... before my last two launches I wasted weeks building before checking who else was in the space. don t be me. here s the 30-min competitor check I do now, all free tools: 1. search PH archives (5 min) search your keywords on Product Hunt. sort by launch date. note how the top 5 positioned themselves the gaps in their taglines are your opening. 2. check who s actually alive (10 min) a launch from 2023 means nothing ... ... signals: are they hiring? shipped anything in the last 6 months? active changelog? I use exploreyc.com for this (free db of 8,600+ YC / a16z / PH startups with hiring status) but LinkedIn works too. 3. read the comments on competitor

... actually check if your idea's been done before? like - gpt it, google it, ask friends, dig through YC's directory, or just.. cross fingers and build? asking because i built ExploreYC trying to fix exactly that... through semantic search on over 8.6k startups, but genuinely curious what people reach for before a tool. what's your move? big changes to the landing page yday, very happy with the result now p.s. did my best with ... ... from Omri Ben-Shoham(@omri_ben_shoham1): honestly my move is usually just typing the idea into PH search plus a quick GPT sanity check, both feel incomplete because keyword search misses anything phrased differently and GPT just hallucinates competitors

... small team. We can ship fast. We want to build what's actually useful. So honest question what would make ExploreYC a tool you open every week? Some things we're thinking about: - API access for devs - Alumni network map (who worked where before YC) - Pivot tracker (companies that changed directions) - Founder Twitter/X feeds aggregated Vote or suggest something we haven't thought of below. Comment from Konstantin Borimechkov(@konstantimb): @darly_selby love it, that will be in the pipeline ... ... Comment from Darly Selby(@darly_selby): i think API access would make ExploreYC

... searchable YC database to compare positioning, find adjacent markets, and avoid building something that sounds new only because I haven t searched deeply enough yet. Comment from Konstantin Borimechkov(@konstantimb): @alan_gregory  what i think as well. exploreyc is open sourced, so feel free to contirbute! Comment from Konstantin Borimechkov(@konstantimb): ExploreYC

... project! I think it would be a good addition to their website and if we can get some more official or helpful APIs to hit and extract data from for YC it would be amazing! Please help me spread ExploreYC and get YC's eye on the project! Share on X, LinkedIn, ProductHunt and let's do this together! Comment from Aleksandra Elman(@aleksandra_elman1): Good luck with ExploreYC

... onto the ExploreYC platform, put your email and start receiving emails every day with: newly added companies companies that just started hiring how are we doing it? we are comparing the snapshot of companies yesterday vs