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Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

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Re: Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

#61

Post by TheYahiaBakour »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #60

If you want to vibe something that gets you 70% of the way to this well funded startup in like 15 minutes just tell your LLM of choice to create a hook or override the web fetching skill to pipe the content through Mozilla’s readability extension that strips the DOM elements out deterministically, leaving only the content. You can then parse it however you want. Can be done entirely client side, in runtime, with a fe…

"the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."

now for my actual thoughts, if that works for anyone in production reliably, then they should at-least try to do that.

many of my customers moved from in-house solutions because the engineering time spent on maintaining something like this alone makes it quite the undertaking, the infra needed to support something like a few hundred TPS w a browser fleet would cost more than a sub to us in the majority of cases

Re: Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

#62

Post by [deleted] »

blast wrote: post #34
twosdai wrote: post #29

Are you using residential proxies? How do you handle websites that don't want to be scraped. EG if I start passing in Linkedin pages what is your expectation of the result that people would see per profile. EDIT: Congrats on the launch seriously hard work, just wanting to understand your scraping stance more. I've worked with a lot of tools on this, didn't mean for my initial comment to be adversarial.

Is "residential proxy" a euphemism for botnets or is there a difference? Genuinely curious.

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

#63

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

TheYahiaBakour wrote: post #61
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #60

If you want to vibe something that gets you 70% of the way to this well funded startup in like 15 minutes just tell your LLM of choice to create a hook or override the web fetching skill to pipe the content through Mozilla’s readability extension that strips the DOM elements out deterministically, leaving only the content. You can then parse it however you want. Can be done entirely client side, in runtime, with a fe…

"the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." now for my actual thoughts, if that works for anyone in production reliably, then they should at-least try to do that. many of my customers moved from in-house solutions because the engineering time spent on maintaining something like this alone makes it qui…

Conversely, many of my customers abandoned many of their SaaS solutions because they can now hand roll the 10% of the SaaS solution they need in 15 minutes.

That’s not to say all SaaS is going away. But a good hunk of the single simple solution products are going to suffer

Re: Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

#64

Post by TheYahiaBakour »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #63
TheYahiaBakour wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." now for my actual thoughts, if that works for anyone in production reliably, then they should at-least try to do that. many of my customers moved from in-house solutions because the engineering time spent on maintaining something like this alone makes it qui…

Conversely, many of my customers abandoned many of their SaaS solutions because they can now hand roll the 10% of the SaaS solution they need in 15 minutes. That’s not to say all SaaS is going away. But a good hunk of the single simple solution products are going to suffer

touché

Re: Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

#65

Post by try-working »

TheYahiaBakour wrote: post #61
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #60

If you want to vibe something that gets you 70% of the way to this well funded startup in like 15 minutes just tell your LLM of choice to create a hook or override the web fetching skill to pipe the content through Mozilla’s readability extension that strips the DOM elements out deterministically, leaving only the content. You can then parse it however you want. Can be done entirely client side, in runtime, with a fe…

"the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." now for my actual thoughts, if that works for anyone in production reliably, then they should at-least try to do that. many of my customers moved from in-house solutions because the engineering time spent on maintaining something like this alone makes it qui…

the remaining 10% accounts for the other 10,000% of the development time

Re: Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

#66

Post by TheYahiaBakour »

try-working wrote: post #65
TheYahiaBakour wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." now for my actual thoughts, if that works for anyone in production reliably, then they should at-least try to do that. many of my customers moved from in-house solutions because the engineering time spent on maintaining something like this alone makes it qui…

the remaining 10% accounts for the other 10,000% of the development time

i see you too are an experienced dev

Re: Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

#67

Post by jackienotchan »

How did you find your differentiation in a highly commoditized space? It's probably one of the most crowded spaces.

Even within YC, there are many competitors that do pretty much the same thing:

- Firecrawl

- BrowserUse

- Browserbase

- CloudCruise

- NotteLabs

- Intuned

- Expand.ai

- Reworkd

And then you have the extremely well-funded web retrieval players like Parallel and Exa.

How do you differentiate to all these?

Another thing that might interest HN: AI crawlers come with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported here on HN (and experienced myself).

Does Context respect robots.txt directives and do you disclose the identity of your crawlers via user-agent header?

Re: Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

#68

Post by TheYahiaBakour »

jackienotchan wrote: post #67

How did you find your differentiation in a highly commoditized space? It's probably one of the most crowded spaces. Even within YC, there are many competitors that do pretty much the same thing: - Firecrawl - BrowserUse - Browserbase - CloudCruise - NotteLabs - Intuned - Expand.ai - Reworkd And then you have the extremely well-funded web retrieval players like Parallel and Exa. How do you differentiate to all these?…

the reality is that the space is huge and expanding

many that you mentioned serve different needs and it tends to not be zero sum to everyone's surprise (including mine at first)

e.g.

browseruse, browserbase = browser automation exa, parallel = search for ai (primarily)

we differentiate by prioritizing the infrastructure use-case, we encourage people to build products & features on top of our APIs and build it accordingly

some direct differentiators are: no hidden credit multipliers, world class brand data, and an api that just works

we're trying to be good samaritans on the web, and cache data whenever possible so we can avoid overloading a website, it's the main reason we don't offer "login with ai" features even though it's trivial at this point, it's quite hard to figure out how to avoid shady behavior while building something people want, i don't have a good answer yet and neither do many others

lastly, to reiterate, lots of our customers migrate from alternatives, but lots also just use multiple providers

Re: Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

#69

Post by aadv1k »

Hi! Congrats on the launch, I gained LOTS of great insights from your comments, particualrly the bits about diffrentiation in a crowded market.

I am building something in agentic automation space, currently it's still under development, but would love to know your journey of ideating -> building -> getting the first customer -> iterating -> and presumably getting into YC.

Am still relatively new to this (19 lol) so I got a long way, but would really appreciate any insights :)

Cheers! Wish you luck with Context.

Re: Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

#70

Post by klntsky »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #60

If you want to vibe something that gets you 70% of the way to this well funded startup in like 15 minutes just tell your LLM of choice to create a hook or override the web fetching skill to pipe the content through Mozilla’s readability extension that strips the DOM elements out deterministically, leaving only the content. You can then parse it however you want. Can be done entirely client side, in runtime, with a fe…

Readability is far from ideal. check this out: https://github.com/promptware/readweb

It's a custom pipeline I made to address its shortcomings

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