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

86 points by tyohn ↗ HN
I'm sure you're aware that its been announced that Google and Yahoo will now be indexing Flash content.

Our idea for a startup was to create a search engine for Flash content. For quite some time now we've been crawling and indexing Flash content and we were getting ready to release a beta version of our site. What would you do if you were us?

Here's the URL http://mediawombat.com

Please beware that we weren't planning on releasing it in this state.

This is a very early beta version - before you click on the Image icon or Audio icon please allow the search results page to load completely or use the traditional search link :)

76 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] thread
tyohn
And we are in process of a re-design. I have to wonder if I should keep working on it...
babul
Keep going. You don't know what opportunities lie ahead . We make our own "luck" by creating opportunities for "luck" to happen. So until their is a definite reason to stop (such as no more cash), keep going and see what happens.
maximilian
The cynic in me says your f'ed. You'll definitely have to repurpose because they have much too much inertia. Once flash search results start showing up in my google results, it'll be like, "oh, thats handy". I can't imagine myself using your site just for flash searches.
danlester
Actually, I think you're being too generous - I can't see myself using a separate Flash search engine even if Google does NOT also index Flash. As above, you need to think who your target niche really is.
amohr
You might at least want to get an original logo. I like bluebison.net as much as the next guy, but you should probably have something original if you're going to have a bunch of traffic.
scumola
We got permission from bluebison.net and she even offered to make a custom logo for us, but we're waiting to see if the idea is even worth investing money into at this point. We bought a logo off ebay (not suggested) that's on our wiki page of logos: http://mediawombat.com/wiki/index.php/Logos
agentbleu
Bugger. I have seen this many a time. But given you have a product launch ready and they are still talking, I would suggest using their might as your opportunity. Right now, I would be scanning the net, anyone posting about Flash I would send them a press release.

Just maybe you can get a mention off the topic as its hot right now.

brk
I like what you've done so far.

Not sure of your funding/day-job(if exists) situation. My first instinct would be to keep going with it. There may be opportunities to use the code as a competitor to Google (at time people thought they too were stupid for reinventing a wheel), or to create something that could be licensed to people to use on their own site for custom content search.

There are also SEO opportunities, to crawl a flash-heavy site and dynamically create pages with the same keywords/content that is easier for other search engines to find.

You could also expand to other sorts of rich meta-data, like indexing the EXIM data on photos, etc.

brm
Yes, keep going. Look at it as a sort of market validation for your product. You've done a lot of work, now look for angles to possibly differentiate yourself.

The door has gotten a little harder to get through but it is by no means closed. Who knows, G and Y jumping into the market may make your technology a valuable acquisition for someone else looking to compete in search.

Mistone
wow your market just got validated by the major players - this is no reason to stop, you do however need to push forward on a specific niche - this can be seen a major set back or opportunity - likely there is a lot of buzz on this announcement. maybe you can great some adwords adds against the news story keywords and get folks that are excited about this server to try our your site first.
seekely
Validated by players that are very likely to crush any start-up into oblivion. I wouldn't be too excited ;).
icey
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.

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

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

That thumping sound you just heard is a bunch of diehard Apple shareholders -- the ones who bought on Steve Jobs' first day and held on -- falling off their chairs in helpless laughter.

But I feel for you: I'm sure it's nigh-impossible to look your potential investors in the eye and tell them that they don't understand how business works. I'm sure they're all so focused on becoming the number-one player in a small and obscure market that they ignore the advantages of being the second (or third, or twelfth) player in a large and buzzing market.

icey
Well, frankly it worked out for the better that the Angels shied away. My startup was too ambitious, and there wasn't enough focus in the product, we were focusing too broadly.

Someone mentioned in another comment that startups should be more agile than the big corps, and they were absolutely right. In the vein of 37signals, we should have been focusing on one problem instead of a class of problems.

tptacek
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.

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

tectonic
Consider licensing your search tech to companies not blessed by Adobe? (I.e., other than Google / Yahoo!) I know my company would be interested.
tyohn
Sure, we'd be very interested.
prakash
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 :-)

DaniFong
Would you need to sell Silverlight indexing to msft?
prakash
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 ;-)

aaronblohowiak
Notice that what they are suggesting is the key component of your solution (taking links from a page and producing the parts to index) not the indexing itself or the search term parsing &c. I think if you offered that aspect (as a web server or licensed, shared-source software) then you could carve out a good nice whithout having to rebuild the rest of the "search" infrastructure. Basicly, I am suggesting that you forget about

"Our search results are not very good right now. We are in the very early startup phase of our website. The crawler has only been crawling for a while, we only have crawled a handfull of websites, and our search query technology is only in the keyword phase. All of these things require time and money to implement. As things progress we'll improve our infrastructure and ramp-up as quickly as we can."

and focus on what you are apparently good at.

mechanical_fish
Exactly. Figure out the sort of thing that Google and Yahoo don't or won't do, and do that.

