Show HN: The Honeybadger | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: The Honeybadger

gethoneybadger.com

147 pointsjaequery55 comments

I found this not just to be useful for people researching potential competitors or partners from a startup perspective, but it's also useful for someone who's researching a potential employer. It provided a fairly accurate snapshot of my current employer for example.

It might be nice if Honeybadger could also provide links to sources for further reading. Basically a "Google it for me" feature that would save a few more clicks and keystrokes.

If it gets good enough, maybe it could work as a freemium service, should you decide to go that far. But I'm impressed with what you've put together so far.

Appreciate the comment! I like the concept of that, it goes in the same line of thought where I was thinking in the lines of "sites like this / alternatives", can be useful. especially when you are shopping for stuff online.

> also useful for someone who's researching a potential employer

Exactly. Thanks for sharing, will definitely find uses.

Sources. I need to know what sources you're getting the information on a site from. Twilio, for example, shows 16 employees which is quite outdated. Just a little footnote would do.

right now it's crunchbase and angellist.

guys, i've just added support for SEO (backlinks, keywords, indexes, pageranks)

It looks like Traffic section will not be available as I'm over the quota limit from compete.com. Major bummer. Anyone know of any other free alternatives out there to get traffic stats about sites?

Unfortunately compete.com has a 1,000 reqs/day allowance ... so expect to see a lot of "Honeybadger don't care" message. I'm going to try to see how much the api costs and see if I can get the quota removed.

Email someone there and offer to include their logo and a link in exchange for a higher limit. API limits are almost always negotiable.

ok just did, hopefully we can work something out. thx :)

Just set it up so there's an options.html where you put in your own API key, and make users signup for Compete themselves. Problem solved.

The Chrome SEO extension includes that stat.

just link to the images...

http://grapher.compete.com/site_media/snapshot/ycombinator.c...

Good idea, but that fails with other sites, better use this "url template": siteanalytics.compete.com/embed_chart/google.com/small/

thanks ! that is exactly what i was looking for!

alright traffic graph now implemented, yipee!

Can someone explain to me the difference between a MVP and a a cool side/personal project?

Jaequerry, I'm going to install it and check it out. The extension looks cool. It solves a pain for me, but not one I would go to the trouble of paying for (sorry). I'm genuinely confused as to what the difference is between all the free non revenue generating chrome extensions made out of love and one made by an HNer that are labeled as potential products (which implies revenue generating to me). Which category are you gearing this toward?

Is your desire to monetize this? If so how? I feel kinda harsh, but there have been a few Show HN MVP posts lately that have been confusing me regarding the line between potential revenue generating products and nifty side projects.

Note: I failed at a project hard this month after pouring 8 months of my life into it... I am probably having one of those days.

It's a difference in the author's attitude toward the project. A person who feels that they're building an MVP will be looking for ways to monetize it, while for "just a side-project" monetization might be an after-thought or explicitly not an objective.

Don't feel bad. I ask myself this for about 80% of the projects I saw posted here on HN. I used to ask the posters themselves, but I rarely got any answers beyond a vague "we'll sell advertising." Really? Do you have any experience in sales of any kind, let alone advertising sales?

My (somewhat cynical) guess is that what used to be called a "side project" is now getting the title "MVP" or "startup" because it sounds cool.

I should add that this is a general note, not directed at this particular project.

I'm not sure if the title of the original post was changed or not, but after reading over the linked website, I did not see any mention of him charging for this. It appears to be a free extension that he is sharing.

Seems to me that a MVP implies that there will be further iterations coming.

I can understand where you are coming from. I feel the same about some MVP posts on HN time to time.

But if you were to ask me, MVP literally is what it says, a minimum viable product. Just a product decent enough so that other people can use it or to check it out.

I know many companies that spends over a year getting ready for MVP, myself included, and it depends on the product. Some products take a long time to get the MVP out and it's just the nature of the business.

