Hi HN! I'm Camin, co-founder of Stackfix. We've built a B2B SaaS comparison platform to solve problems we experienced when buying software.

Evaluating SaaS tools today typically requires piecing together information from marketing pages, user reviews, and sales calls just to understand features and pricing. Existing comparison sites unfortunately don't solve this because their business models depend on incentivized reviews for vendors [1].

Our approach is different:

- We have in-house human experts who test every product using consistent, category-specific rubrics.

- For pricing, we combine vendor information, mystery shopping, and customer data to build models that reflect detailed costs, based on your usage.

We'd love feedback on two core features in particular:

- Pricing calculator: https://stackfix.com/pricing-calculator - Get estimates without talking to sales

- Side-by-side comparison: https://stackfix.com/compare - See true feature parity

We're starting with comprehensive coverage of major categories (CRM, ATS, Product Analytics etc). We're focused on depth over breadth for now. Thanks for taking a look :)

Visual demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBOGySb6zvc

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620432

Hi Camin,

The platform looks quite cool. I was looking at analytics, it works well. Adding the events is a bit strange (e.g. the default is 1 Event, and writing 1000000 is strange, maybe also add some pre-made ranges, like 3-5M events).

ALso, how to add new tools? Do you also support self-hosted tools? Would love to add my https://uxwizz.com to the product analytics category.

Thanks so much for trying it out, and for your feedback. You're right, that is a bit wonky - we should change the UX for inputs when the maximum of the range is massive, will get on that asap.

UXWizz looks great! Unfortunately we don't yet list self-hosted tools simply because our audience generally does not have the technical expertise to set these up. If that changes in the future (and I could see that happening) we'll definitely look into evaluating your platform for inclusion.

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

My goal is to make self-hosting as easy (or easier) than registering for a service. So my desired target audience includes non-technical people. Currently, yes, you need a bit of expertise to set it up, but it can still be done by non-technical people (e.g. using the DigitalOcean 1-Click app https://www.uxwizz.com/trial ).

I know I'm fighting an uphill battle, trying to go against the SaaS trend, but I do think self-hosting is the future.

I really like the Twain quote.

With reference to OP; you'll notice on this site and elsewhere on the web, the best posts are very frequently of the form - "I just figured out this thing and I'm writing this blog post to share my experience while it's fresh in my mind". We could speculate on why that is but I imagine it's because they tend to be much more relatable and actually more helpful to anyone searching out how to do something for the first time. Since you'll likely directly address the questions an expert will have forgotten they ever had.

I agree with this approach: write with a healthy dose of humility, but don’t hold back!

I definitely share your view that the content there is lack lustre (was it ever great?) and it's certainly a high noise-to-signal platform for job searching.

My experience is that it is still an excellent place to reach prospective buyers and to do a semi-authentic style of marketing. The number of impressions a good post gets far exceeds other platforms (X, Medium etc) and, if you're pretty diligent about your connections, those impressions are generally high-quality in the sense they are in your target market.

I've seen a few post from others more successful that me, on this topic. Including Gagan Byiani (Udemy cofounder)[1]

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gaganbiyani_ive-had-over-1m-i...

Stand out from a crowded job market by writing technical blog posts. This is super valuable advice I wish I'd known much earlier. Now I'm in a position to make hiring decisions, developers which can prove their mastery and passion through their writing stand head-and-shoulders above other candidates. Perhaps most importantly, through writing, they demonstrate a clarity of thought and give an insight into their personality which allows them to effectively shortcut a major part of (at least my) interview process.

"This is super valuable advice I wish I'd known much earlier."

Thanks! That's why I have been talking about technical writing and its power since I started with it in 2019. Many engineers disregard it as "ah, it's just blog posts", but it's more than that. It can have a huge impact on your career.

A reassuring take on the history of automation as a labour substitute. While I'd like to believe the fundamental message here still holds from 2015, recent advances make me a little less confident that the following continues to be true - "many of the middle-skill jobs that persist in the future will combine routine technical tasks with the set of nonroutine tasks in which workers hold comparative advantage: interpersonal interaction, flexibility, adaptability, and problem solving."

(for any put off by the length, the paper is very comprehensively referenced. The actual content is 25ish pages)

From page 26 to page 96! 1266 in all.

TL:DR;

The bogeyman of automation consumes worrying capacity that should be saved for real problems . . .” A half century on, I believe the evidence favors Simon’s view.

I had no idea you could do this. Very helpful for theming where the colour of elements needs to be determined at runtime by the user

Agreed the primary objective is solutions to problems. I tend to think the best solutions will very often come from entrepreneurs and startups but that need not always be the case.

However, on the margin, you should choose to solve the biggest problems for the most number of people. If you succeed in doing that you may be able to build a venture scale company (and arguably you should). Furthermore, it's hard to build a company either way, so you might as well try to solve the most ambitious problems you can.

On the Square point - I don't know Jack Dorsey but I would find it hard to believe that he chose the "street vendor" problem as it was the first thing worthy problem he saw after Twitter. Furthermore just the problem statement is not enough, making X easier is not an idea. *Ideation is was happens after you've noticed that initial problem.* A nuance that seems to be lost when people talk about startup ideas.

Here is the oral history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_(financial_services)#...

Appreciated but what we need is the oral history of Jack Dorsey in this time period to understand if this was the only problem he was considering working on. As I say, even if that were true, the problem != the idea. The problem is a starting point for potentially many ideas.

Should have made a problem generator first :)

The rest of us (humanity) are working hard at that.

Then you'll agree it was used correctly, if metaphorically, in the article :)

Yep finding opportunities to take advantage of changes in technology to solve a problem 10x better is part of ideation.

> “want to work on this problem; business seems to be the best way.” This is the right attitude but I would ask - why limit yourself to a single problem?

Well I have worked on lots of problems over the decades (acceptance of open source in business, guess that one worked :-), internet servce (before there were ISPs), drugs in the water supply, remote loally-maintainable solar... and a business is not always the optimal approach.

Saying "I want to start a company, what should it do?" seems like putting the cart before the horse. I guess it matters if your primary goal is actually "I want to make a lot of money", but that's kind of lame for a primary goal IMHO.

> "I want to start a company, what should it do?"

That's not what the article is saying, although I appreciate the sentiment exists. The core idea was that, if you are someone that likes to solve problems, and you've noticed some in the world, how do you figure out a) which of them is a good idea to work on and b) if you find out your initial ideas are flawed, how should you improve them?

I don't mean to single your comment out but I see a common idea I disagree with throughout this comment section namely:

"You should only work on the 1 problem you have a burning desire to solve"

I get why people feel like this. There is a culture of people that just want to start companies because it seems cool. To that I say, so what? If they solve a problem for people, and are successful, it doesn't matter what their initial motivation was and if they fail they fail. Secondly, a problem is not an idea. A problem is a starting point for many ideas - what I think could be better understood is how to ideate from a problem as a starting point. Thirdly, curious people exist in the world and it would be a good thing if they were solving problems and maybe starting companies as a vehicle to distribute their solution. Curious people don't have a single thing they're curious about, they may have many problems they'd like to work on, Elon Musk had a list of at least 2 (humans aren't multi-planetary and we're running out of fossil fuels) but slotted in online ads & payments first because it was a better problem to solve for him at the time.