You can certainly leverage their marketing. For the next couple of months, the Flash universe is going to be filled with discussions of search. Google and Yahoo are going to do a bunch of marketing, and a bunch of market research, all of which you don't have to pay for. Just monitor some Flash-user forums, watch the users rave and/or complain about the new tools, and see if a niche market presents itself.

Meanwhile: Launch. Get something out there you can point to.

tdavis
This is something my company may eventually be interested in as well. Indexing Flash is a huge deal.
DenisM
The rest of us should consider wether we're writing a feature for someone else's product, or if what we do can stand by itself.
tstegart
You've done a lot of work, so don't think its worthless just because someone else jumped in. But you need to strategize and think about all the ways this will affect you. What was your monetization strategy in the first place? You may need to change it to account for the new development. Maybe you'll license your code instead, or come up with something new. But don't just give up without at least thinking long and hard about what your business can do. You should also research what Google, Yahoo and Adobe (hey, where's MSFT?) have ACTUALLY done, not just said they will do. You may have an opportunity there as well.
asimjalis
Why not contact Google and Yahoo and see if they are interested in acquiring you? It couldn't hurt.

Also this is perhaps the downside of waiting too long to launch. Can you rescope this thing and release it sooner? Could you release a flimsy version 1 right now and then improve it and flesh it out over the next few months? Don't worry about solving technological problems that you don't have yet. Solve them when you have them.

I realize Twitter might sound like a counter-example to this line of thinking. But think about it. Imagine if Twitter had not released and was still working on their perfect architecture. Would they even know what the real problems were going to be? They might have squandered their time on non-problems. Plus, no one would know or care about them. So in retrospect, releasing their flimsy app was probably the best thing that they did.

herdrick
> Why not contact Google and Yahoo and see if they > are interested in acquiring you? It couldn't hurt.

You should never do this. When buying or selling something illiquid, the side who brings up the idea of a deal starts off at a disadvantage. So if you make the overture you will get hosed. Except you won't even get that in this case, as an offer like that coming in over the transom to a big company is never going to reach anyone who matters.

But your other advice is good.

scumola
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 to the VC group and ask for a second chance while there's a buzz? :)

- Steve Webb ( http://mediawombat.com - http://badcheese.com )

gojomo
Can you make the case that your solution is better than what Adobe and Yahoo or Google engineers have put together? (If not, I'm not sure why you're mailing companies already strategically linked with Adobe's solution.)

I wouldn't count on Adobe limiting access to this special player to just Google and Yahoo. Adobe wants Flash/Flex accessible by all crawlers, so it's just a matter of time.

scumola
I won't know what they put together - as far as I know, there's nothing concrete on the Google or Yahoo end, but you know PR - just being in talks with Adobe gives the PR department to promise a product. It's also very possible that we could easily get squashed in a very short time. Mainly, I just wanted to open the communication channels with G and Y to see if they bite or even acknowledge us.
webwright
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 that the founders have an unusual amount of credibility. You'd really be better off with angels. Though (on the surface), I don't think you'll get buyoff from ANY investors unless you can prove there's a business there. In your shoes I wouldn't talk to investors until I had a proven growth rate and 10-20k uniques per day.

I'm going to disagree with the people saying, "oooh, market validation". This validates that Google wants to index more stuff and Flash builders want to get indexed. It doesn't validate that users would go to a vertical flash search engine.

When Google does something in the search game, they are generally going to win. Without the exit strategy of selling to them, you are left with building your own search brand (supported by ads). Are there enough people who are passionate about finding Flash stuff that they'd rather use your (better) flash search engine over an integrated experience at Google?

scumola
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. :)

webwright
"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.

tyohn
"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 :)

webwright
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!

rdj
I would license the technology. In my industry crawlers are required to perform a sweep and gather data. However, there is a large void in the flash crawling capabilities of various tools. Look for tools that crawl, index, data mine, whatever and see if there are opportunities to provide the flash crawling component through an API license of sorts.
omnipath
Shout to the world what you're working on right now. Now that the information is out there that what you're doing is worth doing, a lot of the media work is already done for you. Call tech mags and blogs and let them know you're already working on something that Adobe just announced, even if it's in beta.

