Show HN: See what the best startups in the world are using

http://leanstack.io/cloudstacks/

by yonasb • 13 years ago

261 87 13 years ago

leanstack.io

pavanky• 13 years ago

Many of these companies are not "startups" anymore.

Fir example, Ebay ?

suyash5• 13 years ago

well most of them are startups.

mosselman2• 13 years ago

I usually make more sure than 'most of x is y' before I claim certain things. This is just hipsterism. Ebay, LinkedIn, Mozilla? Are you kidding?

While in New York I went to some networking events where people said 'I work for a startup', 'How long have you guys been around?', '4 years', 'That doesn't really sound like a startup.', 'I know, but we FEEL like a startup.'... A*holes.

sspiff4• 13 years ago

I agree. Calling Intuit a startup is like calling USPS an up and coming disrupting force in the mailing business.

suyash5• 13 years ago

This is great insight tool for marketers/business developers. Why did you choose to make this information public? How did you curate all the products/services of all these startups?

austengary4• 13 years ago

Very nice. Throw some charts and graph up in this bitch, compare against time for popularity. I like data.

jerrya• 13 years ago

Mash it up with Crunchbase (?) and see if there is any meaningful correlation between stack and funding rounds, stack and IPO, stack and aquihire, ...

austengary4• 13 years ago

Would die to see this. OP get on it.

In all seriousness, I would PAY to see this. I would pay extra if you add hosted graph widgets that empirically conclude the largest reciprocal relation between valuation and an IIS/MSSQL stack.

suyash5• 13 years ago

Getting a lot of 503's, please fix the problem. Seems another website not being able to handle HN 1st page traffic.

yonasb• 13 years ago

Sorry everyone. Just switched to nearlyfreespeech, thought they could handle it. Trying to work through it now.

joewee4• 13 years ago

Try cloudflare?

asmosoinio• 13 years ago

What kind of things are you running there? I have some small not so important sites on NearlyFreeSpeech and have been happy -- would be nice to hear about their limits.

dewey• 13 years ago

Just FYI: http://leanstack.io/soundcloud/ "SoundCloud is the worldâ€™s leading"

mflindell• 13 years ago

Seems like its time to upgrade your own stack. Getting some 503 errors on some pages.

markwakeford• 13 years ago

influx of HN users ?, I am getting the same. Refresh sometimes fixes it.

joewee4• 13 years ago

I assumed you would pull the javascript embedded in the target sites along with DNS records to see what services they are using. But where do you get Anyperks data from? Are you manually adding this? [EDIT to make more PC]

austengary4• 13 years ago

They're manually adding this data.

joewee4• 13 years ago

OK. But why did I get a down vote for that? My point is there are probably more optimal ways to add the data than manually gathering it. Nice effort though, of course.

suyash5• 13 years ago

Btw orignal post from the co-founder Yonas, seem to have no traffic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243671 (89 days ago)

garazy• 13 years ago

Hey yonasb this is really cool, if you'd like to automate it a bit let me know we've got an API for this (api.builtwith.com) and we've got free attribution version that you could use.

pyvek• 13 years ago

You might want to optimize those images (startup logos). Many of them are like 175 KB each.

PavlovsCat2• 13 years ago

And pngslim turns some of them into 3-5 KB files without changing even a pixel... by the time I saw more than a white blank screen, it had already downloaded 2 megabytes, with no end in sight. That's just nuts.

Everyone, always: If you make websites on a super fast connection, get a proxy (or VM) to simulate a slow connection...! You will learn a lot of things which will become easy habits quickly, and then you can turn off the proxy (turn it on again occasionally).

olegp• 13 years ago

We are working on something similar at StartHQ. In addition to listing which services any given company uses, we've also been thinking of listing the technologies the services themselves use, e.g. https://starthq.com/apps/?technology=mongodb

Is this something you'd find useful?

gearoidoc• 13 years ago

Interesting yes. Useful.....not so much.

The ability to view a company's stack changes over time might prove more useful. For example, what stack did Company X use to get to 10k users, 100k users etc.

Given enough accurate data then it may be possible for a visitor to predict any performance bottlenecks that a technology may enforce over time and what technologies to use to mitigate said problems.

daniel-levin• 13 years ago

This is pretty cool. There was a service a while back which seems to have died called weusethis. It also had interviews with the engineers at the startups detailing how they used their tech stacks.

zaveri• 13 years ago

I think you are referring to: http://weusethat.com

Popcorned• 13 years ago

It's not dead. It's alive and kicking: http://usesthis.com/

stevejalim• 13 years ago

Your Dropbox link is broken (/dropboxc vs /dropbox)

PavlovsCat2• 13 years ago

You should run those .pngs through pngslim or similar :/

moondowner• 13 years ago

This should be 'See what services the best startups in the world are using'.

mef• 13 years ago

Yeah, the use of the word "stack" in the domain is a bit inaccurate.

arocks• 13 years ago

Exactly. It would be great if we can see which languages and other server side technologies they use.

mcintyre1994• 13 years ago

www.builtwith.com seems to be pretty accurate, probably a good starting point for that information.

