[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Taloflow (YC W21) - Find the top cloud or...
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Launch HN: Taloflow (YC W21) - Find the top cloud or dev tools for
your use case
Hi HN, We are Jason, Todd and LV - we're building Taloflow
(https://www.taloflow.ai) to help developers find and evaluate
cloud and API products based on their use case, requirements, and
budget. Have you ever wondered whether you should move a
particular workload off of AWS to GCP? Or which database to build
on? Or which APM is best for your size, architecture, and budget?
A little over a year ago, we launched a cloud management tool for
AWS. A few months after launch, we learned that many of the dev
teams we were working with were actively looking for alternative
cloud products and dev tools to improve their stack. They generally
found the investigation and testing process to be error-prone and a
time suck (finding what fits the use case requirements, reading
docs, sitting on sales calls, projecting costs in complex
spreadsheets, etc.). Similarly, while building our own product, we
implemented several cloud and dev tools into our own stack. Some
worked, and some were terrible. Time after time, we were fooled by
the marketing language, lacked use case-based information to inform
our decision, and generally found third-party review sites not as
helpful when it comes to buying a cloud or dev tool. Why? Comparing
options with info relevant to our specific use case was the missing
piece, and there were several dozen dimensions to consider. We
built two ways to help you pinpoint which products best fit your
use case. The first walks you through a "Quick match"
questionnaire that is designed with the help of domain experts for
particular categories (e.g.: object storage, data pipelines, APM,
etc.) to help you define your requirements and then rank options
within a product category based on the inputs. For example, in
object storage, we collect use case info (Do you provide
information to customers frequently and quickly? Do you perform
intensive ML tasks? Do you work with large graphical or video
objects?, etc.), integration info (CDN, Redshift/BigQuery/ or other
Data Abstraction Tools), budget, compliance, etc. to build a
holistic use case profile to help filter and rank products. We
then scour our database of developer docs, pricing pages, private
pricing, reviews from experts, and internal tests for various types
of use cases to find the best use case fit. The second way we
solve this is by actually ingesting telemetry from various cloud
applications (AWS, GCP, Azure, Twilio, Datadog, etc.) and providing
a cost-benefit analysis on the performance and cost trade-offs of
implementing various products. We can answer questions like "What
are the egress and hidden fees of moving from Azure Blob to
Backblaze B2, Storj or Wasabi?" or "What's the most performant APM
for my architecture?", etc. We're currently experimenting with
pricing, but we make money by selling more advanced or ongoing
analysis to our members, up-selling our SaaS solutions for cloud
infra and dev tool management, and occasionally collecting a
standardized referral fee from vendors who happen to be good
matches for you. We're currently live for Object Storage and will
soon launch for AI/ML tools, CPaaS (e.g.: Twilio, MessageBird,
etc.), CI/CD tools (e.g.: Jenkins, Buildkite), and APM (e.g.:
DataDog). If you don't mind getting ad-hoc analysis for categories
we don't fully support yet, we have an option for that too. We'd
love your feedback on our product and want to hear from you what
product categories you need help researching.
Author : cloudfalcon
Score : 57 points
Date : 2021-03-18 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago)
| bradhilton wrote:
| I just tried out the tool for Object Storage and was pleasantly
| surprised with the resulting experience. I really like this;
| great work!
| dkcdkc wrote:
| So dope to see y'all on the front page. Great team and product.
| Can't wait to see the future growth!
| frenchie4111 wrote:
| There appears to be a recent trend of YC companies being
| increasingly "meta" plays. The increasing number of "startups for
| startups" worries me, it's a leverage against the success of
| startups. It will increase the upward and downward slope of the
| startup market. Leverage leads to bubbles, and bubbles burst
|
| Note: This product looks great, I will probably use it, my
| comment is not intended to disparage taloflow specifically.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| SaaS companies for other startups has always been YC's core
| strength - I don't think this is anything new.
| zapita wrote:
| "startups for startups" is not so much leverage as it is a way
| to enter the market. If your competition is too entrenched to
| take on directly, you find a way to "wrap" it with an adjacent
| product. Then once you have a foothold with joint customers,
| you expand your product to until your complement is reduced to
| unprofitable commodity, and customers derive all the value from
| you.
| ahstilde wrote:
| I'd actually expect this product to have more traction at
| larger companies who require executives to make purchasing
| decisions. Instead of farming it out to an outside consultancy
| for hundreds of thousands, here's a simple SaaS that will
| enable your engineers to make the best decision at any given
| time.
