[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) - AI for public affairs...
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Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) - AI for public affairs and government
relations
Hi HN! I'm Sandy, and I'm excited to introduce Parsagon. Parsagon
is using AI to automate workflows for government affairs
professionals, starting with an AI search for public policy. Here's
a demo: https://parsagon.io/explore-search Current search portals
for political monitoring are outdated. (By political monitoring, we
mean people/orgs monitoring government announcements, policy
updates, etc.; not the government monitoring people.) Each one only
covers one region of the world, and they only allow you to search
government publications based on simple keyword searches.
Government affairs professionals often spend hours combing through
noisy search results to find relevant developments. For example,
they might search for the words "labor", "employment", "workforce",
etc., combing through all US government publications mentioning
these keywords to find relevant material. Then they might have to
repeat this process on separate platforms for the UK, EU, etc.
Parsagon allows you to search for exactly what you want. Instead of
searching for all publications containing the phrase "crop
production", you can search for something as precise as "news
related to US crop production, including foreign crop production
that impacts the US" and get the publications you're looking for
from any region of the world (our demo lets you search the US and
UK). So you might be wondering: why are we launching on Hacker
News now? After all, we're YC W21, and we've been around a while.
Well for the first 2-3 years of our existence, we were working on
an AI developer tool that generates data pipelines, and while we
had plenty of people interested in using our AI, our AI couldn't
solve most of the use cases we encountered (at least, it couldn't
solve them well). Everyone's use cases were quite disparate, and we
wasted a lot of time trying to get our product to the point where
we could solve all of them (and during that time, we just weren't
concerned with launching on HN). We had little success until a
large non-profit reached out for help getting started with our
product. They wanted to scrape a wide variety of government
organizations to get announcements and communications that could
affect their line of work. This request seemed odd to us, since
there are already platforms that track government activity
seemingly ready-made for their use case. Why would these mostly
non-technical government affairs professionals be trying to learn
to use a developer tool? As we talked with these first customers
and learned how outdated current political monitoring tools are,
this use case became increasingly exciting to us for a few reasons.
First, we felt our AI gave us a significant advantage in this
space, allowing us to monitor government websites on a scale that
existing tools couldn't match. While most existing products focused
on monitoring a single country, we could build pipelines to get
most of what our users wanted from any given country in under a
week, and give them better ways to search and aggregate that data
at the same time. Second, two other significant organizations
reached out around the same time with similar use cases. We were
excited that larger organizations were interested in this use case
and were willing/able to pay significant sums for it (one problem
we had before was that many companies interested in using Parsagon
were small startups with low willingness/ability to pay). And since
these organizations were able to introduce us to others in their
industry, it quickly became apparent that we should focus on
solving this one use case of political monitoring. And so now
we're here! We have a product we're excited about, that our current
customers are excited about, and we want to share it with HN! We'd
really appreciate any feedback, and if you know anyone working in
government affairs, we'd appreciate it if you showed this to them!
Author : sand1929
Score : 37 points
Date : 2024-12-04 16:50 UTC (6 hours ago)
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| I know it is truly the peak of the spirit of Hacker News to make
| the first comment a nitpick, but the fact that your name is a
| play on Pentagon but your logo is a hexagon causes me irrational
| levels of emotional distress.
| sand1929 wrote:
| LMAO, this is unironically the kind of feedback I love to see
| from HN
| mung_daal wrote:
| LLMs do not know what a number it is. public affairs and
| government are bean counters. these are conflicting ideas that
| any regex script can handle better.
| instalabs wrote:
| Congrats on the launch - there's a lot of unstructured public
| data as well (existing in the form of PDFs/Excel/PPT) are you
| planning to add support for those?
|
| Also would be great to show the source in the list without having
| to click "source" :)
| sand1929 wrote:
| Absolutely! We're already doing this with PDFs from
| legislatures for our tool to track bills, which should be ready
| soon.
|
| Also, thanks, that's great feedback :)
| marban wrote:
| You're RAGing over a DB of scraped news articles?
| sand1929 wrote:
| News articles, Requests for Comment and similar government
| announcements, speeches, parliamentary questions, government
| reports/statements/consultations--a pretty wide variety of
| sources
| zxexz wrote:
| I do this with the federal register + the comments and
| attachments. Probably the most informative govt. website.
| bozhark wrote:
| got a github to share it?
| ada1981 wrote:
| We were just discussing this TODAY in our weekly AI Playground
| meetup; that someone will soon make something like this.
|
| I'm curious if private ngos or companies can use it as well? Can
| we track policy and potential impacts on industry? Etc?
| sand1929 wrote:
| Yeah absolutely! We have private companies using us right now!
| (We might have an private NGO as a customer--I'm always a
| little hazy on the exact definition of NGO)
|
| I definitely think we're going to see a lot more people
| building in this space. There seems to be a growing consensus
| among the government affairs people I've talked to that it's
| just a matter of time
| enisberk wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! While search with LLMs is quite popular
| nowadays, it is still hard to get it right.
|
| As a smoke test, I tried the following queries, and they returned
| the same result. Good job! international
| relations Turkey international relations about the
| country with the capital city of Ankara
|
| Both return info from this link: https://www.state.gov/secretary-
| blinkens-call-with-foreign-m...
