12 ms·

Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media

261 points by fstopmick 6y ago

dmje 6y ago
Really well done, slick onboarding, nice and simple UI, pricing page makes sense. Good work!
fstopmick 6y ago
Hi everyone - just wanted to drop a message here in case you sent me an email and I haven't responded yet. First - thank you for the super supportive and encouraging vibes here, and for the candid feedback. Really, really appreciate how many improvements are going to be attributed directly to you. Second - sorry for the delayed responses. I'm working through emails / messages / comments and promise to get back to you - I just don't want to rush through bugfixes and conversations, so it might take longer than I'd like. Third - There have been a few reports of email verification breaking, and also of features not being fully enabled with Early Adopter subscriptions. This is my bad - the email verification flow didn't take into account case-insensitivity. Should be fixed now (for anyone impacted, you should have a new verification link in your inbox). Features should also be enabled by EOD today - the complexity of feature-by-feature upgrades is coming back to bite me now. Fourth - I've authored a couple more notes to answer questions that have popped up: Bizdev strategy / vision: https://www.karma.fm/p/SdjVjdj/the-pmalerts-strategy https://www.karma.fm/p/SdjVjdj/the-pmalerts-strategy How closely does PMAlerts listen?: https://www.karma.fm/p/rk3HI4d/how-closely-is-pmalerts-listening https://www.karma.fm/p/rk3HI4d/how-closely-is-pmalerts-liste... Thank you again, - mick
- jamyot 6y ago
  Hey Mick, really great tool and super useful, here are my bits of feedback: 1: When you customize what websites you want to listen to, you should also be able to customize what language you want to include/exclude (where I work, there is a univeristy in Italy with the same name, so google alerts floods my email with Italian website mentions, but they aren't actually relevant to us) 2: When I signed up, I got a message that said "something bad happened", the wording is a little alarming right after giving information, and it doesnt give any more info on what I can do/ where to go to fix things. It stopped giving that alert once I unchecked "custom". Like I said, awesome tool, keep it up!
aluciani 6y ago
Love this - simple and easy to use. Looking forward to giving this a try. Thanks for putting the work into this - great job!
darrenwestall 6y ago
I’m really keen to see how LinkedIn alerts work, I’d love to plug into this by API for our clients. Email in my profile if you’d like to chat?
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Absolutely, shooting an email over now! If anyone here on HN wants it for free, just let me know via m@pmalerts.com and I'll give you an early adopter subscription (full product, free for however long it's around).
  - jmholla 6y ago
    Wow. That's really generous. I could see myself one day using this, but don't have a use for it now. When I do, this is definitely a product I would happily pay for, and, if and when, will.
    - fstopmick 6y ago
      Super appreciate that sentiment. That's what I'm going for - 1) build something valuable, default to freemium 2) pave a clear path to free for those in need 3) have faith in voluntary reciprocation of value
greatsaas12 6y ago
I love the fact the you've spent time focusing on onboarding. Most SaaS companies onboarding workflow these days is: - Describe what they're about - Ask for a sign-up before you even have the chance of using/interacting with the product
- fstopmick 6y ago
  It's always seemed strange to me that the normal SaaS flow forces users to blindly commit... I want you to fall in love without any coercion. It's more romantic that way
hmhrex 6y ago
Awesome! I'm digging this. I also like how the features are tiered. You might want to make a chart showing what features are under what tier, but it's not overly confusing.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  I'm super on the fence about my pricing page, to be honest. Would you rather have just a standard three-tier Personal / Startup / Enterprise plan (3 choices), instead of granular control that confronts you with a $numberOfFeatures choices?
offtop5 6y ago
Anyway to plug in sentiment analysis ? I would love for you to run this through IBM Watson or something so I can see if people are saying positive things about my brand
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm super excited to build this out. I'm admittedly overeager to build and am not very good at building financially sustainable projects, so I told myself I'd fund this feature with revenue from paying customers. ($0MRR right now) In the meantime, you can use webhooks to push results into your own sentiment analysis flow. That's supported (and free).
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Charge people up-front for this. Watson is very expensive after all. Alternatively you can use an npm module to determine basic sentiment https://www.npmjs.com/package/sentiment https://www.npmjs.com/package/sentiment
okokok___ 6y ago
Man, this on-boarding is slick! well done.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Thank you!! That's all attributable to early adopter feedback, but I'll take the credit :)
cmg 6y ago
This is really, really cool. And I love the home page! Being able to see results before signing up is great. I'm not a potential customer right now, but the text on the pricing page "If you find a payment bug (incorrect charges, broken UI, etc), let me know and I'll give you the full version of PMAlerts for free, for life." would absolutely give me pause. A simple addition if you're actually dealing with payment issues would be to add "I'll make sure your billing is straightened out ASAP - and never charge you more if you've been undercharged." But ultimately, get your payment system functioning ASAP. I would not be comfortable putting my card info into a system that tells me ahead of time it might have bugs.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  I very much appreciate the candid feedback, cmg. I'll update the copy now.
  - kyriee 6y ago
