This startup tells you when companies try your competitors’ software

http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/20/this-startup-tells-you-when-companies-try-your-competitors-software-and-is-growing-25-a-month/

by jonhearty • 13 years ago

103 45 13 years ago

venturebeat.com

justinzollars• 13 years ago

awesome!

eli• 13 years ago

Well, assuming your competitors' software is something that would be visible on a public website...

tdumitrescu• 13 years ago

...which it increasingly is, as more and more 3rd-party services provide client-side javascript SDKs (head over to a billion young startup sites and see if they don't have a 'mixpanel' object loaded), as well as the telltale signs in markup and CSS. As well as API keys for various services hanging around in their client-side code, which is a little mind-boggling.

Anyway pretty brilliant idea to keep running stats on this stuff. $$$$$

mrfusion2• 13 years ago

Yeah I was wondering that too.

Maybe it's mainly for competitors to apache ...

mrfusion2• 13 years ago

I'd be curious to hear of a couple examples of software large companies buy that is visible from their websites.

grey-area• 13 years ago

Analytics, highcharts, status page, blogging tools, ticketing software, project management software, crm etc, etc... The article gives more than a couple of examples.

Anything that offers third party js or offers hosted solutions is going to be pretty easy to find.

anodari• 13 years ago

By the piechart in venturebeat, I guess it targets e-commerce plataforms and providers.

isalmon4• 13 years ago

It's a small part of it, it also track Web Analytics, Marketing Automation, DNS, CDN - pretty much everything that's trackable

dangrossman• 13 years ago

It looks like they're tracking 25 different categories of companies right now:

http://www.datanyze.com/market-share/

Happy to see my own little analytics services have enough presence in their crawl to show up at least.

west• 13 years ago

Same here!

lucaspiller• 13 years ago

As a provider, do you feel happy that the stats for your service are out in the open? Turning it around, do you feel any value from seeing how you compare to other providers? :)

yunayoon2• 13 years ago

Good to know^^

yunayoon2• 13 years ago

Happy to read.

knes• 13 years ago

Isn't it a bit too late for a sale to be done when the integration is already in place?

isalmon4• 13 years ago

Most companies run free trials before signing up and that's a perfect time to hit the prospect.

im3w1l2• 13 years ago

But will they put the trial code in example.com/index.php ?

How else will you find the signs of it?

boyter2• 13 years ago

I wonder if there is going to be a market in the future like the current SEO one that is all about masking what technology/products you are using. The idea being to deny your competitors from knowing more about you such as from using this product.

joelrunyon2• 13 years ago

like the current SEO one

What tool are you talking about?

boyter2• 13 years ago

I mean the current SEO market. There is a lot of investment in making your website adhere to best SEO practices. If things like this take off (and it appears it is) then there might be a new market to disguise and hide the tech your business runs to avoid providing your competitors with information.

pbreit• 13 years ago

Would companies start adding Datanyze to their robots.txt and would Datanyze respect that?

snake_plissken• 13 years ago

How are they coalescing the code snippets to look for?

sizzle• 13 years ago

coalescing?

joshschreuder• 13 years ago

So do they scrape a competitor's website every day? Or do they respect the robots.txt?

If so, it seems like this would be extremely easy for a competitor to block, and if not, well it's surely a bit shady?

RaphiePS• 13 years ago

I got the sense that they're scraping the customer's site every day. So they might find a new JS library or CSS file from a competitor.

Paypal might want to know when a customer starts trying out Stripe, and KISSmetrics probably cares when people start using Mixpanel.

alttab• 13 years ago

As a customer, I feel unfairly targeted without my participation for the profit of a third party. This makes money, but it does not make the world a better place to want to live in.

im3w1l2• 13 years ago

No, they scrape potential customers' sites. Customers don't have the same incentive to block it.

diziet• 13 years ago

I wonder how different this is from what https://builtwith.com is doing?

cnlwsu• 13 years ago

probably not much beyond how they are marketing it.

infinitone• 13 years ago

And the fact that BuiltWith is free.

benlarcey• 13 years ago

Seems to be much the same, but with a slightly more b2b marketing element and higher pricing with less data! Have used builtwith before and was very happy with their monthly ($299) plan. If anything I'd expect a competitor to offer lower prices.

jfoster• 13 years ago

It sounds like they're focused on the deltas ("site x just added y") whereas builtwith seems more focused on stats and what sites are using now.

samingrassia• 13 years ago

Mixrank(YCS11) provides very similar data in addition to their ad and mobile app datasets.

isalmon4• 13 years ago

I think the biggest difference is that BuiltWith cannot tell when somebody started to use your competitor YESTERDAY. By the time they report it, it's already too late.

Another thing is Datanyze is more enterprise oriented (Salesforce integration, People/Company information, etc)

garazy• 13 years ago

Hi nice article congrats on the coverage - we do have this functionality for anyone interested - http://trendspro.builtwith.com/pro-features#alerts

joelrunyon2• 13 years ago

“So we can tell their competitors, and they can call those companies, and the sales rep can say: “I see you’re checking out our competitor’s solution right now … why don’t you try ours as well?” That’s pure marketing magic.

"Pure marketing magic."

I'm in marketing and I understand why that might be a useful followup, but if you step out of your marketing shoes - I think I would simply find that creepy.

sfall• 13 years ago

they worded it horribly but it would be a good time to cold call them but not mention the cometitors trial

cl8ton• 13 years ago

Not sure how accurate this can be if you have everything behind a secure login.

We have clients trying our SaaS software but nothing is on their website to indicate such, its all securely hosted by us via login.

So unless they are sniffing traffic, reading our secure web logs or our potential clients are posting on social media, there is no way they would know.

throwaway1220• 13 years ago

Sorry, creating a throwaway account for this since I mostly lurk on HN.

The code used to build Datanyze was stolen from a pre-existing internal tool Ilya was hired to work on at his previous company. All of the original UI looked exactly the same, it tracked all the same services, and the domain was registered while he was still an employee.

A lawsuit was filed, but was dropped because the company was working on closing an acquisition anyway. (http://www.rfcexpress.com/lawsuits/other-statutory-actions/c...)

Just wanted to get this out there so people know they are supporting blatant IP theft.

yajoe• 13 years ago

Interesting story. It seems the case went to arbitration due to a clause in the Ilya Semin employment contract and thus out of the light of regular courts:

http://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/candce/5:2012cv0...

blueskin_• 13 years ago

IP theft? Is that like BGP hijacking?

timpattinson• 13 years ago

IP = intellectual property

Kiro• 13 years ago

I thought he looked like a gangster.

isalmon4• 12 years ago

Hello, everyone. Founder of Datanyze here. I just wanted to respond to this comment as I did not notice it until recently. This throw-away account was wisely created to avoid a libel counter-lawsuit. Torbit indeed tried to sue me and the company...unsuccessfully. Their accusations were ridiculous from the beginning and my position was very open at all times. I offered them to do a code comparison or anything else it would take to prove that I did not steal any of Torbit's IP. Datanyze was written using a totally different set of tools. They refused and kept throwing money into the lawsuit. Torbit was basically claiming that they invented web crawling and predictably failed. The judge has made his decision, but some (not all) of Torbit's investors and employees keep trolling using these 'throwaway' accounts.

This startup tells you when companies try your competitors’ software

Related Stories