BetterTracker’s Big Bet on Brutal Truth
The company’s StackMarket 250 Index and Strata Intelligence Suite are its latest efforts to share sometimes unpleasant facts MSPs and vendors need to know.
Kevin Lancaster has been up to a lot in recent years. The common thread unifying all of it, arguably, is an effort to convert radical honesty into profit.
Consider: Shortly after selling ID Agent, the security vendor he founded roughly a decade ago, to Kaseya in 2019 Lancaster launched Channel Program, a company dedicated to collecting and disseminating unvarnished MSP product reviews.
Then a few years later, Channel Program launched NaviStack, a tool that in the process of helping MSPs catalog all the vendors they do business with also helped them—and everyone else—see who the real leaders are in various product categories, versus who claims that status.
That was followed last year by a tool called BetterTracker that, by importing data from an MSP’s bank accounts and credit cards, showed a lot of people who took pride in financial discipline how much they were wasting every month not only on software they never use but on a whole bunch of other things to boot. Those people included Lancaster himself, who discovered during beta testing that he was spending $600 a month on a subscription he thought he’d canceled six months earlier.
And then, last week, the company renamed BetterTracker in response to that system’s unexpected success began publishing the StackMarket 250 Index, a sort of S&P 500 for the managed services world offering an extremely public look at the top five names in 50 product segments based on objective, anonymous adoption and month-over-month momentum data from close to 10,000 MSPs.
“We think it’s the first time that anybody’s ever shown in an impartial, unbiased way the true market share of these vendors,” Lancaster (pictured) says. “Some vendors might not be happy about it.”
They will, however, finally and definitively know exactly who their top competitors are. As will venture capital and private equity firms looking for rigorously empirical signals on who’s hot and not in product categories they wish to enter and MSPs hungry for something more than Reddit posts to go on when evaluating vendors too.
“We’re helping both sides make better decisions,” Lancaster says.
Beginning Monday, meanwhile, BetterTracker subscribers from the vendor side of that divide and their private capital backers will have access to far deeper market insights via the Strata Intelligence Suite, a new source of brutal truth that displays not only a more extensive list of category leaders but what their market share is and whether it’s trending up or down. Based on the user product reviews BetterTracker collects, the system also shows vendors how MSPs score them on key product attributes.
A similar offering for MSPs due within the next two months will help them compare the tools they use to what their peers use. “We can show them based on their size what their stack should look like,” Lancaster says.
That latest instance of tough love will be followed by yet another soon when the StackMarket 250 begins gradually evolving into the StackMarket 1000.
“We have pretty deep data now on about 200 different product categories,” Lancaster says. “Over the next probably month and a half, you’ll start to see us put in at least another 50 to 75.”