When I started getting stickers of pancakes in the mail in 2019, I thought YourStack was going to be a cool way to find products; that was until Ryan Hoover gave me an invite a little later and I finally realized the potential YourStack has: I believe in a world where doing site:reddit.com
or site:news.ycombinator.com
is necessary to get organic results, getting results not only organicaly, but from people in your network is insanely powerful.
Instead of searching throughout the world wide web for products, why not search through your friends? It’s such a simple concept that social networks and search engines alike aren’t looking at. Let’s look at how search works today:
According to Google they index hundreds of billions of pages [1], giving them a stark advantage in terms of compute power than any other search engine (whether it be Bing, Yahoo). They collect user search queries and histories and package them up to be sold on huge ad networks [2]. At the same time you get generally decent results after nearly a half-page worth of ads (in some cases). Google sometimes is good with organic results, but in many scenarios isn’t.
Duck Duck Go
DDG doesn’t publish how many sites they query with thier bot, but people are using it as they are rapidly increasing in the number of queries they answer [3] . The results are decent; sometimes you might get super nice results directly from StackOverflow or Quora, but they search the entire web to give mediocre results. Most of the time you won’t get organic results, and in organic result sense, its a bit better than Google.
YourStack
YourStack doesn’t publish any data (afaik), but you do get to see an almost live global feed as the default when you logon. YourStack isn’t replacing search engines, it replaces how consumers are introduced to products: by being vetted and reccomended by others you trust. This dismantles the list of ads you see when you want to figure out whether a product is good enough and beats organic search via Reddit or HN (because you don’t know those people directly).
Should you use YourStack to make your next purchase?
100%.
Imagine a search engine powered by a network of people you know. Get reccomendations for products from people you look up to (possibly influencers) and from friends without asking them. I normally search on HN and Reddit as a backup, but as the network of people on YourStack increases, I’ll default to YourStack.
Paragon Trajectory:
Paragon Trajectory is a section where I make predictions on where this product/person will go
Given YourStack is led by Ryan Hoover, founder of ProductHunt, I think YourStack could be well integrated into that as well as other products. The day YourStack starts showing ads and decieves people from knowing about products from people they don’t know, is what I think will be their downfall. If they keep their current organic network alive and well, they’ll be introducing a reccomendation+influencer type of organic search that I haven’t seen before.
I’m not exactly sure whether YourStack is a seperate company from ProductHunt or how they’re being funded (could be Weekend Fund?), but from a funding perspective, there’s lots of potential with YourStack (I’m blind to their exact stats though)