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Show HN: Founderkit – Startup tool recommendations from 1,000 YC founders
- LisaQFetterman 10y agoomg!!!! Very cool. I need this.
- liveink 10y agoGreat seeding network, resulted in a much stronger signal to noise ratio. Definitely going to be using this!
- jorazzle 10y agoA real problem for startups. People waste too much time on routine stuff.
- minimaxir 10y agoThis is obviously modeled after Product Hunt with similar rating/review systems, and suffers from the same issues regarding rating/review quality. Despite the emphasis on "unbiased" reviews, the reviews/comments (example: https://founderkit.com/biz/slack https://founderkit.com/biz/slack) boil down to "I used it and it's good" which doesn't help anyone, and is essentially a manifestation of confirmation bias and makes the entire thing a popularity contest, not a measurement of quality. Also, giving each tool a ranking from 1-10 when the only way to vote is Like/Neutral/Dislike is misleading.
- ryanmickle 10y agoThere's a surprising number of very insightful reviews. Founders are busy, so short reviews are still incredible signal compared to everything else out there. We're totally open to suggestions. This is a huge problem for founders, one that wastes days, weeks, or months of indecision or rework.
- benologist 10y agoYou say founders are busy then you say they're busy letting fairly mundane decisions on what online services to use waste days, weeks or months. Why would someone who's burning runway like that make a good customer? It sounds like you've honed in on the failed startups and made an entertainment product for them. How do you get a piece of their VC pie before they close up?
- ed 10y agoI mean, no one is forcing you to use this product :) but I actually find the ratings to be really directionally accurate, which considers them in aggregate, and use this site all the freaking time. Yesterday I needed a decent conference calling tool, I went with the first one I found and the reliability was terrible - I know there are a million sites out there for this but good luck googling "best free conference call." One founder kit search later I jumped on uber conference and rescued the call. It didn't matter that I was using the best, most deserving startup, I just needed something that worked...
- minimaxir 10y ago> I actually find the ratings to be really directionally accurate That is the definition of confirmation bias. > I know there are a million sites out there for this but good luck googling "best free conference call." OK. https://imgur.com/a/f9JQ4 https://imgur.com/a/f9JQ4 (Which more or less further supports my point of this being a popularity contest)
- ghughes 10y agoWhy do I have to sign up to see the reviews?
- minimaxir 10y agoThe copy is misleading and you do not need to sign up; you can just click the link in the toolbar: https://founderkit.com/reviews https://founderkit.com/reviews
- ryanmickle 10y agoSigning up shows you all of the reviews. Appreciate the feedback, no deception intended.
- gumby 10y agoClassic antipattern. I don't really understand it: if you're willing to allow unrestricted reading, why pretend you don't? It just drives away page views.
- bbcbasic 10y agoLike ExpertsExchange "tired of scrolling?"
- sfrailsdev 10y agoI feel like reviews really need an A/B test at the very least, because someone comparing and contrasting two products gives you an idea of the relative importance of different features.
- sixQuarks 10y agoOnce again, a tool recommendation site that doesn't do anything different or unique than what's been done or what's out there now. This is just like BestVendor.com (site was sold a few years ago, but more of an acquihire). There are tons of these types of review sites. http://www.stacklist.com/ http://www.stacklist.com/ https://startupresources.io/ https://startupresources.io/ https://stackshare.io/ https://stackshare.io/ And they're all pretty much the same. They're mostly just a list of tools, sorted by popularity or recommendations. I'm sorry, but this is just not that useful for me. It still requires a ton of time to look through and research the tools. Sure, it's useful just to help start your research, but it ends there. I've researched this space in-depth and have a solution that's different, but way more useful. I'm just too busy working on other stuff to tackle it right now. --------------- To give you guys an idea of what I'm thinking, here is a tool comparison that is much more useful to me. https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/five-app-prototyping-tools-compared-form-framer-origami-pixate-proto-io-c2acc9062c61 https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/five-app-prototyping-t... It's ONE guy that researched 5 competing prototyping tools with a specific task in mind. He lists the pros and cons of each, and goes into some detail on each one and how they performed with his particular task. I wouldn't be copying this exact format, but the takeaway here is that it's ONE person that has researched ALL or most of the tools within a particular category, and had an actual task to accomplish, so they have a much better idea of what each does, its strengths and weaknesses. The problem with founderkit and similar sites is that the reviewers have not researched all the tools within a category, so they're only giving you their viewpoint on one tool. If anyone is interested in my idea, let me know. I may devote some resources to it if I find the right people.
