6 ms·

Octopart, The Little Startup That Hung In There

184 points by jagira 15y ago

thaumaturgy 15y ago
I really like this new theme on TechCrunch today, giving some attention to under-reported startups doing it "the old-fashioned way". I know it can't last, because it won't get as many page views as other articles, but it's nice. I'm really looking forward to having an excuse to use Octopart. I've only occasionally had to find electronics bits and pieces in the past, and it's always been a pain in the ass. Thanks for building something people need, guys.
waratuman 15y ago
This is my favorite YC startup. I remember in college trying to design and build my computer. It was just awesome to have all the parts, data sheets, and price in one spot. Sure beets an excel sheet, keeping track of data sheets, and going everywhere to find every last part! Glad to hear they hung in there and are doing well!
- andres 15y ago
  Thanks so much for the comment. It's great to hear that hardware hackers find Octopart useful. We have a lot of ideas on how to improve Octopart and now we can finally implement them.
- amac 15y ago
  Mine too. Worked in the Oil industry as a buyer during college and Octopart was pretty useful at finding things I had in my RFQ's.
nicpottier 15y ago
Here's one of their pages: http://octopart.com/at90usbkey-atmel-682670 http://octopart.com/at90usbkey-atmel-682670 Interesting that their look and feel is pretty spot-on Google Apps. Probably a wise move, I'm sure by now customers grant a bit more trust to sites that 'feel' like Google, whether they realize it or not. Glad to see a little startup like this making it though, good for them for sticking to their vision.
jmtame 15y ago
Octopart was the first company that came to mind when I thought about writing Startups Open Sourced. Having not heard about them for a while, I wanted to know what they were up to and writing a book about it was a good excuse to talk to the founders firsthand. Here's an interesting part about their decision to drop out of the PhD program at UC Berkeley to do Octopart: Q: When did you decide to drop out? We wrote the first line of Octopart code during my third year in grad school. We launched a prototype as soon as we had something ready. The prototype was awful. The logo was an octopus drawn in MS Paint and the prototype took 20 or 30 seconds to return results; we launched as soon as we had something ready, and by launch, I mean we just emailed friends and family and told them, "Hey we're working on this electronic parts search engine, here is a link." We basically did that to motivate ourselves. We knew that as soon as we got it out there and told everybody "We're working on this company," we would actually have to have something to show for ourselves. We figured, with the prototype, the more embarrassing the better—it was an incentive to make the product better. Around that time, Y Combinator was organizing a funding cycle so we decided to apply. Sam came out to Berkeley and we filled out the application. We didn't think Octopart was very good so we weren't planning on getting Y Combinator support. We didn't even think we would get invited for an interview. But we got invited and we went out to Boston. We met Paul, Jessica, Trevor and Robert and, that night, Paul offered to fund us. Sam made the decision to drop out of grad school before we even applied to Y Combinator. His last day at CU Boulder was actually the day before the Y Combinator interview. I was closer to graduating and I really wanted to finish my degree so I was planning on doing both Octopart and grad school. After we got YC funding, I took off for Antarctica to deploy the calibration device for my experiment. While I was there I worked on Octopart at night and when I got back I kept doing both Octopart and grad school. But by the end I was basically going into the lab and working on Octopart, almost exclusively. It took me a while to admit that I wasn't actually doing grad school anymore. I was just doing Octopart, except that I was working on it while sitting in my windowless grad student office. Q: Was it your involvement with YC that finally convinced you to drop out of grad school? At that time, Paul and Jessica would take all of the YC founders out to dinner. We met up with them at Jessica's favorite restaurant in Berkeley. We had a really nice conversation and towards the end of dinner, Paul asked me point blank if I was committed to Octopart and, I don't know, the question caught me off guard. I told Paul that I was fully committed and he responded, "Well, as long as you're still in grad school, investors aren't going to invest in your company." I had been working on Octopart for six months already and mentally I had already gone all-in on the company. Before Paul's question I hadn't thought about how my decision to stay in grad school would cause somebody to think that I wasn't entirely committed. The dinner with Paul and Jessica was on a Friday, I remember, and I said to myself, "Okay, this weekend, I'm going to figure out what I want to do; it's going to have to be one or the other." On Monday I went in to the lab and told my advisor that I had to drop out.
