Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder?

Fixed it

Alright, how about an honest-to-goodness new search engine?

I've been working on this piecemeal for a while. I want a completely new alternative in the search space. I think a lot of other people do too. I want to focus on highly personalized results from personal data sets: ingest people's bookmarks, crawl them, crawl their second-order links, and so on. I want discussions from HN, Reddit, and other publicly-accessible, heavily-moderated, active sites to frequently appear in search results. I want search results to be rendered in a modern, interactive interface that makes lists-of-links feel like 2010.

I resolutely do not want advertising revenue. For early stages at least, I'd like to keep it subscription-only. I know that is a big, big limiting factor to growth. I think there could be some other opportunities for revenue that don't require bending over for advertising. I could be open to other suggestions too.

I've got some approaches to try for ranking, I have most of a crawler, I've compiled lists of openly available datasets and shortcuts, a start on the frontend and backend, and great piles of notes and pieces from past experiments. I'm absolutely certain this is doable for a very small team.

I don't have any of the business side. I don't have any connections. I'm mostly pleasant and easy to get along with, and I can comfortably handle groups of technical or non-technical people. But, I have no idea how to find and make the kind of relationships that could get this built much faster, and even posting this here makes me awkward and uncomfortable. Maybe this is a good year for breaking bad old habits.

I'm currently doing freelance work at middling rates, living cheaply, and slowly chipping away at this project. I'd love to be able to work on it full time. I'm pretty sure I can build the entire stack, end-to-end, to MVP in about a year.

I'd really like to meet a good partner for the business side of things. Someone with strong ethics, that gets incensed when trying to find anything in Google or DDG, that sees value in building a whole new dataset rather than putting a new frontend on Bing, and can come up with the resources to accelerate the project. I'd be willing to consider YC if you think you can tip the odds in our favor. I don't have anything that would prevent me from committing to YC this year. But, again: no advertising.

Email in profile. I can receive mail pretty reliably, but replying to Gmail-owned infrastructure has been hit and miss recently.

For what it's worth, I'd do it as a SaaS. 100%. Free to generate PDFs. Pay to print. Take a cut from each printing job, but outsource the printing and distribution.

I suspect you won't find a single mass market for this. The mass market is well served by generically designed notebooks.

Instead, you'll find a number of highly profitable niche markets. (Like the D&D crowd, the design crowd, the hacker crowd, STEM teachers, etc.) Judging by your homepage, it seems you're already on this track.

Because of this, your best bet (once developed or at least in early testing) might be to find a few brand ambassadors from each of those niches: a dedicated gamer, a well-known designer, etc. People who can introduce your product into their respective niches.

I'd also make sure the print quality is on par with Field Notes or Moleskin, to make sure you can command a good price.

Apologies for the unsolicited advice... just really into this idea.

These are great threads to have, but I do worry some underestimate the amount of interviewing they should do for a co-founder they've just met from here. As a rule of thumb if you can't imagine yourself being close friends with this person, it's probably not a good idea to have them as a co-founder. It's a much more important, long-term, and intimate relationship than a simple partnership or internship is. I'd suggest hanging out with prospective co-founders exhaustively, including plenty of idle, personal, and off-topic conversations before committing, and to remember that just like dating, there's a decent chance it may not be the perfect fit, so you have to be willing to move on and try again if so.

Works for me.

Edit: not anymore.