HACKER Q&A
📣 lsj0627

Would a DB of startup tech stacks be valuable to you?


I'm imagining the user would be a Hiring Manager or Recruiter looking for Engineers. If they need Ruby Engineers with startup experience, they click the Ruby box from a tech drop-down list and the search will retrieve the startups that also use it. Ideally, you'd be able to sort by geographical area, founding year, latest funding phase, number of employees (e.g. 50-200), and more. I would also aim for matching the right area of the stack - for example, the option to pick Python AND Backend, so you don't end up with startups using Python only for Data Science/ML work.

Note: I did try the StackShare API and there is no filtering feature. So if you purchase the 1,000-company plan, you have no control over what they send you. It'll be a randomly generated list of 1,000 companies that use the technology you requested, a hodgepodge of companies all around the world, big and small, new and old.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks!

  👤 Tanjreeve Accepted Answer ✓
In HN style I'm going to suggest You could "just" scrape job postings for software Devs and get the same thing and have much more confidence it's accurate what people are using.
👤 hitpointdrew
If I wanted to know what tech stack a site is using I would just pop open Maltego and find out. Which it seems like you are doing but just automating over a large list of companies and storing results in a db.
👤 jonas-w
I think any website where you can filter without any algorithms that think they are smarter than you, ads, seo, etc. is valuable. Imagine you had "direct" DB access to the data google, reddit, twitter, hackernews (we have HN on google bigquery, and its awesome), github, stackerflow, youtube, ... hold. Anyone who knows exactly what they want, will find it. People that don't know exactly what they want, may find it harder to find anything.

I don't know about your specific use case, but personally anything like that is valuable to me.

👤 chzblck
This already exists in many of the Sales tools that are out there today.

Zoominfo, Apollo, and Seamless all have the ability to show what types of technology a company is using.

👤 nithayakumar
Ive seen data sets like this and they've been bad. My main issues have been that dataset isn't kept updated, theres no sense of proportion (e.g. is 1% of the team java or 50%), and there's often not enough companies in the dataset.

So bad that I probably wouldn't buy this data without some proof that its good data

👤 pcthrowaway
I would use it in a job search.

I'm sure tech sales people would find it useful as well