sand1929

Oh interesting, we never actually thought of it that way—we just had a friend design this logo for us and this is what he came up with. And USPTO never complained, so we didn’t think about it too hard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

1) I don't think we'll ever primarily target non-profits (our first customer happened to be a non-profit, but there's just inherently more business in for-profit spaces), but it has been incredibly fun and rewarding to work with non-profits, and if there's a need for policy monitoring there, we're happy to help (even if it's not our main target).

2) Yes, it's our proprietary AI that lets us generate thousands of custom web scrapers, find and clean the right RSS feeds, etc etc

Definitely many thousands, possibly the 10s of thousands depending on what you count as a source (e.g., if you get press releases from one part if an agency’s site, and speeches from another part, one could consider those separate sources I suppose).

Yep we get the sources above. We've definitely thought about contract capture--we've just been hesitant because it seems like such a competitive space. But it's definitely tempting, and it wouldn't take much to convince us for sure

Honestly, if you or anyone else has a really easy way to get all communications/publications from every government/government-adjacent body, I genuinely would love to hear it. Especially at the regional/local level, cause those can be a real pain, and we'd love to save ourselves some time

Aww, thank you! I'm impressed you even remember us from 2021 haha

Thank you! And yeah, getting specialized feeds is one of the main things our current customers do!

Also, hope all is well at Laudspeaker :)

Oh whoops, that seems like a bug. We typically show press releases verbatim, but our intention is to just provide the headline, link, and extracted facts for sources like the Daily Mail. Better see what's going on there; thanks for the catch!

Thanks! I think the best thing we do to assure users that we check everything they'd check is that we add requested data sources pretty fast. E.g., one customer wanted to track announcements from the various state/regional commissions on higher education, and we added those within the hour.

For political monitoring in particular, I think this is pretty important. Different organizations in different industries will inevitably have very specific/obscure sources they want to track, so rather than promising that we already have everything they'd be checking, we just assure them that we can add anything missing really quickly.

Oh interesting, I'll be sure to look into that! Definitely an intriguing use case

If you're talking about search-as-a-service solutions, we didn't end up using any of them. There were certain optimizations we needed to make to our information retrieval algorithms that were pretty specific to political monitoring, and none of the out-of-the-box solutions seemed customizable enough for us.

Thank you! It's been interesting to watch HN playing around with it. This community definitely phrases its search queries differently from how many government affairs professionals would (especially to try smoke tests like yours), so I'm glad it's holding up :)

Yeah absolutely! We have private companies using us right now! (We might have an private NGO as a customer--I'm always a little hazy on the exact definition of NGO)

I definitely think we're going to see a lot more people building in this space. There seems to be a growing consensus among the government affairs people I've talked to that it's just a matter of time