[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built a service to discover and monitor r...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: I built a service to discover and monitor rapidly growing
trends
Author : mikerubini
Score : 272 points
Date : 2020-04-04 10:18 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (treendly.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (treendly.com)
| shireboy wrote:
| Very interesting and nicely done. I could see lots of uses for
| this.
|
| One possible glitch. I searched for ".net" (as in the programming
| framework) and got no google searches. Maybe am escaping issue
| there too?
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hey there,
|
| Thanks a lot and thanks for the feedback. It's probably due to
| dot in the search query. I'll fix it! =)
| arianestrasse wrote:
| I opened the page and tried to register but got "Too many
| requests" message. Any reason for that?
|
| Edit: Also, the website field doesn't accept at least some
| ccTLD's.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hey there,
|
| Thanks for the feedback.
|
| Re: "Too many requests", not really but I do have some
| throttling in place. I'll see what's going on.
|
| Re website field: I'm just using an HTML5 input with HTML
| validation (type="URL" kind of thing).
|
| I'll fix these ASAP. Thanks for the comment!
| mikerubini wrote:
| Updating re: "Too many requests" - it was, indeed, the strict
| throttling. It's now ok.
| diimdeep wrote:
| How many trends you are currently tracking? How many in total are
| curated trends?
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hello,
|
| With Treendly, I am embracing transparency and openness by
| sharing our app and revenue metrics with everyone.
|
| So, you can find that info here: https://treendly.com/open
|
| So far, we have 1.5K trends in the db but not all are growing
| and rising.
|
| Keep in mind that we track a lot more keywords/topics in order
| to find a rising trend.
|
| Thanks for commenting!
| kirubakaran wrote:
| You're running this on a $5 server? Impressive! Thanks for
| making the stats open.
|
| Your scrapers are probably expensive to run, right? They
| don't seem to be listed.
| diimdeep wrote:
| How many keywords/topic ? BTW, seems broken
| https://treendly.com/trend/%D0%A4%D0%9D%D0%A0?geo=RU
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hello, sorry I missed this comment.
|
| A lot of keywords/topics. We don't currently support
| languages with special characters. Please, search in
| English.
| chasers wrote:
| Google Trends scraper.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Yes, we do take data from Google Trends as well as other
| sources.
|
| Thanks for commenting!
| bobosha wrote:
| Are you able to share which other sources?
| mikerubini wrote:
| Yes! It relies on Google Trends, Google News, Google
| searches, Amazon searches, Twitter searches and YouTube
| searches (for now!)
|
| We also have a partner for e-commerce data (usecart.com)
| saturday14 wrote:
| Is this based on Google Trends? Where is the data coming from?
|
| Interesting project, btw
| mikerubini wrote:
| Our data relies on Google and it is based on what consumers are
| searching for.
|
| Specifically, it relies on Google Trends, Google News, Google
| searches, Amazon searches, Twitter searches and YouTube
| searches (for now!)
|
| We also have a partner for e-commerce data (usecart.com)
| saturday14 wrote:
| Very cool. I guess as you grow, you could get more partners
| and the data will keep getting more and more accurate. I wish
| big guys like Amazon released aggregated sales data.
|
| How do you get access to Amazon searches, google searches
| etc? do you have to pay for those?
| mikerubini wrote:
| Absolutely. I don't pay to access data. All of my projects
| are around collecting data. I'm a master scraper [?]
|
| If you are curious, at https://rubini.solutions you can
| check out my other SaaS products =)
| saturday14 wrote:
| Just checked your list of products, very cool!
|
| I've always wondered about building a career with
| scraping, but never got around to it. One reason is the
| legality of scraping - big sites like Craigslist have
| gone after (and shut down) smaller projects. I believe
| priceonomics (YC company) built a big business with
| scraping.
| riku_iki wrote:
| And how do you scrap Google data? They don't ban you or ask
| to enter "I am not robot" captcha?
| mikerubini wrote:
| No, as I mentioned, I'm a master scraper.
| saturday14 wrote:
| Are you not breaking their ToS though?
| mikerubini wrote:
| Nope, everything is ok
| marian2js wrote:
| The project looks very good. It would be nice a feature to modify
| the time range, for instance on the Covid-19 trends, Zoom is -50%
| over the last 30 days. It would be interesting to know the change
| over 2 or 3 months.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hello there,
|
| Thanks! Yes, range modifier is coming, but also please take
| note that -50% is the change regarding the last 30 days
| compared to the previous 30 days.
|
| This year the month over month growth in the US was 3.52% which
| is very good. And, the average interest was only 4.85% which
| tells me there's still a lot of margin for growth.
