Evolvr.io
p/evolvr-io
IMDB for Products & Companies
Kevin William David
Evolvr.io — IMDb for products & companies.
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Kevin William David
Evolvr.io launching today inspired by IMDB aims to be the most comprehensive resource for information about a company ,its products and the makers behind them. See how each product has evolved over time, which companies or makers use a particular product and their reviews.
Chris Carella
I'd be most excited about the Team aspect of this. Like IMDb knowing the people behind the products or search a person to see all the products they've worked on.
Karthik Kamalakannan
@ccarella Hi Chris, We totally respect the amazing people behind each and every product that we use. Having worked on products ourself, we know the pain and the energy that goes into each and every product. That's exactly why we have the "People who made this section" for the company pages. But may be, we might need such a section for individual products too. In the upcoming release, we are trying to bring a dedicated section for these amazing creators and celebrate them! Will keep you posted about it first hand. #Respect 🙏Thanks for bringing this up!
Neel Lukka
Are you developing a UI for companies to onboard themselves? Many early stage startups would love to fill out info about products and items they have built and solves the missing information gap. Could add a feature like angel list uses for advisors/bod members, where anyone added has to confirm by email that they worked on the product to confirm accuracy.
Karthik Kamalakannan
@nlukka Hey Neel. Currently, people can add their own companies from the option in the menubar. And once they create their profile, we look at it, improve it, and approve the profile immediately. But we are improving the process in the following weeks, with integrations with Google Apps and such, where someone signs-in with their company email, and we pick the company info on-the-fly. 😁 We definitely have a huge road-map ahead, and we definitely want to bridge the information gap that startups have. Featuring the amazing people behind a product/company is already there for company profile like Product Hunt: https://www.evolvr.io/e/tech/com... Email confirmation is something we're working on right now. We want to make sure that the process is super easy, and UI/UX is something we give a lot of damns about.
Josh Chen
This is so cool, we can call this Yelp for products & companies too, so that users can give reviews to each products.
Karthik Kamalakannan
@josh_jia_chen That's also in the plan. We really want Evolvr.io to be the platform for the users to express their emotion about a product they use everyday. We're going to be rolling out a lot of new features in the days to come and beyond! 🙌
Josh Chen
@imkarthikk sounds great, I think such platform is as helpful to developers as yelp to small business owners. wish you all the best
Karthik Kamalakannan
@josh_jia_chen Thank you so much Josh! And yes, that's exactly where our focus is! :)
Karthik Kamalakannan
Hello good people of Product Hunt. I’m the maker of Evolvr.io. Thanks @kwdinc for hunting us. We started Evolvr.io, because we thought the story of a product and the growth of a company is so beautiful, but just not celebrated enough. We are looking to connect developers directly to their customers throughout the journey of a product evolution, and not just the beginning. Currently, our team has added the companies that they like, but starting today, we’ve opened up Evolvr.io for anyone who would like to add their company. Once a new company is added, it waits for moderation from us. This is just to make sure that the Evolvr.io provides high-quality content. Here’s a quick overview of how Evolvr.io is organized: We’re a bunch of passionate humans trying to provide a single place on the internet for people like you who care about the products that you use everyday. More info here: https://www.evolvr.io/pages/about/
Sam Chadwick
Obviously early days with only 88 companies when I checked just now - mainly ones that are hyped today e.g. Uber, but no listings for IBM or Cisco - but it is clear what you are aiming to achieve and I wish you luck. You might want to check out http://permid.org as a unique identifier for the companies as that would mean customers could concord your data with other datasets in the future.
Karthik Kamalakannan
@companytrends That's exactly what we're trying to do. We really want to give the idea about where Evolvr.io is heading, in the next few iterations to come. Some of the companies might not have complete information, but we are filling them up real-fast. 👍
Michael Sitver
I like the UI and the concept. This role has already been filled quite well by crunchbase, but if you can leverage their massive trove of data on startups, products, investors, and key employees, you'll be golden.
Karthik Kamalakannan
@msitver Thank you for the feedback Michael. We think we can do more with Evolvr.io, as I mentioned in the other comment, the roadmap we have hugely concentrated on the data aggregation for both startups and enterprises. We should be able to get there in a month according to the milestones that we've set for ourself.
Rob Jordan
Karthik & Team - nice work on an interesting product. What are your thoughts on what it will take to transition this from internal data entry to external data entry? What UX do you intend to deploy to get people to input data from the outside? What is the use case for coming back to this site everyday? It seems to me that the biggest challenge to a product like this is data entry: with timelines changing, new products shipping, etc., there's no way you'll ever catch up unless you spawn LinkedIn-style virality and the data entry starts coming in droves from the outside. What's the plan to help that happen?
