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Ask HN: How do you find the best web-services for your startup?
6 points by apsurd on Aug 27, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
Say you are working on a webapp/startup; What is your process for determining the best fit for say:

    - Payment Processing: (braintree, stripe, recurly, paypal)
    - Analytics: (google, getclicky, mint, omniture)
    - Event tracking: (mixpanel, kissmetrics, google)
    - Customer Feedback: (uservoice, get-satisfaction, feedbackify)
    - Customer Support:(zendesk, assistly, tenderapp)
Now extend this out to the lifetime of your project where you might need invoicing, dashboard integration, chat widgets, phone-answering service, recruiting software etc.

Are there any tools/sites that allow you to efficiently discover and compare web-services? I'm starting my journey into collective intelligence and this will make the perfect side project for me.

P.S. This is my personal process which tends to take more time than I'd like: Search HN. Use google to get an idea of other options; find recommendations in blogs from prominent companies. My decision is heavily influenced by finding recommendations from similar companies that I respect.

Thanks for your help, HN.



Normally I just use the tools that my colleagues or mentors are using. Beyond that, things like Catchfree.com help. It is difficult for startups to figure out what is the best tool for them. If you can create a easy-to-use and well-designed tool, I would be interested in seeing it.


thanks man, I had never heard of catchfree.com before. exactly the type of help I am looking for!

I share your reasoning that in-network referrals are likely the most highly considered. Though researching in general is a time-sink and certainly not something a startup should be worrying about. I'd like to build a recommendations/discovery engine around that principle - pretty hard to wrap my head around but at least I have another person that would find it worthwhile!


I just found http://www.cloudsurfing.com/ which uses crowd sourcing to build a pretty good dataset of related companies, recommendations and metadata. In fact looks like their monetization strategy is to sell a premium service that lets you analyze this data faster/better.




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