    Seconded. Maybe push the security aspect? Have a tier be “bug bounty” and add something like “PM alerts are for users only. Report a bug and get a free version, for life”
    - fstopmick 6y ago
      I like this a lot. I'll incorporate it - thank you!
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Looks nice! I'm giving it a try on one of our projects.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Thanks Chris! My email is m@pmalerts.com if you hit any snags or want to share more about your particular needs/goals. Happy to chat.
bzb6 6y ago
The header of your website is sticky and takes up half the height of my screen.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Gah, the mobile UX is pretty horrible right now. I'll prioritize it, thank you bzb6
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rathel 6y ago
Nice tool, just in time I sought an alternative to Google Alerts, because they filter out most stuff and are biased towards bigger/news portals. For now something is not quite right, whatever I search for, I only get results for Twitter and when I uncheck Twitter, I get nothing. It'd be also cool to search by language (or would site:pl work to filter by TLD?)
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Ack! The onboarding flow only works with Twitter right now, but once you create an alert all platforms will be polled (though some will be polled via search engines until I can fund native search, like LinkedIn). I should add a disclaimer to the onboarding UI... site:TLD filtering is sort of in place right now but it's not obvious... you can select the "Custom" platform and then use that site:tld syntax (or any syntax supported by Google). Lmk if you run into any issues there, that's a relatively new feature. Language / geography filtering is on the backlog! hopefully to be funded by paying customers. Thanks for trying it out!
- rom16384 6y ago
  I find Google Alerts great, my only problem is that it picks spammy news/blog sites that keep reposting the same or similar content from press releases in various domains. Flagging as irrelevant doesn't help: There too many of these "blogs".
  - fstopmick 6y ago
    +1 If you're curious about how PMAlerts addresses this and other Google Alerts shortcomings, I wrote a small piece about that here: https://www.karma.fm/p/0SZfbtW/9-reasons-why-you-should-stop-using-google-alerts https://www.karma.fm/p/0SZfbtW/9-reasons-why-you-should-stop...
pknerd 6y ago
I am surprised why no one thought about it? Awesome!
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Oh I don't want to pretend to be original here. mention, brand24, awario, and lots of other "social listening" solutions exist. I'm just particularly interested in building SaaS products on top of a business model that's designed to redistribute wealth from megacorps to people-in-need, so I don't mind playing copycat until I can fund true originality :p
_hoysala_ 6y ago
Wow, this is really cool! I especially love how you can see results before signing up!
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Thanks for the love!
lprubin 6y ago
Nice work. Have you considered creating a page/blog post the explains how you've used your own tool to find paying customers? Doing that would provide a ton of value I think: 1. You'll (hopefully) find new customers 2. By using your own tool regularly, you'll gain invaluable insight into UX issues and new feature ideas. 3. Potential customers on your site would get to read through a play by play story about somebody successfully using your tool to drive business results. Basically a meta case study.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  I LOVE this thinking. I have a small write-up about "how I'm using PMAlerts to drive growth for PMAlerts" here: https://www.karma.fm/p/BcMEfxQ/frequently-asked-questions https://www.karma.fm/p/BcMEfxQ/frequently-asked-questions But it's not presented as a formalized case study and doesn't provide the value you're proposing (to me or others). I'll do it!
  - lprubin 6y ago
    Nice, you have the foundation there which is great. I'd also recommend making the faq table of contents into clickable links.
    - fstopmick 6y ago
      On it, thank you lprubin.
  - ayewo 6y ago
    Congrats on your Show HN! I absolutely liked your copy. Is karma.fm one of your side projects too?
    - fstopmick 6y ago
      Thanks very much! And yes it is - I'm using PMAlerts to learn how to listen, and Karma is teaching me how to think and write (though it's a bit less mature)
jakelazaroff 6y ago
This looks super cool, I just signed up :) FYI, the verification email landed in my spam folder.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Thanks for the heads up, others have said the same. Someone shared some deliverability tips with me that I'll be implementing asap.
  - WilliamTheFirst 6y ago
    I've also had issues with deliverability. Please share what you learnt about this if you don't mind me asking.
weinzierl 6y ago
Love the pricing model and the UX is nice. Three small things I noticed during sign-up: 1. Please let me sign-up from the pricing page. At least on my phone I couldn't find a direct link or button. 2. The "Save Upgrades" button is annoyingly sticky on my iPhone. 3. Email doesn't autofill. Otherwise registering and adding an alert was smooth. Well done!
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Thank you!!! Will address each of these, hopefully by the weekend depending on dayjob demands. Don't hesitate to let me know of any other friction points - I'm aiming for frictionless
alberth 6y ago
It's like https://www.sprinklr.com https://www.sprinklr.com but 1,000-4,000x cheaper (seriously). Love the homepage. EDIT: Question, I just tried the demo out on some very popular terms (e.g. "google", "Microsoft", etc) - it appears results are only returned for Twitter. If I unselect Twitter, "no results found". Just an FYI in case that's not intended behavior.
- amelius 6y ago
  And I guess it's also like youtube-dl in the sense that it needs to continuously fight updates and/or banning from the sites it wants to download from.
  - fstopmick 6y ago
    yeah, it's not as fixed-cost as I'd hoped
    - amelius 6y ago
