Why another social media management tool?

Let’s get the awkward part out of the way: nobody asked for another social media management tool. There’s Metricool, Buffer, Hootsuite, Later, Sprout Social, Agorapulse, and roughly four hundred others that someone on LinkedIn will recommend the second you type the word “scheduling”.

We used a lot of them. Some are genuinely good. Metricool in particular does a lot for what it costs, and if it already covers everything you need, close this tab and go enjoy your afternoon. We won’t be offended. Much.

But we kept bumping into the same handful of frustrations, and at some point “export to CSV and build a pivot table” stopped feeling like a workflow and started feeling like a hobby. So we built PerchSight. Here’s what was bugging us, and what we did about it.

“My analytics give me a number, not a story”

Most dashboards will tell you a video has 48,312 views. Great. Is that good? Is it still climbing, or did it peak on Tuesday and has been coasting on fumes since? Was it a slow burn or a spike? A total view count is a final score without the match: you know who won, not whether it was a thriller.

PerchSight reads every post’s stats every hour and keeps each reading. So instead of one number, you get the curve: views, likes, comments, shares and saves over time, from the moment the post went live. The stats live at the post level, not just the account level, which sounds like a detail until you try to work out why last month was good and the only answer your tool has is “it was good”.

For videos, you also get watch time and retention curves where the network shares them, so you can see the exact second people decided they had better things to do. (It’s usually the intro. It’s always the intro.)

“Is this video taking off right now?”

This is the one we wanted most. The first few hours after posting decide a lot, and you want to know now whether to push it, pin it, boost it, or quietly pretend it never happened.

Every post in PerchSight shows its views per hour: how many views it picked up between its last two readings. Readings come in every hour on their own, and there’s a Refresh button for when you can’t wait. (You’ll press it every five minutes on launch day. We did too. It’s fine.)

It’s the closest thing to a pulse. It turns “huh, it’s doing OK” into “it’s doing 1,200 views an hour and speeding up, cancel lunch”.

“I want to compare my videos, not squint at two tabs”

Did the Reel beat the TikTok? Did the YouTube Short with a face on the thumbnail outperform the one without? In most tools, answering that involves two browser tabs, a screenshot and a fair amount of squinting.

In PerchSight, you pick up to eight posts, from any network, and put them on the same chart. They’re lined up by time since publication, so a video posted on a Monday and one posted on a Thursday race from the same starting line. You can compare views, or likes, comments, shares and saves per view, which is a fairer fight when one of them had a much bigger audience.

“What are my competitors doing that I’m not?”

Everyone checks on their competitors. Most people do it by scrolling their feed at 11pm, which technically counts as research.

Add a competitor’s public YouTube channel or Instagram account to one of your brands, and PerchSight follows their posts the way it follows yours: every hour. You see what they publish and how fast it grows. And when one of their videos takes off, you can drop it on the same chart as your own, to see exactly how far behind you are. Motivating or depressing, depending on the day.

An honest caveat: for now, competitor tracking works on YouTube and Instagram only. TikTok only opens that kind of data to academic researchers, and Facebook keeps it behind a special review. We’d rather tell you that than scrape and hope.

“Scheduling shouldn’t involve a phone alarm”

Remember when “scheduling” an Instagram post meant your phone buzzing at 9am so you could post it yourself? Good times. Not really.

PerchSight publishes through each network’s official API, to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Write a post, reel or story once, pick the networks, and each one keeps its own settings: YouTube privacy, TikTok audience, Instagram collaborators. You can add an automatic first comment on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube for the links and hashtags you’d rather keep out of the caption, and a time picker shows when each network’s audience tends to be around, so you’re not publishing to an empty room.

“I run five brands and I’m tired of logging in and out”

PerchSight is organized by brand, not by login. Each brand gets one account per network, with its own schedule, stats and competitors. Going from one client to the next is a click, not a password manager workout.

What PerchSight isn’t

There’s no social inbox, no link-in-bio builder, and no AI writing your captions with three rocket emojis. Not because those are bad ideas (well, the emojis), but because we’d rather do a few things properly than everything vaguely. If you need an all-in-one suite for a 40-person social team, the big tools are built for exactly that, and they price accordingly.

So, why another one?

Because we wanted to know not just what our posts did, but how fast, and compared to what. It turned out to be a short list of things we kept wishing our tools did, and building them ourselves was the only way to stop wishing.

If that sounds like your list too, give PerchSight a try. Create a brand, connect its accounts, and within the hour you’ll have your first reading. A few hours later you’ll have a curve. That’s when it gets fun.

— Arthur