What do you think of this SaaS idea?

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#1

One thing I do to promote my main startup is to monitor Twitter for people mentioning my competitors. For instance: An (outdated) app I’m competing with is Norton Commander. When someone mentions “Norton Commander” on Twitter, I reply to them along the lines of “Hey, if you like NC, then you might also like my app”. This brings me new - highly targetted - leads.

The following is an attempt at productizing this approach: https://poachr.herrmann.io/

It’s just the landing page for now. What do you think? Would you pay for such a service to promote your own products?

#2

Hi.
Sure, I can see that turning into a product, although similar systems already exist. (e.g.: google alerts, zapier, etc)

Make sure you connect with as many 3rd parties as you can for notifications besides email. SMS, Zapier, slack, customizable webhooks, etc.

In the long run maybe connect to api X and automatically post some replies or follow some rules to execute some task or mark some potential lead with some tag, etc…

Just my $0.02 knowing very little about the subject and just reading the idea as is. But do run some research on competitors before spending too much time or money on it, because I’m sure there must be some heavy duty players in similar fields, which at the end of the day is probably closely related to lead generation and marketing automation tools.

Good luck

#3

Thanks Luis,

I did some superficial research. Obviously, there are many apps that monitor twitter for you. But I couldn’t find any that are specifically at cold-outreach marketing on twitter.

Thanks!
M

#4

Looks promising.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen someone mentioning about 10 years ago that they had a good success with a similar tool that monitored forums - so the approach itself must be valid, just on a new media.

Can it select only the unhappy customers? With some dictionary or something?

#5

I’ve used Mention in the past and it works fairly well. Is there anything yours has that sets it apart?

#6

I just signed up for the Mention trial and I don’t think it allows you to manage templates for replying. I think that would be the difference. My idea was to (basically) do semi-automated cold outreach on Twitter, but targetted at people who have the problem you have a solution for. Many Twitter tools let you monitor for search keywords, but (in particular) Mention doesn’t seem to give you a tool to then - at least semi-automatically - reply to these people.

But I just found three other tools that (at least claim to) let you do this:

Either way, it’s risky in that Twitter obviously don’t want you to spam their users. I’ll hold off the idea for now, unless someone here replies “I want this!” and is willing to pay a little money for it.

Thanks!
M

#7

I’m not sure how that would work in practice, as a lot of mentions for my products aren’t mentions that I would use as a marketing opportunity. I guess it depends on the business name, but I’ve had a lot of false positive mentions in the past and auto-replying to those would’ve been awkward. Maybe displaying a list of mentions w/ a reply button next to them w/ pre-populated responses could work, but I’m not entirely sure. Cool idea though! Would be useful if you could pull it off. :metal:

#8

Yeah, for outreach you wouldn’t monitor mentions of your own products, but of (say) your competitors. And you wouldn’t auto-reply (people can tell it’s fake). But pick from a set of templates you defined, then customise the reply before sending.

#9

http://resift.io monitors competitors and keywords, does lots of filtering and finds email addresses of prospects. I didn’t get traction with it, most likely because I suck at marketing.

If someone good at marketing wants to collaborate and do a rev-share deal, I would be happy to give it another try.

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