SocialToo Charging $20 for Emails, Reliability: It's the "Spanging" Business Model!
In an email sent to users today and in today's blog post, SocialToo CEO, Jesse Stay, announced that users would no longer be receiving nightly Twitter autofollow and unfollow stat emails on the company's dime. Email from SocialToo now costs $20.
This comes in the wake of a "no guarantees" policy toward accuracy or speed for Twitter users with more than 2,000 followers and general claims of delays, issues, and inaccuracies. Do we smell inadequate infrastructure?
As a matter of fact, we do. On April 24, Stay wrote, "Unfortunately we hit a few growing pains and snags in our servers, and have had to find affordable ways to scale as we work on that."
To mitigate the costs of scaling, users are now being begged to purchase their once-free daily emails containing stats on their new Twitter followers and friends and the tweets that may have led to new followers or losing followers. SocialToo is charging a one-time $20 fee that will reportedly "put you on a dedicated server (or servers as we get more people paying for the service) that will enable us to run your account much more frequently and also auto-follow and re-cache much more frequently for your account."
Sure, it might seem like the humane and reasonable thing to do for SocialToo users; after all, we've all got twenty bucks, right?
But over at CenterNetworks, Allen Stern reminds us of the old "if you teach a man to fish" adage when he says, "My only concern with the $20 one-time fee is that he has lost nearly all chance to get more revenue from his power users. I assume many of the SocialToo power users will pay the $20 which will provide a quick stream of cash. I'd rather see him set the upgrade as a yearly fee. This way in a year Jesse can bring in new features and grab another set of funds. At this point his only chance to gain more revenue from those newly-paying users would be to offer more services and hope that they will upgrade again."
Today's email/blog post continued, "As always, our auto-follow and unfollow services will always remain free from the time you join SocialToo forward. In addition, you will always be able to create SocialSurveys and share them with your friends for free as we have always provided."
Users are also charged negligible to moderate amounts for other SocialToo services in the usual freemium fashion.
In the past, Stay has made much of Twitter's limiting API calls to 20,000 per hour and their "pulling the rug out from under its developers" by only allowing users to follow maximum of 1,000 people per day. After having leveled such heavy criticisms in the past, stating that Twitter was holding back business growth, it is interesting that his real growth challenge should come in the form of inadequate resources for scaling the service.
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I agree Jolie I don't think he has thought this strategy out. There are tons of long term services he could focus on. Power user on not Social Too has great potential (I am a member of course).
I think the best thing they should do is use their own surveys with their clients. In fact offer a free service in return for feedback and then act accordingly.
The email he was sending was slow and didn't provide accurate info. So I opted out weeks ago.
They should consider combining a twellow yellow pages meets tweet later and analytic applications. Even in BETA that could be very powerful!
Add to what you already provide and increase your level of service options (free vs paid).
The end result is that people pay for VALUE. The emails are far from value. No value no sale.
It is a valid request.
If it is used as a work tool it has to perform well, besides the fact that these guys have to make a living somehow other then investor's money.
Another question is besides the now requested $20 fee, what the users have given so far? nothing for something?
Thanks for the writeup Jolie! If you ever would like an interview in person my phone number is 801-853-8339 and I'm always happy to answer questions. I do appreciate your coverage.
Regarding long-term business strategy, this wasn't intended to be that. This is a very short-term move intended to move us towards being able to build out our long-term strategy. We are 100% bootstrapped so investment money isn't an option at the moment (unless anyone is interested). You can bet there will be a more long-term plan rolled out in the near future.
In regards to my vocal stance on Twitter's API and scaling, my complaint wasn't their scaling, but rather their lack of announcement before removing or adding features to the API, along with lack of a ToS for developers outlining what can and can't be done. Even in our case, it wasn't necessarily a scaling issue. It is actually very easy to scale on our architecture right now. Our issue is affording the cost of adding servers and continuing to scale. Contrast to Twitter, our issue is solely a money issue, and this new plan will keep us moving forward at full speed.
Again, thanks for your coverage, and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask me. I do appreciate all the coverage RWW has given us in the past!
Jesse Stay
CEO, SocialToo.com
Let's see if I get this sequence of events correctly.
(1) SocialToo promises daily email updates on follows/unfollows free for all users.
(2) SocialToo completely fails to deliver on this promise, not recognising unfollows for many days, sometimes listing the same unfollows repeatedly, most of the time missing most of the data altogether. Everybody complains.
