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Comment by greysteil | Hacker News Reader

I've been building mentions.us[1] - it sends you alerts when your keywords are mentioned on Hacker News, Reddit, Bluesky, LinkedIn and a few other places. For anyone who uses F5Bot, it's similar but with some extra data sources and a Slack integration.

It's been a fun project. Dealing with the scale of Reddit (~300 posts/second) creates some interesting technical challenges. It's also let me polish up my frontend development skills.

I don't think it will ever be a money spinner - it has ~70 folks using it buy they're all on the free tier. It's felt really good to build something useful, though.

[1]: https://mentions.us

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You just got a signup :) Free plan, I'll admit. I don't need or want anything other than email notifications, and the free plan for that is very generous. Thanks for building this.

For the social platforms, are you hooking up to their APIs or just using Google? I'm only interested in emails and would pay a small price for that (say 5-7/month). I've signed up and added my first keyword to test.

That being said, here is an additional feature: being able to track discord/slack/telegram by providing my API key and you streaming the content of the groups I've signed up to.

We’re hooking up to the APIs - the goal is to alert you of mentions as quickly as possible, so waiting for Google to index results would introduce (much) too much lag.

Interesting feature request! I’ll have a think on it.

This is really interesting, thanks for sharing! I'm keen to know how it compares to a tool like Pulsar? I've been quoted a huge amount to use their service, and it looks like mention.us basically fulfills the same social listening function? If it does then I will definitely push my org to sign up!

Thanks! I haven't used Pulsar, but the general answer is that mentions.us is focussed on sending you alerts for notifications, whereas more sophisticated social listening tools provide a lot more analytics (e.g., sentiment analysis).

If your company just wants alerts when their keywords are mentioned on social media then mentions.us should work great for them. If you work for Coca Cola then you likely need something very different from your social listening tool!

Thanks for clarifying, we're a small org and so the few mentions we get could be analysed manually I'm sure. I will flag it to the marketing team!

Sounds very cool. I'm curious how you manage to monitor Linkedin though. The only tool that seems capable of monitoring Linkedin is https://kwatch.io , so if you manage to achieve that too it's impressive.

Hey Julien! I’ve seen you advertising KWatch in lots of places, assume you’re connected to it / know the founder?

For LinkedIn monitoring we use the voyager APIs. It’s not perfect because it gets posts but not comments, but it’s pretty good.

Perhaps it would be of interest to people into social media marketing or people trying to build social media presence. Keywords mean a lot to them. I'm sure you've thought of it. Perhaps that is where market potential exists for it.

your pricing is little confusing, for free you are providing 100 keywords, and for you most expensive plan you are providing also 100 keywords, in fact only diff between these two is slack notification. What's the motivation behind this pricing plan?

I put more details in a reply to another comment, but basically I think the number of people willing to pay for email alerts is small, so I’ve made the service free for them. It’s only teams who want Slack notifications who have paid plans.

I’m not optimising to extract every possible $ from the market with that pricing strategy. Instead I hope it will maximise the number of users whilst breaking even on costs.

Looks very interesting!! I registered and found an issue: when I add the mention keyword, it shows two results, but after saving it, it shows zero results. I tried checking mentions for my side project DollarDeploy.

Thanks for the feedback! For saved terms we show you the number of matches we’ve notified you about, which always starts at zero, whereas during creating we show you how many you would have matched. That’s a confusing UI and I should improve it

This seems very useful. Why not make it paid ? Do you think your customers won’t buy ? Have you tried ?

What would your customers need to make them want to pay for it ?

I think most of the people who sign up for email alerts would never pay. Lots of them are indie hackers or folks with a side project - I've been there, and know how price sensitive those communities are. I'd rather they use the service for free than not at all - I get valuable feedback from that, a marketing boost if they tell others about it, and the validation of having built something other people use.

I do have a paid plan for people who want Slack notifications, and I think those folks ought to be happy to pay. My hope is that I'll eventually get a few paid signups and that those will cover the costs of the service (which are minimal).

I know I lose a bit of revenue with the above approach, but it's a tradeoff I'm happy to make.

how do you get real time acsess to reddit posts?

Through the API - in particular the info endpoint[1], combined with the fact that Reddit IDs are base36 encoded sequentially increasing integers[2]. You can get 100 objects at a time, so if you make ~3 requests a second it's enough to get all of the new posts and comments.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/#GET_api_info

[2] https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/#fullnames

How do you get realtime data from Reddit?

How do you get realtime data from LinkedIn?

For now we use the LinkedIn voyager API's search endpoint

with your account? you never get blocked? that's impressive

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