I was recently listening to Fuel’s “Shimmer” (probably on the radio, since at any given point in time, it’s playing on either Q100 or Project 9-6-1). Then, out of no where, it hit me: Pip and Estella. Now, between the song’s debut in 1998 on the “Sunburn” album and it’s subsequent homicidal death by radio plays, I must have heard “She calls me from the cold” a million times if I’ve heard it once (hyperbole), but it only recently hit me what the song was about. At least, I seem to be able to – and without much work at all – cut pieces from various moments in the song and essentially recreate one of Dickens’ most memorable works: Great Expectations. However, considering the lyrics in “Shimmer” to be a literary act of epic proportions is a bit of a stretch.
(OK, John. Very good. Anything useful today?)
My point is that it’s not about the idea, it’s about the delivery.
(Ahah! John, you sneaky bitch.)
This seems to be something that startups, at least in Atlanta, don’t get. Everyone is always looking for the next new idea. Cardlytics (which is the stupidest name I’ve ever heard of for a company) thinks they’re going to break ground and make millions with a business plan that is, effectively, inserting advertisements on digital bank statements – a medium that holds your attention for what could be considered 5 to 7 seconds per month. I suppose they were hoping that they could finally get you to look at this white thing with numbers for the first time in the history of either white things or numbers, but frankly, I just don’t see it.
I’m not going to hate too much on the company that hosted aforementioned most-awkward-interview-of-my-life (see previous post), only because there’s so many others to point at. Let’s look at a little company you may remember called Friendster. (Looks for Friendster). Well I can’t seem to find Friendster right now, let’s look at uh…wait. What the hell happened to Friendster? I probably just got some analytics bean-counter over at Friendster corporate excited because I had to visit the site to confirm it was still around, and thus, produced their single-only hit in 2009. What happened?
In a word, Facebook. Well, maybe not Facebook specifically, but the culture that Facebook perpetuates.
While the monetary value of Friendster in May of 2009 is up for debate, mainly because I don’t have access to their finances (yet! mwuahaha…ahem), I think we can all agree that they’re budget is steadily declining, and that if you work at Friendster, you’re sweating. This company succeeded at one time – at least, most people would have looked at the company and considered it a success. And yet, right now they’re probably in their darkest days since the beginning of the company. Their delivery was bested.
Let’s look at Cuil. Cuil had all the potential in the world to succeed. Of all the hailed-as-potential-”Google killers” in the recent years, Cuil seemed to be best. Two of it’s three core founders worked directly on Google’s indexing functionality, and each of them had serious prior experience, one from the Internet Archive and the other from BEA – creators of AquaLogic® Service Bus – currently owned by Oracle. Their interface is simple enough, and in some ways is more convenient than the search engine super power Google. They actually index [many] more websites than Google does. Their name is pronounced “cool”. What gives?
Well, for starters, they are directly challenging Google, not internet search. Rather than tackling an industry, their attempting to just go after a company, with the business plan serving as a medium by which they can exact their revenge on their previous employer (Yes, I’m looking at you, you know who you are). That is a huge mistake. While on the surface it may not seem like it will affect the business’s success – because who really cares about motives, as long as they motivate - the fact is that when it came to core decisions the company should have been making about the industry, they were just trying to one-up Google. For instance, they were thinking about how to best Google’s search results listing persentation, when they should have been thinking about whether or not people really even want another horizontal search alternative.
This is the whole problem with Cuil’s delivery. They are pitching another company as the problem, and they are trying to build a product that solves it – basically by being new and different and, oh! blue. What they should be doing is thinking about the problems that Google has, and trying to solve those.
I’m very interested to see where Cuil is heading over the next year. I feel like Google is already too committed to broad-spectrum search to efficiently dominate video search, people search, housing search, and other popular vertical search criterion, and that’s really the kind of slack I’d like to see Cuil try to pick up, maybe by forming alliances with Facebook, MySpace, Rent, etc. YouTube is probably out of the picture, as they are owned by Google, but, then again, if the recent past is any example, Cuil may not understand the concept of a partnership anyway.
