Show HN: KeepUpdated – Automatically track and monitor your competitors | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: KeepUpdated – Automatically track and monitor your competitors

keepupdated.co

36 pointscodelitt23 comments

I'm reminded of a (possibly apocryphal) study of Warcraft III and/or Starcraft cheaters, specifically ones that hacked the fog of war on the map. They found that the cheaters actually lost more, on average, because they spent so much time watching their opponents' moves that they neglected their own side.

I've also heard the same thing mentioned about businesses. Paying attention to the highlight reel (news) of your competitors can drag you down and make you feel that everyone else is "killing it".

This seems like an incredibly simple startup that thinks that companies are struggling to keep tabs on their competitors. Is it really that difficult to read the news? Or have google alerts to your inbox?

Companies shouldn't be watching their competitors like a laser to see if they add new features in order to stay on top of it. You build features your customers need, not just because others are implementing them.

I'm sure they will update their pricing page because it has no mention if it is recurring or not.

Please change your logo to use something other then a hexagon, every single startup thinks they need a hexagon for some reason.

Awesome use of Apocryphal (had to look it up).

Apocryphal: (of a story or statement) of doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true.

Many options for doing this already exist. Please take my money when you can notify me of specified content, or deliver contextual awareness; and when you can repackage and manipulate the changed data into actionable content for me. Oh, and connect with Zapier.

Take a look at https://monitorbook.com/

We have a lot of cool things coming out soon. Regarding specified content though, you can current select a specific area by clicking and dragging that you want to monitor instead of monitoring the entire page.

Great idea on Zapier. Definitely some valuable feedback. I appreciate it.

If you can login to a site and watch private pages, this would be hugely useful for people that want to watch RFQ pages (for example government purchasing). My brother asked me for something like that a number of years ago (they have a full time employee that logs in and monitors a hundred pages every day).

Hey that's an awesome idea. We will work to implement that soon! Thanks for the idea.

Are those prices monthly or yearly? You should clarify this before asking for the CC details...

You're absolutely right. Just had that emailed to us. Those prices are monthly. Can't believe none of us saw that we didn't state that. All of the tiers have a free 30 day trial and there is a free tier as well.

Thanks. I might give it a try. https://keepupdated.co/uses under FF the flipping icons are badly broken

Great. Let us know what you think.

Firefox. Got it. Thanks for both of your pieces of feedback.

Can I get a glimpse of what it looks like when the page changes? Can I see a diff of the page, or do I simply get an alert that it was changed?

This could be immensely useful to my company for another use case, but I really need to see what the output looks like.

No problem. So remember you can add a page and have us notify you when the entire thing has changed. Or you can add a page, click "Show monitored area," click and drag over area you want to monitor, and you'll only be notified when that area changes. So:

1. You'll get an email letting you know that there has been a change with the image in the email.

2. You can sign in and you'll see a where these (0)'s are? Those will have the number of changes that have happened that you haven't seen yet. http://i.imgur.com/fmuqi8B.png

3. You click on that and you'll see the update (only shows scans when something has changed): http://i.imgur.com/t3lxmVN.png

4. You can compare that with the previous scan to see what changed if you haven't specified an area: http://i.imgur.com/VbP3dcu.png

We're adding several things to the next release though including more markup around what has changed, HTML diff, and an API.

Thanks a lot.

For our use case we for sure need HTML diffs and probably some sort of API. Support for postback URLs would be useful as well.

The products a bit underdeveloped for me to use currently, but I'll keep an eye on you guys. It's priced pretty competitively.

Hey we understand. This is just an MVP. We have a lot of stuff in the works and appreciate the feedback. It's very valuable.

On the home page you have a question "How much does it cost?" and then ramble on without answering the question. That seems odd considering you do have a pricing page.

That's a fair point. That's definitely redundant.

Sort of like RivalIQ. Your blog is down :)

Noooo! Nice catch. No SSL on the blog, but looks like the link takes you there. Will make a quick fix in a few. http://blog.keepupdated.co should work for now.

That doesn't work either (i'm sure you know that already though but just communicating)

Ya. Thank you though. We just haven't had time today. We'll have it up in the morning. Sorry about that.

I use SleepingSpider.

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