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We've been working really hard on our startup and now this

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Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this

#51

Post by scumola »

LPTS wrote: post #49

That totally sucks for you. How much money/time did you sink into this, and do you have investors yet?

We initially put about 5 days (2 people working almost 24 hours a day it seemed) into getting the concept from paper to a working site in time to make a deadline for a VC funding submission (which we didn't get). The crawler, ripper, indexer, DB and the website have been tweaked almost daily over the last 6 months or so. The interface is under a re-design and so is most of the back-end (crawling needs to be done better, uploading to S3). It all runs on 2 linux machines and ripped data is stored on Amazon's S3 service. So-far the only money that we put into it ourselves is $20 for a logo off ebay that we're not even using and the S3 charges, which are about $20/mo at this point. Other hardware and bandwidth is just our own personal machines and internet connections, so that's 'free'. :) We don't have any investors. See our Investors page: http://mediawombat.com/wiki/index.php/Investors

Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this

#52

Post by DaniFong »

prakash wrote: post #14
tyohn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, we'd be very interested.

Congrats on the idea! Now do the same for Silverlight and sell the company to msft. btw: I like the part about Investors on you website :-)

Would you need to sell Silverlight indexing to msft?

Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this

#53

Post by scumola »

webwright wrote: post #50
scumola wrote: post #15

Hi there. I'm the other founder of the site (Troy made the original post on this thread) and I sent a "Hey, we're doing that too" email to the VP of Yahoo search and the VP of Google search this morning regarding SWF search. Still haven't heard anything back from them as of this post though. Also, we were denied VC funding earlier this year for this same project. Does anyone think that now is a good time to re-submit…

You were denied funding? "The VC group"? How many times were you told no by how many investors? The way you said it makes it look like you talked to 1 firm and then stopped. Fundraising is a process-- not a single ask. Expect to have 1 person pitching, largely full-time, for 3-9 months to tons of different investors. But to be honest-- a VC firm isn't going to touch a company with no traction except in the rare event…

Yea, we only submitted our site to one VC group so-far, and the competition was fierce (380 submissions and only 10 were chosen for funding). I've never dealt with Investors of any kind before, so it's kind of a new game to me. I'm comfortable with a keyboard and a compiler, not so much with business people and I suck at golf. :)

It's interesting that even this article on YC has inspired people to submit their own personal Flash websites, so we'll crawl them and index them, so there's some interest. How much interest is still yet to be seen. We're not into the 10k uniques or anywhere close to it, so that's a catch-22.

I'm intimidated by Google and Yahoo going into this market full-steam and us being the only bug to squash. They might not even care about us and just roll over the top of us, but I think - at least listening to what others have suggested is that the key is to out-innovate Google and Yahoo and just do a better job. Ask.com has great search results, but hardly anyone even knows that they exist. Personally, I think that google likes that their search results are lame - they sell more ad clicks that way. Google's search results are just 'good enough' to keep people from abandoning their site and going somewhere else. Also all of the other web-apps give customers a warm-fuzzy about using a Google service. I know that we have all of that to compete with, but I'm still optimistic. :)

Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this

#54

Post by webwright »

scumola wrote: post #53
webwright wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were denied funding? "The VC group"? How many times were you told no by how many investors? The way you said it makes it look like you talked to 1 firm and then stopped. Fundraising is a process-- not a single ask. Expect to have 1 person pitching, largely full-time, for 3-9 months to tons of different investors. But to be honest-- a VC firm isn't going to touch a company with no traction except in the rare event…

Yea, we only submitted our site to one VC group so-far, and the competition was fierce (380 submissions and only 10 were chosen for funding). I've never dealt with Investors of any kind before, so it's kind of a new game to me. I'm comfortable with a keyboard and a compiler, not so much with business people and I suck at golf. :) It's interesting that even this article on YC has inspired people to submit their own pe…

"We're not into the 10k uniques or anywhere close to it, so that's a catch-22."

Seriously, solve that problem or have a VERY credible story on how you could in a very capital efficient manner with a little money. If you aren't growing organically (and FAST), you need to very critically ask yourself why. If your solution is YCombinator, TechStars, getting TechCrunched, etc-- you need to realize that none of those things generate growth. If you can't grow 100 visitors to 1000, you're not going to fare much better with the 10k uniques that a TechCrunch post gives you.

