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Hemlock — Visualize your competitor's content calendar.
Hemlock automatically aggregates all the stuff your competitors do online and lets you analyze and explore it through a simple, calendar interface including social media shares, videos, blog posts, podcasts, and email campaigns.
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Replies
@lukasjorissen Thanks for the feedback, Lukas! Based on conversion thus far we're feeling pretty good about our choice of pricepoint. No free trial right now, but might add that sometime down the road.
I think this is exactly what my team needs. @greggblanchard, is it possible to get a free trial?
@greggblanchard @hernrome Hi, Hernan - thanks for the comment. We don't have a free trial available right now, but something we may add down the road.
Hi Product Hunt!
Gregg from Hemlock here. Excited to share this tool and once again grateful that a tool like PH exists to help creators like us get the word out a gather such priceless feedback.
Hemlock in a nutshell is a tool that aggregates all the little bits of digital marketing that are publicly available on the web and then instead of making charts or graphs or reports, it recreates the way all those things were planned and organized in the first place by that brand: a content calendar.
A marketer at the day job, there had always been this disconnect between how I plan our own marketing - a calendar - and how I tried to keep tabs on my competitors' marketing - individuals feeds or my inbox or a dashboard in other tools. It's been amazingly insightful for my own marketing efforts and fun to get it out there so others can use it too.
Would love any/all feedback. Thanks so much!
Top Hunter
@greggblanchard how do you use this? For inspiration? To crib ideas? I've always heard that you should just stay focused on what you're doing — and not worry so much about the competition (since that's what I tend to do). What's your take?
@chrismessina Great question and thanks for the comment, Chris. I use it in three ways.
First, just as you said, for inspiration which is the big one. And not just on the content, but the distribution. I've learned a ton by being able to dissect the ways competitors time and role out their product launches, for example, or how they use/reuse a blog post across their channels once it's published.
Second, I use this for following my competitors in general instead of following them on Twitter, subscribing to their newsletter, adding their blog in my feed reader, etc. It's my replacement for many of those.
Third, I said "many" in that previous sentence because I still follow a couple. And I love catching myself noticing or remembering some message of theirs and being able to go back and see what they did to get it to stick in my brain. One brand whose webinar I joined had tweeted the link probably 3x as much as I realized they did.
Re: not being concerned about competition, I've heard that sentiment as well and I get why people say it in theory, but in practice I've found that ignoring competitors is kinda like running a race with your eyes closed. You may get a personal best, but you probably aren't going to win. It's not about copying their moves, it's just about giving your own moves context.
Top Hunter
@greggblanchard super, that's helpful — thanks! Those sound like pretty robust use cases.🙌🏻
Do you guys have a plan to track more than 25? Also curious what level of detail you extract? I’m Interested in aggregation of content as a use case more than competitor monitoring but your product looks cool so thought I’d reach out
@mwtbrowser Adam, great question. We can absolutely track many more than 25. With some of the other products we've built we've used the same data for custom and larger scale needs, could easily do the same here. I'll send you a message, would love to hear what you've got in mind.
Big thank you, I would like to try a free test :) A lot of the time these tools start amazing and the industry comes in and ruin everything, hum hum Mention!.... Also I definitively stan you, good luck!
@emmanuel_b_lepage Thanks, Emmanuel. I hear ya. We'll do our best to make sure it doesn't get ruined ;) Appreciate the comment.
Hemlock is not accepting new users at the moment. ?
Did you get overwhelmed with Product hunters and then shut it down or?
@benjamin_powell Yeah, we launched this a couple years ago and had some decent momentum but the API landscape started to get locked down enough that a product like this at our scale just didn't work out.
@greggblanchard ahhh, I just saw the date of submission, now I feel the fool.. its a shame that happened though.
Hey @greggblanchard . I am still not able to understand the use case. Assuming the primary use case is to see the distribution strategy of the competitor. Does the strategy change quite frequently for me gain value say every month? Does the publishing pattern change every channel? What was the last insight that you were able to gain, which was missing by just following their blog, twitter, etc.,?
I might be wrong here, but a free account should in seeing the value.
@navin_gurnani Hi Navin, great question. Take a look at my reply to Chris above for more detail, but a simple one is how they roll out product launches or feature releases. When following on Facebook, the algorithm will prevent you from seeing some of their posts. When following on Twitter, if you don't check often enough or follow too many people, you may miss it there as well. But Hemlock shows you exactly what they did, start to finish. Were they posting at the same time? Multiple times a day to make sure it gets seen? Did they send an email to their list? Two emails? It's really hard to tie everything together when you're watching 4-6 feeds where their efforts are mixed in with everyone else's content. That said, sometimes their strategy doesn't change that frequently. Sometimes it does. But think about it this way, you can't tell whether it does or not without seeing it all in one place.
@zioneyemedia Awesome and welcome aboard! Don't hesitate to reach out with any feedback or questions.
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