[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that...
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Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to
social media
Author : fstopmick
Score : 132 points
Date : 2020-11-20 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pmalerts.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pmalerts.com)
| weinzierl wrote:
| Love the pricing model and the UX is nice. Three small things I
| noticed during sign-up:
|
| 1. Please let me sign-up from the pricing page. At least on my
| phone I couldn't find a direct link or button.
|
| 2. The "Save Upgrades" button is annoyingly sticky on my iPhone.
|
| 3. Email doesn't autofill.
|
| Otherwise registering and adding an alert was smooth. Well done!
| fstopmick wrote:
| Thank you!!! Will address each of these, hopefully by the
| weekend depending on dayjob demands. Don't hesitate to let me
| know of any other friction points - I'm aiming for frictionless
| ryanr23 wrote:
| I'm floored with this app. Well done!!!
|
| If you don't mind me asking...how did you manage to scrape
| linkedin?
| fstopmick wrote:
| Thank you! Right now LinkedIn results show you what you'd see
| from a timeboxed google search, like "ryanr site:linkedin.com",
| but this will change once I have either 1) time to implement
| deep native polling, or 2) a service that does it for me (high
| confidence in 2 becoming available soon).
| offtop5 wrote:
| Anyway to plug in sentiment analysis ? I would love for you to
| run this through IBM Watson or something so I can see if people
| are saying positive things about my brand
| fstopmick wrote:
| Yeah, I'm super excited to build this out.
|
| I'm admittedly overeager to build and am not very good at
| building financially sustainable projects, so I told myself I'd
| fund this feature with revenue from paying customers. ($0MRR
| right now)
|
| In the meantime, you can use webhooks to push results into your
| own sentiment analysis flow. That's supported (and free).
| offtop5 wrote:
| Charge people up-front for this.
|
| Watson is very expensive after all.
|
| Alternatively you can use an npm module to determine basic
| sentiment https://www.npmjs.com/package/sentiment
| alberth wrote:
| It's like https://www.sprinklr.com but 1,000-4,000x cheaper
| (seriously).
|
| Love the homepage.
|
| EDIT: Question, I just tried the demo out on some very popular
| terms (e.g. "google", "Microsoft", etc) - it appears results are
| only returned for Twitter. If I unselect Twitter, "no results
| found".
|
| Just an FYI in case that's not intended behavior.
| amelius wrote:
| And I guess it's also like youtube-dl in the sense that it
| needs to continuously fight updates and/or banning from the
| sites it wants to download from.
| fstopmick wrote:
| yeah, it's not as fixed-cost as I'd hoped
| amelius wrote:
| Have you considered open-sourcing the libraries that fetch
| content from these platforms? You could build an entire
| community that helps you maintain the code ...
| fstopmick wrote:
| I haven't, mostly because I'm scared of the liability. My
| code is pretty sketchy for everything but Twitter, and
| for that I use LinqToTwitter (.NET) which is already OSS
| (and amazing).
| fstopmick wrote:
| Yeah - the onboarding flow (insta-results) only supports
| Twitter. Other platforms are polled run on a recurring basis
| and take ~10 minutes to show results, so when you create an
| alert you'll see stuff from other places. I need to make that
| clear on the onboarding flow - it's a UX bug. Thanks very much
| for the feedback and love.
| onli wrote:
| Also on the site itself, because I did not realize that at
| all! Good to know!
|
| I know that one of my sites is mentioned on one of the
| services that is not twitter, and not seeing it in the
| preview results gave me pause.
|
| Nice site otherwise, best of luck!
| fstopmick wrote:
| Ok yeah that's a clear need - set expectations that results
| from other platforms take a few to show up. Thanks for the
| push to correct
| Accioni wrote:
| I will signup as well! If I can I always looking for a ways to
| avoid Google products and support smaller business and creators.
| I think its time for changes.
| cl0wnshoes wrote:
| Really nice tool! Couple things I'm running into:
|
| 1. I registered on my laptop, opened account verification email
| on my phone. Verification link says I'm verified, laptop say's
| I'm not even after logging out/in.