As for honeybadger, I put this tool up over two weekends. I use it for my purpose and it's still too early to tell what I can do with it. All I know right now is that, this tool comes in handy for me even at the current state, just pulling up crunchbase data site to site. But learning from today, I realize I am facing an issue in that obtaining the API to get the traffic stats isn't free (there's a daily quota limit) so there does need to be a way for me to offset this cost somehow when I upgrade to premium. I just hope it doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

A MVP, under the original definition[1], is a learning tool that helps you to learn the most about your hypothesis, with the least amount of waste.[2]

Note that product under the MVP definition may not be a product under the most common use of the word.[3]

[1] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-...

[2] http://www.w2lessons.com/2010/10/minimum-viable-product-diss...

[3] http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/06/your-product-is-not-the-pro...

Not to be the forebearer of "seen this before" type comments but...

* Duedil has a pretty nice Chrome extension (currently companies registered in UK & Ireland only) - http://www.duedil.com/?share=c99a9be592

* Some guy at Polaris Ventures (I never heard of them either) built a Chrome extension pulling CB, Quora and LinkedIn - http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/26/polaris-insights-extension/ [TechCrunch's somewhat superfluous write up]

This is quite a time saver and works well most of the time. However, I get this message for a few sites "Honeybadger could not retrieve any data about this site or he simply doesn't care."

e.g. sites, http://www.westelm.com/ http://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/

Thanks rve. For those sites you mentioned, Honeybadger actually cares a lot, but the honeybadger only knows how to pull in data from the crunchbase/compete.com at the moment. It's just an mvp at this stage but expect to see some more as time progresses.

it would be great if you could avoid showing the H in the address bar (or grey it out) for such sites (i can't see how you do this without hitting your server on every site, which i imagine you are trying to avoid - but perhaps you are smarter than me :o)

Please adjust the kerning of the "Testimonials" heading on your site -- there's a ginormous space between the 'T' and the 'E'.

Sweet. I'm currently looking for a new job, so this will definitely help me evaluate potential companies. Thanks a ton. :)

Edit : Single gripe to an otherwise very cool project. When I click on HB, and switch to another tab to look up the names of the people, it closes out HB for that tab I was on so I have to go through clicking again. Any chance you can get this to persist and maybe add some google anchors to the entities HB provides?

I found that Chrome has a pretty nifty thing called "Webkit notification" that persists across all tabs. Maybe it's something I can try experimenting with just for this purpose.

Might I suggest adding (my) UnderTheSite.com to display technical details? Contact me if you want any integration help.

that was definitely on top of my to-do list! is there an API somewhere for it?

Awesome! An API is in the works, but in the meantime I suggest just grabbing http://underthesite.com/sites/<domain>.com and DOM parsing the simple markup. Let me know if you have any questions.

thats a really cool site you have there, once i get this implemented, i'll make sure to backlink it to your site to give credit where it's due :)

On the plus side. I dig the name. Any animal that can chow down a poisonous snake, pass out, then shake it off like it was just a hangover is just fine by me - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c81bcjyfn6U [skip to 2:50]

"The icon will be visible when the plugin can act on the current page"

Does the plugin send every new domain or url back to your server? Would you say there are any privacy or bandwith issues?

note: the current info window on my browser is only about 4 characters wide when the icon is pressed.

Oh man, I was just wanting to have an extension like this myself yesterday. Installed!

small UI tweak: change funding amount display from e.g. $400,000.00 to $400k

Really cool. You may even get some additional data from AngelList.

just added it, thanks

This is awesome. I use WebRank SEO for this for a lot of stats but the funding info I find myself looking up all the time.

Looks good. I can't see the video right now but are you looking at /humans.txt? Might contain useful info.

Never heard of humans.txt before but it sure looks interesting.

interesting, maybe you could steal some ideas from polaris insights[1], such as showing linkedin informations data

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/golfffpdocdndgkahj...

Nice. I can see myself using this a lot. Thanks for sharing.

I really liked to use Apture for this use case.

Care to elaborate?

Apture allowed you to highlight the company for example and would show you the Crunchbase entry for it

Awesome. Great job! It's simple and useful.

Any chance for a FF version of this?

What's with the piggybacking name?

Augmented reality for the web

Every VC associate will be using this in a matter of weeks!

Cool stuff! Found a bug though: It recognizes local files (file:///Users/...) as a website and still displays the Honeybadger icon

Honeybadger don't give a shit. It just takes what it wants.

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