First things first – the product has not taken off as virally as I would have assumed. Sure, I haven’t promoted it aggressively yet – just namedropping here and there. So, I believe it’s a matter of time before someone influential shares it with their network, and it kicks off.

But why is a product that is innately viral not taking off? I find two issues with this.

Firstly, I haven’t figured a non-spammy pull towards the product. It could probably happen if I were to put in a few hundred dollars of advertising to get the initial traction. But that’s not what I want to do.

I need to figure a natural way for users to see the product in the wild, and start using it. One way I can think this can happen is through bots.

Take Reddit, for example. If you go through trending videos on this website, you will often find users pinging /u/savevideo – it’s a bot that will invoke the redditsave.com website to download the video and upload it in the comments section for users to download.

Without the bot, the creator of RedditSave may have not found a way to promote their app so frequently as they have been able to now.

If I can figure a useful case for QuickXLS that can be botified, I think it will do a world of good for my promotion. It could be for Reddit, or Twitter.

But how often do people share spreadsheets, compared to videos and photos? This brings to my second problem.

There are simply not enough spreadsheets flying around in the wild for people to take notice. And even if someone does notice this site, they may no longer recall this exists when they finally have a need for it.

This makes me think I may need to reposition this app. QuickXLS can already do a lot more than share spreadsheets. It can be used to share anything and everything – screenshots, texts, other images, etc. It’s just that I have chosen to niche it down to spreadsheets.

If I position it as a tool to share everything, then there is a better chance for people to find a need for it on an almost-everyday basis. This means they use it more often; more people will then see it, and in turn use it.

I think this is where I headed with the app next.

For instance, every conversation between a client and a designer starts with the former asking for the latter’s portfolio. What better way to do it than with a BridgeURL link that, back then, used to display all the various links in a slideshow format.

I also expected PR professionals who wanted to share their media wins with their clients with BridgeURL.

Neither of this happened.

Instead, BridgeURL became extremely popular among gamers. So, apparently, there is a whole ecosystem of gaming servers trying to outrank each other on various directory sites. And my biggest chunk of traffic comes from these servers getting their players to vote for their servers across various listing pages.

This is of course, just one of the many use-cases I have found people use BridgeURL for. But the point here is that I had gotten my product-market fit quite wrong when I first built the site.

The reason I am writing about that today is because I am once again at a similar juncture. I have got a site built as a way for users to easily share spreadsheets online, but I really don’t know who is going to use this product.

Yeah, I know that’s not very smart of me. But I went in knowing this – I like to build products and then figuring out how to market them (probably explains why most of my launches fail!).

Right now, I have been seeding it in my own conversations with clients and partners. Anytime I have to share an update regarding our partnerships, I send them a QuickXLS link. I’m trying to see if this will trigger usage. Hasn’t happened so far.

I also tried spamming a few Twitter conversations with my link. One person actually ‘liked’ my tweet, but don’t really think he even opened my link.

I don’t expect anyone to be reading this blog post, but in case you do – who do you think I should be marketing this to? Please do post a comment.

I am a content marketing consultant by day. So, the other day, I was discussing with one of my clients about what keywords we should be targeting next.

I had a couple of keywords in mind. So, I pulled out the relevant metrics from Ahrefs like the search volume and keyword difficulty and built a very simple spreadsheet. On Google Sheets.

Then, I clicked on the “Share” button, set the right viewing permissions, before sharing it with my client.

They had a quick look and we had moved forward with our discussion. Meanwhile, the spreadsheet I created now lies in my Google Drive gathering dust (metaphorically, of course).

What if there was a more disposable way to create spreadsheets? Something you don’t have to worry about organizing in your own physical or cloud drive?

This is the inspiration behind my next project idea.

I’m a big fan of simple projects that do one job well. I like to think of them as Input/Output sites – you input certain values, and the site processes data and outputs data for you to use.

