A trio of veteran entrepreneurs have joined forces to create a new Seattle startup — and any mentions of the company across the internet will likely be tracked by what they’re building.
Alertmouse generates email alerts for people and brands who want to know what’s being said about them — or anything else they’re interested in — online. The goal is to provide a better offering than other monitoring tools, most notably Google Alerts, which Alertmouse calls “so bad it might as well not exist.”
The startup was created by co-founders Rand Fishkin (SparkToro, Snackbar Studio), Adam Doppelt (Urbanspoon, Dwellable), and Nathan Kriege (Blueprint AI, Fresh Chalk).
Fishkin, the CEO, posted about Alertmouse on LinkedIn this week, saying that while the side project has turned into a full-fledged business, he’s not leaving his other two jobs.
“It doesn’t take a ton of my time but it has been really fun to build this thing that I desperately needed,” Fishkin said in a video on his post, before listing his grievances with Google Alerts, including how it “doesn’t pick up everything you want, it sends you useless alerts” and more.
Fishkin said tracking his mentions or those related to his companies, whether it’s in a news article or in a Reddit thread, allows him to monitor what’s being said and jump in if necessary to reply.
Alertmouse says it searches the index of websites and pages it can reach two or three times each day for the unique string of words/phrases/rules a user has entered. An email is sent with the pages that contained them.
“It’s not rocket science, but it takes a lot of clever programming, testing, and iteration to make a good alert service,” the company says in its FAQ.
In an interview with GeekWire this week, Fishkin said there are enterprise tracking tools that do what Alertmouse does, such as Mentioned, Hootsuite, and Brandwatch, but they can be cost-prohibitive.
“Google Alerts has been this free alternative for a long time, but sometime in the last decade, maybe even before that, it just stopped sending me anything decent,” he said. “I have no idea what they’re doing under the hood. I suspect it’s a defunct product that no one maintains anymore, but I couldn’t tell you what’s really going on.”
On a website loaded with cheesy puns, Alertmouse has four pricing tiers, including Nibble (free), Slice ($120/year), Wedge ($600/year), and Wheel ($1,200/year).
Alertmouse attracted 1,000 sign-ups in the first several hours it was live, and Fishkin credits the fun interface and language on the website, and the fact that it’s easy to use.
“We wanted to make a brand that no one could confuse for AI,” Fishkin laughed. “This is not an AI company. There’s going to be no venture capital, there’s no AI under the hood. It’s just really simple, straightforward, fun, delightful humans.”
Fishkin, an SEO expert who founded and led Moz, a Seattle-based maker of marketing software tools, co-founded SparkToro in 2018. The audience research tool helps marketers and others understand their target audiences. He raised $2.15 million last year for his new independent video game studio, Snackbar Studio.
Doppelt and Kriege previously worked on vacation rental startup Dwellable (sold to HomeAway in 2015), local professional recommendation site Fresh Chalk, and task management company Blueprint AI together. Last year they teamed up to create a resource website for everything you’d ever want to know about smoke detectors.
Fishkin and Doppelt are also part of dedicated group of “Dungeons & Dragons” players.
The Alertmouse website says the startup has no plans to hire. But that could change after a morning in which lots of people were emailing with questions.
“If it keeps going like this we might have to bring someone on,” Fishkin said.
