Interview with Lily Kahler, the CEO of Notifier [2023]

My name is Lily Kahler and I am the CEO and Co-Founder of Notifier. so, an internet listening tool that Notifies you whenever keywords you care about are mentioned online. Most of our customers use it for lead generation, brand management, and even tracking stock and crypto ticker mentions. 

I have a background in managing Data Science and Analytics teams for Fortune 500 companies. I live in Austin Texas.

Notifier alerts users whenever there is a mention of whatever keyword they want to monitor across the internet. We support listening on Reddit, Twitter, and many other platforms. You can check the full list on our landing page. Notifier does this by working with APIs to constantly pull data from social media platforms as well as by in some cases crawling the Internet itself.

So this is an interesting question because there are so many ways that Notifier helps organizations compete with their competitors and provide excellent support. As far as the competition goes notifier is great for generating leads that are highly targeted on social media. 

This is actually the primary way that we have always marketed Notifier. And most of the customers using our tool to generate leads say that the leads they generate are much more valuable and cheaper to acquire overall than things like ads and content marketing through SEO.

As far as providing an excellent customer service notifier is perfect for organizations that want to keep an eye on their brand mentions. We have many large brands using notifier and responding quickly to customer complaints and other issues on social media.

Maintaining a good work life balance requires a lot of discipline and keeping a strict schedule that keeps you focusing on the right priorities at the right time. I also highly recommend people get very good at delegation. 

My favorite thing at this point is dealing with people and building great teams! And I think in order to do that you really have to focus on the people themselves and not treat them as some kind of robot. One key thing I really believe in is setting up periodic 1:1s in order to provide an outlet for feedback exchange.

One tool we really love and use a lot is the tool Tally.so. It allows you to quickly and easily build and integrate beautiful forms into your website. Pricing is also really attractive as it’s not crazy expensive like a lot of its competitors. Using this allows us to get a lot of great feedback from our customers and potential customers without having to always push out new code to production.

One problem we have had is is getting valuable feedback from our customer base. It’s always an issue that customers do not like to get feedback but we’ve taken some steps to make it more important and to incentivize customers to give that feedback.

As far as dealing with competition we actually love competition. It really validates that the idea we are investing in is something we should invest in. Besides there is a lot of room in the market and we’re not worried about being the only social listening tool out there. We just want to be the one that is affordably priced and listens to their customers the most. We think that overtime that will help us become the best product out there.

I would actually recommend that people who want to become entrepreneurs find a problem that is interesting to them and that they think they are somehow qualified to salt and then focus on solving that pain point.

No of course always before you write any lines of code you need to make sure that you validate the idea beforehand. And actually Notifier is a great way to do that by finding potential customers using it and then reaching out to them. I even suggest you throw up a landing page and start collecting sign ups for potential customers before you ever write any code.

We want to continue scaling Notifier and to make it the Premier Listening tool on the Internet.