My old project BridgeURL is a good example of this – you input a bunch of URLs and it outputs one link that links out to all these different pages.

Bitly is another good example. There are other relatively lesser known Input/Output apps I use a lot. One is Snipboard – you input a screenshot and output a URL that you can use to share this image. Others include Imgur (for all kinds of images), Wordcounter.net (to calculate words), and so on.

Every time I come with up one of these I/O project ideas, the first thing that I think of is how am I going to get traffic for this?

The problem with a site like Wordcounter is that you need to rank on Google or have another stream of traffic to have users. On the other hand, a project idea like Bitly, Imgur or BridgeURL works better for me because once I get to the first handful of users, they share the site with their friends and followers – thereby reaching a new audience each time the site is used.

For this reason, I am excited about this new project. People want an easy way to share spreadsheet or tables. And I want to provide them a nifty way to do it.

In my next post, I am going to give you more details about the process itself. The project specs document I created to build this project, how much it cost me to do, and will also share my thoughts on how I am going to get the word out to the first bunch of users.

The reason I wanted to is because, at that point in time, I had learned the hard way to persevere with my business. I had too many instances where I started with a new website only to lose interest within a month or two and would switch to the next big thing.

Since I had no intention of starting my own side-projects, I figured it would be nice to have a log of all these ideas here on a blog.

In 2021, I have made a conscious decision to outsource a lot of my everyday job (which is related to content marketing) to other freelancers. I used to outsource earlier too, but I used to cheap out on the people I hire.

This time, I am hiring quality writers, who don’t come cheap, but do a much better job. Which means, I save a lot of my time. I have also invested in an amazing sales automation tool which saves a further 4-5 hours a week.

I am nowhere near the 4 hour work week dream, but I think I am getting there.

Now with relativevly more time on my hands, I have been considering launching a few side projects once again.

I’m a big fan of people like Spencer Haws (NichePursuits), Jon Dykstra (FatStacksBlog), and Ron Stefanski (OneHourProfessor) who have several niche sites with them that makes money for them – either via ads or affiliate marketing.

But here is the thing – I simply do not have it in me to persist with a site for months or years at a stretch till it starts making money.

So here is what I am going to do.

I am going to launch small, niche product sites. Not micro-SaaS. Something even smaller.

Sites like BridgeURL – this is a website I launched back in 2009 or 2010 and it sees a healthy traffic even today with no marketing whatsoever.

I don’t completely recall how much money I spent on getting this website built, but the first version should have taken me like $100-$120 in all.

So these are the kind of sites I want to build.

This is my plan for this year. I am going to come up with product ideas like this and launch them in public – both here on this blog as well as on Twitter.

Unlike niche SEO-driven websites that the other people I admire work on, I am going to focus on building simple, yet viral ideas.

And because it’s not SEO driven, I don’t think I really have to hide my sites from my readers.

So, on this blog, you are going to get all the information that you need – the idea, how I go about building it, how much I build each of my sites for, how I market it, and how much I make from them.

This is kind of liberating in a way because when I don’t have to focus on SEO, I do not have to care about word length, or link building, etc. I already do enough of it in my day job. This is a passion project and I like to keep it that way.

I hope to not lose direction with my plan this time around and actually have something come off it.

I already have a couple of ideas and I hope to launch them in a few weeks. If you are interested to hear my progress, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter.

You can also follow me on Twitter @anand_sriniv

But as anyone who has published a video on YouTube will tell you – the competition there is INSANE. 

Maybe it’s just me, but it’s easier to rank on Google with a blog post than it is to rank on YouTube for equally competitive search terms. 

This is particularly frustrating because producing a good video is a lot more difficult than putting together a brilliant article. 

Again, maybe it’s just me. 

Recently, I got in touch with Mark Webster from AuthorityHacker – their website has tons of legitimately insightful case studies on various online marketing tactics. 

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you about this. If you have come as far as to my tiny blog, you must have checked out AuthorityHacker already.

