
Oversaid – Keeping track of who said what in tech - atestu
https://www.oversaid.com
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atestu
Hi all,

Over the past few months I have been building a data pipeline that extracts
quotes and assigns them to company executives, using natural language
processing (spacy).

I am focusing on the tech industry right now which I know pretty well (I used
to work at CB Insights). Every Wednesday I put together a newsletter featuring
interesting quotes and explain why they matter.

Eventually, Oversaid will be a platform that lets you search quotes yourself
and come up with your own analysis, but I wanted to launch something early
while I build out the product so that I can learn from prospective customers.

I'm having a lot of fun writing these up and I hope you enjoy reading them!

Here's the last email I sent: [https://mailchi.mp/ab609ce94c60/bill-gates-
gives-bezos-some-...](https://mailchi.mp/ab609ce94c60/bill-gates-gives-bezos-
some-space)

~~~
mstade
Hey, this looks kind of nice actually. But why hide the content behind an
email sign-up, why not also provide an RSS feed, or at least the latest 1-3
send-outs? If you hadn't provided that link to the latest e-mail I would've
brushed it off entirely and not given it a moments more thought. But you did
provide that link, and I found the content relevant and interesting, and even
dove deeper into a couple of the articles.

The content in this one e-mail is pretty good, but before I sign up I'd like
to see more. But also it's not clear to me that I'm your customer, because
reading your post here it sounds like your customer isn't the consumer of
these feeds but actually the producers? I'm not one of them, so why do you
care about my e-mail address, other than to sell to your actual customers down
the line?

~~~
atestu
Hi, fair question!

The main reason I'm starting this newsletter is to start conversations with
people about this data, which is why I want people's emails.

Right now I'm hoping people are enticed enough to put their email address to
check it out. I might be wrong about that and I might add a link to the latest
email on the home page in the future to see if signups improved.

I have no intention of selling those emails. My goal is to start a Saas
platform based on this data. A very small number of subscribers will hopefully
become clients. The rest can just enjoy the newsletter and help me get the
word out if they feel like it.

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Boldewyn
Sorry in advance for the rather harsh feedback, that follows. It’s basically
my unfiltered impression when I visited your site before reading your
introduction comment here.

This is one of the occasions, when I love the German “every website needs a
‘Who’s responsible for this?’ page” law (a.k.a. “Impressumspflicht”). Why
should I trust your specific selection of quotes and their interpretation? You
even don’t trust your visitors with a “Who are we?” section. For all I know,
this could be a Chinese or Russian troll factory outlet sale.

For this to work (for me, at least) you need to work _way_ more on the site’s
transparency than a more or less default privacy disclaimer and an e-mail
input form: Who am I, what criteria and sources are used for the quotes, how
are they categorized, what do I do to prevent bias... The technology may as
well be sound and state-of-the-art, but if I don’t trust the website, I won’t
sign up to anything.

~~~
web007
Does the commentator matter if the quotes are sourced?

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nikeee
Yes, because it may show the commentators intention and may offer some context
of the interpretation.

Also, a lot of people don't read the source. Or know the context.

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asanwal
Love this idea. And congrats Alex - CB Insights Mafia!

Things that I think folks (aka me) would find interesting:

1\. Impressions/views on tech markets (what they're entering, their views on
growth of markets, etc)

2\. Views on competition esp if they talk isht

3\. Quotes with data. Because some of these products by tech cos are opaque
with stats, if execs drop a figure about growth, that's valuable.

4\. Over time, it'd be cool if you could see what products execs talk about in
their public comments as that might give an indication of what they're focused
on. Suspect they might not talk a lot about specific products so perhaps
wishful thinking.

IMO, personally, I think quotes on politics are boring mainly cuz that doesn't
give insight into the biz and cuz politics is already everywhere.

Enjoying the emails so far and look forward to seeing where Oversaid goes

Congrats again.

~~~
atestu
Thanks Anand!

Love idea #3, I'll have to dig in and see if there's enough of that. Might be
info that's in the article and not in the quote itself.

I'm excited to get into #4 as I go through historical sources and extract old
quotes.

~~~
mayank
For #3, you may want to include guest engineering blog posts shared to
highscalability [1]. There are sometimes growth hints and stats included in
the posts.

[http://highscalability.com/blog/category/example](http://highscalability.com/blog/category/example)

~~~
atestu
Perfect! Thank you

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mdszy
Rich people thoughts delivered directly to your email, oh boy sign me up.

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m00dy
I want to have some fun. There it goes my email...

