The least productive teams I've been a part of are the ones where everyone is waiting for their turn to say why an idea is bad. Sometimes being "too smart" can hold you back from building something genuinely new.
Common failure mode in environments that promote being the best over getting things done: If you went from school to college to industry always identifying with being better than everyone else, because that's what it takes to get in the door, sometimes you miss the transition to when you're already in the door. A lot of people don't realize they were supposed to put their guards down until it's too late. It's too bad but this is what the cutthroat labor pipeline rewards.
It's definitely a more nuanced topic than I think the article leads on. There is a right and wrong time to apply the brakes, but you can still be critical in either case.
There have been numerous times where I have identified real issues with an idea, advocated we crack on anyway and ended up with good results. Often you can't know for sure if an issue will even be that insurmountable until you get to it.
But there are other times where the risk/reward isn't lining up, or the risk is very well known, you've tried it before etc. Then hit the brakes, back to the drawing board for another try.
I think the danger is when people treat ideas as precious. In a well functioning team, your idea is going to get picked apart, modified, morphed and implemented by others. Get over your attachment to the idea as your baby, and you get to really enjoy the process.
The vast majority of software engineers is never tasked to do something genuine. It's the opposite, you are tasked to improve, expand and maintain things under very specific constraints. Corporate work is by default anti innovation, the company has made the innovation and wants you to maximize its profits.
Also many great innovations or discoveries have outlived extreme opposition. The problem isn't people saying no, the problem is having non-sociopathic people being reluctant hearing no.
Hey, appreciate the feedback. Will address all your points.
Regarding Reddit, we have our own custom handler for Reddit URLs which uses the Reddit API, which we are billed for when we exceed free limits.
For Terms of Service, you're right, that is definitely an oversight on our part. We just published both our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy on the website.
When it comes to comparing with GPT-5 and Claude, we do believe that our prompting, agent orchestration, and other core parts of the product such as parallel search results analysis and parallel agents are improvements on just GPT-5 and Claude, while also allowing it to run at much cheaper costs on significantly smaller models. Our v1 which we built months ago was essentially the same as what GPT-5 thinking with web search currently does, and we've since made the explicit choice to focus on data quality, user controllability, and cost efficiency over latency. So while yes, it might give faster results and work better for smaller datasets, both we and our users have found Webhound to work better for siloed sources and larger datasets.
Regarding account deletion, that is also a fair point. So far we've had people email us when they want their account deleted, but we will add account deletion ASAP.
Criticism like this helps us continue to hold ourselves to a high standard, so thanks for taking the time to write it up.
Could you share the session url via the feedback form if you still have access to it?
That's really strange, it sounds like Webhound for some reason deleted the schema after extraction ended, so although your data should still be tied to the session it just isn't being displayed. Definitely not the expected behavior.
Accuracy-wise we think it's almost there but probably still a few iterations away from being perfect. It's great at eliminating a lot of the collection time though.
Interestingly, we're working with B2B clients right now where we use Webhound to curate and then act as the "validation" layer ourselves. The agent lets us offer these datasets way cheaper with live updates, but still with human oversight.
The indian company I mentioned earlier mainly had exhibitions and events as clients. These clients usually need huge datasets rather than just a few leads, which makes them a good target market for a tool like yours.
Thanks for testing it! That's definitely a miss, sounds like it got confused about what you were looking for and went after board member pages instead of the actual meeting/document sites.
We're working on better query interpretation, but in the meantime you could try being more specific like "find BoardDocs or meeting document websites for each district" to guide it better. Also, you can usually figure out how it interpreted your request by looking at the entity criteria, those are all the criteria a piece of data needs to meet to make it in the set.
Fair point, most of our users have come from referrals/word of mouth so it hasn't really been an issue for us, but you're probably right that we should have more information on the landing page
Oh definitely not trying to make a point, I'm really just curious about how it is working out in case it is something I should update in my recommendations to customers.
Yep: NextJS frontend, NodeJS backend, Gemini 2.5 Flash LLM, Firecrawl for crawling, self-hosted SearXNG for web search, and fly.io for hosting. Beyond that everything else is built internally, we don’t use many frameworks.
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