      Have you considered open-sourcing the libraries that fetch content from these platforms? You could build an entire community that helps you maintain the code ...
      - fstopmick 6y ago
        I haven't, mostly because I'm scared of the liability. My code is pretty sketchy for everything but Twitter, and for that I use LinqToTwitter (.NET) which is already OSS (and amazing).
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Yeah - the onboarding flow (insta-results) only supports Twitter. Other platforms are polled run on a recurring basis and take ~10 minutes to show results, so when you create an alert you'll see stuff from other places. I need to make that clear on the onboarding flow - it's a UX bug. Thanks very much for the feedback and love.
mobileexpert 6y ago
Are you using public/legit APIs for all these services? Seems like you might be at risk for TOS violation for at least a couple.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Twitter is legit, otherwise I plead the 5th. I do outsource this risk (and pay for that), so stability shouldn't be an issue unless there's a broad and deep crackdown on everyone who scrapes, which I think is unlikely given recent sentiment around the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559 But it is a risk. Serpapi.com is helping me a lot with that - give them a tinker!
  - chrisfrantz 6y ago
    What do you mean by “outsource the risk”?
    - fstopmick 6y ago
      I mean I hope that if I pay someone else to harvest my drugs and I don't know how they do it, then I have some level of plausible deniability, but that just went out the window
bromquinn 6y ago
This is slick! I could see using this for one of my own projects. How do you get the data? Are you using the official apis or are you 'scraping'?
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Twitter results use their official API, otherwise I crackle sounds can't he- crackle what?.. call disconnected
  - riku_iki 6y ago
    Curious how scalable is this service? When services will start throttling/blocking your calls?..
    - fstopmick 6y ago
      Everything "legit" scales along with the cost of API access Everything else scales along with the cost of outsourcing that risk to services located outside of the US (like serpapi.com) who implement lots of proxies and workarounds I'm not sure if there will be margins, so if it scales, it'll have to be very cost-consciously
fiatjaf 6y ago
If, like me, you clicked this expecting to find a tool that would aggregate posts from social media for their own consumption, not as a business intelligence tool, let me recommend https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/.
corytheboyd 6y ago
Quick feedback, on mobile the header takes up about half of the viewport
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm a garbage developer, mobile needs some work. I'll prioritize this - thank you for the heads up
  - corytheboyd 6y ago
    No I think you did a great job here! Just helping out :)
huhtenberg 6y ago
When trying to set up an Hourly alert on a free account it says "Please _register_ your account to ...". Apparently, it's a $10/mo feature, so you may want to reword the message to explain that and also link respective part of the price list from the message itself. Also, "Purchase Upgrades" button is not clickable - https://i.imgur.com/uIyrIFv.gif https://i.imgur.com/uIyrIFv.gif PS. I'm curious to see how well it works, but from what I saw so far - well done, break a leg. Saying this as a user of Talkwalker and F5Bot ;)
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Ack, thanks for the heads up RE the "register" copy. Just pushed a fix. Edit: RE the Upgrade button - once that 0 goes to nonzero, it should work. It's poor design on my end, I'll improve the UX asap. Thanks for trying it out, and for the feedback :).
fstopmick 6y ago
For anyone curious about the services being used to support platform polling, I'm using serpapi.com for the Custom and LinkedIn options on PMAlerts. I highly recommend experimenting with this service - lots of potential gets unlocked as soon as you work around arbitrary scraping limitations that Google throws up. Plus, Julien from serpapi is awesome and super accessible.
- grecy 6y ago
  How are you getting the data from Twitter and Facebook?
  - frankacter 6y ago
    Not OP, but they stated for Twitter they use LinqToTwitter (.NET), for Facebook is a custom { hack } to acomplish.
swlkr 6y ago
Nice work! Definitely a more complete complement to f5bot
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Thank you swlkr
Accioni 6y ago
I will signup as well! If I can I always looking for a ways to avoid Google products and support smaller business and creators. I think its time for changes.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  a sentiment I wholeheartedly embrace
makeee 6y ago
Nice work! I'd love something that alerted me to mentions in Discord servers. Not sure if that's doable without having a bot in every server.. but I'd pay for that.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Hmmm... I could have a setting for PMAlerts integrations (slack, teams, discord, zoom) that configures it to not only feed alert results into the app, but to listen to that server's contents for you and only you. A bit tricky with privacy implications, but technically feasible. I'll have a think on it - thanks for the love.
  - makeee 6y ago
    Cool, just signed up! Transitioning my Zapier-powered twitter alerts over. Love the thought you've put into this, like ability to hide results authored by certain usernames.
    - fstopmick 6y ago
      Woohoo! Email is m@pmalerts.com if you need anything (a bit behind at the moment, but I generally aim for responses within a day). Would love to connect + learn more about your use-case and general needs/challenges in this space.
krelian 6y ago
I really like this! If you don't mind sharing, how much time roughly was spent from the time you wrote the first line of code and until this launch? I'm curious about these things.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Thanks very much! The prototype was a console application I built a little under a year ago (Jan 2020). I've been chipping away at it on nights and weekends since then... maybe about 10 hours per week on average (some none, some double). So ~10 full-time weeks? 9 too many