My gut tells me that the only people who want to search a database of ONLY Flash sites are Flash designers/developers... The rest of the world doesn't want a vertical search engine-- they just want the best results (whether it's Flash, HTML, or a PDF).

Maybe there's a niche business there, but there almost certainly isn't an investor on the planet who would fund it without proof of dramatic traction and growth. We're fundraising right now, have the YC stamp, a great growth rate, paying customers, bafflingly good PR coverage, and we still get plenty of investors who balk due to the perceived size of the opportunity.

Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this

#56

Post by tyohn »

webwright wrote: post #54
scumola wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, we only submitted our site to one VC group so-far, and the competition was fierce (380 submissions and only 10 were chosen for funding). I've never dealt with Investors of any kind before, so it's kind of a new game to me. I'm comfortable with a keyboard and a compiler, not so much with business people and I suck at golf. :) It's interesting that even this article on YC has inspired people to submit their own pe…

"We're not into the 10k uniques or anywhere close to it, so that's a catch-22." Seriously, solve that problem or have a VERY credible story on how you could in a very capital efficient manner with a little money. If you aren't growing organically (and FAST), you need to very critically ask yourself why. If your solution is YCombinator, TechStars, getting TechCrunched, etc-- you need to realize that none of those thin…

"If you aren't growing organically (and FAST), you need to very critically ask yourself why."

Thank you for your thoughts. You could be completely correct for all I know. I don't mind serving a very niche community. But as far as organic growth we haven't released the site other then on YC today :)

Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this

#57

Post by tyohn »

christefano wrote: post #55

Believe me when I say I understand your situation (Apple did something similar to my flagship product in 1998) but I have to ask... Didn't you know that Adobe has been working with Google on this? I learned about it at a Flex conference in March.

Well, I guess I don't get out enough :)

But I remember reading something about Adobe opening up the .SWF format but we were already crawling and indexing when I read about it.

Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this

#58

Post by nailer »

tptacek wrote: post #46
seekely wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Validated by players that are very likely to crush any start-up into oblivion. I wouldn't be too excited ;).

I thought the same thing in 2003, when me and one of my current cofounders decided to build an AOL IM firewall. Then AOL announced they were going to package AIM and offer it to companies with access control and management, and we said "ok we're doomed". AOL mothballed the project, and the leading AIM firewall companies now make mid-high 8 digits.

AIM firewall? I don't understand. Content level inspection of AIM packets? Do you have a URL?

Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this

#59

Post by webwright »

tyohn wrote: post #56
webwright wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We're not into the 10k uniques or anywhere close to it, so that's a catch-22." Seriously, solve that problem or have a VERY credible story on how you could in a very capital efficient manner with a little money. If you aren't growing organically (and FAST), you need to very critically ask yourself why. If your solution is YCombinator, TechStars, getting TechCrunched, etc-- you need to realize that none of those thin…

"If you aren't growing organically (and FAST), you need to very critically ask yourself why." Thank you for your thoughts. You could be completely correct for all I know. I don't mind serving a very niche community. But as far as organic growth we haven't released the site other then on YC today :)

FWIW, I love the idea of a bootstrapped business serving a niche audience... I guess my main point is that there is a fork in the road for startups-- if you want to get funded, you are almost certainly NOT going the niche route. For investors to get excited, yoou need to start getting monomaniacal about attacking a huge opportunity and building a huge business. Investors need to hear a story that involves them getting a 10x return (or at least the potential of it) or they almost certainly aren't buyin'.

Either way-- grats on what you've built!

Re: We've been working really hard on our startup and now this

#60

Post by seekely »

trominos wrote: post #39
icey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this happen to me with my last startup right around the time we were dealing with some angel investors. Every single of one of them called me to say "Well, Microsoft is going to be doing this now, we don't want to throw our money away." It's one thing to have market validation by companies you could theoretically catch up to; it's an entirely different beast to try to compete with Google or Microsoft.

I thought that the entire startup culture was based on the idea that a startup could outpace a behemoth like Google or Microsoft.

I think in many cases outpacing the big players might be true, especially when the big players are known for mucking new pursuits up, but in this particular case, the startup is trying to take on niche functionality of search which Google is already very established and very good at. The odds Google mucks up flash indexing are practically nill.
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