Cohort – A New Professional Social Graph | Hacker News Reader

Cohort – A New Professional Social Graph

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58 pointspandemicsyn14 comments

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They don't have 100M users. Just 100M names from scraping Quora, Linkedin etc.

They probably have less than 1000 users I'm guessing.

Good guess - less than 1k MAUs: https://www.similarweb.com/website/cohort.is

That's more than just a little shady.

They're not even out of beta, yet; give 'em a bit of time first. :)

For what it's worth, I've been on the beta for a few months now, and have known Eamon for years. They're very good people, and I'm really stoked to see this out in the wild.

Don't know any of them, but my BS detector went off pretty hard - more advisors than team, completely unclear value proposition and a brand strategy that will keep them out of any first page SERPs for some tome coming (with nobody finding them on an .is domain and few chances to get a .com) makes me wonder what they're up to.

We do have more advisors than team. Cohort was founded by me, and I brought three of the best people I know on. I don't know if you've ever been a single founder, but it's really tough to start something, just by yourself.

I've had co-founders in the past, and it's very different doing it yourself. Before the team was properly formed, I asked some friends for help. Some of it was product related, some of it was business and fundraising related. And some was just moral support.

I don't think there's a hard and fast rule to the ratio of advisors to team. Every startup is different, every product is different and every team is different.

As to our value prop and brand strategy, I admit, there's a lot that's not obvious from what's essentially a holding page. -- we're still pre launch, and in private beta, which I mentioned in opening paragraphs of the post.

Regarding .is, as I said above, there's a specific reason that was chosen, more to do with the product than with marketing.

If you'd like to see for yourself what we're up to, I'd be happy to give you a demo. Drop me a mail on eamo@eamo.net and I can set something up.

Me again! Cohort as a product, is a social graph first. We expose it through multiple interfaces, mobile being the one we're focused on now.

Cohort.is is our marketing website. We chose the .is TLD for a specific reason.

Fake it till you make it ?

Founder here. Thanks for your comments. No, we do not have 100M users. I think if we did, you'd have heard about us before now :)

What we have is a social graph that a lot of R&D has gone into, using public data - which was outlined in the post.

As I'm sure you know, a social graph is more than just a list of names pulled from Quora and LinkedIn (neither of which are sources for us, btw).

Is this collection of information on non-users even legal? It is not okay here in Sweden (PUL) and as I understand it the same laws apply in the whole of EU. Is this a US service only?

Why would you think they have 100M users?

"As of today, Cohort is a social graph of over 100M people, and over 700M relationships. We are understanding 10,000 people and their networks a day."

That says "people" and not "users"

Because most social graphs are of "users" not "people".

Lots of real world professional social relationships have "off the books" interesting elements to them. When just the people involved know the true nature few companies can easily stitch that together.

Cohort looks like it tries to capture that. What will it be used for outside the meeting the needs of members? How will the VCs use that data to try and make piles of money?

Do people really want the nature of their professional relationships studied by machine learning for someone else's benefit?

Excited about what they're working on. A digital network that more closely represented actual relationships could be a valuable and interesting tool.

why you need "post for you" permission on twitter?

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