|
| https://treendly.com/trend/zoom
| _____smurf_____ wrote:
| Good work!
|
| I have few questions: 1/ How do you determine keywords/topics. Do
| you use any kind of clustering, or do you manually enter the
| labels? 2/ How do you deal with different languages? 3/ How do
| you deal with Spams.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hey there,
|
| Sure.
|
| 1 - Please read https://treendly.com/tech and
| https://treendly.com/models - those should answer this =)
|
| 2 - We are still in the process of dealing with special
| characters in our search. But, it's coming along! Right now you
| can search in pretty much all languages that do not require
| special chars (English, Italian, etc..).
|
| 3 - Spams? I don't understand the question
|
| Thanks for commenting!
| riedel wrote:
| Hi Mike, nice work! I noticed that you have some problems with
| UTF8 characters like German umlauts. Might want fix that:
| https://treendly.com/trend/Kunstliche-Intelligenz?geo=DE
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hello there, yes I'm aware and fixing.
|
| Meanwhile please feel free to search in English.
|
| Thanks for the feedback! =]
| kevinyun wrote:
| Hey Mike, this looks really interesting -- nice work! We're going
| to try it out to follow 'referral software' topics. Any
| tips/advice you can give us? I've already created a new Track for
| that keyword set.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hey Kevin,
|
| Sure, let me understand your needs a little bit more. What kind
| of software? Like a getrewardful.com ?
|
| Also, feel free to connect over email: mike@rubini.solutions or
| Twitter: @mikerubini
| orbifold wrote:
| The interest over time graph uses spline interpolation to connect
| the datapoints, while that might look prettier than straight
| lines, it is something that is strongly discouraged in a
| scientific / data analysis context, because the curving line does
| not carry meaningful information.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hey there,
|
| I agree with your analysis, actually. I'll try with straight
| lines and see how it looks!
|
| Thanks for the feedback!
| londons_explore wrote:
| There are other more valid ways to make a curved line.
|
| If your data points are equally spaced in time, look into
| 'sinc interpolation'
| mikerubini wrote:
| Interesting, thanks!
| atreyad wrote:
| Do you mind pointing to some links that explain why?
| narrator wrote:
| Is the data coming from Google Trends? If so, are you worried
| they're going to shut down your scraping at some point?
| mikerubini wrote:
| Our data relies on Google and it is based on what consumers are
| searching for. Specifically, it relies on Google Trends, Google
| News, Google searches, Amazon searches, Twitter searches and
| YouTube searches. We also have a partner for e-commerce data
| (usecart.com)
|
| I'm not too worried. Everything that is publicly available and
| printed to a screen, I can take. So unless they completely shut
| down the service, I should be good =)
|
| Thanks for the comment!
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hey everyone, my name is Mike and I'm the developer.
|
| On Treendly, you can search a topic or keyword in any region and
| immediately get an understanding of its trend.
|
| You can also set up alerts so that you can monitor a
| keyword/topic and be alerted when it begins trending.
|
| Treendly also curates trends. Getting in early on a trend is key
| these days and within a few minutes, you can find a topic that is
| worth exploring.
|
| Under the hood, I also try to predict how a trend will perform in
| the near future by using Facebook Prophet and other similar
| technologies. Right now we are predicting using the last 5 years
| of data on any topic.
|
| Hope you like it!
| mikesabat wrote:
| Sales/marketing guy here. I like the idea. If you want to get
| more signups, be clearer about what I get if I signup. There is
| a huge yellow banner on the trend page, telling me it's better
| to signup. Use some of that space to tell me why it's better
| and what registered users get.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hey Mike,
|
| Nice name! I hear you. Will update that banner with more info
| now! =)
|
| Thanks for the feedback!
| ryan_glass wrote:
| Great idea - I can see this being popular. Small heads-up on
| responsiveness needing fixed on tablet in portrait view.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! I'll fix it
| treyfitty wrote:
| Kinda tangential: but what's with startups naming their companies
| ending in vowels since 2010- especially ending in -ly? It kinda
| irks me but I can't put my finger on it.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hey there,
|
| Good observation. I personally do not spend a lot of time
| finding a domain, or a logo, or setting up the perfect
| onboarding sequence, etc..
|
| The truth is the business can work out with whatever domain. I
| have another SaaS (in the e-com space) that started with the
| domain angage.net and now we have usecart.com - maybe if we
| grow we'll get cart.com
|
| But, when you start, you don't need 99% of the things you'd
| think you need - and a good domain is one of them.