ryanr23 6y ago
I'm floored with this app. Well done!!! If you don't mind me asking...how did you manage to scrape linkedin?
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Thank you! Right now LinkedIn results show you what you'd see from a timeboxed google search, like "ryanr site:linkedin.com", but this will change once I have either 1) time to implement deep native polling, or 2) a service that does it for me (high confidence in 2 becoming available soon).
nyellin 6y ago
I love the idea. Does this support searching for links to a specific domain? I tried adding my personal blog (without the http:// http:// prefix) and no results showed up.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Thanks nyellin - and for sure! If you used the onboarding flow or "result preview" functionality, you'll only see recent Twitter results. But if you create an alert for your personal blog and select "Custom" along with other platforms, you'll be notified whenever someone drops your link AND (important) it isn't shortened by something like bitly.
cl0wnshoes 6y ago
Really nice tool! Couple things I'm running into: 1. I registered on my laptop, opened account verification email on my phone. Verification link says I'm verified, laptop say's I'm not even after logging out/in. 2. It says 5 alerts are free, but at 3 alerts I'm presented with a message stating I've reached my limit. 3. Last pass doesn't seem to like the email field on sign in. It won't autofill it :(
- fstopmick 6y ago
  I'm hearing similar feedback from others on all three items - if you shoot me your email to m@pmalerts.com I'll upgrade + verify you manually while I troubleshoot. Thanks for confirming these, and sorry for the headache!
visarga 6y ago
Do I have to disclose my passwords or open my accounts for pmalerts to work?
- fstopmick 6y ago
  No you don't! You can use PMAlerts without even providing your email if you'd like.
uberneo 6y ago
Great product!! Super simple to onboard, cheap and very useful. What service are you using from sending Emails and Text notification?
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Thanks uberneo! I'm using Sendgrid for emails (looking to switch to something with high deliverability, high trust, and easy analytics if you have any suggestions!) and Twilio for texts (super friendly SDKs).
  - adrianh 6y ago
    Postmark is great for sending transactional email with high deliverability.
northpoleescape 6y ago
Nice work! You mentioned you are using serpapi in one the response below. Are you simply fetching results from Google or are you also using some other ways to monitor these sites like Facebook, Reddit and others natively. I would be curious to understand how you implemented it.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Thank you! Most platforms have a combination of "poll via search engines" and "poll natively". Native polling mirrors the functionality of performing a keyword search using the platform's search functionality.
gverrilla 6y ago
my antivirus blocked this page
kilroy123 6y ago
I'm very curious how this is built, I've created something like this myself using a combination of tools. (huginn, rss-bridge, searchx, etc.)
- tectonic 6y ago
  Huginn author here (alerted by huginn to this post!) and I'd also like to know how it's implemented.
kevsim 6y ago
Cool tool! I added it to our slack and did a /pmalerts a couple of times in a channel (twice I think) without first inviting your bot to that channel and I got A LOT (10+) of messages from the bot. Seems like something's a little off there.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Hey Kevsim - thanks for the heads up and sorry about that - that's a familiar bug that I thought was fixed. I'll try to repro, would love to connect via email to confirm any attempted fixes - m@pmalerts.com
slykar 6y ago
There's https://brand24.com/ https://brand24.com/ that might do something similar
markdown 6y ago
If you're taking feature requests, I have one for you: Let me filter the alerts. For example, I want an alert every time "foo" (a topic) comes up on social media. However, some fool just named their startup "foo", and now all searches for "foo" the topic are polluted with material about "foo" the startup. So maybe let me set up alerts for "foo -finance -money -banks" because the topic is about gardening and the startup is in the financial services sector.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Ooh this is implemented! If you click on "Filters" at the top of any selected alert, you'll see options for keyword filtering, username filtering, and domain filtering. The UI/UX is a bit immature, so if you use it and have any feedback, I'm happy to address whatever friction you hit.
  - markdown 6y ago
    Ooops, not sure how i missed that. Thanks!
akfaew 6y ago
Hey, welcome to the club. I'm working on Syften.com. I'm focused on helping startups engage in conversations, so I try to send the notification within one minute. Here for example is how I used Syften to grow Syften by an additonal $640 ARR from one Reddit comment: https://syften.com/blog/post/one-comment-640-arr/ https://syften.com/blog/post/one-comment-640-arr/ . It also has features like being notified when someone replies to you on Hacker News. PS. I'm wondering, how in the world can you monitor GitHub? There is no API that I know of. Surely you don't scrape the entire GitHub every minute?
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Pleasure to connect, and congrats on the success! I envy your alert times :). I actually don't scrape all of GitHub (or any platform)... I just simulate a user performing a keyword search and share new results.
tasubotadas 6y ago
How does it monitor results on Facebook? AFAIK the api is closed down for this - it's possible to get content only for a single authorized user.
tug0fwar 6y ago
Hi, you should hide elements with CSS instead of with JS, following is visible on visiting the page with JS disabled. "A confirmation link has been sent to your email. If you register and confirm your email, you can skip this step."
- fstopmick 6y ago
  Thanks for the heads up about this

