I went into a rabbit hole into how to detect paying Cloudflare customers (for a technographic product I am building in Bloomberry) and wrote up some techniques here.
Response header analysis were a waste of time (Cloudflare returns the same ones no matter what type of customer they are) so I had to resort to analyzing custom error pages, IP ranges, SSL certificates and more
I went deep inside a rabbit hole in trying to discover paying Cloudflare customers (for a technographic I am building in Bloomberry), and wrote up some tactics on how to detect if a conpany is a paying Cloudflare user.
Involves analyzing custom error pages, IP ranges, following redirects, etc.
1. You need something called a technographic product to get lists of companies that use a particular technology. Though these products are notorious for having stale data, so make sure you do some cross-checks to ensure it's somewhat accurate (IE. lookup their IPs and see if they're really hosted on AWS). I haven't used Builtwith in awhile, but they're the leader in that category. Bloomberry is another one.
2. As someone else mentioned in this thread: job postings can be useful. You particularly want to look at job postings that mention AWS AND FinOps. FinOps = basically engineering to save costs for cloud costs. That is a very high signal they're investing in someone who can help them save costs (albeit a lot of job postings these days are fake, so it's not a 100% sure signal)
3. Combine the first 2 methods with headcount data from Linkedin or Cloudflare radar traffic data to find companies that are using AWS and growing the fastest, or having huge traffic spikes. Those are probably highly correlated with the desire to want to reduce AWS costs.
Didnt think of the FinOps angle - thats a goodd one! The annoying thing about filtering by AWS mentions is that every other company seems to list all the clpud platforms like in a list, even if they use just one of them. Adding FinOps is a good additional filter in that case
I love Sheets, but I dont care for using Gemini to interact with Sheets. It seems like a recipe for disaster. Do I really want it to muck around with thousands of rows and no intuitive way to diff its changes? Nope, sticking with basic Sheets
Its not just engineers, and its not just about the 3rd party/rate limiting stuff. I feel like the reasoning capabilities have deteriorated too for non-coding tasks.
There's loads of companies that use Discord, but they all seem to be blockchain/gaming companies [1]
I think Discord has the same problem that FB faced when it tried to launch their FB Workplace product. It has the perception of being "fun" and not serious/professional.
If I were you, I'd pay the $$$ for Slack. The ability to search past conversations has saved me hours of productivity and well worth it
Response header analysis were a waste of time (Cloudflare returns the same ones no matter what type of customer they are) so I had to resort to analyzing custom error pages, IP ranges, SSL certificates and more