I found this not just to be useful for people researching potential competitors or partners from a startup perspective, but it's also useful for someone who's researching a potential employer. It provided a fairly accurate snapshot of my current employer for example.
It might be nice if Honeybadger could also provide links to sources for further reading. Basically a "Google it for me" feature that would save a few more clicks and keystrokes.
If it gets good enough, maybe it could work as a freemium service, should you decide to go that far. But I'm impressed with what you've put together so far.
Appreciate the comment! I like the concept of that, it goes in the same line of thought where I was thinking in the lines of "sites like this / alternatives", can be useful. especially when you are shopping for stuff online.
Sources. I need to know what sources you're getting the information on a site from. Twilio, for example, shows 16 employees which is quite outdated. Just a little footnote would do.
It looks like Traffic section will not be available as I'm over the quota limit from compete.com. Major bummer. Anyone know of any other free alternatives out there to get traffic stats about sites?
Unfortunately compete.com has a 1,000 reqs/day allowance ... so expect to see a lot of "Honeybadger don't care" message. I'm going to try to see how much the api costs and see if I can get the quota removed.
Can someone explain to me the difference between a MVP and a a cool side/personal project?
Jaequerry, I'm going to install it and check it out. The extension looks cool. It solves a pain for me, but not one I would go to the trouble of paying for (sorry). I'm genuinely confused as to what the difference is between all the free non revenue generating chrome extensions made out of love and one made by an HNer that are labeled as potential products (which implies revenue generating to me). Which category are you gearing this toward?
Is your desire to monetize this? If so how? I feel kinda harsh, but there have been a few Show HN MVP posts lately that have been confusing me regarding the line between potential revenue generating products and nifty side projects.
Note: I failed at a project hard this month after pouring 8 months of my life into it... I am probably having one of those days.
I can understand where you are coming from. I feel the same about some MVP posts on HN time to time.
But if you were to ask me, MVP literally is what it says, a minimum viable product. Just a product decent enough so that other people can use it or to check it out.
I know many companies that spends over a year getting ready for MVP, myself included, and it depends on the product. Some products take a long time to get the MVP out and it's just the nature of the business.
As for honeybadger, I put this tool up over two weekends. I use it for my purpose and it's still too early to tell what I can do with it. All I know right now is that, this tool comes in handy for me even at the current state, just pulling up crunchbase data site to site. But learning from today, I realize I am facing an issue in that obtaining the API to get the traffic stats isn't free (there's a daily quota limit) so there does need to be a way for me to offset this cost somehow when I upgrade to premium. I just hope it doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
I'm not sure if the title of the original post was changed or not, but after reading over the linked website, I did not see any mention of him charging for this. It appears to be a free extension that he is sharing.
Don't feel bad. I ask myself this for about 80% of the projects I saw posted here on HN. I used to ask the posters themselves, but I rarely got any answers beyond a vague "we'll sell advertising." Really? Do you have any experience in sales of any kind, let alone advertising sales?
My (somewhat cynical) guess is that what used to be called a "side project" is now getting the title "MVP" or "startup" because it sounds cool.
I should add that this is a general note, not directed at this particular project.
It's a difference in the author's attitude toward the project. A person who feels that they're building an MVP will be looking for ways to monetize it, while for "just a side-project" monetization might be an after-thought or explicitly not an objective.
This is quite a time saver and works well most of the time. However, I get this message for a few sites
"Honeybadger could not retrieve any data about this site or he simply doesn't care."
Thanks rve. For those sites you mentioned, Honeybadger actually cares a lot, but the honeybadger only knows how to pull in data from the crunchbase/compete.com at the moment. It's just an mvp at this stage but expect to see some more as time progresses.
it would be great if you could avoid showing the H in the address bar (or grey it out) for such sites (i can't see how you do this without hitting your server on every site, which i imagine you are trying to avoid - but perhaps you are smarter than me :o)
Sweet. I'm currently looking for a new job, so this will definitely help me evaluate potential companies. Thanks a ton. :)
Edit : Single gripe to an otherwise very cool project. When I click on HB, and switch to another tab to look up the names of the people, it closes out HB for that tab I was on so I have to go through clicking again. Any chance you can get this to persist and maybe add some google anchors to the entities HB provides?
I found that Chrome has a pretty nifty thing called "Webkit notification" that persists across all tabs. Maybe it's something I can try experimenting with just for this purpose.
Awesome! An API is in the works, but in the meantime I suggest just grabbing http://underthesite.com/sites/<domain>.com and DOM parsing the simple markup. Let me know if you have any questions.
On the plus side. I dig the name. Any animal that can chow down a poisonous snake, pass out, then shake it off like it was just a hangover is just fine by me - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c81bcjyfn6U [skip to 2:50]
It might be nice if Honeybadger could also provide links to sources for further reading. Basically a "Google it for me" feature that would save a few more clicks and keystrokes.
If it gets good enough, maybe it could work as a freemium service, should you decide to go that far. But I'm impressed with what you've put together so far.