How can I keep up to date with the startup world?

December 10, 2013 1:33 AM

As a programmer, I try to keep up to date with the tech world - including startups. Unfortunately, sometimes a site or app grows to huge proportions (ie. PInterest or Snapchat) and I have no idea that it exists. I know that there are a ton of blogs such as Techcrunch, Mashable, The Next Web and ReadWriteWeb, but these blogs are far too noisy for me as they all seem to run several posts per day. So I'd really love to find a site that focuses on those startups that are gaining significant traction. Or, I'd love to find a site where you can view what startups are getting hot, based on some metric such as people's votes. I know there's http://www.reddit.com/r/startups, but most of the posts are about the process of creating a startup. So what's a good site for keeping updated on startups that isn't too noisy?
posted by casebash to Technology (7 answers total)

Hacker News is likely going to be too busy for you, but it's what I'd recommend.

Crunchbase might be useful as well.
posted by third word on a random page at 2:37 AM on December 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

Seconding Hacker News. If all these sites are too noisy for you, you may be asking for too much in the way of predicting power. You can't learn about the start-ups that are gaining traction without learning about many, many more that seem to be gaining traction only to sputter and die.
posted by zanni at 4:57 AM on December 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

Hacker News has the same problem as most of the other sources you read already: it's dominated by adult men. You missed Pinterest because it skews very female. You missed Snapchat because it skews very young.

Your best bet is probably to talk to actual people in those demographics, and see what is gaining traction.
posted by smackfu at 5:46 AM on December 10, 2013 [10 favorites]

Best answer: You can get hacker news rss filtered to only have the top posts. There is a delay so they won't appear at the top if your reader.

http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overload/
posted by ridogi at 6:28 AM on December 10, 2013 [2 favorites]

There's also apparently a weekly HN newsletter, although I haven't really bothered with it.

It's easy to get sucked into a Metafilter-esque time vortex on Hacker News but scanning the headlines should at least keep you aware of New Things. The comments can be a bit of a cesspool of narrow-minded "fuck you got mine" American geeks sometimes though, mostly if the topic is anything social or political. The more technical the subject, the less horrifying the comments, generally.
posted by Reversible Diamond-Encrusted Ermine Codpiece at 12:51 PM on December 10, 2013

Best answer: Some of these searches should help you out. If they don't work, customize. There are many more things you could try, like other geographically-limited websites.

I suppose you're looking for a site that integrates all of this into one digest, but it'd be pretty hard for it to know what you've already heard of. There is https://www.globalwebindex.net/ which supposedly is good. It costs money, which might be worthwhile if you're really serious, but it also publishes free infographics that might be enough information if you just want to get caught up every few months.

Sample searches:

http://www.crunchbase.com/search/advanced/companies/2131038

https://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/ios-social-networking/id6005?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D2



https://www.google.com/search?q=10+million+users#q=10+million+users&tbm=nws

https://angel.co/new-users

https://twitter.com/search?q=%22my%20favorite%22%20app&src=typd

https://twitter.com/search?q=%22better%20than%20twitter%22&src=typd

http://www.arcticstartup.com/companies?utf8=%E2%9C%93&location_filter=All&startup_type_filter=Mobile&sort=Recent
posted by michaelh at 5:07 PM on December 10, 2013

Response by poster: And I finally found a product that does what I want: http://www.producthunt.com/!
posted by casebash at 6:08 AM on August 3, 2014