Mark shared with me one of his recent marketing wins – DOUBLING their YouTube traffic in under 90 days. 

How did they make it happen? 

Here is a 5 point plan that helped Authority Hacker double their YouTube traffic in such a short span. 

Point 1 – Post regularly on a schedule

Authority Hacker committed to a weekly schedule by announcing this to their audience and then sticking to it. 

Why does it matter? Well, in addition to keeping it predictable for your viewers, posting regularly also helps compound your viewer engagement. 

This is how it works. Viewers who watch a video on YouTube are recommended more stuff along the same lines. 

If you have plenty of recent videos, then YouTube recommends all these different videos to the user even if they are coming off from a different channel. 

However, if you are an infrequent poster, there is nothing from your video list that would make the cut. 

In short, posting more videos regularly helps you get a lot of views from YouTube’s recommendation engine. 

Point 2: Quality thumbnails

You could have the best (or the worst, for that matter) content in the world. But how is anyone supposed to know that till they click and watch your video? 

Your video title is so important – everyone knows that. But what often gets missed is the quality of your thumbnail.

When users search for certain keywords on YouTube, they are served dozens of results which are all a good match in one way or the other. 

The only way someone is going to sort through the clutter and pick your video is based on what you have in the thumbnail. 

AuthorityHacker hired a graphic designer for this purpose. The objective of each thumbnail was to:

• Be engaging
• Be colorful, and 
• Contain select keywords

In doing this, they were able to capture an audience and bring them to their video. 

Now, since the YouTube algorithm uses the click-through and engagement metrics to rank their videos, AuthorityHacker’s strategy helped them rise above competitors in YouTube search.

Point 3: Adding timestamps to videos

This is a genius move. Imagine searching for the answer to a very specific question and landing on a video that is an hour long. 

Nobody has the time to watch an hour-long video unless you are subscribed to their content. 

There are two things that Authority Hacker does that’s genius. 

First, they share timestamps in the YouTube video description area. So if you are only interested in a specific section of the video, you could easily click and watch that particular section. 

Second, the video itself includes the currently discussed topic displayed at the bottom of the screen. Timestamps are a part of the description and are often hidden (unless you expand the description). So, by showing the section in the video itself, users are nudged to skip parts they are not interested in, and only go to the sections they are interested in.

Overall, these two tactics help improve viewer engagement which is such an important metric in YouTube’s video ranking algorithm. 

While Mark from Authority Hacker did not mention this in my discussion with him, I also feel the ‘Subscribe’ button that is displayed at the bottom at all times is a great tactic.

Not everyone watches the complete video. But if you are someone who enjoyed the content and would like to come to it in the future, the omnipresent ‘Subscribe’ link will make sure that this visitor becomes a subscriber.

Point 4: Video premieres

In case you are not aware, YouTube has a feature called ‘Premieres’ that is sort of a mix between livestreaming and a regular video.

What you do is that you pre-record a video, but instead of publishing it at your chosen time, you announce to your feed when the video premieres on your channel. 

So, although it’s a prerecorded video, users get to live chat on premiered videos. 

Authority Hacker has used this strategy to great effect to grow its channel. Mark Webster says that the premieres were successful in getting their subscribers together to the channel at the scheduled time. 

Also, he and his co-host would spend the time on live chat interacting with the audience. This improves engagement and also helps build a connection with subscribers.

Point 5: Interaction is key

The previous point sort of gave it away, but Authority Hacker places a huge emphasis on interacting with their audience. They engage with almost every commenter in the YouTube comments section and answer their questions. 

This is a positive signal for YouTube and Mark says this has made a significant impact on viewer engagement.

Truth be told – compared to its competitors, Authority Hacker is still a relatively small channel. However, the strategies listed here appear to have helped the channel grow immensely in a very short period of time. This is priming them for excellent traction over the next few months.

I am excited to watch their growth on YouTube from here. 