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

Agreed. I was expecting languages used, server environment, etc. A little disappointed.

cerales• 13 years ago

It's especially misleading because "services" like Amazon RDS and the provisioning systems offered by the big IAAS providers are listed and the self-hosted (+- open source) alternatives don't get mentioned.

sspiff4• 13 years ago

I'm sorry, but can we stop calling these startups?

Companies like Twitter, eBay, GitHub, Mozilla, Netflix and Atlassian are past the startup stage by now. Many of them have been market leaders for years.

Calling Intuit a startup isn't even stretching it anymore. They're 30 years old and have a revenue of over $4B.

I realize HN thinks startups are sexy, but these have no business being labeled startups. If Intuit is a startup, what does it take to be a called a mature company?

capex• 13 years ago

these companies may not be startups, but they provide a useful info: what large tech companies are paying for.

sspiff4• 13 years ago

I'm not disputing that this information may be useful. I'm just saying it's poorly labeled to look more attractive to certain types of visitors.

Replacing "startups" in the title with "(technology) companies" would be more accurate, but probably reduce traffic.

ankitml• 13 years ago

the title is still misleading.

onedev• 13 years ago

I came in here just to say this.

I'm sorry but on what planet is eBay a startup?

detst3• 13 years ago

[Meta-comment warning]

This comment is in the same category as the one PG talks about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920

I don't want to pick on you because there might be a place for your comment but it's not at the top; we need to stop voting these to that position (I'm not encouraging down-votes).

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

Firstly, sspiff isn't dismissing the article. sspiff is making a meta-comment about the article's choices in presenting itself.

Secondly, if it shouldn't be at the top, what should be? I think you are looking at spiff's comment in a vacuum and saying, "This is not platinum-quality comment material!". But there isn't any platinum-quality comment in this page of comments yet. You can't upvote the rightful comment to the top if it doesn't exist yet.

dinkumthinkum• 13 years ago

I get that this is an issue that bothers PG. I also get that this particular comment you're singling out might be an example of it, but I'm not sure. However, I'm not convinced that every instance that looks like the alleged problem is really a problem in itself and, perhaps I am in a minority, do not believe this sort of thing is the downfall of HN.

For me, I think the issues that make discussions go "downhill" are less to do with criticism and much more to do with prevalence of group-think. I don't think the prevailing wisdom that pointing out fundamental errors of facts of faulty arguments is a bad thing, even if they are not the main point of the article. I think there is edifying value in such criticism. Now, it is true that an article may have value beyond it's minor or major inherent fallacies and errors. Criticism is not censorship and it does not prevent others from reading and discussing other parts of an article if they are interesting and fodder for good conversation. Nevertheless, I don't think being overly generous or charitable necessarily the best method or should be enforced via an algorithm or community brow beating. No one wants inane Reddit conversations but I don't think most want sterile group-think or hug sessions either.

HN has all kinds of users with different backgrounds and some users are very knowledgeable and critical and we can learn a lot of have great discussion regarding the criticism as the more traditionally positive style conversations. If we eliminated this sort of discussion from HN, I think it would make things much worse than better, Valley group-think would rule the day. One thing I think users that come to HN expect is good information either in the articles or to find the proper information in the comments. If we let erroneous information stand because of we want to be nice or follow Atwood's "ruthlessly civil" or whatever the hell his ideology is, I think we would less a great benefit of HN discussions and users, particularly less experienced ones, would be worse off. If I'm new, and I see an HN submission that says eBay and Netflix are startups and that clearly is a significant part of the article and as well there are many comments on HN, but with no contention of that issue anywhere to be found, I may well think that the community consensus is that eBay is a startup.

On other articles that get submitted, I may conclude that the smart people on HN think all manner of pseudoscience and homeopathy are generally accepted, if I wasn't aware of there being new a impetus to avoid criticism.

I personally don't want what is suggested by this random author: http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2013/03/mrs-feynmans-advic...

>Is your problem that the hearty self congratulation mutual admiration society on Hacker News (now there's a middlebrow dismissal!) thinks that something you like isn't as new and shiny as something you don't care about?

(oddly enough I think that article is relevant to the original topic) I think that comment is somewhat unfair to HN but if we are not careful and are to act to hastily toward criticism we may just end up with a "mutual admiration society." Let's no do that. :)

mgkimsal2• 13 years ago

I realize HN thinks startups are sexy, but these have no business being labeled startups. If Intuit is a startup, what does it take to be a called a mature company?

