How did you find your differentiation in a highly commoditized space? It's probably one of the most crowded spaces.
Even within YC, there are many competitors that do pretty much the same thing:
- Firecrawl
- BrowserUse
- Browserbase
- CloudCruise
- NotteLabs
- Intuned
- Expand.ai
- Reworkd
And then you have the extremely well-funded web retrieval players like Parallel and Exa.
How do you differentiate to all these?
Another thing that might interest HN: AI crawlers come with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported here on HN (and experienced myself).
Does Context respect robots.txt directives and do you disclose the identity of your crawlers via user-agent header?
I'm always genuinely curious on how startups navigate the founder maze as it helps to break the myth of an overnight success story.
Based on your YC page, you went through a couple of pivots over the last years:
- 4 years ago: Intuned - The data assistant for engineering leaders [0]
- 2 years ago: Intuned - The browser automation platform for developers and product teams [1]
- 1 year ago: Intuned Auth Sessions - Build authenticated scrapers and RPA [2]
What was kind of the evolution from YC S22 4 years ago till you arrived at today's launch? How did you find your differentiation in a highly commoditized space? Even within YC, there are many competitors like Firecrawl, Reworkd, BrowserUse, NotteLabs, Browserbase, etc.
Another thing that might interest HN: AI crawlers come with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported here on HN (and experienced myself).
Does Intuned respect robots.txt directives and do you disclose the identity of your crawlers via user-agent header?
Why is this not a Launch YC (or at least mention it?) since you seem to be part of the current batch?
The record/replay is definitely and interesting direction. The browser automation space is getting super crowded though (even within YC), so curious to hear how you differentiate from:
AI crawlers have lead to a big surge in scraping activity, and most of these bots don't respect any scraping best practices that the industry has developed over the past two decades (robots.txt, rate limits, user agents, etc.).
This comes with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported here on HN (and experienced myself).
Does Webhound respect robots.txt directives and do you disclose the identity of your crawlers via user-agent header?
The third quote is from a VC who has never founded a startup himself and has a clear interest in pushing founders to trade work-life balance for his own quick returns.
So none of these people worked on anything longer than 2 years. I wonder what will happen if we check back in 5–10 years. Will they still be doing and promoting 996, or will they be burned out and have changed their minds? Make your bets.
Even within YC, there are many competitors that do pretty much the same thing:
- Firecrawl
- BrowserUse
- Browserbase
- CloudCruise
- NotteLabs
- Intuned
- Expand.ai
- Reworkd
And then you have the extremely well-funded web retrieval players like Parallel and Exa.
How do you differentiate to all these?
Another thing that might interest HN: AI crawlers come with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported here on HN (and experienced myself).
Does Context respect robots.txt directives and do you disclose the identity of your crawlers via user-agent header?