juiceandjuice 15y ago
Hah, I remember using all the way back to 2007 looking for special types of terminals from Keystone Electronics that were ridiculously hard to find because they were for some ancient 3/16" thick phenolic. Newark ended up having them, but Digikey and Mouser didn't. (I'm also a physics grad)
braindead_in 15y ago
I remember spending hours and hours on DigiKey and Mouser looking for the right components for the prototype we were building. It's a huge pain. Especially the low value resistors and capacitors. We later found out that we should have fist checked if the parts were available before we did the design (the design itself was from reference design provided by manufacturer's, outdated). I wished Google would get into Electronics Part searching. But then it's too niche an area for Google.
OmarIsmail 15y ago
It's amazing that a growing company from 2007 is considered "vintage". Just goes to show you that the timescales when it comes to web startups is highly compressed.
staunch 15y ago
There are only like 4 companies that sell these products. Why would those companies bother giving Octopart a referral fee? It's not like Octopart is going to remove their listing if they don't pay up, that would hurt them more than the companies. What am I missing?
- joelhaasnoot 15y ago
  It's not really a business about the nuts and bolts, it's about the big orders that their customers can bring in if they decide to produce the product they're hacking on on a larger scale.
- sam 15y ago
  We're listing about 65 distributors right now. Early on we did remove listings from distributors who didn't want to pay. Usually they would call back the next day to make a deal. Sometimes it took longer. From what they tell me now, we're providing a good return on investment.
  - staunch 15y ago
    Ah cool. Good to hear. Hoping you guys continue to do well.
- mellis 15y ago
  As Sam says, one of the best parts of Octopart is that it has so many distributors, especially the ones you've never heard of. So when Digikey and Mouser are sold out of what you need, you can find it somewhere else.
noonespecial 15y ago
I've been a hardware hacker since I could walk. Finding and actually obtaining any parts at all in the 80's was excruciating. Even in the bad old days of the web, datasheets and even pricelists seemed to be the locus of some very unseemly rent-seeking activity. I can't even begin to say how awesome octopart seemed when I first discovered it. Even today, when I go looking for a part I find myself stopping and not believing how awesome this is.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  datasheets and even pricelists seemed to be the locus of some very unseemly rent-seeking activity I once made the mistake of paying $10 to subscribe to a datasheet web site because they seemed to have the full tech specs (i.e. register layouts) of an IC I was reverse engineering (see http://myhd.sourceforge.net/ http://myhd.sourceforge.net/). It turned out to be the same marketing materials I had downloaded from the chip vendor's web site. Octopart is like the million-dollar part spec databases that electronics manufacturers buy just to have available in their design software, but for free.
hxf148 15y ago
Hanging in there is key. I have found that sometimes you have to dig deep and hold on to the good idea that with good work everything will work given enough time. Something I have reflected on after three months at http://infostripe.com http://infostripe.com
nl 15y ago
I'm kinda surprised this got YC funding. I meant it's a good idea, but ultimately it's an affiliate marketing play right? The main barrier to entry is getting good SEO (and I guess becoming known as a direct source) - there doesn't seem to be huge technical barriers. Affiliate plays can be highly profitable, but I never thought that they were all that attractive to investors.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  Their search system is unequaled in any of the electronics parts sites I've used (Mouser, Digikey). That probably qualifies as a technical barrier.
  - nl 15y ago
    I'm not an electronics expert, but I know a fair bit about search implementations. I'd be guessing the partname->vendor price matching thing is non-trivial (because I bet the vendors all use different names and product codes). But it's not that hard. The search itself is something that could be replicated fairly easily by someone who knew what they are doing.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - sudonim 15y ago
