
We've been working really hard on our startup and now this - tyohn
I'm sure you're aware that its been announced that Google and Yahoo will now be indexing Flash content.<p>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?<p>Here's the URL http://mediawombat.com<p>Please beware that we weren't planning on releasing it in this state.<p>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 :)
======
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 ;-)

------
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.

~~~
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.

------
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> )

~~~
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!

------
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.

------
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.

~~~
blinks
> They'll probably just add a "Flash" link under "more v", and that's it,...

Just like they do with PDFs? /sarcasm

------
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.

------
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.

------
christefano
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.

~~~
tyohn
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.

~~~
Tichy
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
jaycee
John Gruber of Daring Fireball (<http://daringfireball.net>) grumbled today
about the closed nature of Adobe/Google/Yahoo's methodology on this one. Which
means there's surely an opportunity to appeal to everyone who prefers openness
in their web--and that's a lot of people. Go for it.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
scumola
Hey, I'd just like to thank everyone for helping out and providing your
comments and suggestions about our project. We got a lot of exposure just from
this YC post and we're starting to shake hands with people who have offered
assistance. None of this wouldn't have happened without the help and support
of the YC community. Thanks!

------
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! ;)

------
maxklein
Well, how about making categories: Flash games, Flash tools, stuff like that.

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

------
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.

------
aspirant
Keep going, but take time to imagine a world where flash-search is
commonplace. What will the world need then? What will Google need then?

If nothing else, the work you've done puts you in a better place to answer
that question than almost anyone.

------
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?

------
pi3832
Flashblock is a popular add-on for Firefox. I would recommend a button on your
page that adds your site to the Flashblock "allowed" list.

~~~
scumola
Yea, I use flashblock myself. I'm of the mind of making a non-flash front-end
just because it's not very light-weight. Javascript and CSS could provide the
same experience without the weight of the flash interface, but it kinda makes
sense to display flash guts in a flash container, doesn't it? :)

------
NonEUCitizen
Opensource it and make it part of Lucene? then ask Index Ventures (pun NOT
intended -- Index invested in MySQL) to invest?

------
pjackson
YouTube didn't give up because Google launched Google Video. And as it turns
out YouTube did it better and sold to Google.

Press on!

------
tyohn
And we are in process of a re-design. I have to wonder if I should keep
working on it...

~~~
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.

------
ideamonk
no result for the query 'sex' , what more should I expect from it. It should
show me some flash animations over that!

~~~
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.

------
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.

------
ltbarcly
This is a bad idea for a startup. Anyone can run 'strings' on a flash file and
index it. And your website isn't very good either. So all in all, I would say
you should spend your time doing something that would take more than 20
minutes to copy. (Look up "barriers to entry")

------
sabat
_Figure out the sort of thing that Google and Yahoo don't or won't do, and do
that._

Exactly. There has to be an approach or angle on this data that Google isn't
doing -- maybe they wouldn't think to do it, or maybe they'd just find it
anathema.

------
LPTS
That totally sucks for you.

How much money/time did you sink into this, and do you have investors yet?

~~~
scumola
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>