261 points by fstopmick 6y ago

dmje 6y ago

Really well done, slick onboarding, nice and simple UI, pricing page makes sense. Good work!

Hi everyone - just wanted to drop a message here in case you sent me an email and I haven't responded yet. First - thank you for the super supportive and encouraging vibes here, and for the candid feedback. Really, really appreciate how many improvements are going to be attributed directly to you. Second - sorry for the delayed responses. I'm working through emails / messages / comments and promise to get back to you - I just don't want to rush through bugfixes and conversations, so it might take longer than I'd like. Third - There have been a few reports of email verification breaking, and also of features not being fully enabled with Early Adopter subscriptions. This is my bad - the email verification flow didn't take into account case-insensitivity. Should be fixed now (for anyone impacted, you should have a new verification link in your inbox). Features should also be enabled by EOD today - the complexity of feature-by-feature upgrades is coming back to bite me now. Fourth - I've authored a couple more notes to answer questions that have popped up: Bizdev strategy / vision: https://www.karma.fm/p/SdjVjdj/the-pmalerts-strategy https://www.karma.fm/p/SdjVjdj/the-pmalerts-strategy How closely does PMAlerts listen?: https://www.karma.fm/p/rk3HI4d/how-closely-is-pmalerts-listening https://www.karma.fm/p/rk3HI4d/how-closely-is-pmalerts-liste... Thank you again, - mick

jamyot 6y ago
Hey Mick, really great tool and super useful, here are my bits of feedback: 1: When you customize what websites you want to listen to, you should also be able to customize what language you want to include/exclude (where I work, there is a univeristy in Italy with the same name, so google alerts floods my email with Italian website mentions, but they aren't actually relevant to us) 2: When I signed up, I got a message that said "something bad happened", the wording is a little alarming right after giving information, and it doesnt give any more info on what I can do/ where to go to fix things. It stopped giving that alert once I unchecked "custom". Like I said, awesome tool, keep it up!

aluciani 6y ago

Love this - simple and easy to use. Looking forward to giving this a try. Thanks for putting the work into this - great job!

darrenwestall 6y ago

I’m really keen to see how LinkedIn alerts work, I’d love to plug into this by API for our clients. Email in my profile if you’d like to chat?

fstopmick 6y ago
Absolutely, shooting an email over now! If anyone here on HN wants it for free, just let me know via m@pmalerts.com and I'll give you an early adopter subscription (full product, free for however long it's around).
- jmholla 6y ago
  Wow. That's really generous. I could see myself one day using this, but don't have a use for it now. When I do, this is definitely a product I would happily pay for, and, if and when, will.
  - fstopmick 6y ago
    Super appreciate that sentiment. That's what I'm going for - 1) build something valuable, default to freemium 2) pave a clear path to free for those in need 3) have faith in voluntary reciprocation of value

greatsaas12 6y ago

I love the fact the you've spent time focusing on onboarding. Most SaaS companies onboarding workflow these days is: - Describe what they're about - Ask for a sign-up before you even have the chance of using/interacting with the product

fstopmick 6y ago
It's always seemed strange to me that the normal SaaS flow forces users to blindly commit... I want you to fall in love without any coercion. It's more romantic that way

hmhrex 6y ago

Awesome! I'm digging this. I also like how the features are tiered. You might want to make a chart showing what features are under what tier, but it's not overly confusing.

fstopmick 6y ago
I'm super on the fence about my pricing page, to be honest. Would you rather have just a standard three-tier Personal / Startup / Enterprise plan (3 choices), instead of granular control that confronts you with a $numberOfFeatures choices?

offtop5 6y ago

Anyway to plug in sentiment analysis ? I would love for you to run this through IBM Watson or something so I can see if people are saying positive things about my brand

fstopmick 6y ago
Yeah, I'm super excited to build this out. I'm admittedly overeager to build and am not very good at building financially sustainable projects, so I told myself I'd fund this feature with revenue from paying customers. ($0MRR right now) In the meantime, you can use webhooks to push results into your own sentiment analysis flow. That's supported (and free).
- offtop5 6y ago
  Charge people up-front for this. Watson is very expensive after all. Alternatively you can use an npm module to determine basic sentiment https://www.npmjs.com/package/sentiment https://www.npmjs.com/package/sentiment

okokok___ 6y ago

Man, this on-boarding is slick! well done.

fstopmick 6y ago
Thank you!! That's all attributable to early adopter feedback, but I'll take the credit :)

cmg 6y ago

This is really, really cool. And I love the home page! Being able to see results before signing up is great. I'm not a potential customer right now, but the text on the pricing page "If you find a payment bug (incorrect charges, broken UI, etc), let me know and I'll give you the full version of PMAlerts for free, for life." would absolutely give me pause. A simple addition if you're actually dealing with payment issues would be to add "I'll make sure your billing is straightened out ASAP - and never charge you more if you've been undercharged." But ultimately, get your payment system functioning ASAP. I would not be comfortable putting my card info into a system that tells me ahead of time it might have bugs.

fstopmick 6y ago
I very much appreciate the candid feedback, cmg. I'll update the copy now.
- kyriee 6y ago
  Seconded. Maybe push the security aspect? Have a tier be “bug bounty” and add something like “PM alerts are for users only. Report a bug and get a free version, for life”
  - fstopmick 6y ago
    I like this a lot. I'll incorporate it - thank you!

