SumAll: Pay us Please.
We’ve heard this a billion pitches before – an application launches, offers free and premium service, and hopes to capture 10% of worldwide market for whatever metrics the company was gunning for. At the same time, growth pattern is mandating cash burn that your runway is becoming shorter each month. If it succeeds, like LinkedIn or Twitter (or even Google) – the service stays for free, and monetization becomes a matter of services such as LinkedIn Premium or Twitter for Business.
If we look into SumAll, which can be described as ‘big data analysis for your social media channels’, it looks like the time of Unicorn has passed, and in order not to become a unicorpse, the company is forced to pull a do-or-die move. Yes, SumAll is becoming a premium-only service. This is a letter the company sent to all of its users:
Dear Friends,
For years we’ve delivered data to hundreds of thousands of users for free. We’ve sent you email digests, thank you Tweets to your followers, and provided analytics through our app. We are dedicated to offering you the same level of innovation, service and reliability. But handing that amount of data costs a fortune, over 4 million last year.
So, with a heavy heart, we’re writing to tell you that SumAll will be discontinuing our free service and will only be offering premium accounts. Premium accounts allow us to continue our dedication to the vision of a data enabled world.
The good news is your email digests and all the features you’ve come to enjoy will remain along with the amazing things our paying customers already love. Premium includes deeper analytics like when and what to post, who and where your key customers are, segmenting and demographics, and pretty data charts even your boss will like. Your support over the years has been instrumental and we want to thank you for that – you will receive a 50% off discount for life for everything we offer plus all the great things we will be developing in the coming years!
Sadly, in the next 6 days we will have to close all unpaid accounts. We sincerely hope that you will continue on as a paid customer. And for those who will not be continuing on as paid customers, we thank you for coming with us on our journey!
Thus, if you believe that SumAll is worth your money, you will have to either pay the full fare of $99 per year – or take advantage of a limited time promotion of $49/year for life. We wonder what the conversion rate will be, and is SumAll going to become a must-have tool for social media managers, or some other visualization app is on the horizon. Personally, I’ve used SumAll for a year or so, and it’s a good tool if you need professional-grade (or ego-boasting) analysis of your followers. From one side, it is obvious that the company backers started to demand higher conversion rates, or that the company needs funding to continue operating.
In any case, SumAll will either become a RABBIT or an Unicorpse. If you’re asking what is rabbit, that’s a term invented by Anand Sanwall, CEO of CB Insights – and we will be hearing much more of RABBIT vs. Unicorn as 2016 progresses. Real Actual Business Building Interesting Tech indeed.
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