most startups don't have the time to do so.

[AznHisoka]

users + revenue is private for a lot of businesses.

For the rest, they all belong to the category of "social monitoring". That's the name given to this. It's a crowded market.

[plax512]

the point is to make competitive analysis available to any startup. So, if you signed up, I would manually do the research for you on any 3 competitors you like. This competitive analysis would be sent as a pdf, and the data would entail recent milestones reached the company, how many users they have, their current marketing strategies, what new products or features they are offering, etc. Essentially, it will allow you to examine the 4 p's of any company: product, price, promotion, and place.

I hope that helps. The first report would be free.

[malditojavi]

How do you plan to make the competitors research? I think the guys in http://www.compass.co/ have a great product, but sincerely if they don't share revenue of it with startups and businesses that are the ones providing data & info, it won't work.

[cedsav]

I wouldn't pay for it, but competitive research is a big and active market, so I don't doubt there's a demand for it. I suspect though that your audience would be mostly established businesses. Startups are usually too busy to worry about their competitor's every move.

[plax512]

How does bi-quarterly sound? It's risky business neglecting your competitors.

[cedsav]

I understand what you're saying, but I'm actually inclined to think that (in our case) it doesn't matter what they do. We learn what we need to know from our customers and we have our own roadmap. We can keep tab on the competition, but getting periodical detailed reports seems counterproductive to me.

[lauradhamilton]

I would not pay for it. Can learn more by doing research myself.

Also, it costs a bunch of money to acquire business customers. Tough to recoup that on $40/month if you spend $30/month doing the research work.

[marvvelous]

I can't answer without seeing what we'd be paying for. That said, in general, a quality analysis would be worth $40/month to me.

If you add your email to your public profile I'd like to reach out privately.

[plax512]

ok

[kayhi]

I'd find it helpful if you had a white paper on it perhaps using 3 YC companies as examples.

[plax512]

I can do the first report free if you like

[sharemywin]

little confused what would have changed about my top 3 competitors in a month?

[plax512]

It's just you get an updated report on them... So, what sort of milestones they reached, any new marketing stratehies they've undertakem, any new product changes or releases thet've done, and any sort of complaints they got from customers, and about what. It's a way to stay updated on your competitors.

Maybe bi-quarterly would work better?

[davidsmith8900]

- No. That is too much money.

[softwareman]

rofl