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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#61

Post by trominos »

seekely wrote: post #60
trominos wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the long run, maybe.

But I certainly think it's plausible that a startup could out-develop Google in a relatively unexplored area over the course of a year or two—and that's all they need, since their exit strategy is (presumably) getting bought out, not IPOing.

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

#62

Post by prakash »

DaniFong wrote: post #52
prakash wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As long as they don't buy Yahoo, you don't need to sell msft anything, they will buy it, so you are right :-)

In fact VC's should start a fund, similar to Iphone apps fund, called "msft not buying yahoo, so lets make them use that 44 billion" fund ;-)

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

#63

Post by BrandonM »

seekely wrote: post #60
trominos wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you see the site at all? It already does more than just indexing Flash. I thought it was pretty awesome, personally.

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

#64

Post by vaksel »

why is everyone so quick to roll over the second one of the big boys enter your area? Did you really expect your site to stay unique?

Its not like those big companies had vast amounts of success outside their core ventures. Even Google the internet behemoth, has had very few #1-#2 products, most of their products are pretty average. And lets not even talk about Yahoo.

You want to know how the Google version of your product will look like? They'll probably just add a "Flash" link under "more v", and that's it, you'll be able to search flash but it'll be hidden a few clicks away, where 99.9999% of users will never see it. So it'll have its 15 seconds of fame on Techcrunch and the blogosphere and then it'll go away.

So you can compete just fine. I would change the site around so it looks a little bit more like a content site. i.e. try something along the lines of youtube, where you show some featured search results for video/games. And I'd come up with some tag line that basically tells any person that comes to your site right away, that THIS is the place where they can find any flash game/video on the net.

You need to look at flash search as a niche. And niches is the place where big boys have constantly gotten their asses kicked by the 1-2 man start-ups. Plenty of people competed with Google, survived, and were bought out by them. So why not you?

So instead of moping that you finally have competition, look at Google's attempt at your technology, figure out how you can differentiate, and then add the few features that they missed.

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

#66

Post by sutro »

Google/Yahoo/Adobe did you a favor. Dump the consumer-facing site and business model and reposition yourself as an enterprise software business, which will greatly increase your chances of monetizing this. Sell it to Autonomy or one of its competitors, or perhaps to one of the enterprise content vendors like Vignette and their ilk. I'm sure a little research would reveal other such opportunities.

Take a look at this company: http://www.ephox.com. It sells a WYSIWYG web content editor. Those things are a dime a dozen on sourceforge. They probably wouldn't cover their own hosting fees if they tried to sell a consumer/developer-facing version. So they have wisely embedded themselves with enterprise software vendors and are doing quite well for themselves as a result.

Transform your company into an Ephox. Forget all the consumer-facing Web 2.0 BS you read about on HN and TechCrunch and focus your time and energy where the real money is: in corporate IT.

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

#67

Post by Tichy »

tyohn wrote: post #57
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.

Still, it can't have been a complete surprise that Google wants to crawl Flash. They crawl lots of other file formats, so if you can manage to crawl flash, what made you think Google wouldn't be able to?

Maybe you could still survive as a specialized flash search engine? With Google, you get just everything lumped together, at your site, I know I am only searching flash.

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

#69

Post by tptacek »

nailer wrote: post #58
tptacek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The two key features of an AIM firewall are filter rules about who can talk to who (or, in corporations, whitelists), and direct relay of messages between people in the same company, so company information isn't hitting OSCAR.

I should have been clearer, but, we gave up. But check out:

www.imlogic.com www.akonix.com

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

#70

Post by livecrunch »

Name does not tell me anything, Get your site SEO Make a point of your startup , text you wrote is too small and does not make any sense what website is about. Speedup your search and make the boxes smaller they are loading to slow due to images etc Do some advertising Overall not bad.
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