Channel Program Wins Unexpectedly Again
BetterTracker, a solution originally designed to show MSPs what they’re paying for software, has turned out to be good at revealing what they—and their customers—are paying for everything.
I first met Kevin Lancaster late in 2017, when he was running ID Agent, a dark web monitoring vendor that had only just started selling through MSPs that spring. One of the biggest, best surprises for him in those early days was the discovery that subscribers were using his solution not only to protect existing clients but as a sales tool for landing new ones too. Sharing the email password with a prospect that you’d found on the cyber black market turned out to be a nearly perfect way to get contracts signed.
I suspect that Lancaster (pictured), who sold ID Agent to Kaseya in 2019 and is now CEO of Channel Program, has been unusually sensitive to unexpected product-market fit ever since, and that this explains some of the functionality he’s been adding to his newest solution, BetterTracker, this year.
Some back story: In 2023, Channel Program introduced a product called NaviStack that helps MSPs inventory all of the different applications in their tool stack. The tool took off to a degree Lancaster didn’t expect, and today contains some 60,000 individual solution listings.
Then, earlier this year, Channel Program began letting users integrate NaviStack with their bank accounts and credit cards. The idea was to let MSPs see not only what products they were using but what they were paying for those products. The reality was that they uncovered a lot of spending on products users didn’t even know they had, a discovery Lancaster calls an “aha moment.”
“It was like, all right, the SaaS sprawl and the subscription problem are much bigger than anybody thought they were,” he says. Bigger, even, inside Channel Program itself.
“I hate admitting it publicly, but when we first beta-ed it and built it in our environment, I saw a subscription that I thought we had canceled about six months prior. It ended up being $600 a month,” Lancaster says.
The thing about checking and credit card statements, though, is that they cover a whole lot more than software spending, and suddenly all of that was visible too.
“It’s not just what you’re paying to the channel vendors. We’re now able to help these businesses understand everything that they’re spending,” Lancaster says. Which is why Channel Program eventually renamed the new tool BetterTracker. “It’s tracking just about everything,” Lancaster says.
And here’s where Lancaster yet again stumbled across unanticipated product-market fit. There’s nothing to stop an MSP from using BetterTracker not only on themselves but on their customers, and making themselves much more relevant to their clients in the process.
“Most of these MSPs are still talking about backup,” Lancaster says, despite the fact that their customers aren’t listening. “They’re thinking about how do you help me save money? How do you help me become more efficient?” The MSP who answers that question is not only a sticky one but a more competitive one as well.
“Just about every MSP looks and sounds the same, they sell the same,” Lancaster observes. “You’re going in as an advisor versus just an MSP.”
You have even more to advise about now too since the launch last month of 365 Scout, a Channel Program tool that imports data from Microsoft Entra ID to reveal not just what an organization is paying for but all the additional, potentially unauthorized apps their users are logging into every day as well. Once again, Channel Program itself turned out to be an eye-opening early test case.
“I thought we were probably using 30 to 35 different tools,” Lancaster says. The actual count was 69.
Coming soon is AI-based functionality that will recommend optimization measures based on an end user’s usage and spending patterns, as well as integration with usage data from Google. If any of that proves unexpectedly popular, safe to say, Lancaster will be ready.