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Looks nice! I'm giving it a try on one of our projects.

fstopmick 6y ago
Thanks Chris! My email is m@pmalerts.com if you hit any snags or want to share more about your particular needs/goals. Happy to chat.

bzb6 6y ago

The header of your website is sticky and takes up half the height of my screen.

fstopmick 6y ago
Gah, the mobile UX is pretty horrible right now. I'll prioritize it, thank you bzb6

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rathel 6y ago

Nice tool, just in time I sought an alternative to Google Alerts, because they filter out most stuff and are biased towards bigger/news portals. For now something is not quite right, whatever I search for, I only get results for Twitter and when I uncheck Twitter, I get nothing. It'd be also cool to search by language (or would site:pl work to filter by TLD?)

fstopmick 6y ago
Ack! The onboarding flow only works with Twitter right now, but once you create an alert all platforms will be polled (though some will be polled via search engines until I can fund native search, like LinkedIn). I should add a disclaimer to the onboarding UI... site:TLD filtering is sort of in place right now but it's not obvious... you can select the "Custom" platform and then use that site:tld syntax (or any syntax supported by Google). Lmk if you run into any issues there, that's a relatively new feature. Language / geography filtering is on the backlog! hopefully to be funded by paying customers. Thanks for trying it out!
rom16384 6y ago
I find Google Alerts great, my only problem is that it picks spammy news/blog sites that keep reposting the same or similar content from press releases in various domains. Flagging as irrelevant doesn't help: There too many of these "blogs".
- fstopmick 6y ago
  +1 If you're curious about how PMAlerts addresses this and other Google Alerts shortcomings, I wrote a small piece about that here: https://www.karma.fm/p/0SZfbtW/9-reasons-why-you-should-stop-using-google-alerts https://www.karma.fm/p/0SZfbtW/9-reasons-why-you-should-stop...

pknerd 6y ago

I am surprised why no one thought about it? Awesome!

fstopmick 6y ago
Oh I don't want to pretend to be original here. mention, brand24, awario, and lots of other "social listening" solutions exist. I'm just particularly interested in building SaaS products on top of a business model that's designed to redistribute wealth from megacorps to people-in-need, so I don't mind playing copycat until I can fund true originality :p

_hoysala_ 6y ago

Wow, this is really cool! I especially love how you can see results before signing up!

fstopmick 6y ago
Thanks for the love!

lprubin 6y ago

Nice work. Have you considered creating a page/blog post the explains how you've used your own tool to find paying customers? Doing that would provide a ton of value I think: 1. You'll (hopefully) find new customers 2. By using your own tool regularly, you'll gain invaluable insight into UX issues and new feature ideas. 3. Potential customers on your site would get to read through a play by play story about somebody successfully using your tool to drive business results. Basically a meta case study.

fstopmick 6y ago
I LOVE this thinking. I have a small write-up about "how I'm using PMAlerts to drive growth for PMAlerts" here: https://www.karma.fm/p/BcMEfxQ/frequently-asked-questions https://www.karma.fm/p/BcMEfxQ/frequently-asked-questions But it's not presented as a formalized case study and doesn't provide the value you're proposing (to me or others). I'll do it!
- lprubin 6y ago
  Nice, you have the foundation there which is great. I'd also recommend making the faq table of contents into clickable links.
  - fstopmick 6y ago
    On it, thank you lprubin.
- ayewo 6y ago
  Congrats on your Show HN! I absolutely liked your copy. Is karma.fm one of your side projects too?
  - fstopmick 6y ago
    Thanks very much! And yes it is - I'm using PMAlerts to learn how to listen, and Karma is teaching me how to think and write (though it's a bit less mature)

jakelazaroff 6y ago

This looks super cool, I just signed up :) FYI, the verification email landed in my spam folder.

fstopmick 6y ago
Thanks for the heads up, others have said the same. Someone shared some deliverability tips with me that I'll be implementing asap.
- WilliamTheFirst 6y ago
  I've also had issues with deliverability. Please share what you learnt about this if you don't mind me asking.

weinzierl 6y ago

Love the pricing model and the UX is nice. Three small things I noticed during sign-up: 1. Please let me sign-up from the pricing page. At least on my phone I couldn't find a direct link or button. 2. The "Save Upgrades" button is annoyingly sticky on my iPhone. 3. Email doesn't autofill. Otherwise registering and adding an alert was smooth. Well done!

fstopmick 6y ago
Thank you!!! Will address each of these, hopefully by the weekend depending on dayjob demands. Don't hesitate to let me know of any other friction points - I'm aiming for frictionless

alberth 6y ago

It's like https://www.sprinklr.com https://www.sprinklr.com but 1,000-4,000x cheaper (seriously). Love the homepage. EDIT: Question, I just tried the demo out on some very popular terms (e.g. "google", "Microsoft", etc) - it appears results are only returned for Twitter. If I unselect Twitter, "no results found". Just an FYI in case that's not intended behavior.

amelius 6y ago
And I guess it's also like youtube-dl in the sense that it needs to continuously fight updates and/or banning from the sites it wants to download from.
- fstopmick 6y ago
  yeah, it's not as fixed-cost as I'd hoped
  - amelius 6y ago
    Have you considered open-sourcing the libraries that fetch content from these platforms? You could build an entire community that helps you maintain the code ...
    - fstopmick 6y ago
      I haven't, mostly because I'm scared of the liability. My code is pretty sketchy for everything but Twitter, and for that I use LinqToTwitter (.NET) which is already OSS (and amazing).
fstopmick 6y ago
Yeah - the onboarding flow (insta-results) only supports Twitter. Other platforms are polled run on a recurring basis and take ~10 minutes to show results, so when you create an alert you'll see stuff from other places. I need to make that clear on the onboarding flow - it's a UX bug. Thanks very much for the feedback and love.

