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My company's first SaaS app. Thoughts?

peterpings.com

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Re: My company's first SaaS app. Thoughts?

#4
How are the submissions sent. Is it all automated or you send it manually

On the Publisher list page you say:

"We send your notification via online forms, emails, twitter and exclusive partnerships."

This sounds like you are doing it manually.

Good service though :)

Re: My company's first SaaS app. Thoughts?

#5
post #4

How are the submissions sent. Is it all automated or you send it manually On the Publisher list page you say: "We send your notification via online forms, emails, twitter and exclusive partnerships." This sounds like you are doing it manually. Good service though :)

Ah thanks! We should make that clearer.

For each publisher it breaks down to one of these methods:

1) submission via their online form. we do this automatically via POST.

2) if their form has a captcha, we queue it for manual submission by a human being (most don't have a captcha though - it's just the big guys)

3)email. the majority of sites encourage submissions via an email address.

4) twitter - worst case scenario is we tweet their account for you

5) publishing partner. similar to (3) email, except the publisher can set their preferred time to receive.

All of the above except (2) is automated. I'd guesstimate that for about 95% of the publishers we support, the submissions are all handled by the software. We want to build it as scalable as possible.

Re: My company's first SaaS app. Thoughts?

#6
post #3

Looks cool! How specific to iPhone/iPad apps are the email templates? I could see it being useful for web apps too…

Right now it's pretty specific to iPhone / iPad.

Reason being, in order to pre-populate the templates for a customer, we search the iTunes API and grab data about their app (screenshots, name, price etc).

I guess to support "any" app including web apps, there could just be a manual override for this step. I'll put it on the ideas list!

Re: My company's first SaaS app. Thoughts?

#7
Could this also work for an already-established but un-marketed company? So it's not strictly a "launch email" but just a press release?

My site[0] first launched almost 18 months ago and had a fair bit of buzz, but I never did the marketing-to-tech-blogs side of things. There are a few new things I want to push out first (company blog, etc.) but do you think your service would be suitable for it?

[0] https://openexchangerates.org

Btw - great work on the site, looks lovely.

Re: My company's first SaaS app. Thoughts?

#8

Could this also work for an already-established but un-marketed company? So it's not strictly a "launch email" but just a press release? My site[0] first launched almost 18 months ago and had a fair bit of buzz, but I never did the marketing-to-tech-blogs side of things. There are a few new things I want to push out first (company blog, etc.) but do you think your service would be suitable for it? [0] https://openexc…

yes absolutely! I should make that clearer - it's suitable for any "newsworthy" event, like a launch or an update or if you previously have not liased with the tech blog community.

That said, as I've elaborated in another post, it's quite closely tied to the iTunes API right now so if you're not an iPhone/iPad app it won't work for you. We can work on that though!

Re: My company's first SaaS app. Thoughts?

#10
Youngfook, congrats with launching another online venture. I'm your "follower" since the days of OpenSourceFood.

The most important question I raise with submission services (like your PeterPings and AppLaunch) is that followed traffic would not be targeted.

"Why A Link from TechCrunch Will Not Make You Rich" - this excellent article by Rob Walling better describes this issue: http://j.mp/VXJoDp

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