ggiaco

Most extensions do work that way, but if privacy or resource-draining background processes are a concern you should check out sitestacks.com - the crawl is only run on command and from the SiteStacks servers.

Troy, We don't believe we're running afoul of TOS and have good reason to believe this. We want to add value by mentioning product handles once to generate awareness about their profile and their ability to curate their presence in front of a large buyer community.

Of course, Twitter is free to change its mind and decide we're treading on the wrong side of the line and then ban the account or ask us to stop; we would immediately comply.

FWIW - we were already thinking of cutting back since it doesn't convert that well anyway. Feel free to report the account though. I kind of wish you'd done that instead of letting the mob loose. It's probably for the best that you're not actually a journalist.

A Google search will generally turn up sites like Siftery, among others ('A vs B' is one of our very top organic search traffic drivers).

Hope you'll take a look at the substitutes data specifically though. We're showing companies that are actually switching from one product to another, and then rolling that up to showcase some trends and insights.

The posts to HN that you're mentioning are interviews with founders/creators of the products. They're actually similar in nature to interviews posted from other sources (e.g. Indie Hackers). Here's an example: https://siftery.com/stories/monitor-online-mentions-of-your-...

I know when we post new ones, so I can add them here first. It's not the only type of content I post, and the HN community can decide if they're worthy of attention or not.

Point well taken.

Our approach is to minimize the need to sign up at all - a lot of Siftery, including all of these alternatives/substitues pages, is fully accessible without logging in.

We only suggest that you sign up (with a non-personal email), where we think we can meaningfully improve the experience by personalizing the experience to your company, and this also allows you to contribute verified data.

We stopped supporting personal email signups because there's not very much we can do to improve the experience in that case, so why bother? We can spare you a meaningless drip campaign.

You can see this philosophy at work clearly in our Product Recommenations AI (https://siftery.com/personalized-recommendations) where you can choose your own adventure by signing up or not.

Yeah, we decided to de-clutter the LP (would you say we overdid it?), but the About Us link is on close to 1M pages throughout the site. Not hiding :) https://siftery.com/about-us

We use Intercom quite a lot at Siftery. What would you say are the top alternatives/substitutes if not what's listed?

Here's what we have for the "substitues" calculation: "When companies stop using Intercom, its most frequent substitutes are Drift (44.9% of the time), followed by Zendesk (9%), and by Zendesk Chat (Formerly Zopim) (7%)"

(Drift as the closest substitute closely matches my experience investigating options in this space; other products are more like partial or imperfect substitutes)

The alternatives ranked by NPS include Appcues, Chameleon, Clickhelp, Tawk.to, Olark, Freshdesk. Intercom is multi-faceted and difficult product to categorize, but all of those products are alternatives for some of its functionality.

Are there other products you think definitely belong here and were missed? Not trying to come off as defensive by the way, just trying to really understand where's the opportunity for improvement here.

Does Stackshare programmatically track when companies start and stop using software products and run some calculations on top of that to predict the most likely substitutes?

What we're doing with Substitutes is to complement the NPS ranking with a mapping of actual switch behavior. It's entirely possible that a lower-rated product is a much more popular substitute for a product if it's a better fit (e.g. targeting SMBs or Enterprise).

An example: In the Recruiting/ATS space, Greenhouse and Lever are each other’s most significant competitor. Meanwhile, companies looking to replace iCIMS by far most frequently end up using Oracle Taleo (and vice versa)

We generally see company size and employee count is highly predictive of which products they’ll consider and we can see a progression as companies grow out of services catering to SMBs to more fully-featured alternatives.

Search for the top alternatives for over 40k B2B software products.

We're doing a couple of things here that this community might find interesting:

A) Actually tracking when companies start and stop using a piece of software

B) Using this "switch" data to calculate a probability that the switches are a true substitution and then rank the top substitutes for reach product - based on actual switching behavior. 
We use a weighted average where the switches are weighted according to how much the product’s categories overlap (every product is tagged with 1-5 tags). For example, Intercom and Drift are closely related so when a company stops using Intercom and starts using Drift that's heavily weighted. However, a percentage of the companies who stop using Intercom and then start using Zendesk are effectively substituting Intercom with Zendesk.

- You can use search to find a product, or start with the ones below:

https://siftery.com/intercom/alternatives https://siftery.com/mandrill/alternatives https://siftery.com/shopify/alternatives https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives https://siftery.com/lever/alternatives https://siftery.com/icims/alternatives



Note: There's switch data for roughly 1k products (out of a total of 40k)

Our focus has been more on business tech, but we're expanding coverage into cms, libraries etc.

Here's some data we have on CMSs currently

https://siftery.com/categories/content-management-system-cms... https://sitestacks.com/products/wordpress https://siftery.com/wordpress

Thanks for the feedback. Sounds like NameCheap should be picked up as a registrar; we'll take a look!