|
| When I'm starting a SaaS I focus on its core features and
| making it profitable.
|
| Just my 2 cents
| bobwaycott wrote:
| It started with registering .ly domains (think bit.ly). Then it
| stuck for others who weren't using a .ly domain. Same trend
| occurred for .io domains. There was also that trend of
| _removing_ vowels.
| ficklepickle wrote:
| Little CSS bug in the nav bar. 770px to 1200px screen width
| causes a horizontal scrollbar to appear. The problematic rule is
| coming from bulma.css, so it might be easiest to just set
| div.nav-left { overflow: visible; }, that fixed it for me.
|
| Chromium on Debian, FYI
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hey there,
|
| Thanks for the feedback! I'll fix it ASAP
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| https://treendly.com/trend/Fitness?geo=FR
|
| There's a huge uptick for fitness gear and it seems not being
| signalled.
|
| All gear in France and Belgium are sold out. I'm pretty sure it's
| elsewhere too.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hello Nico,
|
| It depends on what you search. Just searching for "fitness" is
| not enough.
|
| In fact, we did spot a trend. Look at trends like: -
| https://treendly.com/trend/at-home-workout?geo=FR -
| https://treendly.com/trend/gym-equipment-rental
|
| You can also try searching trends directly in French (but
| without the special characters, please).
|
| Thanks for commenting!
| jefflombardjr wrote:
| Really cool - I'm interested in this. Despite similar services -
| I like your opportunity indicator. Love the search functionality
| idea - but hit a bug so it took a couple of tries to get it to
| search.
|
| This has potential and I hope you keep working on it. I would
| consider paying for it down the road if it's more mature. Also
| hit the free limits very quickly.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hey Jeff,
|
| Thanks for the feedback. We have no limits on all tiers
| regarding searches: you can search all the keywords/topic you
| want, for free.
|
| The only limit we have on the free plan is the fact that you
| can track only 1 trend, meaning that you can receive alerts
| only for one trend.
|
| The other limit we have on the free plan is regarding curated
| trends, because these are trends that we personally curate and
| are rising and I feel like $9/m is not a lot of money to get
| access to those opportunities.
|
| Are you referring to any of these limits in particular?
| dgtlmoon wrote:
| Beat you by about 16 years on that one, sadly the website is not
| around anymore and the CSS appears to be broken..
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070210013005/http://trendwatch...
|
| check out 'blog'
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070501172450im_/http://trendwa...
|
| or 'youtube' which had just 80,000 results..
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070501172450im_/http://trendwa...
| mikerubini wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for the comment!
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Whose is your target customer? Ie what are their job titles and
| what are their jobs? How would your tool fit into their workflow?
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hello, at this point this question is hard to answer.
|
| I've identified a lot of real customer profiles (as I call
| them) that can use the product and receive value.
|
| Some of those are: e-commerces, marketers, affiliates,
| investors, SEO experts. If you are curious, you can read more
| about each of them on the homepage, in the "use cases" section.
|
| I don't know which one of these customer profiles will benefit
| the most at this point. It's too soon, but time will tell.
|
| Thank you for the comment!
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Nice. A lot of people have said that tools like Glimpse and
| ExplodingTopics are cool and fascinating but they find it
| hard to find a concrete use case for them. once you find that
| target audience, I recommend really nailing down that value
| proposition. Rather than rely on people trying to find a job
| to be done for it.
| 1337biz wrote:
| On the website you are showing 7 trends for free. So I created an
| account in the assumption that I can see more for free. But when
| I logged in I can only see 6 for free and then you are trying to
| upsell me. That doesn't make sense.
| mikerubini wrote:
| You are right, I'll give logged users the ability to see a
| little bit more trends =)
|
| Thanks for the comment!
| capableweb wrote:
| Tried adding a monitor for a trend with two words, got lots of
| matches for just one of the words that is generic. Tried then
| again but putting the two words in quotes, expecting it'll match
| the entire query instead of each one of them individually, but
| then encountered bug that quotes turn into %22 and trend report
| has no data.
|
| Otherwise, looks like a useful service! Thanks for sharing
| mikerubini wrote:
| Ah, thanks for this. I'll fix it right now! =)
| p2detar wrote:
| A bit slow when searching, also there seems to be an issue with
| umlaut letters. But keep it up!
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hey, yeah, it's probably overload from HN. Thanks for the
| feedback!