mobileexpert 6y ago

Are you using public/legit APIs for all these services? Seems like you might be at risk for TOS violation for at least a couple.

fstopmick 6y ago
Twitter is legit, otherwise I plead the 5th. I do outsource this risk (and pay for that), so stability shouldn't be an issue unless there's a broad and deep crackdown on everyone who scrapes, which I think is unlikely given recent sentiment around the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559 But it is a risk. Serpapi.com is helping me a lot with that - give them a tinker!
- chrisfrantz 6y ago
  What do you mean by “outsource the risk”?
  - fstopmick 6y ago
    I mean I hope that if I pay someone else to harvest my drugs and I don't know how they do it, then I have some level of plausible deniability, but that just went out the window

bromquinn 6y ago

This is slick! I could see using this for one of my own projects. How do you get the data? Are you using the official apis or are you 'scraping'?

fstopmick 6y ago
Twitter results use their official API, otherwise I crackle sounds can't he- crackle what?.. call disconnected
- riku_iki 6y ago
  Curious how scalable is this service? When services will start throttling/blocking your calls?..
  - fstopmick 6y ago
    Everything "legit" scales along with the cost of API access Everything else scales along with the cost of outsourcing that risk to services located outside of the US (like serpapi.com) who implement lots of proxies and workarounds I'm not sure if there will be margins, so if it scales, it'll have to be very cost-consciously

fiatjaf 6y ago

If, like me, you clicked this expecting to find a tool that would aggregate posts from social media for their own consumption, not as a business intelligence tool, let me recommend https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/.

corytheboyd 6y ago

Quick feedback, on mobile the header takes up about half of the viewport

fstopmick 6y ago
Yeah, I'm a garbage developer, mobile needs some work. I'll prioritize this - thank you for the heads up
- corytheboyd 6y ago
  No I think you did a great job here! Just helping out :)

huhtenberg 6y ago

When trying to set up an Hourly alert on a free account it says "Please _register_ your account to ...". Apparently, it's a $10/mo feature, so you may want to reword the message to explain that and also link respective part of the price list from the message itself. Also, "Purchase Upgrades" button is not clickable - https://i.imgur.com/uIyrIFv.gif https://i.imgur.com/uIyrIFv.gif PS. I'm curious to see how well it works, but from what I saw so far - well done, break a leg. Saying this as a user of Talkwalker and F5Bot ;)

fstopmick 6y ago
Ack, thanks for the heads up RE the "register" copy. Just pushed a fix. Edit: RE the Upgrade button - once that 0 goes to nonzero, it should work. It's poor design on my end, I'll improve the UX asap. Thanks for trying it out, and for the feedback :).

fstopmick 6y ago

For anyone curious about the services being used to support platform polling, I'm using serpapi.com for the Custom and LinkedIn options on PMAlerts. I highly recommend experimenting with this service - lots of potential gets unlocked as soon as you work around arbitrary scraping limitations that Google throws up. Plus, Julien from serpapi is awesome and super accessible.

grecy 6y ago
How are you getting the data from Twitter and Facebook?
- frankacter 6y ago
  Not OP, but they stated for Twitter they use LinqToTwitter (.NET), for Facebook is a custom { hack } to acomplish.

swlkr 6y ago

Nice work! Definitely a more complete complement to f5bot

fstopmick 6y ago
Thank you swlkr

Accioni 6y ago

I will signup as well! If I can I always looking for a ways to avoid Google products and support smaller business and creators. I think its time for changes.

fstopmick 6y ago
a sentiment I wholeheartedly embrace

makeee 6y ago

Nice work! I'd love something that alerted me to mentions in Discord servers. Not sure if that's doable without having a bot in every server.. but I'd pay for that.

fstopmick 6y ago
Hmmm... I could have a setting for PMAlerts integrations (slack, teams, discord, zoom) that configures it to not only feed alert results into the app, but to listen to that server's contents for you and only you. A bit tricky with privacy implications, but technically feasible. I'll have a think on it - thanks for the love.
- makeee 6y ago
  Cool, just signed up! Transitioning my Zapier-powered twitter alerts over. Love the thought you've put into this, like ability to hide results authored by certain usernames.
  - fstopmick 6y ago
    Woohoo! Email is m@pmalerts.com if you need anything (a bit behind at the moment, but I generally aim for responses within a day). Would love to connect + learn more about your use-case and general needs/challenges in this space.

krelian 6y ago

I really like this! If you don't mind sharing, how much time roughly was spent from the time you wrote the first line of code and until this launch? I'm curious about these things.

fstopmick 6y ago
Thanks very much! The prototype was a console application I built a little under a year ago (Jan 2020). I've been chipping away at it on nights and weekends since then... maybe about 10 hours per week on average (some none, some double). So ~10 full-time weeks? 9 too many

ryanr23 6y ago

I'm floored with this app. Well done!!! If you don't mind me asking...how did you manage to scrape linkedin?