On the second point, we should clarify that the data is meant to be domain-wide (except for the real-time mapper for domains not already in our universe - there we only look at the first page so we can return data quickly).

You're right. We'll fix that. Thanks!

Thanks for that piece of feedback. Team's looking into it.

Yeah, and they're not the only provider you can point to. Some competition pushes everyone to do better?

Here's my pitch for why you might want to use SiteStacks with a browser extension:

Lightweight: The extension is only 25 KB (mostly images). The one-click technology lookup runs entirely on our servers. No content insertions or background processes to slow down your browsing. It's like your favorite search engine.

Secure: SiteStacks doesn't download any of your browsing data - only the active tab URL is passed along.

Great product coverage: SiteStacks is supported by Siftery and its library of over 40,000 products. SiteStaks includes data for some products that isn't publicly available anywhere else.

Best-in-class accuracy: The data on SiteStacks benefits from validation form the awesome Siftery community. This built-in constant feedback loop helps us identify data collection methods that are yielding bad data and ultimately promotes best-in-class data accuracy.

Got you covered https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sitestacks-for-chrome

What's the URL? We can report back exactly why it was picked up.

Even if we're wrong, it's exactly this kind of feedback loop that's built into the product and ultimately helps make the data better for everyone else.

Others to consider are SiteStacks (http://sitestacks.com) and Wappalyzer (http://wappalyzer.com)

Is it though? Giving it until 2020 might end up being generous http://productgraveyard.com/products/flash.html

Same thing applies Mexico -- if you're not involved in the drug trade or law enforcement, your odds of getting killed are almost nil. Mexico welcomes over 20M tourists a year from all over and almost all make it back home safely.

The richer the country and the stronger its institutions, the less likely cartels will take over sure, but when $40 billion USD in yearly profit (in the US drug trade) are up for grabs, someone's going to be stepping up.

Stop it in Colombia and it shifts to Mexico. Stop the routes along all of Mexico and the Caribbean and who knows - no reason to be so sure it absolutely couldn't happen in Canada.

The richer the country and the stronger its institutions, the less likely cartels will take over sure, but when $40 billion USD in yearly profit (in the US drug trade) are up for grabs, someone's going to be stepping up.

Well, then they essentially become above board legitimate businesses competing on their ability to provide a service in the market.

Legalization implies regulation of some sort (e.g. like alcohol). You could also have a government-run monopoly.

The point is to remove the billions of dollars in black-market profits which give rise to criminal organizations who cannot depend on the law to resolve their disputes and must therefore "make their own law".

No it isn't. It's a huge nightmare and this is why even current and former Mexican Presidents are calling for legalization - despite pressure from the U.S. against it.

https://qz.com/874497/mexico-is-moving-toward-medical-mariju... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/former-preside...

Just started this today so it's a WIP. So far we've picked up 291 unique products across 103 companies.

With PH there are some similarities (both are product feeds after all), but substantial differences in the feed mechanics and results. Siftery's ranking is based on recommendations coming from verified business users and the products listed all have business use cases. Products also have a persistent identity (i.e. a new one is not created each time a product is created).

Ultimately, the are different products at the top of each feed, as would be expected from their different use cases and different (if to some degree overlapping) audiences.

We think Siftery Trending is a place where b2b products can go after launching and "graduating" from a community like Product Hunt. One way we're thinking about it is that Product Hunt is to high school what Siftery Trending is to college. There's a time and place for both!

That's my take, but additional thoughts/feedback appreciated.

Thanks. Great link. It does seem that having multiple feeds is emerging as a consensus suggestion.

Separately, one thing I'd be excited about is filtering by users at companies in a certain grouping (e.g. by Geo, industry, or some other affiliation like YC or 500 Startups alums). Siftery can do this since users have verified business e-mails.

Does this sound interesting?

Yeah, that makes sense.

Adding additional filters is fairly easy, but I think we decided against it thinking that "no one" would find them or be interested.

Maybe we're wrong about that (there seems to be demand here, and HN seems to be doing just fine with multiple feeds/filters).

We're looking into ways to improve the ranking, so thanks for sharing that teej. We actually started with a normalized and more complex algo that was more along the lines of what you suggest, but the resulting feed had mostly random products and was not very helpful for more casual users. It also made it difficult to understand why a product was ranked. I think you're right that as it stands, we can do more to surface younger products. So far, we're doing it manually with "wildcards".

I mentioned in another comment that one of our bets is that since a user can only recommend a product once, over time the more obvious products should find it relatively more difficult to get new recommendations and newer products will surface.

e.g., if we did a filter of recommendations by YC companies (or more extreme - YC founders), then something like Slack would be popular the first month, but then have few remaining votes. Thoughts?