My question is, how do you get $500,000 for a feature you can get by clicking "Show Search Options" in Gmail? I do get the bigger picture but I don't see how to monetize it or prevent Google from mimicking it a 1000% better if it gets popular.
I suspect there's a profitable sized market consisting of "People who don't want Google mining and indexing all their mail".
You could make gmail "the best email reading and management experience on the planet by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude", and they're still not going to end up handling mail for the nsa.gov domain. I'm not sure how far down the paranoia scale from director@nsa.gov you need to go before having Google index your internet-cat-pictures and know your social graph becomes the right choice, but there are certainly people with email management needs that Google are not going to address.
At this point we're not just a tool for searching attachments in Gmail. We support Yahoo Mail, Twitter, and Facebook as well. We also plan to branch into other services, e.g., general IMAP. We let you pull together these various accounts into one simple, visualized, central index.
The philosophy of "why build something, because company x, with infinite money, will just build it better" I think is a flawed one.
>The philosophy of "why build something, because company x, with infinite money, will just build it better" I think is a flawed one.
Fascinating quote, but do you think you can articulate why it is flawed? Was it something your investors asked you?
I think the hardest question to answer for a lot of startups is "what happens if [company X with infinite money] decides to copy you"?
My first instinct might be to say I'm one of the top ten or twenty people in the world who are capable of writing the code for my product (however arrogant that might sound), but even if that's true, that still leaves nine or so others that Infinite Money Company could recruit to compete.
Is truly the only good answer being the very absolute best in the field, or are there other good answers?
I think there is a very real danger of competition eating your lunch, but you can't let it frighten you too much, or let it stop you from executing on a good idea. It has been my experience that large companies sometimes lose their ability to rapidly iterate on a product. Maybe it's not even in their best interests -- if you have a killer product like Gmail, there's not a strong motivation to stray too far from the course. It leaves room for companies to take those risks, and find out where there is room for innovation.
