Posted by shpran 4 days ago
The original motivation was frustration with how difficult it can be to find information on early-stage startups. Most databases need accounts, or subscriptions, ro just feel too cluttered. I wanted a website that felt like Wikipedia, no accounts, no subscriptions, no weird metrics, just go in, the info is on the page.
The project is still very early, but currently includes:
Startup profiles Search and filtering Company categorization Public API (in progress)
I'm especially interested in feedback on:
What information you look for when researching startups Features missing from existing startup databases API use cases
I'd love to hear feedback.
It's easy to scrape YC startups from https://www.ycombinator.com/companies. Scrape that and a dozen other investors' portfolio pages and you'll have a useful fraction of startups.
Or are you talking about some other API?
I expect "verified" to mean that either you or someone else has confirmed it, not just that an LLM was asked for one.
You could have a "traction" stat and ask for a JS snippet be installed on homepages or a set of pages. Old school and unreliable. Registered users is also a good way to assess traction. Not sure how that information could be readily obtained.
In my previous comment I mentioned attaching a crypto address to domains - you could do that too. That'd be interesting. One feature you could add long-term is crowdfunding. Either for new features, code releases, media, documents - whatever.
Crowdfunding activity on startups and individuals would be a great way to measure traction.
I think it's important to attach a bunch of people to any given startup (you've already done it.) Going forward, I'd expect more startups to behave like bands. Any 1 person can be attached to a number of bands, but eventually one of these bands will make it big and the members will get locked-in. Staff also bring users, credibility and hence traction early on.
"If you want something done, ask a busy person."
Build trust by: truly making this a public good, by open sourcing it. Be the maitnainer. Data dump every week as a zipball/tarball. These will ensure you can't rugpull.
With this trust, offer an extension (open source of course) to all, which whever a user goes through crunchbase, traxn, etc, sends any factual data (hence non-copyrightable) to you. If you gained trust, I would also do this.
You get the right to be a maintainer, and figure out if you also want to make a business with it on top.
https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/overview/auth/oauth
Would be a good way to have others absorb some of your inference limits and fill in missing data that they need. A call to action on a blank search would be a great flow.