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I've got no data while searching for "javascript". Is the signal
| too small or does the app only cather to some niches?
| mikerubini wrote:
| Nope, it's probably just overloaded from HN.
|
| I just updated the trend and, as you can see, it does show the
| data: https://treendly.com/trend/javascript?geo=US
|
| We don't cather to any specific niche:
|
| Thanks for the comment!
| capableweb wrote:
| According to the " Interest over time by search volume "
| graph over the last 5 years, interest/what-your-measuring
| seems to have decreased.
|
| I'm my experience, but I'm probably in a bubble, more and
| more people are talking, interested in and using JavaScript,
| in the last 5 years, but again, probably biased as I'm a web
| developer.
|
| Is the graph adjusted to the number of people on the planet
| or some other metric? Or why do you think it shows the data
| it's showing?
| z3t4 wrote:
| JS got an upswing with Node.JS. But was then EEE:ed.
| capableweb wrote:
| They entered the European Economic Area (Espacio
| Economico Europeo in Spanish)?
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hello there,
|
| The graph is a little bit adjusted, but if you go on Google
| Trends, you will actually see the same trend: https://trend
| s.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
| seapunk wrote:
| Hi Mike, your service and interface remind me Exploding Topics
| [https://explodingtopics.com/].
|
| Known as Trennd before and launched here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20478339
|
| I noticed you have a related searches section with amazon queries
| and youtube queries.
|
| Do you plan to display accounts/pages ranking the best for these
| queries?
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hey there,
|
| Yes, we both find rising trends but we differ in so many ways.
|
| First and foremost, we give our users the ability to monitor a
| keyword/topic over time. As a user, you can receive daily,
| weekly and monthly email alerts.
|
| Secondly, you can search a keyword/topic in any country and
| what you search stays private to you so that you can build your
| own private library of trends.
|
| Thirdly, each trend has so many related topics that we find by
| querying Google, Amazon, YouTube, etc that you can dive into.
|
| And finally, we have a beta feature where the tool forecasts
| how a trend will likely perform in the next 6 months.
|
| > Do you plan to display accounts/pages ranking the best for
| these queries?
|
| No, but I do have another tool in the making for Amazon self
| publishers. I don't know if you are in that target market.
| supremerumham wrote:
| Hi Mike, I like the YouTube search queries.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Thanks! It's a nice addition and we plan to add more =)
| bastijn wrote:
| So this is a bit like https://explodingtopics.com but with a
| different angle to find the categories and trends? I see no
| "world/global" option, is that on purpose?
|
| I do like how the data is presented in the details page. In
| exploding topics you have to leave the site to see the same on
| gtrends.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hello there,
|
| Yes, we both find rising trends but we differ in so many ways.
|
| First and foremost, we give our users the ability to monitor a
| keyword/topic over time. As a user, you can receive daily,
| weekly and monthly email alerts.
|
| Secondly, you can search a keyword/topic in any country and
| what you search stays private to you so that you can build your
| own private library of trends.
|
| Thirdly, each trend has so many related topics that we find by
| querying Google, Amazon, YouTube, etc that you can dive into.
|
| And finally, we have a beta feature where the tool forecasts
| how a trend will likely perform in the next 6 months.
| monkin wrote:
| Exploding Topics has a one huge advantage. They don't require
| account to search and test. Maybe leave basic features for
| everyone to use without account?
| mikerubini wrote:
| You actually do not require an account to see the trends in
| the home page. For example,
| https://treendly.com/trend/dalgona-coffee is free to look
| at at.
|
| You do require an account to search because I'd like to
| understand who is searching and protect me a little bit
| better against bots. Also, searching has a much higher
| computing cost for me under the hood.
|
| Hope it explains why I did it this way. Thanks for the
| comment!
| bastijn wrote:
| Thanks for explaining. So Exploding topics as a Service and
| with additional features to make it a business. Can be
| interesting depending on how accurate your trend spotting are
| and how well the prediction beta feature works. Keeping track
| of new technology trends and competitors offerings is a
| healthy amount of work in any business. If a service could
| already take out the initial search part that could be value.
| mikerubini wrote:
| I agree 100% that it could be a lot of value. That's what
| I'm going for =)
| oogetyboogety wrote:
| I liked this for example to watch how people are going crazy due
| to viral epidemiology
| https://treendly.com/trend/Healthcare?geo=US
| mikerubini wrote:
| Yep, you might also like our coronavirus case study:
| https://treendly.com/blog/coronavirus
|
| Thanks for commenting!
| lettergram wrote:
| I created something similar to be deployed on any network
| (internet, company, even social group):
|
| https://hnprofile.com/
|
| Happy to discuss with you (OP) about some things I learned along
| the way.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Seems cool! Your thing is specific to HN, though, right? I plan
| to integrate HN as a source in Treendly, too.