And if you can, even show off the beta so that people and the media can quickly give you feedback, thus improving your site/software at a faster rate. Good luck.

mattmaroon
I wouldn't sweat it too much just yet. You don't know when/how Google and Yahoo will add this into their results, and until you launch, find customers, and start iterating, you don't know exactly where you'll end up yourself. You might find yourself not competing with Google head on after all.
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jm4
I imagine that you had to have known this would happen sooner or later so my advice would be not to sweat it too much. You decided to enter a niche market that was basically only a niche market because the major players had chosen to overlook it. At any time they had the resources available to move in and you can bet that if you had become popular they would have come along to eat your lunch. If anything, this may even put you in a better position because now you've really got a fire under your ass to do something to separate your product from theirs. There's also the possibility that if you garner enough attention you'll be acquired.

P.S. Very neat search engine. I especially like the ActionScript view.

danlester
This sounds like a sensible feature for Google or Yahoo, but you need to think about who would really need to search Flash content - as you suggest on your site, perhaps the Flash Developer community is your likely audience. So do deals with sites involving that.

The point is that very few general users are going to give up on Google results and think "I wonder if what I'm looking for happens to be in a Flash file somewhere". Of course, if it's thrown in for free with Google results then it might be used by general users, but not on its own.

And there are plenty of other new directions that people have suggested for your technology. Probably the best to see a return on your investment so far would be to provide precisely the feature that Google have announced to the second tier of search engines.

Kaizyn
That's good and that's bad. It's bad because it means you'll have to move much faster to get your site out the door. It's good because then that makes your site much more valuable as an acquisition for one of the large search engines that falls behind the leader in this space. Specifically, I would target trying to be acquired by Microsoft, Ask.com, or A9.

Don't be intimidated by Google and Yahoo! as they're both trying to juggle too many balls in the air at the moment to design something that does a great job at dealing with this specific type of web content. If your service is done well, I really don't think you'll have any problem with the acquition.

coltafever
Ouch. I feel your pain.

It's probably too late to help much but when I look at product initiatives my first criteria to do something that is never going to show up on the shelves at Wal Mart and that none of the big boys like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc. would ever consider doing.

gojomo
There are also open-source projects for reading (and thus finding the text and links inside) SWF files -- see Gnash, JavaSWF, and others. So there's a practical cap on how much other crawl/search teams would pay for such technology, unless you've got something really advanced.
Alex3917
The vast majority of niche file types are currently not indexed by Google. Even though these file types make up only a fraction of a percent of what people are looking for, if you were able to create a search engine that covered a wide variety of these then there might be some opportunity. For example, if your search engine can index .sfg files (for Go players), .mm files (mind maps), etc.
Maro
There have been many occasions when the large players like MS or Google announced something and nothing usable came of it: e.g. OpenSocial is mostly vaporware.

Also, Google AND Yahoo, i.e. two huge corporations working together raises flags for me. When's the last time that worked out? There'll be a lot of managarial communication, overhead, bureaucracy, stupidity, etc. Assuming they really are doing this together: having worked at large corporations and knowing how inefficient even internal management is, I actually wouldn't worry too much about this.

ashleyw
I must admit I wouldn't be using your search when Google has flash search support.

But as you can see below, licensing your technology to other companies would be a big step. If only you had it launched 6 months ago you would be in a better situation by now, but I see now evidence to say your a dead startup if your claims stand up! ;)

PieSquared
It says you'd be open to other names, so here's my suggestion: flashiefind. It describes what you're doing, has a sort of alliteration and ring to it, and feels natural. And the domain name is open. Eh?
maxklein
Well, how about making categories: Flash games, Flash tools, stuff like that.

Just change your focus a bit, but keep your technology.

ideamonk
no result for the query 'sex' , what more should I expect from it. It should show me some flash animations over that!
tyohn
look for body parts ;)
scumola
Yea, 'sex' is actually a popular query, but for some reason, none of the SWF files that we've indexed contain the string 'sex'. Believe me, there are plenty of porn-related SWF files out there, so the material is not lacking, just categorizing the data is something that needs to be done.