We launched with a bang on HN! We made it to #1 and got over 200 points that day and the journey officially began.

8 months after launching on HN, we joined the 500 Startups accelerator in San Francisco.

During 500 Startups we figured out how to accelerate signups, traffic, and how to start talking to investors. We gave the following description of what we do: 'StackShare is the fastest growing community for SaaS tools - we show you all the software a company is using and why. We're a developer-only community of engineers, CTOs, and VPEs from some of the world's top startups...We're building LinkedIn for the $150B SaaS industry, starting with dev tools.'

After getting requests from the community to let them embed their stack profiles into their own personal sites, we built Stack Embed! This meant you could grab a JS snippet from your stack profile page (or any stack profile) and get an embed code. Today, developers embed them on them on their personal sites as part of their resume and/or portfolio. Some cool examples on GitHub Pages here, here, and here.

7 months after graduating from 500 Startups we raised our first round of venture capital from Cervin Ventures, Precursor Ventures, and some awesome angel investors that worked at Facebook, Square, Airbnb, Heroku, and Salesforce.

This was a significant product update because it marked the first time we allowed developers to signup and contribute to StackShare without needing a GitHub account to authenticate- you could now use Bitbucket! We continued to make StackShare developer-only but with support for more developer platforms and added GitLab authentication shortly after this.

After hearing from developers that they were using StackShare to find jobs, we decided to make that easier. Before Stack Match, you'd have to go to a profile like Ruby, click on stacks to see the companies using Ruby, then click through to the company's stack profile and then click out to their website and find the careers page. With Stack Match, you could just enter your stack and see matching jobs based on your preferred tech stack. Fun fact: if you try to visit Stack Match now you're redirected to an updated Jobs portal that essentially does the same thing (more on that below).

'For many companies, the organizing logic of the software stack becomes inseparable from the logic of the business itself...“What you end up with is entire companies being built on a set of software tools and services,” says Yonas Beshawred, whose own company, StackShare, lets tech professionals publish their companies’ stacks and see what others are using, comparing technology the way hobbyists might compare gear.'

Stack News was our first attempt at creating a feed-like experience that kept you up to date with the tools you care about. It was essentially a dev tools RSS feed that showed you content from other sites like Hacker News, Reddit, blogs, etc all mapped to the tech stack you care about. Ultimately we realized that only a small subset of the community wanted to keep up with their stack this way and so we built news into the core Feed.

“When you look at the biggest platforms, even the ones that focus on developers like Github and StackOverflow, they don’t focus on technology, they focus on code. StackOverflow has to be about a specific line of code. Github has the same problem, it has to be tied to a repo or a pull request”

After starting out as a simple Rails app with standard ERB and HAML templates, we decided to adopt React and a host of other related tooling to make StackShare's front end more performant, increase developer productivity, and increase reliability via automated testing.

The release of Stack Decisions was our most significant product update to date. A brand new way for you talk about your tech stack and get it in front of other developers to help them learn from your experience. The launch was covered by VentureBeat and Computer Weekly. You can now see Stack Decisions in all their glory in the main feed: stackshare.io/feed.

As a follow-up to the newly introduced Stack Decisions, stack profiles got a major facelift- going from the classic black background tech stack that the community had come to know us for, to a much cleaner white background with organized tiles and more interaction. The update included a ton of other improvements including the addition of Stack Decisions right inside stack profiles. You can see some great examples of new stack profiles being added here

Awesome Stacks is an open source community-curated list of tech stacks, starter kits, and boilerplates to help you decide how to build your next feature or application. Awesome Stacks has its own static site that you can check out at awesomestacks.dev.

Forbes featured StackShare's Founder & CEO, Yonas Beshawred: 'We augment the way people make these decisions with a network-based approach focused around other professionals. Start with who’s using which software as a social signal (stack profiles), then dive into the details (tool profiles and comparisons), make your decision and then share that with others.'

StackShare was named a Cloud 100 2019 Rising Star by Forbes. “The 20 Rising Stars list includes innovative cloud companies that are developing next-generation technology to meet customer demand. We see great potential for these companies in the future on the Cloud 100 list and are excited to watch them as they disrupt industries around the world.” Matt Garratt, Managing Partner, Salesforce Ventures said. Previous Rising Stars included LaunchDarkly, Zapier, Algolia, and more.”

We received requests from StackShare community members at Fortune 500 companies- who said that they love StackShare, however, they're unable to contribute publicly and wanted a private version. Initially, we wondered 'Why would they want StackShare without all the awesome public community content?'' We learned that most large companies don't know what technologies are being used in-house and why, let alone which ones they should choose on new projects. So we announced that we would be building a private version of StackShare and allowed community members to sign up for Beta access.

After having created Stack Match, we launched a new and improved job search experience on StackShare: stackshare.io/jobs. Simply enter your preffered stack and you'll automatically see jobs near your location. You can even follow companies you're interested in to keep up with their open roles.

With the StackShare API you can:

• Automatically enrich your customer records and workflows with company technology data
• Improve lead scoring by knowing which technologies your customers use at their company
• Instantly build your sales pipeline with access to over 32 million data points from 1.5 million companies using over 7,000 technologies

With the introduction of Stack Advice, we took a huge step forward in fulfilling our mission of making developers more productive by learning about technology through the people and companies they trust. Using Stack Advice, you can directly ask developers for advice on specific tech stack decisions. Just describe your situation, tag the relevant technologies, and developers following the tools in question will get an email with your question in it and they'll see it in their Feed. Head over to the live Feed to see some awesome recent Stack Advice threads!

We announced that Private StackShare was officially available for free on the GitHub Marketplace during GitHub's annual GitHub Universe, Partner Day.