Show HN: We Use That. What startups use to get stuff done

by daniel_levine • 14 years ago

201 43 14 years ago

Hi all, we are launching We Use That and would love any feedback. More cool companies to come and anyone can submit their company via pull request https://github.com/weusethat/we-use-that

pizza• 14 years ago

Definitely definitely put that at the top of your front page!

oacgnol• 14 years ago

Something I'd like to see is also the personal setup of the interviewee(s), for example, coding environment or Mac/PC preference.

bti• 14 years ago

Don't know if you are already aware of http://usesthis.com. Some of the developers they interview get pretty in depth with their setups.

jedberg• 14 years ago

Why only startups? Wouldn't it be interesting to know what non-startups use?

I can see how it wouldn't be all that useful to have a full stack of Oracle and Peoplesoft, but a lot of big companies are built on the same stuff that startups use.

daniel_levine11• 14 years ago

We would love to have some bigger companies as long as they still try new things. For bigger companies we might do it by product. Instead of Google, Gmail and so on

SCdF• 14 years ago

If anything (imo), startups are the least interesting company size / maturity when looking at technology stacks, since they have neither grown enough or been around long enough for their choices to actually matter,

(on the other hand, really large/mature companies are likewise uninteresting, because their choices are almost certainly entrenched in historical BS and legacy nonsense.)

asm89• 14 years ago

You should add http://weusethat.com/ to the description of the repository and as the url of the github user (not an org?). Right now there is no link to click!

daniel_levine11• 14 years ago

Good point!

eranation• 14 years ago

Nice... was looking for something like this

Is the data going to be available in a structured way? It think of trend tables, use counts, graphs, you know...

daniel_levine11• 14 years ago

We're starting out with the interview format but we definitely have plans to use the data in different ways.

danso• 14 years ago

This is similar to what was done with developers, right? The one thing I wished that had -- as well as WeUseThat -- is actual entities per question.

For example, for Pulse's answer to the stack question:

   * Google App Engine
   * AWS
   * Hive
   * S3
   * Redis
   * Django
   * Backbone
   * ASI
   * MBProgressHUD

That way, you could provide a view that showed most popular solutions. Or, if I click on the "Backbone" tag, I see every company that is using it. It'd be a non-scientific way to compare the popularity of components.

If you want to get fancier, you could have it be a delimited list:

Name of product|Category|Purpose at company

If the backend has this data, then we can see popular solutions by category, such as JS frameworks.

Obviously, it wouldn't be hard to go through the few entries you have now and pick out the entities, but better to have a system in place early on before you expand too much.

I think a view that allows sorting by tech product and comparing usage would be very useful. I'm not saying ditch the interview format, just provide multiple ways to view the datapoints given.

For the front page, I'd also reduce the size of the logos.

Otherwise, great start, this is something that will be very useful to developers.

daniel_levine11• 14 years ago

Yes, it's similar to The Setup (http://usesthis.com/), which we're big fans of. We will definitely do this kind categorization but wanted to get a bit more data first and also see if people wanted it. So thanks :)

waferbaby2• 14 years ago

Hooray! I don't know if you wanted to look at the newer version of The Setup, but it's now Sinatra-based with a MySQL backend, and all the software/hardware is nicely organised. I can dump that out for you, if that'd help.

Jun8• 14 years ago

Second that! My huge frustration with usesthis was to manually note down the software people used, since you're designing the same idea, definitely get this from teh start.

The company logos are huge, why not have more in a row rather than only two.

Usesthis has photos of the person being interviewed, you can have a nice picture of the workspace of each interviewed company. This will give a more personal touch than just logos.

Why limit yourself to just software? Ask them what catering firm they use (if any), hardware, where they got their furniture, where they get their business cards made, etc. This will give you more chance for ad revenue.

Great idea and nice page design, good luck!

daniel_levine11• 14 years ago

We will defintitely do more with structured data.

We thought about doing things besides software and we might eventually but we didn't want the interviews to be too onerous and we drew the line at software for now.

A few people have already strayed and referenced things like exec.

waferbaby2• 14 years ago

FWIW, I have the source up for usesthis.com, if that's useful to anyone:

http://github.com/waferbaby/usesthis/

spullara• 14 years ago

Something more like this?

https://bagcheck.com/bag/382-bagcheck-technology

danielweber2• 14 years ago

What in the world is this? Is there actually a start-up that exists to list what technologies it uses?

bithive123• 14 years ago

I think it's a great idea, startups can spend less time and energy to stay "on trend" and focus more on creating new trends.

dannyr• 14 years ago

Seriously, stop the negativity.

HN is for community of people who build. He built something that he thinks will be useful to other people.

If you want to criticize, do it constructively.

What have you built lately?

delluminatus• 14 years ago

I think you might be confused by the name. If you looked at the site you would see that it lists what other startups use.

danielweber2• 14 years ago

Indeed. The incredibly vague titles on HN combined with vague articles are a source of frustration to me. I thought this was just TechCrunch where you get listed via git, but you helped me see what's going on.

I'm sure in their A/B testing people thought it was much cooler to have giant logos on their front page instead of explanatory text.

southphillyman• 14 years ago

Can't front...this made me literally laugh out loud.

dudurocha• 14 years ago

I would love to see some company that handle videos.

daniel_levine11• 14 years ago

would Zencoder qualify? We should have an interview from them in the next week or two

kodablah• 14 years ago

I especially like the interviews that explain why they chose one service over another (even if their views may be incorrect or skewed).

My favorite part, however, is the "What business software do you most wish existed" section. Once more interviews get posted (removing the small sample size), others can use these as startup ideas themselves.

AtTheLast• 14 years ago

I'm just getting into programming and something like this would be really cool. If I saw that my favorite company was using certain technology I might try to learn that first. If you could also take snapshots of a start ups stack it would be cool to see how it evolves. Keep going with this and good luck.

imperialWicket2• 14 years ago

I think this is excellent, and that the general consensus here to add more data structure and drilling/reporting is a great idea.

I was a little disappointed that there isn't an auto-biographical interview. The meta post of "We Use That Uses..." seems like an easy add.

daniel_levine11• 14 years ago

We didn't want to become too enamored with ourselves but i definitely think we will do a meta post.

imperialWicket2• 14 years ago

The first point still stands - I like the product. I also appreciate the humility angle.

Maybe an easter egg, buried on the about page?

praveenhm• 14 years ago

Good collection for a startup

ehutch79• 14 years ago

It's not clear at first that the things we're looking at are the companies, not the elements of the stacks in use. Many of them are themselves parts of other peoples stacks.

I'm worried that this is proof that a lot of the big darlings of the 'industry' are really just feeding off each other's venture capital.

jhuckestein• 14 years ago

It would be very to get reports for these kinds of questions across many industries and company sizes. I especially like the forward-thinking questions such as what do you need. Does anyone know if Gartner or some other company provides this? Otherwise it seems like it would be worth a lot of money to many people

daniel_levine11• 14 years ago

You read our minds

shloimtothee• 14 years ago

Cool idea.

lightyrs• 14 years ago

Somewhat related, I start next week at BestVendor: http://bestvendor.com

kvar• 14 years ago

also like http://www.whohostswhere.com/

sohooo• 14 years ago

I wonder if anybody uses asana[1] to manage there tasks. I saw that it's free for teams up to 30 members.

[1] http://www.asana.com/product

kgosser• 14 years ago

I love this kind of stuff. Keep it coming!

genwin• 14 years ago

Same here. I come to HN in hopes of finding such good info.

Show HN: We Use That. What startups use to get stuff done

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