Idea Feedback: Weekly spreadsheets of new startups
I have a 5+ background in data extraction.
Repurposing an old project to round up new startups daily from a lot of sources on the internet .
Data includes: website, contact data (verified), social media accounts, and others organized in a spreadsheet sent weekly.
Looking to hunt it on PH at the end of the week.
Monetization 10$ subscription.
Any feedback?
Thank you for reading this.
Who would actually buy it? Like who do you know, by name that would want it? Reach out to them and ask them. Then do that 10 more times.
Or just build the thing, throw it on Product Hunt and hope your hunch is right. Honestly either can work, but I feel you learn more from the first. Good luck!
Good advice from @joshdance. I wouldn't even post on Product Hunt unless it's a validated idea. Product Hunt is more of a marketing platform these days.
Great advice.
Sound idea validation advice. Thank you!
check out: http://growthlist.co/
Good find. I knew about them. It's basically them but on a new niche.
Seems like it could be a neat idea. Would the information be available before it hits Crunchbase or Pitchbook?
Very early stage probably bootstrapped. Most are never going to reach product market fit to be listed on Crunchbase.
There might be some analysts at VC firms or entrepreneurs search for ideas that would be interested in this for research purposes.
The more diverse the list companies (i.e. it's not the same type of startups all trying to attack very similar problems), the better.
Nah.
Non-curated 'pay for play' listing will attract desperate startups. Noone of significance will read a list of desperate startups. A couple of germs amid desperation won't change the equation; the gems will anyway surface elsewhere.
The idea was not for the startups to pay. But, for anyone being on top of new projects surfacing up. @AndrewKamphey gave a great example http://growthlist.co/ but with early stage niche.
Ah, then I totally misunderstood. Sorry!
Though, you might be able to use my misunderstanding as a learning for your messaging.
Might be better as a high ticket niche product or find some affiliate programs you can market to them?
I like your background, seems a bit similar to my own, will try to catch you on Skype, need to setup an account didn't use it for years hehe
See my reply to cass1 to get an ideea of what the current parts of the tech I have.
I like your idea. As I can take a peek automatically on any page to get a sense of what's there some automatic wp affiliate plugins are testing a variant of this tech.
They want to display a nice preview with image and price behind a link.
They call our API with a link found, we return to them type of page (ecommerce, travel booking, article) and any pricing data found, image, .etc
This way they can provide affiliate support for websites that don't have an API to get required data or discover new affiliate providers and create a partnership.
The way this was done until now was to have support for a list of websites.
They would use their API to get details about the product and create the preview.
But, there are a lot of websites that don't provide a public API. And it was quite difficult to add support for a large number of websites that do not so. With our API they just send the link our way, and we extract the necessary info. This way they have up to date pricing info on their clients affiliate websites and they can still provide a nice preview.
Your a bit tech/product focused rather than business/value with this..
I was going simple
You get a list of new launches.
You get contact details of these companies.
Think what do these companies or subset of them want
(I would think marketing services of sorts
For example as I mentioned below you could have a reverse offer, you find them one only one or several sites, offer to list them on the others in one click + pay...
Affiliate I meant go to an affiliate network site pick offers that might be relevant and send them..)
Sorry I already get tired to get PH daily and stopped with Betalist.
There is too much crap on there to have any benefit for me. I just look a bit for inspiration and sometimes (rarely) there is something cool I can use.
What could be an option is to make a proper review/research on all these startups and present a top-10 most promising each month.
I like the idea, would not be willing to pay a $10 subscription though. What value does this spreadsheet bring? I don't see how I get $10 worth of value per week/month.
Initially I've thought that there would be value for people looking to market something to them. But as @Cass1 mentioned they might not have the money. I am rethinking the use case, see my reply to cass to get an idea to what the tech can be used for.
hello!
nice idea!
I want to discuss who and how will buy it.
If possible, write me to vladimir@ntile.app or Telegram (@Fire_Frog), or leave your contacts, please :)
IDK
You dont need any background in data extraction science. Any avg Joe could do this: Just a 30 bucks Crunchbase account, a fixed search query (startups founded last 12 months + first funding just happened), and a weekly copy and paste of its result into a spreadsheet and then get email addresses from hunter.io (latter could be automated). former as well with puppeteer.
Or you just save the copy and paste crap and check the stuff in Crunchbase. New funded startups are anyway not that relevant. If you want to copycat don't, risk is too high. If you want to sell the CEO stuff, yes, that's good but then you compete with millions of sales research tools and again Crunchbase.
If you do anything signifcantly better pls let us know. thx
ps reporting on startups without funding is questionable, not that they are bad but the signal vs noise ratio is so bad that you need to screen 1000 startups to find one good idea/execution which has the potential to be cloned. Second drawback non funded startups have no money to buy stuff from you (98% of them)/
Thanks for the insights. Very well thought.
This might not be the right use case.
The data extraction tech that could power this is a little more advanced. I think it could power something significantly better.
Parts of it, are similar to what Diffbot does. Given a page (article, ecommerce page, real estate listing, job page) it automatically extracts clean structured data with no manual supervision.
It can be use for automatic ecommerce pricing comparison, crawling jobs posting from job boards.
As it can detect lists on a page, I've thought about building an automated RSS feed generation for websites that don't have any.
Based on the ideas and feedback from this thread. I am going to validate the ideas better and find something suitable.
Thanks for the feedback! Maybe I didnt get it but isn't scraping also more advanced stuff with pupeteer through an multi-IP-proxy not kind of an commodity? Don't want to judge your skills but it's something a good dev could jump in and produce good results within a week. Correct me if I am wrong.
Are you manually scraping these startups or do they have to submit to your website, similar to PH?
Good question. We automatically scrape the startups.
Which sources do you use?
ProductHunt, Betalist, HN, Reddit side projects/Entrepreneur, index.co, betalist, launching next, thestartuppitch.com, Indie Hackers, f6s, growthhackers, eu startups, startuplift.com and others. Adding new sources is easy and is not time intensive. We just feed the URL and setup some fields on the back-end.
You can reverse it and offer a listing service ;)
Listing service is nice, though people uploading to these tend to have limited cash and probably will do it themselves.
Everybody has a price. You still pay bills right? How long did it take you for the last 2 listings? How about doing 20 how long would that take you? Would you pay 10$ to get back that time?
How do you define startups (aka what qualifies a new business as a startup)? And whom do you foresee would benefit financially from this information (indirectly)?
Someone wanting to market to them? It might not be the case as the most might be boostrapped or very early stage.
I get it that I did not fully explain myself what I mean by a startup. In my case it would be anyone featuring on ProductHunt or BetaList. Very early stage.
Makes sense - so how would you differentiate yourself from the likes of PH/BL? A searchable database that has them all in one?
One consideration will be deduplication - but a mechanism to crowd-source flagging/reporting those shouldn't be too difficult.