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KISSmetrics' bizarre pricing decision
41–50 of 56 posts
Re: KISSmetrics' bizarre pricing decision
#42Seems really bizarre to me. What do they offer that, in your experience, is so much better than google analytics?
We (nearlyweds.com) are a beta customer of Kiss. We use GA and Kiss right now. As much as I love GA, they do a crappy crappy job at tracking via conversion funnels, in fact it's almost useless for our business. The real story is that Kiss tracks people, not just visits. This gives us clarity and insight into our conversion funnels, which paths convert the best, which referral sources convert the best, and then on the back-end, because they track people, which sources produce the subscribers that last the longest, etc. We can set up funnels for just about anything.
There is also a psychological element at play here that has been interesting for us. When the product was free, we didn't prioritize optimizing our funnel aggressively. Now that monthly fees are looming, we are having to fish or cut bait and get real serious about which funnel projects to pursue or not to pursue. It's a very healthy restriction on our business (a la 37signals).
Re: KISSmetrics' bizarre pricing decision
#43Here's something that I don't get. Is funnel analysis even suitable for a monthly subscription service? Unless you're mucking around with your checkout funnel constantly (why?) this seems more like the kind of tool that I'd use once. Or at least very, very infrequently. Discover what's wrong, fix it, the end . The weird thing is, psychologically I would have no problem paying a couple of hundred bucks for a one-off e…
Funnels are never done because a) the market changes as you become more popular, have new competitors, the economy tanks, etc and b) there's no perfect funnel - you might see diminishing returns but you never know what will make a big difference.
Re: KISSmetrics' bizarre pricing decision
#44I was in the KISSMetrics beta and will probably pay for it, without complaint. It is a pretty simple decision: am I likely to get 5% or more lift out of them? (Assuming a baseline of somewhere near $3,000 in sales a month.) Answer: yeah, based on my experience with funnel optimization, I think that is likely. I will also continue to recommend them to clients. I yield to no one in empathizing with cash-strapped startu…
I think the point of the guys blog post / rant is not so much the price in general, but that he felt the product targetted at the start-up community. Not that I have taken too much notice but I was under the impression that is where they were targetting it and I wouldn't be surprised if most of their beta testers were from that community and expecting the $10 per month pricing that they are more familiar with. Person…
You realize you're responding to a solo founder of a standalone startup that sells bingo card creation software, right? I have mad respect for Patrick (he's sitting right next to me at the moment), but if you were under the impression that being a Bingo Card Mogul meant Cristal and Rolex watches, uh, no.
How much more credible a testimonial can you get than "I built my business in 5 hours a week, I sell bingo cards to school teachers, and I easily expect to recoup the investment I'm making in KISSmetrics"?
For what it's worth: I sell enterprise software at a price point several orders of magnitude higher than Patrick's, at a company with more employees than most established YC companies, and KISSmetrics isn't worth it for me right now, because I'm simply not prepared to feed it the data it needs or to make the decisions it's expecting me to make.
I don't take it personally that KISSmetrics is pricing me away from paying for it. In fact, I appreciate it; it's preventing me from wasting time.
Re: KISSmetrics' bizarre pricing decision
#45I was in the KISSMetrics beta and will probably pay for it, without complaint. It is a pretty simple decision: am I likely to get 5% or more lift out of them? (Assuming a baseline of somewhere near $3,000 in sales a month.) Answer: yeah, based on my experience with funnel optimization, I think that is likely. I will also continue to recommend them to clients. I yield to no one in empathizing with cash-strapped startu…
5% would only be the break-even point, though (for 3000$). At that point, you still haven't made any extra money, but invested time into adapting their solution.
Also, if you make 3000$/month, you are already rich (if it comes from automatic sales), so your attitude to spending might differ from somebody who is just starting out.
Re: KISSmetrics' bizarre pricing decision
#46Honestly I don't think they're putting themselves out of the reaches of a startup. It's more than possible to justify the cost if the service is going to be genuinely valuable.
The problem is that the 30 day free trial probably isn't enough time to evaluate it, and the people who are being left out are the hobbyists who like to blog about all the cool things they've managed to do with stuff.
An ecosystem of hobbyists is useful for me when evaluating products, it's a shame KISSMetrics is going to miss out on this. A free account for under 100k events and a noncommercial license would be far more useful than a 30 day trial.
Re: KISSmetrics' bizarre pricing decision
#47Cindy 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 t…
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.
Re: KISSmetrics' bizarre pricing decision
#48I was in the KISSMetrics beta and will probably pay for it, without complaint. It is a pretty simple decision: am I likely to get 5% or more lift out of them? (Assuming a baseline of somewhere near $3,000 in sales a month.) Answer: yeah, based on my experience with funnel optimization, I think that is likely. I will also continue to recommend them to clients. I yield to no one in empathizing with cash-strapped startu…
5% would only be the break-even point, though (for 3000$). At that point, you still haven't made any extra money, but invested time into adapting their solution. Also, if you make 3000$/month, you are already rich (if it comes from automatic sales), so your attitude to spending might differ from somebody who is just starting out.
Thanks, that was kinda the point I was making when I said KISSmetrics needed to make you $200 on the $149 plan... you'll have invested your own time into this tool so that needs to be accounted for.
Re: KISSmetrics' bizarre pricing decision
#49I was in the KISSMetrics beta and will probably pay for it, without complaint. It is a pretty simple decision: am I likely to get 5% or more lift out of them? (Assuming a baseline of somewhere near $3,000 in sales a month.) Answer: yeah, based on my experience with funnel optimization, I think that is likely. I will also continue to recommend them to clients. I yield to no one in empathizing with cash-strapped startu…
Thanks Patrick, I'm sure it was one of your blog posts that put me on to KISSmetrics so I'm interested/glad to hear that you're going to stick with them. Perhaps you'd do a review in 6 months time to see if their pricing plans vs the effect to your conversion ratios really has balanced out? (I'm not being snide, I'd be genuinely interested how it works out)
I agree with how market positioning is so important to a startup, and yeah I kinda respect KISSmetrics for having the guts to do this. My anger really came because I felt they'd cut off the bottom of the ladder where those of us who can't justify $150/month on analytics where standing. And this was a surprise because nothing until the pricing announcement indicated that this was the direction they were going to take.
Re: KISSmetrics' bizarre pricing decision
#50I was in the KISSMetrics beta and will probably pay for it, without complaint. It is a pretty simple decision: am I likely to get 5% or more lift out of them? (Assuming a baseline of somewhere near $3,000 in sales a month.) Answer: yeah, based on my experience with funnel optimization, I think that is likely. I will also continue to recommend them to clients. I yield to no one in empathizing with cash-strapped startu…
Thanks Patrick, I'm sure it was one of your blog posts that put me on to KISSmetrics so I'm interested/glad to hear that you're going to stick with them. Perhaps you'd do a review in 6 months time to see if their pricing plans vs the effect to your conversion ratios really has balanced out? (I'm not being snide, I'd be genuinely interested how it works out) I agree with how market positioning is so important to a sta…
Feel free to ask me about that in six months. I'm always grateful for blog post topics.
It is intrinsically hard to attribute improvements in conversion rate to a single cause, except in an A/B test. It will be sensitive to changes in the traffic mix, seasonality, strategic decisions, etc etc.