fstopmick 6y ago
Thank you! Right now LinkedIn results show you what you'd see from a timeboxed google search, like "ryanr site:linkedin.com", but this will change once I have either 1) time to implement deep native polling, or 2) a service that does it for me (high confidence in 2 becoming available soon).

nyellin 6y ago

I love the idea. Does this support searching for links to a specific domain? I tried adding my personal blog (without the http:// http:// prefix) and no results showed up.

fstopmick 6y ago
Thanks nyellin - and for sure! If you used the onboarding flow or "result preview" functionality, you'll only see recent Twitter results. But if you create an alert for your personal blog and select "Custom" along with other platforms, you'll be notified whenever someone drops your link AND (important) it isn't shortened by something like bitly.

cl0wnshoes 6y ago

Really nice tool! Couple things I'm running into: 1. I registered on my laptop, opened account verification email on my phone. Verification link says I'm verified, laptop say's I'm not even after logging out/in. 2. It says 5 alerts are free, but at 3 alerts I'm presented with a message stating I've reached my limit. 3. Last pass doesn't seem to like the email field on sign in. It won't autofill it :(

fstopmick 6y ago
I'm hearing similar feedback from others on all three items - if you shoot me your email to m@pmalerts.com I'll upgrade + verify you manually while I troubleshoot. Thanks for confirming these, and sorry for the headache!

visarga 6y ago

Do I have to disclose my passwords or open my accounts for pmalerts to work?

fstopmick 6y ago
No you don't! You can use PMAlerts without even providing your email if you'd like.

uberneo 6y ago

Great product!! Super simple to onboard, cheap and very useful. What service are you using from sending Emails and Text notification?

fstopmick 6y ago
Thanks uberneo! I'm using Sendgrid for emails (looking to switch to something with high deliverability, high trust, and easy analytics if you have any suggestions!) and Twilio for texts (super friendly SDKs).
- adrianh 6y ago
  Postmark is great for sending transactional email with high deliverability.

northpoleescape 6y ago

Nice work! You mentioned you are using serpapi in one the response below. Are you simply fetching results from Google or are you also using some other ways to monitor these sites like Facebook, Reddit and others natively. I would be curious to understand how you implemented it.

fstopmick 6y ago
Thank you! Most platforms have a combination of "poll via search engines" and "poll natively". Native polling mirrors the functionality of performing a keyword search using the platform's search functionality.

gverrilla 6y ago

my antivirus blocked this page

kilroy123 6y ago

I'm very curious how this is built, I've created something like this myself using a combination of tools. (huginn, rss-bridge, searchx, etc.)

tectonic 6y ago
Huginn author here (alerted by huginn to this post!) and I'd also like to know how it's implemented.

kevsim 6y ago

Cool tool! I added it to our slack and did a /pmalerts a couple of times in a channel (twice I think) without first inviting your bot to that channel and I got A LOT (10+) of messages from the bot. Seems like something's a little off there.

fstopmick 6y ago
Hey Kevsim - thanks for the heads up and sorry about that - that's a familiar bug that I thought was fixed. I'll try to repro, would love to connect via email to confirm any attempted fixes - m@pmalerts.com

slykar 6y ago

There's https://brand24.com/ https://brand24.com/ that might do something similar

markdown 6y ago

If you're taking feature requests, I have one for you: Let me filter the alerts. For example, I want an alert every time "foo" (a topic) comes up on social media. However, some fool just named their startup "foo", and now all searches for "foo" the topic are polluted with material about "foo" the startup. So maybe let me set up alerts for "foo -finance -money -banks" because the topic is about gardening and the startup is in the financial services sector.

fstopmick 6y ago
Ooh this is implemented! If you click on "Filters" at the top of any selected alert, you'll see options for keyword filtering, username filtering, and domain filtering. The UI/UX is a bit immature, so if you use it and have any feedback, I'm happy to address whatever friction you hit.
- markdown 6y ago
  Ooops, not sure how i missed that. Thanks!

akfaew 6y ago

Hey, welcome to the club. I'm working on Syften.com. I'm focused on helping startups engage in conversations, so I try to send the notification within one minute. Here for example is how I used Syften to grow Syften by an additonal $640 ARR from one Reddit comment: https://syften.com/blog/post/one-comment-640-arr/ https://syften.com/blog/post/one-comment-640-arr/ . It also has features like being notified when someone replies to you on Hacker News. PS. I'm wondering, how in the world can you monitor GitHub? There is no API that I know of. Surely you don't scrape the entire GitHub every minute?

fstopmick 6y ago
Pleasure to connect, and congrats on the success! I envy your alert times :). I actually don't scrape all of GitHub (or any platform)... I just simulate a user performing a keyword search and share new results.

tasubotadas 6y ago

How does it monitor results on Facebook? AFAIK the api is closed down for this - it's possible to get content only for a single authorized user.

tug0fwar 6y ago

Hi, you should hide elements with CSS instead of with JS, following is visible on visiting the page with JS disabled. "A confirmation link has been sent to your email. If you register and confirm your email, you can skip this step."

fstopmick 6y ago
Thanks for the heads up about this