|
| 2. It says 5 alerts are free, but at 3 alerts I'm presented with
| a message stating I've reached my limit.
|
| 3. Last pass doesn't seem to like the email field on sign in. It
| won't autofill it :(
| fstopmick wrote:
| I'm hearing similar feedback from others on all three items -
| if you shoot me your email to m@pmalerts.com I'll upgrade +
| verify you manually while I troubleshoot. Thanks for confirming
| these, and sorry for the headache!
| nyellin wrote:
| I love the idea. Does this support searching for links to a
| specific domain? I tried adding my personal blog (without the
| http:// prefix) and no results showed up.
| fstopmick wrote:
| Thanks nyellin - and for sure! If you used the onboarding flow
| or "result preview" functionality, you'll only see recent
| Twitter results. But if you create an alert for your personal
| blog and select "Custom" along with other platforms, you'll be
| notified whenever someone drops your link AND (important) it
| isn't shortened by something like bitly.
| greatsaas12 wrote:
| I love the fact the you've spent time focusing on onboarding.
|
| Most SaaS companies onboarding workflow these days is:
|
| - Describe what they're about - Ask for a sign-up before you even
| have the chance of using/interacting with the product
| fstopmick wrote:
| It's always seemed strange to me that the normal SaaS flow
| forces users to blindly commit... I want you to fall in love
| without any coercion. It's more romantic that way
| bzb6 wrote:
| The header of your website is sticky and takes up half the height
| of my screen.
| fstopmick wrote:
| Gah, the mobile UX is pretty horrible right now. I'll
| prioritize it, thank you bzb6
| mobileexpert wrote:
| Are you using public/legit APIs for all these services? Seems
| like you might be at risk for TOS violation for at least a
| couple.
| fstopmick wrote:
| Twitter is legit, otherwise I plead the 5th. I do outsource
| this risk (and pay for that), so stability shouldn't be an
| issue unless there's a broad and deep crackdown on everyone who
| scrapes, which I think is unlikely given recent sentiment
| around the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559
|
| But it is a risk. Serpapi.com is helping me a lot with that -
| give them a tinker!
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| What do you mean by "outsource the risk"?
| fstopmick wrote:
| I mean I hope that if I pay someone else to harvest my
| drugs and I don't know how they do it, then I have some
| level of plausible deniability, but that just went out the
| window
| makeee wrote:
| Nice work! I'd love something that alerted me to mentions in
| Discord servers. Not sure if that's doable without having a bot
| in every server.. but I'd pay for that.
| fstopmick wrote:
| Hmmm... I could have a setting for PMAlerts integrations
| (slack, teams, discord, zoom) that configures it to not only
| feed alert results _into_ the app, but to listen to that server
| 's contents __for you and only you __. A bit tricky with
| privacy implications, but technically feasible. I 'll have a
| think on it - thanks for the love.
| makeee wrote:
| Cool, just signed up! Transitioning my Zapier-powered twitter
| alerts over. Love the thought you've put into this, like
| ability to hide results authored by certain usernames.
| fstopmick wrote:
| Woohoo! Email is m@pmalerts.com if you need anything (a bit
| behind at the moment, but I generally aim for responses
| within a day). Would love to connect + learn more about
| your use-case and general needs/challenges in this space.
| bromquinn wrote:
| This is slick! I could see using this for one of my own projects.
| How do you get the data? Are you using the official apis or are
| you 'scraping'?
| fstopmick wrote:
| Twitter results use their official API, otherwise I _crackle
| sounds_ can 't he- _crackle_ what?.. _call disconnected_
| riku_iki wrote:
| Curious how scalable is this service? When services will
| start throttling/blocking your calls?..
| fstopmick wrote:
| Everything "legit" scales along with the cost of API access
|
| Everything else scales along with the cost of outsourcing
| that risk to services located outside of the US (like
| serpapi.com) who implement lots of proxies and workarounds
|
| I'm not sure if there will be margins, so if it scales,
| it'll have to be very cost-consciously
| fiatjaf wrote:
| If, like me, you clicked this expecting to find a tool that would
| aggregate posts from social media for their own consumption, not
| as a business intelligence tool, let me recommend
| https://fraidyc.at/.