      The tech doesn't seem that complex, but successful businesses aren't about ideas, or technology. They are about applying technology to ideas and getting people to use it. The hard part to replicate of what octopart did is the 'putting all the pieces together' part.
      - kongqiu 15y ago
        This is key. "Putting all the pieces together" is usually less glamourous than coding something new and hoping it gets picked up on TechCrunch, but it's huge.
      - 15y ago
mb21 15y ago
seriously not trying to be a downer, but doesn't this smack of starting a company just to start a company? they all took $0 in salary in 2008, I wonder if they are making live-able wages now in 2011. They took on their first employee and maybe had to again cut their salaries to afford it? YC worries me that it convinces everyone to start a company rather than go to school, work for another company as an employee or follow a different dream. We're being sold someone else's dream of "starting a company is the best thing in the world to do". The talent pool is being severely diluted just like too many expansion teams in a sports league. The end result? Less success for everyone. I admire their persistence, but I wonder if Octopart is in a market where they can build a company that can hire and pay the employees or maybe even generate a larger lump of cash. I may not get the new model yet, but I still think that revenue generation is the goal of a company. However, it's just roughly 3 years into their lifespan, so maybe they will eventually build a nice business. I definitely wish them luck if this is truly their dream. Or maybe it's just the experience of building a company that is the reward. I don't know.
- jasonkester 15y ago
  Actually, this is exactly what it's like to bootstrap a company these days. You scrape along with no success and no money for a long time before it grows into something that can support you. Hitting the $1000/founder/month profit mark is a huge milestone since it means you can just barely squeak by without digging further into your personal savings. It means that if you can keep growing the business, you're going to win. You'll notice that it's a completely different game than starting with big VC. And as you mentioned, it doesn't fit a lot of people's definition of a "business". That's fine. Just remember that there is in fact another definition. Revenue Generation is still part of it, but it's not the end goal. Generating enough revenue to live comfortably on while minimizing the amount of time and effort you need to expend is the ultimate goal for a lot of us. In that context, a company that brings in $20k/month and runs on autopilot is the highest form of success. For a lot of people with different definitions, that would be classed as complete failure. Anyway, enough talk. I'm off to Scotland for a week or so to get some fresh air while my business runs itself without me.
  - 15y ago
pbsurf 15y ago
I've tried Octopart but always go back to http://www.findchips.com http://www.findchips.com In any case, congrats to the Octopart guys.
- sam 15y ago
  I'd love to get feedback as to why you prefer findchips. You can email me at sam@octopart.com.
colindowlingq 15y ago
Congratulations to the team. It is always worth celebrating when perseverance triumphs. I was somewhat critical of Octopart when TechCrunch first wrote about the company years ago. My opinion was that there were already a number of similar sites that boasted the same features but (at the time) had MORE distributor listings. This continues to be the case. In my opinion, if Octopart is interested in massively increasing usage then they should find a way to market to the enterprise side of things and not just hobbyists. Most all of the buyers I speak to on a daily basis (and the buyers employeed at our semiconductor distribution company) use OEMSTrade or Find Chips dozens (if not hundreds) of times every day. Furthermore, there are still a number of distributors that are not published by these two sites (Samtec, for example) that are increasing their footprint in the CM community. One place for differentiation - and a chance to "win" the sector - can come from adding some of these lesser known yet very important distributors to the network. Regardless, congratulations on the hard-earned success. Best of luck in the future.
Hisoka 15y ago
What's Octopart's backup strategy if Google somehow punishes their site in their next algorithm change (ala so many other innocent sites during the Panda Update)? I bet 80% of the traffic comes from search engines. If those 80% leave, it's game over in terms of revenue and partnerships. I think Octopart should somehow develop a strategy for returning visitors that doesn't depend on search engines.