All these searches come from business users with HIGH purchase intent – they are unhappy with Slack for whatever reason and want to find something that’s better.

With tons of collaboration tools out there (including Hubbion, the tool I founded), the competition for this keyword is INTENSE. 

SEMRush says the keyword difficulty is 74% – that means a lot of work to get ranking for this keyword. Sites like Hubspot, Jotform, Medium with DR of more than 90 compete for this search term. 

So. how did Chanty.com, a relatively smaller player with a more modest domain authority compared to bigwigs like Hubspot manage to beat everyone else to hit the top spot? 

In this article, I am going to take you through the exact strategy that Chanty followed to seek this marketing win.

The story starts in 2017. Closer to when the company itself was founded.

Chanty was started as an AI-powered team communication platform, an industry dominated by Slack. 

Given this, ranking for this search term is going to be highly valuable.

So it is not surprising that an article about “Slack alternatives” is among their earliest blog posts. 

Wayback machine tells me that the first draft was published back in May 2017

Lesson 1 : Ranking on Google for your money keywords is a long, laborious project. Don’t expect results overnight

While this article itself was published back in 2017, it has evolved quite a bit over time. 

In the first draft of this article published in May 2017, the article talks about 4 different alternatives to Slack.

Then in January 2018, the team added more content to now discuss 5 different alternatives to Slack.

Six months later, the folks at Chanty added more content so there are now 7 different Slack alternatives. 

While the number of alternatives discussed has not changed since, the article itself has been continuously updated. 

Between May 2017 and now, the word count of this article has increased by 1500 words. 

But it’s not adding words for the sake of it. In the past few months, in fact, word count has actually reduced by around 300 words.

I believe what’s working for them is that the content is being constantly optimized so that it is not just words, but the value that is being delivered through the content. 

This increases engagement, the time spent on the page, and ultimately, click-throughs to the Chanty sign up form. 

Lesson 2: Constantly update your content. Even if this means removing fluff so the value you provide increases

But perhaps, the biggest impact has been from external link-building. Take a look at this table below from Ahrefs.

Chanty has nearly three times more backlinks than the next site (Hubspot, in this case, which happens to have taken up the Featured Snippets spot).

There is of course, MatterMost, at the 9th spot that has way many more links. But they are not ranking higher because Google understands that the searcher’s intent is to look at a bunch of alternatives, not just one alternative.

So how did Chanty manage to do this?

I asked Jane Kovalkova who is the CMO at Chanty. She tells me that although their content was wonderfully written, results did not actually start coming in till they started building backlinks. 

Over the course of one year, they published more than 100 guest posts linking to this article

Similar to their content strategy, link building too has not been done for the sake of link acquisition. Every link that Chanty built to this page has come from top authority websites like Hubspot, Marketo, Process.St and so on.

And in each of these posts, there is a definite call to action pointing users to this Slack alternatives post.

Lesson 3: Build HIGH quality backlinks. And LOTS of them if you want to hit the number 1 spot

Jane tells me that Chanty has managed to hold on to the top spot for the most part over the past three years, and this is mainly due to these top authority backlinks that they built to their article.

Here is a quick snapshot of what this marketing win has brought to Chanty.

I hope you enjoyed this small case study. Don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter to follow more such stories. 

Want to share your own marketing win? Send me a message on LinkedIn or Twitter and I will be happy to share your story here.

What’s common to all these payment processors? High transaction fees!

A company like Visa or Mastercard charges the business around 2.5% for every transaction. So, when a customer swipes a payment for $100, the business only gets around $97.5.

That is, a company with a turnover of $100,000 loses close to $2500 in just processing payments.

Paypal is even worse. The processing charges are $0.30 plus 3.5% on every transaction.

For overseas transactions, there are currency conversion charges as well. Add to this, the really poor conversion rates that Paypal offers to its users.

All in all, users lose as much as 5-6% on all their transactions.

