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?
Congrats on launch. I have experienced these issues first hand with `Open Finance` a few years ago.
I feel that you'll end up being an automation agency (you mentioned UiPath), companies who have the skills and capacity to build, will not need your service. But those who want the full service, you might fill a gap.
Yes, we we did our YC and social launches, we had few companies sign up and we have been building with them sense. For some of them, we have enabled them to run 1000+ scrapers which would have been very hard without Intuned. Some of these have been with us for 2+ years!
What our users love is the agent and the idea that we are not using AI at runtime which improves reliability.
this is not meant as personal assistant to do a task like this - the idea is that if you want to build a travel assistant and you want to do an integration with a travel booking service using browser automation - you can use Intuned to build this integration and expose an API to do search and one to do a booking, etc.
Does this make sense?
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?
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Gqr-intuned-the-data-as...
[1]https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/LGE-intuned-the-browser...
[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Lpq-intuned-auth-sessio...
I feel that you'll end up being an automation agency (you mentioned UiPath), companies who have the skills and capacity to build, will not need your service. But those who want the full service, you might fill a gap.
I wish you all the best.