I?m Mike Roberts, Founder and CEO of SpyFu.
Thanks to the OP for bringing this to our attention. I?d like to reiterate Danielle?s apology; it was our oversight ? we have absolutely no intent to take any money you don?t want us to have. I am sorry that we missed your emails; it was a combination of Spam filters and a very high volume of emails we manually sift through ( our support email address has been around as a publicly facing address for 7 years, and is on every spammer?s list).
Our cancellation policy is simple: We will never be dicks.
Unfortunately, it?s not: ?We will never make a mistake.?
At SpyFu, if you want to cancel by
email, you can. If you want to cancel by
Phone,
Twitter,
Facebook,
Livechat ? those are all available to you. You can send me a
personal letter to our physical address in Scottsdale, AZ.
Of course, like many websites, you can cancel from within the
?My Account? tab at the top of every page.
Apparently, you can also cancel by posting something to a Forum (or blog) ? and when Google Alerts tells us about it, we?ll get a hold of you.
*Here?s the thing:*
No matter how you cancel we?ll never, ever try to hold on to your money. Even if you forget to cancel and get in touch with us after the fact. We?ll issue a refund, or give you a credit ? whatever. Even if it?s more than just the last billing cycle. That?s an explicit policy, btw, and I reference it in that video you link to in your original post.
There are no forms, questions asked, no faxing your driver's license, no blood tests
So, the longer form of our cancellation policy is: 30 Day money back guarantee. Cancel anytime. Any reason. No contracts. No questions. Seriously, we?re not dicks.
Our policy is more customer friendly than any I?ve ever experienced, which is the goal.
Personally, I think that there are essentially two ways to make money:
1. Create value.
2. Take advantage of people?s weaknesses.
I, and by extension my company, will never and have never engaged in the latter. It?s my philosophy, and I?ve absolutely passed up millions of dollars in revenue by following it.
At the end of the day, I get pride and satisfaction from what we?ve built and continue to build. The money is a measure of how good a job we?re doing ? or not.
I have zero respect for anybody that would scam, or in any other way take money they didn?t earn. Those people are everywhere, so I understand and sympathize with this thread. But, that?s not me; that?s not my company.
When you cancel, it sucks because we obviously failed to show value for you. But, it?s a feedback loop we value ? and we?re going to work hard to integrate your feedback and create more value next time.
While I?m on the subject of *only* making money by creating value: SpyFu has been around for 7 years. Before SpyFu, and GoogSpy before that if you wanted to know which keywords your competitors rank on or buy, you?d have to guess and check. We invented the concept, a genre that has been successfully copied by more than one competitor.
But, we continue to innovate and create more value. For the last 6 years we?ve been collecting organic ranking data on the
Top 50 ranks (2.5x more depth than our competitors).
Just Tuesday we released a new tool that lets you see how a
Domain or Url ranked on any keyword any time in the last 6 years. Furthermore, we overlaid Google?s algorithm updates on the timeline so you can see at a glance if it was Panda #21 or the EMD Update that caused a site?s rankings to tank. [spyfu.com/ranking]
I am super-excited about that tool. Next week, we?ll release something else we think is awesome. And we?ll never stop.
But, we?re listening. If you have any ideas for how we can improve, we?d love to hear them. We aren?t perfect, but we try to get better every day. Our passion is solving your problems.
And when say ?your? I mean, you hardcore black hat mofos.
Thanks again for showing us at least one way we could improve.
Cheers,
Mike Roberts
Founder and CEO, SpyFu