(3) Suddenly SocialToo promises *exactly the same they promised before*, but this time, it's going to cost $20. And really, really trust them this time. Really! Even though they totally NEVER GAVE IT TO YOU THE LAST TIME THEY PROMISED IT TO YOU.
You've got it backwards, Jesse. That's not how you do the internet. You can't, and won't fail upwards in this world, sorry. Strategy doomed. Back to square one.
DBL, if you're still seeing issues please contact us - contact@socialtoo.com. Over the last week stats have been much, much more reliable since moving to a new architecture - I have yet to see an instance where it isn't working, but if that is the case I would like to know. I wouldn't offer this if I weren't confident it was reliable.
Jesse Stay at SocialToo doesn't seem to know what to do with the problems that SocialToo is experiencing. The turn around time to answer customer e-mail is two weeks. I let Social Too know that the script was not working and there was nothing that I could do on my end. Jesse didn't respond to e-mail, Twitter tweets or even a forum request for help.
When did I get a response from Jesse? After I replied to his $20 request letter. I'm not the only Social Too user who has had a problem with the service. Jesse's response - well it works now and sorry there was no service. Stay did not identify himself as the owner of the business and did not take responsibility for SocialToo's lack of communication to my problem.
Asking customers to pay $20 and there is no guaranteed service is nonsense. Stay obviously doesn't know how to conduct business. Yet, Guy Kawasaki is listed on his site as an advisor. I sent a tweet to him and haven't heard back yet.
I added followers myself when SocialToo wasn't working - no big deal, but now any users that unfollowed me (mostly porn sites and SEOs) can't be automatically unfollowed through SocialToo's unfollow part of the program.
@Jesse,
If you're worried about server costs, why not approach a company liked LayeredTech.com and ask for hardware+bandwidth donations from them? LT is working with other companies like Woopra already and I'm sure they would be more than willing, in exchange for some publicity, to offer up some servers to help you run SocialToo.com
Feels like that would be a much better alternative than asking for money.
I love the socialtoo service, but it's not a service I'm willing to fork out any money for -- it's not a mission critical service for me.
Marlene, you're now going around to every blog posting the same stuff. I've told you both via e-mail and our Twitter account we're sorry for the delay and I'd love to make it up to you. As I said in numerous places I need some clarification on what you're expecting so we can make it up to you. Thus far all I've heard back is "you need to read". I simply need clarification and I'd love to make you happy. My offer's still good - I just need clarification from you on what it is you're wanting from us.
Just to clarify on my end - you want it to finish unfollowing the surplus of people you're following that aren't following you back. Our free service doesn't cover that, and I'm showing you didn't purchase the catch up service that unfollows those you've manually followed. Is there a chance you did purchase that and we recorded it wrong? I need to know that and, as I've said via e-mail and elsewhere I'm happy to help you further.
I've now tried to contact you and help you for 3 days now. I'm still happy to help and I'll continue to be happy to help. If you can clarify that I'll be happy to resolve whatever service you're trying to get from us.
Jonathan, thanks - I was not aware of them. We're a business though and we do need to come up with a business plan of some sort. While Twitter and Facebook and others are free right now they also have funding supporting them and for even them that funding will eventually run out and they'll have to find creative ways to charge as well.
We still have a free plan and will continue to have that. We're just deciding right now that the only way we're going to be able to grow infinitely with this is to charge for things like this. That said, I'm open to other ideas, and I appreciate your suggestions.
Jesse,
Don't worry what I am doing - worry what you are NOT doing. I'm a consumer hoping that other consumers don't have to go through what I went through (wasting money on a script that doesn't work and the frustration because there is no response from customer service).
You're a businessman who has an inflated ego and you blog about your success. Do you realize that you have an application that doesn't always work? Look around at all your unhappy users. I was a paid subscriber and I deleted SocialToo today because you wouldn't help me. You didn't learn to interact with people when you got your degree from an online school, I guess.
As soon as I wrote to you that the application wasn't working, you should have responded. You should have offered 110% customer service after you ignored a customer for two weeks. You didn't ignore posting in your blog for two weeks did you?
Hasn't Guy Kawasaki taught you anything about customer service?
Look at Jesse Stay complaining because his e-mail service isn't responding within 24 hours to his call for help:
http://twitter.com/Jesse/status/1744088628
I didn't hear from Jesse Stay even after 240 hours for help with company SocialToo. Isn't that like the pot calling the kettle black?
The thing that irked me about this change was the fact that the free version didn't work right - if he can't prove the concept with the free 'sample', why would I want to fork over money suddenly for the version that works 'right'. Just seems backwards to me and was my reason for deleting my account entirely.