| okokok___ wrote:
| Man, this on-boarding is slick! well done.
| fstopmick wrote:
| Thank you!! That's all attributable to early adopter feedback,
| but I'll take the credit :)
| lprubin wrote:
| Nice work. Have you considered creating a page/blog post the
| explains how you've used your own tool to find paying customers?
| Doing that would provide a ton of value I think:
|
| 1. You'll (hopefully) find new customers
|
| 2. By using your own tool regularly, you'll gain invaluable
| insight into UX issues and new feature ideas.
|
| 3. Potential customers on your site would get to read through a
| play by play story about somebody successfully using your tool to
| drive business results. Basically a meta case study.
| fstopmick wrote:
| I ___LOVE_ __this thinking. I have a small write-up about "how
| I'm using PMAlerts to drive growth for PMAlerts" here:
|
| https://www.karma.fm/p/BcMEfxQ/frequently-asked-questions
|
| But it's not presented as a formalized case study and doesn't
| provide the value you're proposing (to me or others). I'll do
| it!
| ayewo wrote:
| Congrats on your Show HN!
|
| I absolutely liked your copy.
|
| Is karma.fm one of your side projects too?
| fstopmick wrote:
| Thanks very much! And yes it is - I'm using PMAlerts to
| learn how to listen, and Karma is teaching me how to think
| and write (though it's a bit less mature)
| lprubin wrote:
| Nice, you have the foundation there which is great.
|
| I'd also recommend making the faq table of contents into
| clickable links.
| fstopmick wrote:
| On it, thank you lprubin.
| darrenwestall wrote:
| I'm really keen to see how LinkedIn alerts work, I'd love to plug
| into this by API for our clients. Email in my profile if you'd
| like to chat?
| fstopmick wrote:
| Absolutely, shooting an email over now!
|
| If anyone here on HN wants it for free, just let me know via
| m@pmalerts.com and I'll give you an early adopter subscription
| (full product, free for however long it's around).
| jmholla wrote:
| Wow. That's really generous. I could see myself one day using
| this, but don't have a use for it now. When I do, this is
| definitely a product I would happily pay for, and, if and
| when, will.
| fstopmick wrote:
| Super appreciate that sentiment. That's what I'm going for
| - 1) build something valuable, default to freemium 2) pave
| a clear path to free for those in need 3) have faith in
| voluntary reciprocation of value
| _hoysala_ wrote:
| Wow, this is really cool! I especially love how you can see
| results before signing up!
| fstopmick wrote:
| Thanks for the love!
| hmhrex wrote:
| Awesome! I'm digging this. I also like how the features are
| tiered. You might want to make a chart showing what features are
| under what tier, but it's not overly confusing.
| fstopmick wrote:
| I'm super on the fence about my pricing page, to be honest.
| Would you rather have just a standard three-tier Personal /
| Startup / Enterprise plan (3 choices), instead of granular
| control that confronts you with a $numberOfFeatures choices?
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Quick feedback, on mobile the header takes up about half of the
| viewport
| fstopmick wrote:
| Yeah, I'm a garbage developer, mobile needs some work. I'll
| prioritize this - thank you for the heads up
| corytheboyd wrote:
| No I think you did a great job here! Just helping out :)
| krelian wrote:
| I really like this! If you don't mind sharing, how much time
| roughly was spent from the time you wrote the first line of code
| and until this launch? I'm curious about these things.
| fstopmick wrote:
| Thanks very much! The prototype was a console application I
| built a little under a year ago (Jan 2020). I've been chipping
| away at it on nights and weekends since then... maybe about 10
| hours per week on average (some none, some double). So ~10
| full-time weeks? 9 too many
| [deleted]
| cmg wrote:
| This is really, really cool. And I love the home page! Being able
| to see results before signing up is great.
|
| I'm not a potential customer right now, but the text on the
| pricing page "If you find a payment bug (incorrect charges,
| broken UI, etc), let me know and I'll give you the full version
| of PMAlerts for free, for life." would absolutely give me pause.