| igammarays wrote:
| It's actually quite ridiculous, I actually thought YC is
| starting to feel like a pyramid scheme. I took a look at the
| recent batches of YC companies and more than 70% of them seemed
| to be of the "meta" type, startups selling to startups. Of
| course these companies do well initially being able to tap into
| YC's huge community of startups. That doesn't mean they provide
| fundamental value to the economy, they're just sloshing around
| a lot of VC money.
|
| On the other hand, maybe that's intentional, kindof of how
| sports players practice on each other before facing others in a
| real game. YC is like a startup playground, but the ones who
| "make it" are those who can use their experience to play in the
| wider economy. Still, I feel like YC is providing a lot of
| false hope to people by not being more selective in the ideas
| they fund.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| It would be useful to see this tool used for other SaaS.
|
| Want to manage a (1) 10-50 person (2) construction firm in (3)
| the US, should you use Basecamp, Asana or Wrike?
|
| You have a (1) 50-100 person (2) Tech firm should you use
| docusign or hello for document management?
|
| And if you already have and are committed to Quickbooks, does it
| change any of the answers above?
| jasonkimtech wrote:
| Hey omarhaneef that's great feedback.
|
| With regards to SaaS besides project management and document
| management what are some categories where you find picking
| tools the most cumbersome?
| omarhaneef wrote:
| I have never met any SaaS where it wasn't cumbersome to
| figure out the competitors, the differences and the pricing.
|
| I think the greatest area that a small company could use help
| in is learning which tools are out there i.e. answering this
| very question. For instance, one firm I know had no idea how
| useful bill.com was and it saved them 10s of manhours per
| week but began using it years after it was offered.
|
| The other area is workflow: you use software X and software Y
| in this way, but did you know most other companies link them
| up with software Z in the middle and it works much better, so
| long as you check the box that reminds you to tag the
| invoices (or whatever).
| jasonkimtech wrote:
| >The other area is workflow: you use software X and
| software Y in this way, but did you know most other
| companies link them up with software Z in the middle and it
| works much better, so long as you check the box that
| reminds you to tag the invoices (or whatever).
|
| I think adding up all the time savings for certain
| workflows or integrations across different sets of products
| would be immensely useful. You're totally right there's no
| easy way to see that currently anywhere.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| It would be valuable just to tell people what others are
| using. The most popular configurations would lead to
| suggestions based on usage in the field.
|
| This is sort of the reason people check out state of
| Javascript and learn that "everyone else" is gravitating
| towards Vue, or that Svelte is gaining in popularity, or
| that VS code is everyone's preferred editor.
| akudha wrote:
| How would one go about building such a product though?
| Comparing hardware features (say iPhone with Samsung for
| example) is a lot easier than software, isn't it? SaaS products
| can release features every week, it would be quite hard to keep
| up.
|
| It would be cool if there is a JSON standard to publish
| features (and pricing) for SaaS apps - something like what AWS
| does for its products. Defining such a standard itself would be
| tricky, but it is worth trying. It might make it a bit easier
| to compare various project management apps, for example.
| stets wrote:
| Awesome to see this on the front-page, guys. Nice!
|
| - if you monetize partly by collecting referral fees, do you plan
| to stay vendor-agnostic? how?
|
| - over time, as products change via acquisition, updates, etc,
| how can you keep the various metrics, fees, features organized
| and up-to-date? This seems like immense work to me
| jasonkimtech wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| We're currently experimenting with pricing (charging retainer
| or SaaS fees for advanced/ongoing analysis) but think we can
| keep referrals vendor-agnostic by standardizing referral rates
| and aligning incentives in a way where we get a small
| percentage over a long time period of usage. We're trying to
| optimize for long-term satisfaction and usage of a product so
| only want to be rewarded when we can fulfill that.
|
| Also we'll always give a transparent reason for why each vendor
| was recommended or excluded based on your use case requirements
| (this vendor doesn't fit your compliance or cost requirements,
| this vendor has low average ease-of-use rating and you said
| ease of use was a high priority for you, etc).
|
| In terms of keeping track of every product, feature, release -
| it's currently being done in a combination of monitoring tools
| for public docs, websites, and releases and in some cases we
| will directly communicate with the vendor to validate. In the
| future we're hoping to create a system of record whether that's
| an API or interface so vendors can push information to us
| directly (which we will then vet for accuracy) to keep things
| accurate and up to date. Eventually we want to help standardize
| terminology, and potentially even standardize some benchmarks
| so developers can view features and performance in a more
| uniform way.
| GKND95 wrote:
| We've constantly asked ourselves this as we built our tech stack,
| love the idea!
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(page generated 2021-03-18 23:01 UTC)