Wire transfers are way cheaper. But it’s a pain to get done from the sender’s side. There are dozens of fields to fill up, and even after you do all this, the transaction could get stalled because the client got the details of the SWIFT code, or intermediary bank or clearing code wrong.

As a vendor, it’s awkward to keep following up with your client on this.

There has to be a better way, right?

Yes, there is, and it’s no secret. The good old check (or cheque if you are from one of the Commonwealth nations).

Checks do not cost a lot, relatively speaking, of course. In the US, banks charge between $7-$10 for the “check-cashing service”. But in many countries (like India, since I am from here), it’s technically free. You simply walk into your bank and deposit it – as simple as that.

So if you are someone who has a turnover of $10,000 a month, you can save close between $250-$600 each month simply by getting paid in checks instead of Paypal or other electronic payment methods.

But getting paid in checks is not easy

Getting paid in checks is okay when you meet your client face-to-face. But what if you work with someone from the other side of the country? What if your client is overseas?

Here’s the business idea – create a service that facilitates check payment between parties that are based in different geographies.

Well, don’t we have echecks for that?

Here’s the thing – electronic checks place the onus on the payer (or client, in this case) to change their workflow. If you are working with a large company that pays in checks to hundreds of their suppliers and vendors, they are not going to change their process just because one of their vendors asks them to.

Also, echecks won’t work if you are looking for a cross-border transaction.

There is a big opportunity in building a service that keeps the workflow simple and unchanged at the client’s end and still lets the vendor get paid in the mode they prefer.

Here’s how it will work

Let’s call your company “Rafrador”

The service provider (the one who gets paid) signs up with Rafrador. They will be given a unique code – this unique code is entered either in the memo field of the check, or is part of the PO BOX that is held by Rafrador.

There are a couple of different workflows from here. When it is time to get paid, the service provider requests their client to draw a check in favor of Rafrador

OR, if that is going to cause a trust issue, they may also draw the check in favor of the service provider. They are also asked to enter the unique code in the memo.

Another way to do this would be to let the client draw a check in favor of the service provider. The unique code, in this case, will be part of the address that they will be asked to send the check to (this is similar to a PO Box, except that it will be delivered to an address that is leased by Rafrador)

If the client requires the service provider to collect the check from their office, Rafrador can tie up with a service like Postmates to get it collected and delivered to their address

Rafrador thus collects all the different checks that is sent to all of their different users.

If the checks are drawn in favor of Rafrador, these are encashed, and for a small fee is sent over wire transfer to the account of the recipient.

Checks that are drawn in favor of the service provider are consolidated and posted to the address they have given you.

In essence, this business takes care of all the hassles with check payment from the client and thus makes the process seamless for both sides.

If you are a freelancer working from India or Philippines and want to get paid by your American client, this process can cost you less than $50 regardless of how much money your client pays you. Think of all the hundreds of dollars you could save by not getting paid via Paypal!

What do you think of this business idea? Think you are up for it?

• Create a simple iPhone/Android app that lets you tag each photo you take with easy to remember keywords (“anniversary”, “Juno”, etc.)
• App contains a search box where you can search for photos that were tagged with specific keywords
• Build traction for this app so thousands of users use this search tool
• When you have enough traction, build an additional feature to make your photos public/private
• All public photos are now part of your social media profile – the next Instagram where millions of people are sharing photos and videos with others

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Instagram got acquired by Facebook for a cool $1 billion. Snapchat, if they had agreed to their acquisition from Facebook, could have been bought for $3 billion.

There really is a lot of money in building the next big social network; especially one that’s driven towards visual content on mobiles.

But isn’t this space already saturated? How do you go about launching the next Instagram? Here is possibly one way to get there.

So think of that really funny video or photo you captured several months back. If you have to go find it again, how do you do it?

This is what I do – I start scrolling the photo gallery on my Android phone while at the same time trying to remember when that photo was taken.