184 points by jagira 15y ago

I really like this new theme on TechCrunch today, giving some attention to under-reported startups doing it "the old-fashioned way". I know it can't last, because it won't get as many page views as other articles, but it's nice. I'm really looking forward to having an excuse to use Octopart. I've only occasionally had to find electronics bits and pieces in the past, and it's always been a pain in the ass. Thanks for building something people need, guys.

waratuman 15y ago

This is my favorite YC startup. I remember in college trying to design and build my computer. It was just awesome to have all the parts, data sheets, and price in one spot. Sure beets an excel sheet, keeping track of data sheets, and going everywhere to find every last part! Glad to hear they hung in there and are doing well!

andres 15y ago
Thanks so much for the comment. It's great to hear that hardware hackers find Octopart useful. We have a lot of ideas on how to improve Octopart and now we can finally implement them.
amac 15y ago
Mine too. Worked in the Oil industry as a buyer during college and Octopart was pretty useful at finding things I had in my RFQ's.

nicpottier 15y ago

Here's one of their pages: http://octopart.com/at90usbkey-atmel-682670 http://octopart.com/at90usbkey-atmel-682670 Interesting that their look and feel is pretty spot-on Google Apps. Probably a wise move, I'm sure by now customers grant a bit more trust to sites that 'feel' like Google, whether they realize it or not. Glad to see a little startup like this making it though, good for them for sticking to their vision.

jmtame 15y ago

Octopart was the first company that came to mind when I thought about writing Startups Open Sourced. Having not heard about them for a while, I wanted to know what they were up to and writing a book about it was a good excuse to talk to the founders firsthand. Here's an interesting part about their decision to drop out of the PhD program at UC Berkeley to do Octopart: Q: When did you decide to drop out? We wrote the first line of Octopart code during my third year in grad school. We launched a prototype as soon as we had something ready. The prototype was awful. The logo was an octopus drawn in MS Paint and the prototype took 20 or 30 seconds to return results; we launched as soon as we had something ready, and by launch, I mean we just emailed friends and family and told them, "Hey we're working on this electronic parts search engine, here is a link." We basically did that to motivate ourselves. We knew that as soon as we got it out there and told everybody "We're working on this company," we would actually have to have something to show for ourselves. We figured, with the prototype, the more embarrassing the better—it was an incentive to make the product better. Around that time, Y Combinator was organizing a funding cycle so we decided to apply. Sam came out to Berkeley and we filled out the application. We didn't think Octopart was very good so we weren't planning on getting Y Combinator support. We didn't even think we would get invited for an interview. But we got invited and we went out to Boston. We met Paul, Jessica, Trevor and Robert and, that night, Paul offered to fund us. Sam made the decision to drop out of grad school before we even applied to Y Combinator. His last day at CU Boulder was actually the day before the Y Combinator interview. I was closer to graduating and I really wanted to finish my degree so I was planning on doing both Octopart and grad school. After we got YC funding, I took off for Antarctica to deploy the calibration device for my experiment. While I was there I worked on Octopart at night and when I got back I kept doing both Octopart and grad school. But by the end I was basically going into the lab and working on Octopart, almost exclusively. It took me a while to admit that I wasn't actually doing grad school anymore. I was just doing Octopart, except that I was working on it while sitting in my windowless grad student office. Q: Was it your involvement with YC that finally convinced you to drop out of grad school? At that time, Paul and Jessica would take all of the YC founders out to dinner. We met up with them at Jessica's favorite restaurant in Berkeley. We had a really nice conversation and towards the end of dinner, Paul asked me point blank if I was committed to Octopart and, I don't know, the question caught me off guard. I told Paul that I was fully committed and he responded, "Well, as long as you're still in grad school, investors aren't going to invest in your company." I had been working on Octopart for six months already and mentally I had already gone all-in on the company. Before Paul's question I hadn't thought about how my decision to stay in grad school would cause somebody to think that I wasn't entirely committed. The dinner with Paul and Jessica was on a Friday, I remember, and I said to myself, "Okay, this weekend, I'm going to figure out what I want to do; it's going to have to be one or the other." On Monday I went in to the lab and told my advisor that I had to drop out.

