HN Explorer

Ask HN: Where do you find products at their early stage?

38 points by gomangogo ↗ HN
For instance, how to be an early adopter of such products (before being famous) : Bitcoin, Ethereum, Facebook, Instagram...etc. In other words, what is your strategy to find all these products before going mainstream.

26 comments

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pr07ecH70r
I am reading tech news extensively on different platforms. HN is also a great source. I assume, you would like to profit being ahead of the flock. The trick, though, is to make a judgement of what will come out as a disruption. Bitcoin, before it was cool, was just a crypt currency. Something new, and something that except for few, no one understood. And yet, it became what it is today. Some were lucky because they just decided to try it, others because they made a sound judgement based on experience... and yet some made a big mistake.
gomangogo
I agree HN is quite good to find niche product. But for bitcoin it all started from an unknown forum
r_singh
Hmm, while not for path breaking tech like the above, I go to product hunt or indie hackers to go checkout new products and become an early adopter.
marshallbananas
ProductHunt and IndieHackers.

I visit them basically every day. Not to be an early adopter but to get inspiration. ProductHunt is good for checking how random business/app/website ideas are received. IndieHackers is more of a motivational tool because people share their struggles and wins. Both are are great for new product discovery as makers use them as announcement platforms.

J_cst
I've always been unable to like product hunt. I find difficult to navigate it, and to me just looks a never ending unlinked waterfall of products and services. Just an opinion though.
muzani
1. Talent attracts talent. You should be somewhere where ideas can flourish.

2. You need to be in a group where people encourage crazy ideas.

HN and the Bay Area have a lot of 1 but not 2. I guess you also have to be somewhere where people don't take themselves too seriously.

A lot of them also seem like crazy fun ideas at first, and often you hear people saying they're just sticking around for the community. You could feel it gain momentum, people get excited and energetic.

gomangogo
This is not true for bitcoin for instance where it all started from a forum. How would one know that something is happening in a forum ?
muzani
I had forums in mind for all that. Or somewhere like elite colleges.

It follows the same rules. Reddit, HN, much of that stuff won't attract people doing big things.

For example, my friend just built a platform with $250k GMV in 3 months. It started with a few back and forth comments on Facebook, and later an invite-only Facebook group. I've seen Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress back when they pointless experiments. Both were popular on forums.

There's a lot of things going around, but it's easy to get sucked into the wrong forums and communities and spend all your time and energy there.

quickthrower2
Bitcoin is an outlier. Once in a century kind of thing in that it was available in plain sight to the masses then boomed.

Trying to find the next bitcoin like thing will probably be frustrating.

You are looking for things that other people laugh at or dismiss but in your mind will win.

Something like Elm programming language (or its paradigm at least) But you don’t get rich but getting Elm early like Bitcoin :)

muzani
There's been other big things but all of them were laughed at. Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon were all seen as terrible stocks by analysts. If nobody laughs at it, chances are it's not going to go very far.

Newton did theology, alchemy, calculus. All of these were/are considered crazy ideas, but one worked.

matt_the_bass
It sounds like the other comments are mostly talking about a mainstream source to learn about pre-mainstream products. Aren’t those at odds with each other? If these new products could be found easily then everyone would be using them and it would be too late to take advantage of first mover principles.

I’m not trying to be snarky but if this was easy then what would VCs need to do?

zupa-hu
[Shameless plug.] Funny, I'm in the opposite shoe, just released a product after a decade+ of work but it somehow didn't show up in the Show HN section. This won't answer your question but it is definitely 1 product that matches your criteria. Maybe there could be a monthly Early HN thread if others post here too? :)

Boomla - a web development platform which I call a Website OS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21292726

preommr
How do you offer stuff like 1gb storage and unlimited bandwidth for a product that seems to be completely free?
zupa-hu
I plan offer paid services in the future but I'm focused on the product for now to make it awesome. Most people only use a fraction of the available space so the average is much less. Bandwidth costs are also manageable as the max file size limit of the system is 10MB. You can't host huge videos on it, for example.

That said, it won't affect the current offering.

EDIT: added 2nd paragraph

terrycody
There is another sneaky but time consuming way to find hidden clues.

You need scrape every new-registered domains, extension with .io or filter with keywords, then manually check each newly registered domains, typically, you can find some very new projects or products.

Btw, except ProductHunt and IndieHacker Marshallbananas mentioned, another website that list popular small business ideas, but I forgot its name, damn it.

zupa-hu
Why only .io? Then you would need to check all, especially .com. Except that’s not feasable..
gomangogo
You made an interesting point. This strategy is compatible with all the products I cited (Bitcoin, Facebook, Instagram..etc), i.e they all start with a domain name. However, it would be difficult to guess their name with keywords.
zer0sand0nes
Let's say you spotted an early stage start up... If it was not IPO, you wouldn't be able to invest in it easily.

You would still have to reach out to the founders and offer something. Is this what you are trying to do? In this case, how would you approach it?

PS: I also read highscalability.com - the dude usually talks about cool new products and stuff they are making. It's usually heavy tech related but always interesting reads.

AznHisoka
Scrape alexa/app rankings daily, and keep track of those that have gotten a huge spike in interest that week.
gomangogo
How do you scrap alexa, I think it is paid now ?