ExploreYC
Your data layer for Y Combinator's startup ecosystem
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honest one for the founders here (+ updates on the open-source YC data platform) 👇

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how do you actually check if your idea's been done before? like - gpt it, google it, ask friends, dig through YC's directory, or just.. cross fingers and build?

asking because i built ExploreYC trying to fix exactly that... through semantic search on over 8.6k startups, but genuinely curious what people reach for before a tool. what's your move?

big changes to the landing page yday, very happy with the result now 🔥

p.s. did my best with the 3d map view, if you have any tips let me know or contribute directly

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For me, it's usually a mix of Google, Product Hunt, and some other random places.

But honestly, even if I find something similar, I don't see it as a reason to stop. Sometimes it's more about building a better one.

 of course! but would be great to see what is on the market - even for validation.. as competition as well as bad means good - the market is in need of the product!

honestly my move is usually just typing the idea into PH search plus a quick GPT sanity check, both feel incomplete because keyword search misses anything phrased differently and GPT just hallucinates competitors half the time. semantic search over an actual startup dataset sounds like the right fix rather than a workaround. one question - does ExploreYC only index companies that made it into a YC batch, or does it also catch stuff that applied and got rejected/pivoted? that second group feels like where the real "someone already tried this and it didn't work" signal would be

 no, i extended it to go over 2.5k companies form ProductHunt itself, Hacker News, a16z.. so you get a vector search across the name/description/details of the companies so you can get the most out of the search!

Most people I know do a mix
quick Google for exact matches, then browse a few category leaders on Crunchbase or Product Hunt to see what's recent.

Curious if you're filtering by funding stage or geography, since "done before" often means "done before in my market" rather than globally.

I have been thinking about this recently because I am building an Influencer discovery tool using the logic and python setup we used in-house for our agency. Before this, the solutions for influencer discovery were just Modash, fevikon and some of the top players. None of them were affordable nor were they solving the problem with the logic we were using. They were just database depended. Now when I am working on the tool's launch, I come across many influencer discovery tools people are building and some are even crazier than I think. However, as said here in the comments, it doesn't stop me from building my tool. In fact, I use the competitors to study what market really need.