
Show HN: We Use That. What startups use to get stuff done - daniel_levine
http://weusethat.com/
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danso
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.

~~~
Jun8
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_levine
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.

------
daniel_levine
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>

~~~
jedberg
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.

~~~
SCdF
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.)

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kodablah
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.

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ehutch79
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.

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AtTheLast
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.

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

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jhuckestein
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_levine
You read our minds

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

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

Maybe an easter egg, buried on the about page?

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sohooo
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>

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dudurocha
I would love to see some company that handle videos.

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

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

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praveenhm
Good collection for a startup

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kgosser
I love this kind of stuff. Keep it coming!

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

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kvar
also like <http://www.whohostswhere.com/>

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shloimtothee
Cool idea.

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

~~~
delluminatus
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.

~~~
danielweber
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.

~~~
daniel_levine
Tried a more descriptive title but too long and then i think it got modded.
With so many yc companies it might have seemed like too much pandering.