|
| A simple addition if you're actually dealing with payment issues
| would be to add "I'll make sure your billing is straightened out
| ASAP - and never charge you more if you've been undercharged."
|
| But ultimately, get your payment system functioning ASAP. I would
| not be comfortable putting my card info into a system that tells
| me ahead of time it might have bugs.
| fstopmick wrote:
| I very much appreciate the candid feedback, cmg. I'll update
| the copy now.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| This looks super cool, I just signed up :) FYI, the verification
| email landed in my spam folder.
| fstopmick wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up, others have said the same. Someone
| shared some deliverability tips with me that I'll be
| implementing asap.
| swlkr wrote:
| Nice work! Definitely a more complete complement to f5bot
| fstopmick wrote:
| Thank you swlkr
| rathel wrote:
| Nice tool, just in time I sought an alternative to Google Alerts,
| because they filter out most stuff and are biased towards
| bigger/news portals.
|
| For now something is not quite right, whatever I search for, I
| only get results for Twitter and when I uncheck Twitter, I get
| nothing.
|
| It'd be also cool to search by language (or would site:pl work to
| filter by TLD?)
| fstopmick wrote:
| Ack! The onboarding flow only works with Twitter right now, but
| once you create an alert all platforms will be polled (though
| some will be polled via search engines until I can fund native
| search, like LinkedIn). I should add a disclaimer to the
| onboarding UI...
|
| site:TLD filtering is _sort of_ in place right now but it 's
| not obvious... you can select the "Custom" platform and then
| use that site:tld syntax (or any syntax supported by Google).
| Lmk if you run into any issues there, that's a relatively new
| feature.
|
| Language / geography filtering is on the backlog! _hopefully_
| to be funded by paying customers.
|
| Thanks for trying it out!
| rom16384 wrote:
| I find Google Alerts great, my only problem is that it picks
| spammy news/blog sites that keep reposting the same or similar
| content from press releases in various domains. Flagging as
| irrelevant doesn't help: There too many of these "blogs".
| fstopmick wrote:
| +1
|
| If you're curious about how PMAlerts addresses this and other
| Google Alerts shortcomings, I wrote a small piece about that
| here: https://www.karma.fm/p/0SZfbtW/9-reasons-why-you-
| should-stop...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Looks nice!
|
| I'm giving it a try on one of our projects.
| fstopmick wrote:
| Thanks Chris! My email is m@pmalerts.com if you hit any snags
| or want to share more about your particular needs/goals. Happy
| to chat.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| When trying to set up an Hourly alert on a free account it says
| "Please _register_ your account to ...". Apparently, it's a
| $10/mo feature, so you may want to reword the message to explain
| that and also link respective part of the price list from the
| message itself.
|
| Also, "Purchase Upgrades" button is not clickable -
| https://i.imgur.com/uIyrIFv.gif
|
| PS. I'm curious to see how well it works, but from what I saw so
| far - well done, break a leg. Saying this as a user of Talkwalker
| and F5Bot ;)
| fstopmick wrote:
| Ack, thanks for the heads up RE the "register" copy. Just
| pushed a fix.
|
| Edit: RE the Upgrade button - once that 0 goes to nonzero, it
| should work. It's poor design on my end, I'll improve the UX
| asap. Thanks for trying it out, and for the feedback :).
| fstopmick wrote:
| For anyone curious about the services being used to support
| platform polling, I'm using serpapi.com for the Custom and
| LinkedIn options on PMAlerts. I highly recommend experimenting
| with this service - lots of potential gets unlocked as soon as
| you work around arbitrary scraping limitations that Google throws
| up. Plus, Julien from serpapi is awesome and super accessible.
| pknerd wrote:
| I am surprised why no one thought about it? Awesome!
| fstopmick wrote:
| Oh I don't want to pretend to be original here. mention,
| brand24, awario, and lots of other "social listening" solutions
| exist. I'm just particularly interested in building SaaS
| products on top of a business model that's designed to
| redistribute wealth from megacorps to people-in-need, so I
| don't mind playing copycat until I can fund true originality :p
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(page generated 2020-11-20 23:00 UTC)