juiceandjuice 15y ago

Hah, I remember using all the way back to 2007 looking for special types of terminals from Keystone Electronics that were ridiculously hard to find because they were for some ancient 3/16" thick phenolic. Newark ended up having them, but Digikey and Mouser didn't. (I'm also a physics grad)

braindead_in 15y ago

I remember spending hours and hours on DigiKey and Mouser looking for the right components for the prototype we were building. It's a huge pain. Especially the low value resistors and capacitors. We later found out that we should have fist checked if the parts were available before we did the design (the design itself was from reference design provided by manufacturer's, outdated). I wished Google would get into Electronics Part searching. But then it's too niche an area for Google.

OmarIsmail 15y ago

It's amazing that a growing company from 2007 is considered "vintage". Just goes to show you that the timescales when it comes to web startups is highly compressed.

staunch 15y ago

There are only like 4 companies that sell these products. Why would those companies bother giving Octopart a referral fee? It's not like Octopart is going to remove their listing if they don't pay up, that would hurt them more than the companies. What am I missing?

joelhaasnoot 15y ago
It's not really a business about the nuts and bolts, it's about the big orders that their customers can bring in if they decide to produce the product they're hacking on on a larger scale.
sam 15y ago
We're listing about 65 distributors right now. Early on we did remove listings from distributors who didn't want to pay. Usually they would call back the next day to make a deal. Sometimes it took longer. From what they tell me now, we're providing a good return on investment.
- staunch 15y ago
  Ah cool. Good to hear. Hoping you guys continue to do well.
mellis 15y ago
As Sam says, one of the best parts of Octopart is that it has so many distributors, especially the ones you've never heard of. So when Digikey and Mouser are sold out of what you need, you can find it somewhere else.

noonespecial 15y ago

I've been a hardware hacker since I could walk. Finding and actually obtaining any parts at all in the 80's was excruciating. Even in the bad old days of the web, datasheets and even pricelists seemed to be the locus of some very unseemly rent-seeking activity. I can't even begin to say how awesome octopart seemed when I first discovered it. Even today, when I go looking for a part I find myself stopping and not believing how awesome this is.

nitrogen 15y ago
datasheets and even pricelists seemed to be the locus of some very unseemly rent-seeking activity I once made the mistake of paying $10 to subscribe to a datasheet web site because they seemed to have the full tech specs (i.e. register layouts) of an IC I was reverse engineering (see http://myhd.sourceforge.net/ http://myhd.sourceforge.net/). It turned out to be the same marketing materials I had downloaded from the chip vendor's web site. Octopart is like the million-dollar part spec databases that electronics manufacturers buy just to have available in their design software, but for free.

hxf148 15y ago

Hanging in there is key. I have found that sometimes you have to dig deep and hold on to the good idea that with good work everything will work given enough time. Something I have reflected on after three months at http://infostripe.com http://infostripe.com

nl 15y ago

I'm kinda surprised this got YC funding. I meant it's a good idea, but ultimately it's an affiliate marketing play right? The main barrier to entry is getting good SEO (and I guess becoming known as a direct source) - there doesn't seem to be huge technical barriers. Affiliate plays can be highly profitable, but I never thought that they were all that attractive to investors.

