TLDR: We’re building the ultimate resource for tracking early-stage startups and exploring the marketing techniques being implemented by the most successful ones.

In the midst of searching for direction with Holler a few months ago, I got into a conversation with Nivi over at AngelList who asked why I wasn’t tracking the early-stage startup space as it’s an area ripe for in depth coverage. Around the same time, one of my Holler co-founders (and girlfriend) started learning to code. Together we spent a month or two playing with Ruby,Iron Worker, Heroku, and a number of other tools to collect data on startups on AngelList and Crunchbase.

Some of the tools we came up with were pretty useful so we decided to build a site that leverages them. While we’re not launching the tools this week, we have a few that we should be able to reveal in the very near future. The objective of our tools is to expose which startups are getting traction. Our articles will cover how they’re doing it and explore the opportunities that each company faces. We’ve received tons of feedback from investors and startups prior to launching the tools and we even debated never launching them or possibly selling them to someone else.

A More Transparent World

The source of contention is that many startups don’t want us exposing some of this information about them. In fact I had some influential ones stop communicating with me after they knew the data that we had. Whether they’re talking to investors, concerned that competitors will be able to see how they’re getting traffic, or painting a false picture about the state of their startup, they want full control. However the world is becoming more transparent and in a world where there is large quantities of information just waiting to be aggregated and organized, we want to develop interesting ways to leverage that data. If we don’t, someone else will, and they’ll probably just lock it away for competitive reasons.

Now that we’ve found ourselves swimming in an ocean of data, and have the tools to make powerful systems with that data, we’ve decided: hey, why not? The information that we collect can be used by investors and startups to learn what models are performing well and surface new opportunities for growth. As you follow along with StartupStats please don’t hesitate to reach out to us to let us know about any startups that our data sets have missed, or any strategies that we’ve overlooked, or even if you want to write a guest post!

Getting in touch is simple, email myself (nick@startupstats.com) or Natasha (natasha@startupstats.com).