Show HN: Find AI – Perplexity Meets LinkedIn

Show HN: Find AI – Perplexity Meets LinkedIn usefind.ai/...

As a founder, finding early customers is always a challenge. I'd come up with specific guesses for people to talk to - such "VCs that used to be startup founders" or "Former lawyers who are now CTOs." Running those types of searches typically involves opening dozens of LinkedIn profiles in tabs, and looking at them one-by-one. And, it turns out that going through LinkedIn profiles one-by-one is a daily job for many people.

I started building Find AI to make it easier to search for people. I initially started just having GPT review people's LinkedIn profiles and websites, but it cost thousands of dollars per search (!). The product we're launching today can now run the same searches in seconds for pennies.

Find AI is Perplexity-style search over LinkedIn-type data. Ask vague questions, and the AI will go find and analyze people to get you matches.

The results are really impressive - here are some questions I've used:

- Find potential future founders by looking for tech company PMs who previously started a company

- Find potential chief science officers by looking for PhDs with industry experience who now work at a startup but have never founded a company before

- Find other founders who have a dog and might want my vet app product

The database currently consists of tech companies and people, but we're working to scale up to more people. The data is all first-party and retrieved from public sources.

Our first customers have been VCs, who are using Find AI to keep track of new AI companies. We just launched email alerts on searches, so you can get updates as new companies match your criteria.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Cool but after waiting 2 mins for a one sentence prompt I got;

We have analyzed 1681 candidates and found 0 records matching the search criteria. The search was initiated 2 minutes ago and took 1 minute and 42 seconds to complete.

philip1209 · a year ago

That's not a good experience - sorry! What was the prompt? Feel free to reply it here or email and I can look into it.

We're starting a retro on the thousands of searches people ran today, and will tweak the system based on the results. But, an early takeaway is that some searches failed when people applied a filter that the system doesn't understand.

For example, searching "Find AI startups with 50-100 employees" returns 0 results because Find AI doesn't know headcounts yet. (We'll work on that, though).

webappguy · a year ago

And then a second more simple Query ‘find me people who have posted on Mamba architecture and might be looking for jobs’ and got;

We have analyzed 695 candidates and found 0 records matching the search criteria. The search was initiated 1 minute ago and took 50 seconds to complete.

philip1209 · a year ago

I'd recommend going broader on this one, looking for just people who know Mamba architecture.

Find AI is built right now so that people exist only within a company. So, we don't have profiles or index people as individuals - just as employees. That probably made your search hard, because most employees aren't advertising that they are looking for a job (especially on the data sources we use).

ben_jones · a year ago

Hi Philip! This tool looks amazing!

My company specializes in selling to underserved communities in the AMEA region. Can your product help me connect with LGBT customers specifically in the Sudan and Saudi Arabia? Thanks!

PS can I get their exact addresses as well as the addresses of their family members and community leaders?

johndhi · a year ago

Is this OP's problem or LinkedIn's problem? If he's just searching their data, can he really be blamed for making that work better?

jsemrau · a year ago

This shouldn't be downvoted as it raises an important point about privacy and safety.

Thanks everybody for trying this out. I just looked at our logs and we're doing >2k requests per minute to OpenAI right now.

Free users only get partial search results. If there are any you want to see run to completion, reply here or email me and I'll mark it to run to completion. (The code PRODUCTHUNT is also available this week for a free month of access).

Palmik · a year ago

Congrats on the traffic, I hope you get a high conversion rate :)

I assume you do more than one GPT call per search, e.g. rewriting user's query into multiple search queries, summarization of the results, etc.?

It's complex. We make a lot of GPT calls. Lots of them. And, for lots of different purposes.

How are you handling the unit costs, rate limits, and model risk?

That’s a deep question. Under the hood we use some LLM gateways like Helicone and https://usevelvet.com to track cost per request and optimize it.

Update: >5k requests per minute to OpenAI right now

esafak · a year ago

Don't forget to rate limit every end point.

7thpower · a year ago

> I started building Find AI to make it easier to search for people. I initially started just having GPT review people's LinkedIn profiles and websites, but it cost thousands of dollars per search (!).

Can you help me connect to what was costing >$1k/search or is that hyperbole? Genuinely interested, not patronizing.

nielsole · a year ago

I suppose every search was passing all indexed documents into GPT asking for a rating

Yes, essentially this. Massive contexts and massive numbers of documents.

Matticus_Rex · a year ago

Trying to get a sense of whether the results really are good by testing it on a query I basically know the answers to for my niche, but it looks like to get more than 3 results I've got to join the $39/mo plan. Is that the case?

Yes, but if you share or email me the link I'll redo the search run to completion.

There's a pretty high cost to run each search. So, even offering partial searches to logged-out users is pretty expensive for us.

evashang · a year ago

When are you going to add non-tech companies? I'm constantly scanning bios like this for lawyers, especially on what types of law they practice and what types of cases they've done in the past.

We're mainly focused on the tech vertical right now, but are going to expand to a second vertical soon - and law is one we've been considering.

We use public data sources, so Find AI works best in industries where people want to be found. And, lawyers spend a lot of time building websites and profiles - so I think it would work really well with our data model.

I'll follow up with you once we add lawyers!

marigoldwhale · a year ago

What are some of the other verticals you're considering. What types of data sources are you using?

armcat · a year ago

Amazing concept! I am a heavy user of such tools, and typically build my own bespoke search. I tried out Find AI across a number of different queries, and I think the general issue here is one of coverage. For example, when searching for "all people with PhD", it only analyzes 1700 candidates (for reference, around 2% of US population alone, holds a PhD).

Also - do you intend on providing an API for this tool, e.g. for enterprise clients?

Yes, the data is limited. We plan to 10x it over the next month.

And, we have had some people request API access today so we are discussing it. (If you’re also interested, please email me.)

neilv · a year ago

The examples start out looking like recruiting, and heavy on the usual school obsession (MIT, Stanford, Harvard), with no improvement over existing simple queries that every bottom-end sourcer is doing.

Ideally, smarter tech will let us get closer to what we're really trying to do like "Find me a person, who I can hire, who will do great work at responsibilities X, Y, and Z."