| lettergram wrote:
| The way our system works (might be similar - but Treendly
| looks like integrations?) is looking solely at comments.
| Basically, all that's sent to our API are messages (author,
| comment/message, and some unique identifier). From there we
| use topic modeling to determine related topics, track
| sentiment, trends, author expertise, etc
|
| We also have:
|
| - https://redditprofile.com/
|
| - https://insideropinion.com
|
| - https://lettergram.net
|
| Among others...
|
| Are you (OP) planning to make this a business?
| mikerubini wrote:
| Got it, yes. Building successful SaaS products is my
| business =)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| How is this different from google search trends?
| mikerubini wrote:
| Google Trends is for researching things you've heard of.
| Treendly is to find things you haven't.
| Jemm wrote:
| I don't see Canada on the list which makes me sad eh.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Just added!
|
| Sorry about that, I'm manually adding them one by one after I
| test them.
|
| Thanks for the comment!
| saadalem wrote:
| I know trennd could be the inspiration, but what is different ?
| mikerubini wrote:
| First and foremost, we give our users the ability to monitor a
| keyword/topic over time. As a user, you can receive daily,
| weekly and monthly email alerts.
|
| Secondly, you can search a keyword/topic in any country and
| what you search stays private to you so that you can build your
| own private library of trends.
|
| Thirdly, each trend has so many related topics that we find by
| querying Google, Amazon, YouTube, etc that you can dive into.
|
| And finally, we have a beta feature where the tool forecasts
| how a trend will likely perform in the next 6 months.
|
| Btw, I'm pretty sure that I originally launched this tool
| before them. I'm just revamping it now =)
| [deleted]
| cmauniada wrote:
| A suggestion! While logged in, when you want to track a trend, it
| isn't clear how I can track it after I search for it.
|
| Instead of having a dropdown list menu for choosing frequency, it
| would be nice to spread them out. Like a normal list, or 4 types
| of buttons. Or you can also add a plus button which might bring a
| popup asking the frequency type too.
| mikerubini wrote:
| That's a fantastic feedback! I'm going to do that now. Thank
| you!
| personjerry wrote:
| How is this different from Glimpse https://meetglimpse.com/ ?
| mikerubini wrote:
| We both find rising trends but we differ in so many ways.
|
| First and foremost, we are an actual tool you can use, not a
| simple newsletter.
|
| We give our users the ability to monitor a keyword/topic over
| time. As a user, you can receive daily, weekly and monthly
| email alerts.
|
| Secondly, you can search a keyword/topic in any country and
| what you search stays private to you so that you can build your
| own private library of trends.
|
| Thirdly, each trend has so many related topics that we find by
| querying Google, Amazon, YouTube, etc that you can dive into.
|
| And finally, we have a beta feature where the tool forecasts
| how a trend will likely perform in the next 6 months.
| _curious_ wrote:
| Goodstuff Mike, thanks for making and showing Treendly!
|
| "Proudly built nomading." i love it.
| mikerubini wrote:
| My pleasure, and thank you for checking it out!
| [deleted]
| mam2 wrote:
| how does it work ? if i look for "business" i have not so much
| about business...
| sdrothrock wrote:
| I tried it out and it doesn't seem to support unicode well.
|
| I searched for "Xue Xiao " (Japanese: gakkou, school) in Japan
| and the results page was headed with "%E5%AD%A6%E6%A0%A1".
|
| Additionally, the actual results weren't great; it found a 2014
| movie and a handful of Amazon/Youtube searches that aren't
| accurate. Some of the Youtube search results weren't even
| Japanese, but Chinese.
|
| Just in case I'd weirdly picked a bad word (dubious since school
| closings etc. are all over the news), I also tried pankun
| (Japanese: pan-kun, the name of a chimpanzee who was famous for
| being with Shimura Ken, a recently deceased comedian), which is
| currently trending on Twitter.
|
| I didn't get any trend information at all.
| mikerubini wrote:
| Hello there,
|
| Yes, I'm aware of the bug. We don't support Japanese characters
| still. Sorry, I'll fix it as soon as I can.
|
| Meanwhile, please give the tool a second chance by searching in
| English if you can.
|
| Thanks for the feedback!
| sdrothrock wrote:
| Maybe remove the Japan option until you do support Japanese?
| It just seems to be an invitation to make yourself look bad.
| :/
| mikerubini wrote:
| Yep, thanks for the feedback! =)
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(page generated 2020-04-04 23:00 UTC)