| sdesol wrote:
| Well if you ask GPT-4o the following:
|
| Give me keywords to search for based on this sentence
| "international relations about the country with the capital
| city of Ankara"
|
| You get the following:
|
| - Turkey international relations - Ankara diplomacy - Turkey
| foreign policy - Turkey global partnerships - Turkey
| international politics - Turkey geopolitical strategy - Turkey
| foreign affairs - Turkey global relations - Turkey NATO
| relations (if relevant to your topic) - Ankara as a diplomatic
| hub
|
| So it is not unsurprising that the same link was returned
| enisberk wrote:
| This is a demo from a small startup dedicated to enhancing
| government transparency, which I greatly appreciate. As a
| result, my expectations are aligned with this goal, and I
| refer to this as a smoke test.
|
| Achieving accuracy with RAG and LLMs is a challenging task
| that requires balancing precision and recall. For instance,
| when you type "Ankara" into GPT-4o, it provides information
| about Turkey. However, searching "Ankara" in their product
| does not yield articles related to Turkey.
| sand1929 wrote:
| Thank you! It's been interesting to watch HN playing around
| with it. This community definitely phrases its search queries
| differently from how many government affairs professionals
| would (especially to try smoke tests like yours), so I'm glad
| it's holding up :)
| _1 wrote:
| Is there a custom search engine underneath this? My company's CIO
| has been asking about an LLM-driven search engine for the entire
| company.
| sand1929 wrote:
| If you're talking about search-as-a-service solutions, we
| didn't end up using any of them. There were certain
| optimizations we needed to make to our information retrieval
| algorithms that were pretty specific to political monitoring,
| and none of the out-of-the-box solutions seemed customizable
| enough for us.
| bozhark wrote:
| same, anything suggested?
| kianN wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch! A tangential use case to your
| current focus could also be smaller financial firms focused on
| fundamental analysis. I've done some work in the past setting up
| news datastreams for these sort of firms. Something like this
| that structures public government data could be really
| interesting for them.
| sand1929 wrote:
| Oh interesting, I'll be sure to look into that! Definitely an
| intriguing use case
| 1123581321 wrote:
| This is neat; congratulations on launching. Curious what you do
| to assure users that you're searching every corner they'd be
| checking manually, and that there haven't been any regressions to
| the source set. This came up at work recently.
| sand1929 wrote:
| Thanks! I think the best thing we do to assure users that we
| check everything they'd check is that we add requested data
| sources pretty fast. E.g., one customer wanted to track
| announcements from the various state/regional commissions on
| higher education, and we added those within the hour.
|
| For political monitoring in particular, I think this is pretty
| important. Different organizations in different industries will
| inevitably have very specific/obscure sources they want to
| track, so rather than promising that we already have everything
| they'd be checking, we just assure them that we can add
| anything missing really quickly.
| christoff12 wrote:
| Love the PMF journey -- good luck!
| ned wrote:
| I see that you are quoting in extenso News articles (I read one
| from the DailyMail). How did you secure the copyright issues of
| reproducing full articles ?
| sand1929 wrote:
| Oh whoops, that seems like a bug. We typically show press
| releases verbatim, but our intention is to just provide the
| headline, link, and extracted facts for sources like the Daily
| Mail. Better see what's going on there; thanks for the catch!
| abe94 wrote:
| Love the story about your journey sandy - its been great watching
| you stick through the pivots!
|
| Could your software be used to create something like a
| specialized feed? For example like the newscatcher feed product
| (if you are familiar with them)
| sand1929 wrote:
| Thank you! And yeah, getting specialized feeds is one of the
| main things our current customers do!
|
| Also, hope all is well at Laudspeaker :)
| bozhark wrote:
| Our use case is similar to your "first" customer
|
| at first we got zero results. tuning specific wording from
| "requirements" to "policies" got the intended results
|
| thank you for this, excited to try it further
| sand1929 wrote:
| Glad to hear it!
|
| If you have any questions or need anything, please reach out at
| https://parsagon.io/contact ! Working with non-profits has been
| some of the most fun work we've done, so we'd love to do what
| we can to make the platform work for you!
| vm wrote:
| Seeing your launch hn made me happy. I tested one of your
| products in 2021. It's cool to see you and Parsagon working
| through iterations and finding customer traction. Mad props!
| sand1929 wrote:
| Aww, thank you! I'm impressed you even remember us from 2021
| haha
| nisten wrote:
| It still boggles my mind what mental & legal gymnastics are
| passed through to get 3 years of funding for what looks like
| someone last night put together a RAG of a cbp data dump that you
| get for free from their site.
|
| Not saying it's not useful, just fascinated at what excuses have
| gone in endless meetings for 3 years to do whats basically an
| afternoons worth of work.
|
| Yes I mean that literally. You start off an aws rag app or a
| huggingface container, you download the CSVs fom cbp public
| portal, and you add a sh*tty backgroundcolor and a border glow
| that doesn't go all the way around a button. 10-15 more years of
| this and maybe we'll get the next dropbox again who knows.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Perhaps I am not using it right, I wanted to see if I could get a
| list of sources for "policy roadblocks to timely court justice"
| for the last 7 days in the UK.
|
| I get some interesting articles, but only really one was relevant
|
| even then it was only tangential.
|
| Its kinda useful as a news cutting service, but its really not
| precise enough to replace a decent PR summary report.
|
| for housing policy It either over indexes on hansard (good
| source, but not for policy) or the daily mail (would have been a
| good source for conservative policy, but not labour.)
|
| What am I doing wrong?
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(page generated 2024-12-04 23:00 UTC)