Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

AutoModerator t1_j6n8s66 wrote

Users, please be wary of proof. You are welcome to ask for more proof if you find it insufficient.

OP, if you need any help, please message the mods here.

Thank you!


I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

chrismatters t1_j6nac33 wrote

What growth tactics, other than partnerships, did you use to grow your startup?

2

marin_smiljanic OP t1_j6nb01a wrote

It was pretty intuitive really. When I was working at Amazon, we had an internal system for training videos. As I was always on teams with fairly complex technical products (S3 and Alexa), the videos would always be pretty long and packed with dense technical content.

So whenever I wanted to look any information up inside these videos, there was no way to do it - you could search by title, description or other such metadata, but searching the content and navigating to the exact spot where something was covered was impossible.

This was the spark that led to the product.

4

marin_smiljanic OP t1_j6nbd4p wrote

We tried a ton of different things, except that we didn't do too much advertising. We have pretty strong content marketing (constantly publishing blog posts and posting on social media), lead magnets such as e-books, posting on Reddit, HN and Product Hunt (we were the Product of the day in October).

PR actually achieved pretty good results too. A bunch of cool prospects reached out to us after the press covered our round.

1

SylviaJacob t1_j6nf4mx wrote

What are your thoughts on the evolution of search technology this decade?

1

marin_smiljanic OP t1_j6ngwf6 wrote

I'm assuming you mean '20s. I believe that there will be two main factors in the evolution of search.

  1. A far bigger focus on multimodal, rather than just text search. The old-school search companies were built in a text-first world. But text is pretty rapidly declining in importance. And while still an essential part, it's no longer enough. I think you'll see more and more companies focusing on multimedia content like video, audio and images.

  2. I'd say that rather than having one huge new competitor to Google, you'll rather have large platforms that each cover a specific area of search. Reddit, Instagram, TikTok and Amazon are good examples of that, and I think the trend will continue.

2

PeanutSalsa t1_j6nix09 wrote

How does a search engine know how to direct the visitor to a certain part of a page so they don't have to scroll down it? Same for video and audio? Do the content builders have to put in certain metadata for the search engines to pick up on this or can the search engines pick up on them on their own?

1

marin_smiljanic OP t1_j6nt40t wrote

Currently what you'd call enterprise or B2B search is estimated at about $10B annually, but I believe that'll increase significantly once more customers start discovering the value of multimodal search experiences.

We currently expose an API which customers can use for integration. We can definitely make the integration process smoother by providing out of the box ingestion options (Google Drive, S3, and such, which is planned for this quarter) and also by developing SDKs.

2

IAmAModBot t1_j6ntahh wrote

For more AMAs on this topic, subscribe to r/IAmA_Business, and check out our other topic-specific AMA subreddits here.

1