First Search

First Search

First Search is a new product from First Round and it's also the Product of the Day on Product Hunt. Another premiere for this product is the fact that I decided to start my product review series with it. The idea behind this series is to pick a product, it will usually be the Product of the Day as seen on Product Hunt, to learn and discover what makes it successful.

Short introduction: First Round is an investment company that invests early ("we're usually the first money in") in startups. Some notable startups that got funding are Uber, Mint, GroupMe, Vidme, 9GAG, Wikia, Blue Apron and many others.

First Search is basically a directory consisting of lists of articles on startup related topics. The articles are carefully selected and curated by the partners at First Round and apparently there are more than 10000 articles waiting to be read by people hungry for information and advice.

There are a lot of topics and subtopics and the sight of them can create an overwhelming experience for someone like me who is interested in a lot of them. I can't wait to start reading and learning new things where should I start? It reminds me of the paradox of choice effect: people have a difficult time making a decision when they are faced with multiple options. More info about the paradox of choice here. I did a count and there are more than 130 visible topics, maybe showing only the main categories and the rest of the subcategories in a dropdown would be a better idea.

first search categories

I've read some of the articles and they are indeed great. Here are some of the things that I've learned:

  • Tweets shorter than 100 characters get a 17% higher engagement rate
  • The ideal length of a Facebook post is less than 40 characters
  • The ideal length of a blog post is 7 minutes, 1,600 words
  • Reward and Punishment Super-response Tendency
  • Liking/Loving Tendency
  • Disliking/Hating Tendency
  • Doubt-Avoidance Tendency

Links to the articles in cause: The Ideal Length of Everything Online According to Science | Charlie Munger on The Psychology of Human Misjudgment

A neat feature is that if you sign up you can then bookmark the articles that interest you.

There is a lot of information overload and a lot of unstructured data on the Internet so a product that solves these problems is highly appreciated. I will definitively come back and use First Search for knowledge acquisition.