Introducing TheirStack's Technology Matrix

TL;DR: it lets you search and see at a glance all technologies many companies use, grouped by technologies' categories. To use it, create a free TheirStack account here and create a copy of this spreadsheet.  

The problem

Until now, with TheirStack users could find companies using certain technologies, and filter the results by company country, size, industry, etc. with an API and also with a basic UI.

To know the technologies used by each company, you'd have go over each company and see what's in that technology list.

That was annoying.

Talking to some users, they said that it would help them a lot of time if they could see the technologies used by the companies that belonged to the categories they cared about in one place.

We also know the category each technology belongs too, so I thought we could group the technologies by category and company, and let users select the categories they'd be interested in.

These are all the technologies we track, and their categories.

The solution

In my mind, a good solution for this would look like a table with one company per row and then one category per column.

Each cell would contain the technologies found in the company's jobs that belong to that category.

Something like this.

Then I made an endpoint on our backend that would return the same information so that users or other apps could use it. You can see its documentation here.

It lets you filter companies by

• technologies used
• countries
• company size

and get the results in JSON or CSV.

Finally, I made a very simple MVP in Google Sheets to display the results and pass the filters to the endpoint.

By default it shows technologies in all categories (more than 400), but you probably are interested only in a subset of them. To select the ones you care about, pass a list of categories in the categories field, or a part of their names.

In the future we'll have a more polished UI but now this spreadsheet is more than enough to validate that people want this.

One more thing

Another problem

Users also said that it's not possible to have 100% accuracy on whether a company uses a technology or not just by looking at the company job posts.

That's true.

They may mention something like this

But it's unlikely that they're using Redshift, Snowflake and BigQuery at once.

A solution

If a company only mentions Redshift in all the job posts, and never mentioned Snowflake or BigQuery, chances that they actually use Redshift are higher.

So in addition to being able to look for companies mentioning certain technologies, I added a parameter that lets users exclude companies using another set of technologies.

That's it for now

If you'd like to use this, you can create a TheirStack account for free, with 50 monthly credits forever.

And if you'd like to know more or need more credits, you can talk directly with me - I'll love to hear what your problems are and what we can do to help you :)