Show HN: Siftery Trending Products
siftery.comIt's always interesting to see what tools people are using, but to be honest I was a little disappointed that everything on the list is a well-established, already popular app. I was hoping to see more in the way of new and up-and-coming stuff. In other words, I don't gain anything if a website tells me GitHub, Slack, and Sketch are popular.
That said, I think the overall problem of productivity/business software discovery is one that will grow in the coming years as we see a shift away from traditional enterprise dev and sales and towards a more consumer-like model. And Siftery is smart to try to build buyer trust and own the buyer side of the equation. We may well see a lead gen industry emerge in b2b software that looks a lot like the lead gen industry for consumer products like, say credit cards.
Interesting thoughts! We're definitely trying to strike a balance between reliability and short-term popularity. One of the ways we're trying to solve is by every day pushing up "wildcard" products that are getting traction.
Another of our bets is that since a user can only recommend a product once, over time the more obvious products should find it relatively more difficult to get new recommendations and newer products will surface.
This effect might become more noticeable with some filters (e.g. recommendations only from YC companies).
IMO you need two lists: "Popular Lately" which is what this list is now, and ALSO "Trending" which is sorted by some measure of recent growth.
That way up and coming stuff doesn't have to dethrone github/slack/etc in order to get seen.
Separately, one thing I'd be excited about is filtering by users at companies in a certain grouping (e.g. by Geo, industry, or some other affiliation like YC or 500 Startups alums). Siftery can do this since users have verified business e-mails.
Does this sound interesting?
Slicing and dicing in that way by geo, industry and whatnot, would be very interesting as someone looking to build and sell software. It's always really helpful to know what different kinds of prospective buyers are currently using - and if they're excited about it or not.
As a prospective software buyer, however, it doesn't necessarily sound all that interesting. I mean, so what if a lot of companies that are in a similar location and industry to mine use Bitbucket. That doesn't tell me if it's actually great or if they just don't know any better. And if fin-tech companies that went through YC love using Aha for product roadmapping, it's kind of the same thing - what does that really mean?
That said, I can see some situations where it would be interesting. If I'm looking for software that has intense compliance or performance requirements, then know what other people in my industry use would be helpful - so I would know that I'm making a reasonable decision.
Also, what would be super interesting would be knowing what software transitions/replacements people have made. For example, if I'm using JIRA and not really loving it it would be really cool to know what people who have left JIRA have used to replace it. A lot of times I've found myself not entirely satisfied with some work/productivity app and wondered if there's a better option out there, but then found it can take a lot of research and experimentation to answer that question so I just go back to the status quo. Seeing that a lot of people have happily made a transition I'm considering - or maybe a slightly different one - would be cool. Of course, you may well not have that kind of information for a long time.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Adding additional filters is fairly easy, but I think we decided against it thinking that "no one" would find them or be interested.
Maybe we're wrong about that (there seems to be demand here, and HN seems to be doing just fine with multiple feeds/filters).
From the "how does this work"
> How do products trend? What causes a product to trend? Products are ranked based on the number of users who have recommended the product in the past month (we’re using a rolling 30 days).
Ok so this isn't trending, it's popularity. Typically you want to normalize such that items with evergreen popularity get sifted out and you're left with items growing in popularity.
A marginally better approach might be to look at % of like growth month over month, with some floor of likes so that going from 1 to 100 likes doesn't dominate. This isn't perfect but it should kick google drive, Dropbox, and git out of the list.
We're looking into ways to improve the ranking, so thanks for sharing that teej. We actually started with a normalized and more complex algo that was more along the lines of what you suggest, but the resulting feed had mostly random products and was not very helpful for more casual users. It also made it difficult to understand why a product was ranked. I think you're right that as it stands, we can do more to surface younger products. So far, we're doing it manually with "wildcards".
I mentioned in another comment that one of our bets is that since a user can only recommend a product once, over time the more obvious products should find it relatively more difficult to get new recommendations and newer products will surface.
e.g., if we did a filter of recommendations by YC companies (or more extreme - YC founders), then something like Slack would be popular the first month, but then have few remaining votes. Thoughts?
You need to separate the concept of popular and trending. Make two lists. Have a popular list at a couple fixed time grains - all time, last year, last 30 days (what you have now). Then for your trending list use a z-score like described in this stack overflow post [0] to normalize. I honestly wouldn't invest a ton of time trying to do something fancier then that. You're trying to rank with one signal, you can't expect computers to perform magic.
I'd also consider a third list - highlighted. Have your team internally pick something new and interesting once a month. Finding novel and interesting things is something humans are really good at.
[0] - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/787496/what-is-the-best-w...
Thanks. Great link. It does seem that having multiple feeds is emerging as a consensus suggestion.
I like the idea of a social network of businesses first, individuals second.
The problem in this space (usually encountered when typing "Quickbooks Reviews" or "Quickbooks vs Xero") is the results do not feel trustworthy, mainly because there is no provenance of the reviewer. It feels like the reviews can be bought.
If you can build a high quality review and dataset, that answers detailed questions about the product in an objective fashion, that would be very useful.
I agree.
> It feels like the reviews can be bought.
I assume Siftery's business model depends on getting paid by software companies when a prospective buyer makes a purchase after visiting Siftery. Maybe it's more advertising-based though? (Siftery folks, please correct me if I'm wrong).
Like all affiliate marketing, there's a fundamental tension between maintaining customer trust by actually making good, honest recommendations and maximizing profits by directing consumers to products whose makers are willing to pay more. A lot of affiliate marketers start out very consumer-focused in order to build a strong brand that consumers trust. They later find it very hard to resist the temptation to maximize revenue by making bad but profitable recommendations later on. Of course that will catch up with them eventually, but they can exploit the inertia of a trustworthy brand for a while.
All of that said, hopefully Siftery will be able to provide good, consumer-focused information. There is real pain point around learning about this kind of software.
> A lot of affiliate marketers start out very consumer-focused in order to build a strong brand that consumers trust. They later find it very hard to resist the temptation to maximize revenue by making bad but profitable recommendations later on.
spot on! this is one of the reasons why we want to entirely avoid any sort of lead-gen or affiliate business models that depend on revenues from sellers of software or services. we're planning to make money from buyers with higher value tools that help them after the discovery phase -- for example, providing insights into pricing, helping automate the RFP process and potentially helping them manage billing etc. early days though!
Yeah, most reviews in top software review sites may be incentivized (e.g. with an Amazon gift card). Siftery's approach is to be as data driven as we can, while focusing on verified business users and what products they use and recommend at their workplace.
I don't understand what problem is this solving. Another ProductHunt?
With PH there are some similarities (both are product feeds after all), but substantial differences in the feed mechanics and results. Siftery's ranking is based on recommendations coming from verified business users and the products listed all have business use cases. Products also have a persistent identity (i.e. a new one is not created each time a product is created).
Ultimately, the are different products at the top of each feed, as would be expected from their different use cases and different (if to some degree overlapping) audiences.
We think Siftery Trending is a place where b2b products can go after launching and "graduating" from a community like Product Hunt. One way we're thinking about it is that Product Hunt is to high school what Siftery Trending is to college. There's a time and place for both!
That's my take, but additional thoughts/feedback appreciated.
I think https://founderkit.com is a better comparison to what you are providing than product hunt. I agree Product Hunt seems to target consumers more, whereas Siftery and Founterkit are providing a service to businesses and founders.
One thing I would find of value is a means for differentiating all of the different services being reviewed. I think everyone knows that slack is the foremost business chat app, etc. But what are the specific things that make the app at #2 different that I might be looking for that would make me chose it over what's in the #1 spot.