[HN Gopher] Show HN: Telescope - Hassle-free company research
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       Show HN: Telescope - Hassle-free company research
        
       Hey HN. I recently started a company and found myself constantly
       doing company research for competitors, prospective customers, and
       outbound leads. As an engineer, I found it challenging to figure
       out where to get up-to-date company information as well as tedious
       needing to visit multiple sites often.  I built Telescope to solve
       that problem. Under the hood, Telescope performs multiple search
       queries the same way I would and synthesizes the results for me.
       This is very much a WIP but I would love for you to try it out and
       let me know what you think. Over the next couple of weeks, I plan
       on continuing to improve Telescope and add more features.  Cheers
       :)
        
       Author : GRVYDEV
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2024-01-31 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (scope.quantichq.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (scope.quantichq.com)
        
       | vvram wrote:
       | Interesting problem, but it's hard to say what you offer compares
       | to others. You should probably have some examples for visitors to
       | understand the value prop without signup.
        
         | GRVYDEV wrote:
         | Thank you for the feedback! I'll get to work on an About page.
         | 
         | What we are doing is automating bespoke account qualification
         | and research. Say, for example, you are a company that sells
         | software to chemical synthesis labs. Your ideal customer
         | synthesizes more than 5 chemicals. They need to synthesize them
         | in large batches and they need to have more than 10 chemists on
         | staff.
         | 
         | To go out and find those ideal customers, right now, you would
         | need to spend hours upon hours searching and manually
         | qualifying each account. We are going to automate that. By
         | providing more accurate leads we will reduce the amount of time
         | that companies need to spend on prospecting while also
         | increasing the open rate.
        
           | jll29 wrote:
           | This is potentially useful for "partner search" functionality
           | (as operated by governments and e.g. the European Commission)
           | - e.g. when people want to team up to co-apply for research
           | grants.
        
             | GRVYDEV wrote:
             | This is a great use-case!
        
       | jll29 wrote:
       | Company research is a very important field, and you can buy
       | datasets (D&S), appliances (Bloomberg) and software/Web apps
       | (LSEG/Refinitiv, Factset) for this purpose.
       | 
       | If your purpose is competitive intelligence, then including
       | information from other sides is crucial. What are analysts
       | saying? etc. What are customers saying about products? And a lot
       | of info is in financial reports and SEC filings if your target
       | company is public.
       | 
       | There are also commercial providers that let you register a set
       | of Web domains and they will email you once there is a change
       | anywhere, including the "diff" information (before > after),
       | which is also useful for Competitive Intelligence.
       | 
       | It is not trivial given a company name to find the set of
       | homepages that belong to the company (called the "homepage
       | finding" task in information retrieval, there are US government
       | benchmarks on it, such as at the TREC conference, see
       | trec.nist.gov). Once you have the homepage, it is not trivial to
       | reverse engineer, from the Web presence, the org structure of the
       | company (if large).
       | 
       | One area that I am interested in a lot is finding out where
       | companies are going. For that, you can analyze what people
       | indicate in interviews, R&D talks at more technical conferences,
       | patent applications, acquisitions in unusual areas etc. - at
       | large, this is called "horizon scanning".
       | 
       | There is a lot of money in high-quality datasets about companies
       | for investment management, and there is an under-supply of
       | detailed datasets with systematic coverage of private companies.
        
         | GRVYDEV wrote:
         | Thank you for this thoughtful response. We have the same
         | mindset. This is exactly what we are building. I'd love to chat
         | with you more on this.
        
       | piltdownman wrote:
       | Got a sub-ChatGPT precis including gems like 'Their website
       | utilizes cookies to enhance user experience and to better
       | understand their users.'
       | 
       | Honestly not sure what use-case this is intended to support.
        
         | GRVYDEV wrote:
         | Thank you for the feedback. Apologies for the crappy response.
         | This is still super nascent technology and I'm still working on
         | improving the search process. In my eyes the real value here
         | lies in data enrichment from other sources allowing you to get
         | a really deep understanding of a company. I am actively
         | building out that functionality now.
        
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       (page generated 2024-01-31 23:01 UTC)