Under the Radar

Trend signals for marketers, investors, and entrepreneurs

No Employees
Founders Code
Solo Founder
SaaS

I know, I know. There's no shortage of trendspotting services. So why another one? The short answer is that Under the Radar offers high quality trend signals and powerful filters at an affordable price.

March 8, 2022 Simplified everything

There used to be all kinds of pages that presented trends in different niches and various filter buttons. Now there is just a single feed that includes all trends from all categories. Also there are no more filters. Just a single search box that users can use to find, for example, subreddits, or startups.

June 10, 2021 Completely revamped the landing page

Finally, found the time to completely revamp the http://UnderTheRadar.io landing page.

Under The Radar new landing page

Still far from perfect but it at least looks a bit more professional now and follows best practices.

Any kind of feedback is very much appreciated! Feel free to send me a DM on Twitter in case you don't want to say mean things publicly馃槈

June 9, 2021 100 paying subscribers and increased prices

All early bird slots that I offered at a discounted rate are now taken and I increased the prices to the regular rate of $19/month.

Compared to all competitors this is still incredibly cheap and since the project is sustainable at this point there is no no immediately need to increase it further at this point.

May 7, 2021 $500 MRR

Stats from yesterday's launch.

馃檪142 upvotes and 15 comments on Product Hunt.
馃槏 20+ encouraging emails and DMs.
馃コ 41 paying subscribers (~$500 MRR).

Too bad that launching on Product Hunt is not a scalable strategy but this is definitely an encouraging start.

May 6, 2021 Launched on Product Hunt

馃殌 Spontaneously decided that today is launch day.

Under the Radar is a set of databases full of non-obvious trend signals for investors, marketers, and entrepreneurs (including Search, GitHub, PH, Reddit, Amazon, Shopify, Crypto and SaaS trends)

Let's see how it goes.

May 6, 2021 Background - how and why I built Under the Radar

A bit more background on how and why I decided to build it.

Building Under the Radar was super fun because I was able to use everything I learned building Product Explorer and http://Opportunities.so.

It's the first time, I鈥檓 using a custom-made user interface. Really hoping it will survive this first real world test.

Initially my idea was to do what everyone else is doing when it comes to trendspotting and then use price as the main differentiator.

Primarily, I wanted to have a simple project so that I can learn more about custom user interfaces and data pipelines.

But as soon as I started working on the project, I had hundreds of additional ideas and, well, now the project is no longer that simple.

One idea was that instead of relying on random walks in keyword space, the algorithms are monitoring specific data sources like GitHub.

This not only leads to a more interesting selection of trend signals but also allows me to show them in their proper context alongside relevant metadata.

A common question I got is: "What鈥檚 the difference between this and http://Opportunities.so?"

In short: Under the Radar is use-case agnostic whereas Opportunities is specifically for entrepreneurs looking for business ideas.

We're using the Under the Radar data to find interesting signals for our http://Opportunities.so trend brainstorms.

Fun Fact 1: Instead of preparing properly for the launch this morning I thought it would be smart to add a completely new category of trends (crypto).

Needless to say that I also added quite a few bugs.

Fun Fact 2: Instead of a proper database, I'm using Google Sheets.

The main reason is that with Google Sheets it's so easy to manually edit and curate data. I can now easily bring in freelancers without having to build an admin interface.

More on the stack:

The front-end is hosted on http://Render.com. Love the push- to-deploy workflow.

All backend code is Python and runs on a cheap Digital Ocean server.

Everything else, 1.) payments 2.) sales taxes 3.) authentication is handled by Gumroad.

April 27, 2021 Came up with the idea

I wrote lots of code for Opportunities.so that helps us find interesting trends plus generate pretty charts.

Since the algorithms are working quite well now I thought that this is far too valuable to keep it for myself and decided to turn it into a standalone product.

About

I know, I know. There's no shortage of trendspotting services. So why another one? The short answer is that Under the Radar offers high quality trend signals and powerful filters at an affordable price.