How does a new entrant into a category get listed?
Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing
21–30 of 54 posts
Re: Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing
#22How does a new entrant into a category get listed?
You can submit products through this form - https://siftery.com/submit-product, our team will do a quick review, and push the product through if it's legitimate and live.
We have 40K+ products in the DB, so you are in good company :)
Re: Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing
#23One of my pet peeves on the new products launched on HN has been a missing "About" page. If people are asking for personally identifiable information like emails etc, they should be open about who they are and what their competencies are in storing this kind of data.
Secondly, I don't see an explanation for what exactly the promoter score is?
Lastly, the source of data. While I am sure that is the secret sauce here, some of my personal fields have thrown up results which are far off the mark.
Re: Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing
#24did a search on React.js, got some results that I expected, and some that I did not. did a search on Vue.js, and the top 'alternative' is Bootstrap...... Yeah. Bootstrap isn't an alternative to Vue.js. They aren't even in the same wheel-house. https://siftery.com/vuejs/alternatives
That was one of the first thing I noticed about this too - the 'alternative' pool is just too broad and in some cases nonsensical.
For example - I searched for replacements for 'Intercom' because it is of particular interest to me, having gone through several support chat tools over the past 2 years.
Most of the suggested alternatives were NOT in fact, replacements for Intercom. Some were product walk through demo apps (not really in app support chat and knowledgebase at all). Other suggestions, while being great front end web chat systems, were nowhere near the functionality of Intercom as far as back end app support chat systems and shared help desk features go.
I know this from personal experience jumping from system to system over the past 24 months, looking for a viable alternative.
(BTW - No affiliation with Intercom, apart from being a paying user 2 years ago, then a period of not using them, then back to using Intercom a couple of months ago due to not being able to find a good alternative).
Re: Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing
#25One of my pet peeves on the new products launched on HN has been a missing "About" page. If people are asking for personally identifiable information like emails etc, they should be open about who they are and what their competencies are in storing this kind of data. Secondly, I don't see an explanation for what exactly the promoter score is? Lastly, the source of data. While I am sure that is the secret sauce here,…
Net promoter score is a extremely common and very valuable gauge of customer loyalty to a product. It sounds dumb when you look into it but sometimes the simplest thing works and this is one such case.
Re: Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing
#26did a search on React.js, got some results that I expected, and some that I did not. did a search on Vue.js, and the top 'alternative' is Bootstrap...... Yeah. Bootstrap isn't an alternative to Vue.js. They aren't even in the same wheel-house. https://siftery.com/vuejs/alternatives
That was one of the first thing I noticed about this too - the 'alternative' pool is just too broad and in some cases nonsensical. For example - I searched for replacements for 'Intercom' because it is of particular interest to me, having gone through several support chat tools over the past 2 years. Most of the suggested alternatives were NOT in fact, replacements for Intercom. Some were product walk through demo ap…
In this case, the primary category for Intercom is `User onboarding and Engagement` which can be broken down separately to `User Onboarding` and `In-app Support` or `In-app Chat`. That will suddenly spike up the sanity of both categories (maybe we can even normalize further - siftery has more than 700 categories/tags, a first for any such platform).
Categorisation of a data set like this can be non-trivial and will false positives. We can cherry-pick such a false positive and ignore all the actual positives. That said, thanks for this feedback - this is exactly what is needed to improve status quo. We are on it and will report back in a few hours with the category split I suggested in the previous paragraph. Do let me know if you think it can be broken down into a different type of granularity?
Re: Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing
#27One of my pet peeves on the new products launched on HN has been a missing "About" page. If people are asking for personally identifiable information like emails etc, they should be open about who they are and what their competencies are in storing this kind of data. Secondly, I don't see an explanation for what exactly the promoter score is? Lastly, the source of data. While I am sure that is the secret sauce here,…
Net promoter score is a extremely common and very valuable gauge of customer loyalty to a product. It sounds dumb when you look into it but sometimes the simplest thing works and this is one such case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter
Yeah, NPS is a good way to understand how actual customers feel about a product. We have collected tens of thousands of sentiment over the last six months on a wide range of products, and at scale, this sentiment data set can be quite valuable.
Re: Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing
#28Siftery kind of annoyingly added my OSS project to it and started emailing me about it without me signing up for it... (months ago)
Re: Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing
#29Siftery kind of annoyingly added my OSS project to it and started emailing me about it without me signing up for it... (months ago)
Inclusions usually come from the community - users tend to add products to their stack, a lot of them obviously being OSS. We have tried to reach out to creators/admins in the past to understand if they'd like to represent themselves in the right way in front of a large buyer group.
Apologies Matt - we'd love it if you gave the platform a try, but will not include you in any future email-campaign, going forward.
Re: Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing
#30did a search on React.js, got some results that I expected, and some that I did not. did a search on Vue.js, and the top 'alternative' is Bootstrap...... Yeah. Bootstrap isn't an alternative to Vue.js. They aren't even in the same wheel-house. https://siftery.com/vuejs/alternatives
That was one of the first thing I noticed about this too - the 'alternative' pool is just too broad and in some cases nonsensical. For example - I searched for replacements for 'Intercom' because it is of particular interest to me, having gone through several support chat tools over the past 2 years. Most of the suggested alternatives were NOT in fact, replacements for Intercom. Some were product walk through demo ap…
We use Intercom quite a lot at Siftery. What would you say are the top alternatives/substitutes if not what's listed?
Here's what we have for the "substitues" calculation: "When companies stop using Intercom, its most frequent substitutes are Drift (44.9% of the time), followed by Zendesk (9%), and by Zendesk Chat (Formerly Zopim) (7%)"
(Drift as the closest substitute closely matches my experience investigating options in this space; other products are more like partial or imperfect substitutes)
The alternatives ranked by NPS include Appcues, Chameleon, Clickhelp, Tawk.to, Olark, Freshdesk. Intercom is multi-faceted and difficult product to categorize, but all of those products are alternatives for some of its functionality.
Are there other products you think definitely belong here and were missed? Not trying to come off as defensive by the way, just trying to really understand where's the opportunity for improvement here.