Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations
Current search portals for political monitoring are outdated. (By political monitoring, we mean people/orgs monitoring government announcements, policy updates, etc.; not the government monitoring people.) Each one only covers one region of the world, and they only allow you to search government publications based on simple keyword searches. Government affairs professionals often spend hours combing through noisy search results to find relevant developments. For example, they might search for the words “labor”, “employment”, “workforce”, etc., combing through all US government publications mentioning these keywords to find relevant material. Then they might have to repeat this process on separate platforms for the UK, EU, etc.
Parsagon allows you to search for exactly what you want. Instead of searching for all publications containing the phrase "crop production", you can search for something as precise as "news related to US crop production, including foreign crop production that impacts the US" and get the publications you’re looking for from any region of the world (our demo lets you search the US and UK).
So you might be wondering: why are we launching on Hacker News now? After all, we’re YC W21, and we’ve been around a while. Well for the first 2-3 years of our existence, we were working on an AI developer tool that generates data pipelines, and while we had plenty of people interested in using our AI, our AI couldn’t solve most of the use cases we encountered (at least, it couldn’t solve them well). Everyone’s use cases were quite disparate, and we wasted a lot of time trying to get our product to the point where we could solve all of them (and during that time, we just weren’t concerned with launching on HN).
We had little success until a large non-profit reached out for help getting started with our product. They wanted to scrape a wide variety of government organizations to get announcements and communications that could affect their line of work. This request seemed odd to us, since there are already platforms that track government activity seemingly ready-made for their use case. Why would these mostly non-technical government affairs professionals be trying to learn to use a developer tool?
As we talked with these first customers and learned how outdated current political monitoring tools are, this use case became increasingly exciting to us for a few reasons. First, we felt our AI gave us a significant advantage in this space, allowing us to monitor government websites on a scale that existing tools couldn’t match. While most existing products focused on monitoring a single country, we could build pipelines to get most of what our users wanted from any given country in under a week, and give them better ways to search and aggregate that data at the same time.
Second, two other significant organizations reached out around the same time with similar use cases. We were excited that larger organizations were interested in this use case and were willing/able to pay significant sums for it (one problem we had before was that many companies interested in using Parsagon were small startups with low willingness/ability to pay). And since these organizations were able to introduce us to others in their industry, it quickly became apparent that we should focus on solving this one use case of political monitoring.
And so now we’re here! We have a product we’re excited about, that our current customers are excited about, and we want to share it with HN! We’d really appreciate any feedback, and if you know anyone working in government affairs, we’d appreciate it if you showed this to them!