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My last startup started this way. My advice: don't do it. It's a bad market. First, there are competitors in the space. Some have done an objectively nice job,

by timr 9y ago

My last startup started this way. My advice: don't do it. It's a bad market. First, there are competitors in the space. Some have done an objectively nice job, but they're not blowing up. Second, you don't realize it, but you're not just competing with Google (the search engine) -- you're competing with every product in the Google ecosystem. If you want people to use your new niche search engine, you have to find a value proposition so compelling that people will explicitly choose to use your search, even though every other tool they use is tied back to Google somehow. That's insanely hard. Finally, but most importantly: programmers are a tiny market, they're terribly picky, conservative, and they don't like to pay for things. If you're going to take on the challenge of beating Google in a vertical, at least make it one that's huge or has huge value. Focusing on programmers means that you'll spend a ton of time trying to optimize for a highly technical, low-value use case that doesn't generalize well.

manquer 9y ago
from a pure business model sense it is true programmer focused search is not good space to be in .. Solving problems you face daily and are tired of has always been significant driver of innovation. This is an important and satisfying problem to be working on, not all startups have to become the next google or the next unicorn.
- timr 9y ago
  "not all startups have to become the next google or the next unicorn" No, but you do have to survive. That's hard enough for any company, but it's much harder when you pick a small target market that can't be trivially replicated in other verticals. So sure, pick a problem that you know well, but be realistic about the achievable market size, and don't start a business that requires huge scale to work (i.e. a search engine), when your target market is tiny. (Also, as in all things, beware survivorship bias: just because counterexamples to what I'm saying exist, does not mean that the likelihood of creating one is high. Nor does it mean that the counterexamples are doing as well as you think they are.)

by timr 9y ago

manquer 9y ago

from a pure business model sense it is true programmer focused search is not good space to be in .. Solving problems you face daily and are tired of has always been significant driver of innovation. This is an important and satisfying problem to be working on, not all startups have to become the next google or the next unicorn.

timr 9y ago
"not all startups have to become the next google or the next unicorn" No, but you do have to survive. That's hard enough for any company, but it's much harder when you pick a small target market that can't be trivially replicated in other verticals. So sure, pick a problem that you know well, but be realistic about the achievable market size, and don't start a business that requires huge scale to work (i.e. a search engine), when your target market is tiny. (Also, as in all things, beware survivorship bias: just because counterexamples to what I'm saying exist, does not mean that the likelihood of creating one is high. Nor does it mean that the counterexamples are doing as well as you think they are.)