Maybe September last year? So, I quickly scroll to September and then try to dig out the photo from here.

That’s a lot of messy work. Imagine having to find a photo from sometime in 2017! Or from so long ago, you don’t even remember when it was taken.

What if we had an easy way to search for photos?

Imagine an app that allows you to add a little detail to every photo or video you take. Something like “Baby’s first words”, or simply tags like “Sydney opera house” or “Taj Mahal” is enough for you to look up photos taken when you were visiting one of these popular places.

If you are feeling adventurous, you can also go ahead and create filters that allow you to add descriptions to several photos at once. For instance, you can tag every photo captured at a particular geographical coordinates or those captured at a particular time with a particular tag or description.

This simple feature creates a search engine right within your phone’s photo and video gallery.

Quite nifty. But how does this become the next Instagram?

That’s step 2. We get there when you have already built a solid number of users who use your tag feature to map their photos with the relevant description.

You now have tens of thousands of people using your app to tag their photos and search for them. That’s a database of billions of photos. Of course, this is easier said than done, but that is something you have to figure out on how you can do it.

Anyway, at this point, you introduce a simple feature – the ability to make your photos public. You may choose which of your photos to stay private and which ones to be public.

So in one swoop, you have thousands of users sharing millions of photos through your application.

At this point, you must consider seeking the user’s permission in accessing their contacts. When they do give you permission, you can identify other people in their network who use your app as well. In one tap of a button, your users can start following all these different people from the app.

There you have it – a visual social network made with simple features that I wonder why we do not have on our phones yet.

• People get a lot of email newsletters. Need a way to aggregate them
• Let users register on your website and generate a new email ID
• Users can now use this ID while signing up to various newsletters
• All emails sent to this ID is then consolidated and sent as one email at a frequency of the users’ choice

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Businesses love to “capture” your email address. First, they lure you with something magical (an ebook, a free preview of an anticipated show, VIP access – you name it), and once you have got what you wanted for free, they will continue to nag you till you part with your money.

Except for the really few times when you enjoy, and even eagerly anticipate, the next email from a business you subscribed to, most times – it just sits there cluttering your inbox.

There are of course ways to eliminate this. You could unsubscribe. Or, you could give a temporary email address while signing up. These are fixes that do not solve all of your problems.

Take the example of Netflix’s newsletter. I don’t care what the next trending show on the platform is. So I ignore their emails most of the time. But when the next season of a show I watch is out, I need to know.

The same is true with movie ticket booking websites. You are only interested with some of their emails; not all of them. If you are into real estate, you like these websites pitching some properties, not others. Even regular blogs – some topics are interesting and you want to check them out. Others are meh.

So the point is this – you are subscribed to dozens of newsletters simply because you fear missing out on some cool thing that may come up once in a while. Most other times – the email simply gets deleted or archived.

There is a better way to organize your emails and bring clutter down – Aggregated mailing lists.

This is how it works. When you sign up to this aggregated newsletter service, you will be given an email address of your own. You now give this email address to the various websites while signing up.

What this service now does is that it aggregates all the newsletters being sent to you into one ‘digest’ that gets delivered to your inbox at a frequency of your choice – daily, weekly or even monthly.

This way, you don’t get a hundred emails each week. Instead, all of that is condensed into one digest that you can look at and see what’s interesting and what’s not. Like something? Click on the link and read the mail in its entirety. Or else, skip.

There is however a challenge here. Most times, you do not start off subscribing to a newsletter. With Netflix again, the email they send their mailers to is the one you gave them while signing up. You get a lot of transactional messages too on this address – email verification, password change, personal message alerts, and so on.

You do not want to wait until the week is over before you can click on that verification email. So for this, you need this service to be “smart”, in that it knows when the message is transactional and when it is a marketing mailer.

Essentially, if the email you receive contains an ‘Unsubscribe’ button, it is a marketing mail. Other times it is transactional.

