| ▲ | jackienotchan 2 hours ago | |
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? [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... | ||
| ▲ | fkilaiwi 2 hours ago | parent [-] | |
We actually went through 1 hard pivot only, the reset is more about framing the problem as we dug deeper and understood the customers and issue more. As an example, "Intuned Auth Sessions" is just a feature that we still support today! But you are right, being a founder is not easy and the hardest part is figuring out what to build, does it make sense to keep going or should you stop - those are questions I still struggle with until today. For your question about how is this different - I think if you dig into those product you will see that our focus is different, many of the companies mentioned are focused on powering agents via APIs, some are focused on enabling users to use AI at runtime, we do feel that our product is somewhat differentiated - the closest one is possibly Reworkd and I would still say the product is somewhat different. Now, the hardest part is actually commenting this with customers and the market in general - and there, we have a lot to figure out! For robots.txt and user-agents question, we think of ourselves as providing infrastructure and flexibility for our customers to do what they want - we do encourage in our docs that they respect robots.txt but we don't enforce it on a platform level. Appreciate you taking the time to leave this comment - very thoughtful | ||