Karthik Kamalakannan
@robertjordan33 Hi Rob, Thanks for checking Evolvr.io. Here are my thoughts, and I'm going to be breaking down these questions one by one: 1. While I don't quite understand the internal/external data entry thing, we have been seeing a lot of unusual interest from the community to add companies they own and the companies and products they like. We're updating the homepage newsfeed to reflect this activity on the system. 2. We are bringing in a lot of integrations one-by-one as we speak. For example, today, we're rolling out an update that will allow the users/employees to input their colleagues' Twitter profiles and everything will be imported automatically. Likewise, we are also working on bringing in LinkedIn logins, which will allow users to import data into the system automagically. 3. While we have small amount of data (2K companies and products), its growing as we speak. We want to be the place which gives you a live feed of updates about a company/product as it happens. And starting today, the homepage will reflect the same. We are also seeing a lot of interest from startups to get their profiles into Evolvr.io, which literally acts as their Wiki page. Anyone who is researching on a company or product will definitely find the platform useful. Fingers Crossed. The version we've launched now is the initial version to get some traction. And the launch has given us tremendous feedback from the community, giving us the direction in which we should be moving into. 4. Yes. That's a huge challenge that we have. But company owners or PR have been filling in their data so fast that we are trying to scale the DB as fast as we can. We are trying out other venues to 'generate' unique data points that you will not be able to find in other places. We are literally talking to each and everyone who signed up with us, checking with them what they're up to and what awesome thing they are doing. 5. We are a very small team of intensely passionate developers working to make this platform as powerful as possible. We don't have enough resources to hire a marketing person and make things viral. Given a chance, we have a tremendous plan that will 'definitely' work out for Evolvr.io. Focus: Currently, until we reach a point where we have nearly 10,000 companies listed and information filled, our entire team's energy is going to be focussed on products. But with a marketing person, we would have a parallel growth. I'm very optimistic about this.
Vignesh Selvasundar
This truly is IMDB of products. Being a technology reporter, I feel a tool like Evolvr would become indispensable while working on any story. I just have a couple of questions: 1. Is all the information entered manually by users? Do you plan on adding more information using web scrapes? 2. Do you intend on giving APIs to third party developers? There is an ocean of information here which can be used. And yes, the design truly is amazing! Especially the small stuff which not a lot of companies give attention to.
Karthik Kamalakannan
@nextgenguy Hey Vignesh, Evolvr.io would definitely help reporters to get data. Some interesting things like embeddable widgets are on its way. We'll share the timeline for those releases on our own Evolvr.io page. 👍 Answering your questions: 1. Currently, we are doing it manually. But we would like to automate the entire process in the next release. That's being tested internally at Skcript. We believe that web scrapers are not something that would suit Evolvr.io. We don't want to just copy paste someone else's work. Instead, we want to craft it ourself. And allow the product owners to put their heart and soul into creating and crafting their company/product profiles on Evolvr.io. 2. API's are currently in alpha. But we might need some more companies and products in our DB to open up API to large scape developers. We love supporting developers and if someone would need an API for their own use, we're ready to test out with limited set of creators. Talking about the design. We've sat down for hours and hours thinking about the design elements. And believe it or not, over the past few months, we've made nearly 40 design iterations and started out from the scratch. Ultimately, we want to use Evolvr.io ourself. And we love using some of the best designed products. Evolvr.io is a reflection of that burning desire. 🙌
Vignesh Selvasundar
@imkarthikk After Engadget got GDGT, I think there has not been a single good alternative for embeddable widgets which we could use. Good to know that there's something coming up. Also by web scrapers, you could probably use it to get the bare minimum amount of data and then build on it manually. This way you'll be able to add a lot more companies including the lesser known ones.
Karthik Kamalakannan
@nextgenguy We all loved GDGT. Those days were golden. Their Live Blogs, the design and their database. Wow! True. We're trying to get CrunchBase's API. But fingers crossed. Let's see how things go. If we're not able to get the API access, we will have to add them manually, which is still fine at this point I guess! ☺️
Lauren Dorman
I see that Makerbase is listed as a similar product and it was the first thing that came to mind when discovering this. I enjoy the UI here a lot more and the in depth product relationships, re: sub-products (products made by). Very cool!
Karthik Kamalakannan
@laurendorman Nice to know that you liked the UI and the depth of information on Evolvr.io. People are adding new companies that they own every single minute, and its super exciting. We are bringing in more relationships to the platform, and I'm pretty sure you'll find it useful as the time goes. The next update will have "recommended for you", and "what you missed" features! 😁
Hussein Yahfoufi
Any chance the @hunterwalk blog post inspired this product? http://hunterwalk.com/2015/02/09...
Karthik Kamalakannan
@husseinyahfoufi Hello Hussein, To be honest, no. When I first read @hunterwalk’s post, I was like ‘wow’, that’s something that we are doing right now. Evolvr.io actually started back in April, and then the development began in September (https://twitter.com/EvolvrIO/sta...). But the full-fledged work went in the last few months this year. 😊
Rob Jordan
@husseinyahfoufi - Hunter actually first posted the IMDB-for-projects concept way before April (just to set the record straight and give credit where due): https://twitter.com/harper/statu....
Kristin Adams
Nice work! Excited to see where this goes!
Karthik Kamalakannan
@ka23a Thank you Kristin! We have a pretty solid roadmap. I'm sure its going to be one amazing journey of our lifetime! :)
Jordi Garcia
Some feedback: Seems that the timelines items aren't following the order they should. Check PH page: https://www.evolvr.io/e/tech/com... (Jun 2015 > Oct 2014 > Aug 2014 > Jul 2015 > Jul 2013 > Nov 2013). Keep up the good work!