Regardless of this, your service can come with a web-based inbox that users can log into and check all the latest emails – just like they would on their own Gmail inbox. So even if the service gets the classification wrong, users will always be able to access messages in real time, if required.

So if it is all this good, why have I not gone ahead and built this platform myself? That’s because there are a few challenges that still need to be addressed.

Firstly, there is the issue with security – building a platform like this is no less than building Gmail. If you use this service to handle your Netflix and Amex newsletters, do know that even password informations get routed through this platform. How do you make sure that hackers don’t get access to all your user emails?

Secondly, businesses do not want you to use this service that will make their email marketing campaigns less effective. So the moment this takes off, be ready for every other platform to ban email addresses from this service. This is always going to be a cat-and-mouse game where you buy new domain names to create email addresses on, only for it to be suspended, and you having to start the process again.

But while these challenges exist, they are not unsurmountable. And for this reason, I think this is an idea that is worth pursuing. What do you think?

Customer reviews is important to all kinds of businesses. Local businesses can see a huge upswing in visibility with a handful of 5 star Google or Yelp reviews. If you are a SaaS marketer, you might be interested in platforms like G2 and Capterra since a good number of buyers research these websites before they come to you. For app developers, it is reviews on platforms like the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store that define their success.

In each of these cases, businesses look for two things – volume of reviews, and the rating. At the same time, even a few negative reviews from disgruntled customers can turn the tide and stop newer customers from coming to you.

What if you could build a tool that would ask each of your customers to rate your product or service? Those who rank it highly will be nudged to leave a review on Google/Yelp/Play Store while those who express disappointment will be asked for feedback for internal review?

Workflow

The app will work something like this:

Send an email to customers asking them to rate your product or service on a scale of 1 to 10

People who rate it 7 or above will be thanked and shown a message to leave a review on Google (or whatever platform you choose)

People who rate your offering lower than 7 (or whatever you choose) will be shown a questionnaire where they can give more details on what went wrong

From an implementation perspective, there are many ways to do this. You may, for instance, offer “Google Reviews as a service”. In this case, you get a database of customers from your client and manually shoot them an email with the above workflow. This could be a regular agency-like project where you are paid monthly.

You may also offer this as a standalone service that business users can configure themselves. For instance, they could sign up on your app and choose what happens when a user clicks on each of those ratings (from 1 to 10). They may further configure the message and the URL that the user is redirected to after clicking these ratings.

A more sophisticated tool could integrate with your CRM application and this tool can be scheduled to send out the ratings mailer after a predefined number of days.

Pricing

When I first came up with this idea several years back, I thought I should not charge more than $20/month for a product like this. Come to think of it – it’s a very simple tool to build. I know developers who can build something on these lines for just $100 or so. Knowing that, I am afraid charging more would mean your customers would rather build their own tool instead of using yours.

But this is where it gets interesting. As an app, you are offering something that can bring tons of new business. Imagine a company that offers local truck rental services. Even adding a couple of customers a month through your service would mean thousands of more dollars in revenue.

These business owners are also incredibly non-tech. So they are going to assess the price of your product based on what it means to their business rather than how much it would cost them to replicate it.

There was a user on the Reddit Entrepreneur sub a few years back who had built an app that is very similar to this and charged (if I remember right) his customers something like $250 per month. This user went hyper-local in their marketing and signed up businesses that would have never signed up for an online service as this otherwise.

Of course, at this price, your customers would need a lot of hand-holding. You may hence be in charge of more than just Google Review management. You may be asked to handle their online customer acquisition in its entirety. Your profitability depends completely on how you position your product.

If knocking doors is not your thing, you can choose to make this product completely online and focus on a very niche segment – like “Capterra Reviews” and tweak your pitch suitably.

Reach out to every business on Capterra that is not ranking in the top five and offer your product. While your revenue per customer might be lower than the hyperlocal model, you may still be able to scale up a lot faster and thus be able to sign up hundreds of customers in quick time.