- stunod 10y agoHi sixQuarks, Really appreciate you mentioning Stacklist here. Your comment has given me a lot to think about in how we can provide value to other entrepreneurs and founders. Would love to connect and learn more about your idea. Email me at danny@stacklist.com.
- StuieK 10y agoI'm biased but we found that it's so incredibly rare that a single person has extensive experience with all the options, esp when it comes to electronics. We went in a different direction than reviews, slightly more collaborative: https://www.slant.co/topics/341/~2d-game-engines https://www.slant.co/topics/341/~2d-game-engines edit: another problem with a single person owning the comparison is keeping it up to date.
- lowglow 10y agoI think my biggest issue with all of these things is they tend to only serve YC companies and not the multitude of other independent hackers out there outside of that pipeline. I've just stopped sharing stuff like this because it hurts the entire ecosystem long term. shrug
- ryanmickle 10y agoHey lowglow, it actually started/was tested by YC founders, but we just onboarded several new founder networks in the weeks leading to launch, including First Round, Slow Ventures, Social Capital, Fuel Capital. There are many, many brilliant founders contributing (also note that ratings are hidden while written reviews show by whom they are posted).
- netik 10y agoIs there any reason why there isn't a single security utility, aside from password managers on this list? It seems that security is an afterthought at most startups.
- ihunter 10y agoPeople have requested it. Only now are there a handful of security service startups as opposed to good ole devops service providers. We split categories when we get enough companies to support it. Let me know if you have a list and I'll happily get this in there, I'd love to have more security products as well.
- swah 10y agoThe recommendation site I wanted to have was http://stackparts.com/ http://stackparts.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2993371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2993371) but nothing became of it... Maybe there are just too many options nowadays for a visualization of possible stacks to be useful. cc @joshu
- ihunter 10y agoThis is a great idea. I think it can be done
- ares2012 10y agoShockingly, YC companies are always at the top of the lists in the categories they service. Smells like a growth hack to me.
- ryanmickle 10y agoIt's no secret that YC services are commonly used by YC founders, especially since founders of the big startups are often super generous with credits, to help founders just starting out. Nothing weird happening here, there are several categories where the commonly assumed best YC solution isn't #1, or even close. That made us realize we had something.
- baccredited 10y agoWhy do they need my email address during signup? Isn't access to my twitter account enough?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rrggrr 10y agoWhen I need a tool I check Zapier first. Why? Because I know I can easily integrate with other systems and because I get almost the full lay of the land. That said... without knowing the size of the user base, how much cash these companies have, etc. whose to say even 1/2 of them will be around 5 years. These tools need to be used and integrated with great caution.
- rahul71 10y agointernal server error when I tried to add myself
- rahul71 10y agoServer error when I tried to register
- ihunter 10y agoServers are getting slammed, try again just spooled up more.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mtw 10y agoI hate how they force users to sign up. You need to give access to your Twitter and LinkedIn. Who knows what kind of data mining they do. Also: dude, you already have my twitter, why do you still need my email address? Twitter already gives you that. What If I don't have a title? Why is that required? No thanks
- andyfleming 10y agoIt only required one of the connections for me. I used twitter, which in my view, is better than Facebook and LinkedIn as far as privacy concerns.
- endlessvoid94 10y agoFinding tools is (unfortunately) not the hard part about being a founder.
- ravishah 10y agoApplication error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.
- ihunter 10y agoThanks Ravi, seems we inundated the middle tier Heroku postgres servers. Bumped up and site seems to be humming again.
- kriro 10y ago"Beta tested and used by almost 1,000 YC founders" Most things I have clicked on have about 10 ratings tops and one line reviews. Even as a quantitative tool it's not that useful (yet). Would be interested in seeing some stats. From a first glance I expect a correlation between number of ratings and positive ratings. At least the subcategories I clicked through all followed that pattern. I'd also love a filter on the subpages like: https://founderkit.com/biz/optimizely https://founderkit.com/biz/optimizely where I can filter the negative feedback to the top (especially once there's a lot more data). I personally make most decisions after reading negative feedback and only roughly browsing the positive feedback. Edit: I'd also like to read a bit more on the reasoning of the ranking. Why was this system (popularity, score, recency) picked over purely ranking on score?
- annastil 10y agowhenever you're having issues contacting a real hacker, you can hire one or findout more on hiring a pro so as to get all your anon jobs completed. 19283233115. text or call
- johanneskanybal 10y agoI liked it. In particular the categories which I think a lot of really small companies might find useful. Needs to be 40 times more users and less yc backed bias but still ok.
- funkyy 10y agoThere is not enough data on review list. You need to click the product sometimes to see what it does. There should be 3-4 sentence, non-biased, non-advertisement description.