nitrogen 15y ago
Their search system is unequaled in any of the electronics parts sites I've used (Mouser, Digikey). That probably qualifies as a technical barrier.
- nl 15y ago
  I'm not an electronics expert, but I know a fair bit about search implementations. I'd be guessing the partname->vendor price matching thing is non-trivial (because I bet the vendors all use different names and product codes). But it's not that hard. The search itself is something that could be replicated fairly easily by someone who knew what they are doing.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - sudonim 15y ago
    The tech doesn't seem that complex, but successful businesses aren't about ideas, or technology. They are about applying technology to ideas and getting people to use it. The hard part to replicate of what octopart did is the 'putting all the pieces together' part.
    - kongqiu 15y ago
      This is key. "Putting all the pieces together" is usually less glamourous than coding something new and hoping it gets picked up on TechCrunch, but it's huge.
    - 15y ago

mb21 15y ago

seriously not trying to be a downer, but doesn't this smack of starting a company just to start a company? they all took $0 in salary in 2008, I wonder if they are making live-able wages now in 2011. They took on their first employee and maybe had to again cut their salaries to afford it? YC worries me that it convinces everyone to start a company rather than go to school, work for another company as an employee or follow a different dream. We're being sold someone else's dream of "starting a company is the best thing in the world to do". The talent pool is being severely diluted just like too many expansion teams in a sports league. The end result? Less success for everyone. I admire their persistence, but I wonder if Octopart is in a market where they can build a company that can hire and pay the employees or maybe even generate a larger lump of cash. I may not get the new model yet, but I still think that revenue generation is the goal of a company. However, it's just roughly 3 years into their lifespan, so maybe they will eventually build a nice business. I definitely wish them luck if this is truly their dream. Or maybe it's just the experience of building a company that is the reward. I don't know.

jasonkester 15y ago
Actually, this is exactly what it's like to bootstrap a company these days. You scrape along with no success and no money for a long time before it grows into something that can support you. Hitting the $1000/founder/month profit mark is a huge milestone since it means you can just barely squeak by without digging further into your personal savings. It means that if you can keep growing the business, you're going to win. You'll notice that it's a completely different game than starting with big VC. And as you mentioned, it doesn't fit a lot of people's definition of a "business". That's fine. Just remember that there is in fact another definition. Revenue Generation is still part of it, but it's not the end goal. Generating enough revenue to live comfortably on while minimizing the amount of time and effort you need to expend is the ultimate goal for a lot of us. In that context, a company that brings in $20k/month and runs on autopilot is the highest form of success. For a lot of people with different definitions, that would be classed as complete failure. Anyway, enough talk. I'm off to Scotland for a week or so to get some fresh air while my business runs itself without me.
- 15y ago

pbsurf 15y ago

I've tried Octopart but always go back to http://www.findchips.com http://www.findchips.com In any case, congrats to the Octopart guys.

sam 15y ago
I'd love to get feedback as to why you prefer findchips. You can email me at sam@octopart.com.

colindowlingq 15y ago

Congratulations to the team. It is always worth celebrating when perseverance triumphs. I was somewhat critical of Octopart when TechCrunch first wrote about the company years ago. My opinion was that there were already a number of similar sites that boasted the same features but (at the time) had MORE distributor listings. This continues to be the case. In my opinion, if Octopart is interested in massively increasing usage then they should find a way to market to the enterprise side of things and not just hobbyists. Most all of the buyers I speak to on a daily basis (and the buyers employeed at our semiconductor distribution company) use OEMSTrade or Find Chips dozens (if not hundreds) of times every day. Furthermore, there are still a number of distributors that are not published by these two sites (Samtec, for example) that are increasing their footprint in the CM community. One place for differentiation - and a chance to "win" the sector - can come from adding some of these lesser known yet very important distributors to the network. Regardless, congratulations on the hard-earned success. Best of luck in the future.

Hisoka 15y ago

What's Octopart's backup strategy if Google somehow punishes their site in their next algorithm change (ala so many other innocent sites during the Panda Update)? I bet 80% of the traffic comes from search engines. If those 80% leave, it's game over in terms of revenue and partnerships. I think Octopart should somehow develop a strategy for returning visitors that doesn't depend on search engines.