-------

2 decades after the IPO should be the cutoff point. After that, you're "mature"; before that, you're still considered a 'scrappy startup' which might fold at any moment without the day to day pivoting of the charismatic founders in their garage. ;)

lazugod• 13 years ago

Whichever company realizes it can brand itself as "newer than startups" will have a marketing boon.

fuzzywalrus• 13 years ago

Here here! I visited the above link and my immediate reaction was, "These aren't startups..."

SiVal• 13 years ago

I think that sometime in the mid- to late 90s, when there was an explosive land grab on the Web and every Web-based company was a new startup because the Web itself was a new startup, the word startup ended up meaning Web-based company to a lot of people.

why-el• 13 years ago

This is similar in spirit to weusethat.com (itself modeled after usesthis.com), which I really liked but they stopped updating the content mid-past-december. Hopefully leanstack continues.

acjohnson55• 13 years ago

Cool info, but the presentation could use some help. The pageloads to view companies are slow, and once they show up, the grid of technologies is not the most thoughtful way to organize the data. It's not clear to me whether order has any meaning.

There's got to be a better way to categorize the technologies used. Perhaps separating the core web request stack and from the support components would be a start. Some aggregate information across all of the companies would be useful as well.

Goranek• 13 years ago

Wow Github is on Rackspace?

lewisflude• 13 years ago

I don't think your use of hamburger buttons is appropriate. Maybe a normal button would be better?

rachelbythebay• 13 years ago

Good people can make amazing stuff happen with any stack.

PommeDeTerre• 13 years ago

But that's only part of the picture. It's also important to consider how much effort they need to expend to do so, and how many resources are consumed in the process.

Truly good developers will know to discard poor tools in favor of better ones, and will be eager to do so. They don't have emotional attachments to, say, Ruby on Rails or MongoDB, or some other piece of software or service. Once the tool becomes insufficient, it's gone. In many cases, this is obvious right away, so the tool isn't even used in the first place.

ParadisoShlee• 13 years ago

Needs more software.

calinet6• 13 years ago

Pretty cool showcase-style site; I could easily see finding a service here that I didn't know everyone else was using. Every software company starting out really should look through these services and others like them, just see if there's something interesting.

BTW -- Unicode fail at: "99designs is the worldâ€™s largest..." and other places. Check your page's UTF-8 support.

n1c• 13 years ago

Nice; I started doing something similar at thestack.io but lost momentum.

riteshpatel• 13 years ago

The 'Submit Your Startup' form doesn't validate because there's no way to say no to the 'Is this a cloud service intended for developers?' field (because it's a checkbox rather than radio buttons).

moe• 13 years ago

Interesting data but worst presentation ever.

It's tabular data. Put it in a plain old HTML table so we can make sense of it.

Zolomon• 13 years ago

Would be interesting to see a recursive descent (probably wrong term, my swedish is getting in the way) of this; Twitter uses Pingdom, now I want to click on Pingdom to see what they use.

Also, a graph with dependencies between these companies would be cool to see. Security companies might want to give the node with most edges a call or two.

dakinsloss• 13 years ago

In the same vein, sign up at swRev.com to find out when we launch with a consumer reports for software. Should be this summer.

salimmadjd• 13 years ago

Great idea, but kind of disappointed in the data. For a site called leanstack, I don't see any of the used stack. What DB they're using, which framework, etc.

for example, I know Instagram uses python, redis and Postgres. Pinterest python/django but moving to flask and using MySQL. But I'm curious to know about other sites.

Cryode• 13 years ago

Same; I don't associate "stack" with cloud services / SaaS / etc. While I did learn about a few services I didn't know about that seem quite useful, it wasn't what I expected.

markoa• 13 years ago

I have a validation bug to report: "Is your service currently in Beta?" is a required field however there is no way to answer with no to that.

whichdan• 13 years ago

The Squarespace link goes to /squarespace/c instead of /squarespacec, and incorrectly shows the profile for Cage.

Pent• 13 years ago

There is a typo on the Braintree company information page. Right at the beginning.

waltz• 13 years ago

It would be cool to check all the startups that use a certain tool.

outside1234• 13 years ago

Is there a site that talks about the technology in the stacks in use by startups instead of the cloud and SaaS platforms they are using?

clement75009• 13 years ago

Many comments here are focusing on negative stuff, so I wanted to say congrats, I find this website incredibly interesting and useful! I learned a lot browsing through it!

ljd• 13 years ago

I would love to see someone do a sort of trade deficit analysis to see how many products one of these companies uses versus how many other companies use them on this site. Obviously everyone will have far more export than import but perhaps the ratio would provide some interesting insight into how a company operates or how competitive their industry is.

It would just be a fun fishing expeditions with the data.

qompiler• 13 years ago

But what does leanstack use? ;)

Show HN: See what the best startups in the world are using

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