Karthik Kamalakannan
@jordigg Hello Jordi, thanks for that. We noticed the issue. GitHub is currently experiencing a DDoS that's preventing our production push. This issue should be resolved in a very short while! 👍
Karthik Kamalakannan
@jordigg Jordi, Just wanted to let you know that we've fixed the issue with the timeline arrangement. 😁
pbj
So linkedin + angel.co?
Karthik Kamalakannan
@patrickbjohnson Not sure if we would call ourselves that. We ultimately want to be the most authoritative platform for products and companies with a very high quality, beautifully crafted information. 😊 Do you like the platform overall? Is there anything that you think should be corrected or improved or added? I'm always here to listen to your inputs.
Elisa Jo Harkness
Lovely design. I'm not sure I see the relationship between emotion and research here - not that it wouldn't be nice to have a Yelp for internet products, but that doesn't seem to be what you're doing. IMDB is indeed closer to it, but there are already so many products trying to do that. Questions: 1) What differentiates you from CrunchBase or MakerBase (featured on Product Hunt quite recently), besides UI? 2) What's the incentive for the user to make contributions?
Karthik Kamalakannan
@eliservescent Hello Elisa, Nice to know that you like the design. 👍 We believe that emotion does come into play with any product that you use in your daily life. For example, when you see a picture of your friend with a wedding dress on Facebook, you smile. Also, whenever a developer of product owner is working on their product, there are a lot of emotions that come into play. We want to let the product owners express their emotion in someway on a platform. That's one of the reason why Evolvr.io was born. Here are the answers: 1. Besides UI, I think there are a lot of differences. Crunchbase, for example does not allow the users of a particular product to comment and we think its one-way. Also, MakerBase is aimed (probably) towards the makers and not the companies / products yet. 2. What we've been seeing is that the product owners are the ones who're creating and moderating Evolvr.io. We believe that many of the Tweets (for example) gets unnoticed when people appreciate or hate some feature of a product that recently got updated. We wanted a platform for those users to feel one step closer to the makers. Hope I answered your questions Elisa. If there's anything more I could help you with, I'd be glad to do that.
Elisa Jo Harkness
@imkarthikk Thanks for the reply! I think you're right that MakerBase is very person-oriented, and I like the idea of a Crunchbase+comments. But I'm not seeing comments on the site right now - is that a feature you'll roll out at some point in the future? It's not clear to me who's meant to be expressing emotion, or of what kind, besides 'likes'.
Karthik Kamalakannan
@eliservescent The comments are limited to the moderators right now. We will be opening up comments to more users in the coming weeks. We wanted Evolvr.io to be a platform to express their emotion of both the product owners and the end-users. You might not clearly see that right now, but as time progresses, I'm pretty sure that'll come to light. 😊
Farhana Rahman
Great idea. Good luck to you, team!
Karthik Kamalakannan
@farhanarahman Hello Farhana, Thanks for wishing us luck. Would love to get any feedback that you have for us! 😊
Junior B.
Nice UI, I hope you can get a lot more companies and services listed, the idea looks great and define a single place where to search for this kind of information would be also awesome! I wish you best of luck to achieve that!
Karthik Kamalakannan
@bontojr Hi Junior👋. We've put in a lot of effort in building the UI, and nice to know that you liked it.😁 The entire team is celebrating the launch by on-boarding new companies as we speak. The idea for the launch was to have some of the well known companies and the companies we (our team) love the most. There's more that meets the eye in Evolvr.io, but we're rolling out some important features in the weeks to come. ☺️
Ilias Ism
This is great! Early days but I'm curious to see more of this.
Karthik Kamalakannan
@illyism Hello Ilias, we're in the very early days of the product. But we wanted to get the idea across and build in public. Just like how @rrhoover published earlier. http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/04... We are super excited to work on the next set of features that are there in our roadmap. 😁
Arjun Maheshwari
Great product guys.. Suggestion: Adding screenshots from Archives.org could also make the database more powerful for the designers and adding more context in the information. Anyway congrats
Bakz T. Future
@arjun59 I like what the guys at evolvr.io are doing! I have a website already setup with snapshots of startups from the Internet Archive, you can check it out at http://www.StartupTimelines.org/ if you like it consider donating to the IA - great cause to support
Karthik Kamalakannan
@arjun59 Hello Arjun, Thank for the suggestion. Yes. We're exploring that option too. To add them to the Timeline. I'll personally reach out to you once we release that feature and probably get you on beta-testers group! 😊
Karthik Kamalakannan
@bakztfuture Bakz, We checked out Startup Timelines, and loved the design of it. Really well crafted! 👍
Bakz T. Future
@imkarthikk awesome to hear :D always exciting to see people interested in the history of different startups
Karthik Kamalakannan
@bakztfuture I believe that there's a need for that. In terms of learning how some companies/products grew over time. If there's someone working on something, I think products like these would help them make the right choice without having to waste time doing the same mistake. 😊