Show HN: Telescope – Hassle-free company research

[GRVYDEV]

Hey HN. I recently started a company and found myself constantly doing company research for competitors, prospective customers, and outbound leads. As an engineer, I found it challenging to figure out where to get up-to-date company information as well as tedious needing to visit multiple sites often.

I built Telescope to solve that problem. Under the hood, Telescope performs multiple search queries the same way I would and synthesizes the results for me. This is very much a WIP but I would love for you to try it out and let me know what you think. Over the next couple of weeks, I plan on continuing to improve Telescope and add more features.

Cheers :)

[jll29]

Company research is a very important field, and you can buy datasets (D&S), appliances (Bloomberg) and software/Web apps (LSEG/Refinitiv, Factset) for this purpose.

If your purpose is competitive intelligence, then including information from other sides is crucial. What are analysts saying? etc. What are customers saying about products? And a lot of info is in financial reports and SEC filings if your target company is public.

There are also commercial providers that let you register a set of Web domains and they will email you once there is a change anywhere, including the "diff" information (before > after), which is also useful for Competitive Intelligence.

It is not trivial given a company name to find the set of homepages that belong to the company (called the "homepage finding" task in information retrieval, there are US government benchmarks on it, such as at the TREC conference, see trec.nist.gov). Once you have the homepage, it is not trivial to reverse engineer, from the Web presence, the org structure of the company (if large).

One area that I am interested in a lot is finding out where companies are going. For that, you can analyze what people indicate in interviews, R&D talks at more technical conferences, patent applications, acquisitions in unusual areas etc. - at large, this is called "horizon scanning".

There is a lot of money in high-quality datasets about companies for investment management, and there is an under-supply of detailed datasets with systematic coverage of private companies.

[GRVYDEV]

Thank you for this thoughtful response. We have the same mindset. This is exactly what we are building. I’d love to chat with you more on this.

[vvram]

Interesting problem, but it's hard to say what you offer compares to others. You should probably have some examples for visitors to understand the value prop without signup.

[GRVYDEV]

Thank you for the feedback! I'll get to work on an About page.

What we are doing is automating bespoke account qualification and research. Say, for example, you are a company that sells software to chemical synthesis labs. Your ideal customer synthesizes more than 5 chemicals. They need to synthesize them in large batches and they need to have more than 10 chemists on staff.

To go out and find those ideal customers, right now, you would need to spend hours upon hours searching and manually qualifying each account. We are going to automate that. By providing more accurate leads we will reduce the amount of time that companies need to spend on prospecting while also increasing the open rate.

[jll29]

This is potentially useful for "partner search" functionality (as operated by governments and e.g. the European Commission) - e.g. when people want to team up to co-apply for research grants.

[GRVYDEV]

This is a great use-case!

[Atom99]

I work in Data Partnerships and this seems like a solid idea. Wanted to know if you're open to a quick chat to discuss a possible partnership. Drop me a hi at [e-mail]

[GRVYDEV]

Dropped you an email!

[piltdownman]

Got a sub-ChatGPT precis including gems like 'Their website utilizes cookies to enhance user experience and to better understand their users.'

Honestly not sure what use-case this is intended to support.

[GRVYDEV]

Thank you for the feedback. Apologies for the crappy response. This is still super nascent technology and I’m still working on improving the search process. In my eyes the real value here lies in data enrichment from other sources allowing you to get a really deep understanding of a company. I am actively building out that functionality now.

[quickthrower2]

How do you get around that a lot of company websites are marketing BS and gobbledygook?

[GRVYDEV]

You can aggregate data from multiple different sites with the hope that it gives you a true picture of what the company does