In Jan of this year, I was a junior in college struggling to find internships for the summer. Every application I submitted was a shot in the dark…
In Feb, I got severe neck spasms that had me bedridden for almost a month. I was skipping classes, without a job in a lot of pain feeling hopeless.
I remember searching up questions like "are chiropractors legit?" on Google and I kept getting answers from (obviously biased) chiropractic blogs telling me why I should visit a chiropractor.
I realized that today 16 dominant publishing companies dominate search, meaning answers no longer benefit a user but drive publishing companies money. Why should a few companies control our source of information when I wanted to hear from experiences from real people?
And then I turned to reddit..I found so many useful life experiences from real people like me. But the problem? There was so much content out there that it was so hard to find the consensus.
And that's when I realized I had to build the solution. I spun up a working prototype that cut through the SEO/Affiliate BS and generated crowd-sourced recommendations from Reddit, YouTube and TikTok.
While basically bedridden, I sent it to a few friends and they shared it to their friends and soon enough I had over 2k people using it. But here's the catch…I had no money and wellll… these things are expensive 🙁
Fast forward to today, I was recently accepted into a startup accelerator in SF and raised pre-seed funding to build my vision of a more democratized internet driven by the experiences of real people!
Rejected from every SWE job to raising $500k to build the anti-Google. Here's my story.
byu/notepad— inEntrepreneur
Posted by notepad—
14 Comments
Congrats! I have so many questions. How much equity did you give up for $500k. What’s the diff between seed and pre-seed round? Have seed rounds just become so large, that now we need the designation of pre-seed for anything under $1m? What strategy did you use to fundraise? $500k on what valuation? Again, cheers to the successful raise!
Isn’t reddit the anti google? I can only respond to your chiropractor comment. Far too many people dismiss chiropractors as quacks and I’m here to tell you — they have SAVED my life. That sounds hyperbolic but a good chiropractor is absolutely priceless. A considerable amount of pain in our bodies is result of twisting, turning, moving – weak muscles – and you will be in terrible pain if you can get those joints and vertebrae back in alignment. Sometimes in can happen organically but injury recovery takes time and people get impatient and rush into surgical alternatives. Unless its absolutely necesarry I would never let a surgeon cut into me. Go to a chiropractor for a few months – I can’t imagine why you would be having neck spasms but hopefully it isn’t serious.
Heck yeah man, sounds very useful. The hive mind definitely has a lot of value, great way to make it findable. Any way you can send it to me too?
Do you have any strategy to monetize it? Since search is basically free so to make money maybe you will also have to earn money from those big brands like google?
Google wasn’t always that bad but over time they got worse since they wanted to make more money.
What would prevent you from being the same?
Also I haven’t used dudkduck go much but do they also have the same problem as google, of always pushing big advertisers first in search results?
Congrats! We desperately need an alternative. I’m not convinced the powers that be will ever allow it to come to fruition, but know this random internet girl is rooting for you.
Chiropractor are great for posture work
Now this is how entrepreneurship is supposed to work people- this person found an actual problem that lots of people have and solved it. In this case, there is no need for market research like I usually recommend because we know for a fact that almost everybody uses a search engine.
Can you tell us more about how you got excepted into the start up accelerator?
Yes! Yes! This is what the internet used to be, before it was taken over by capitalism, censorship and propaganda.
Reddit and YouTube do have personal experiences but they are still heavily censored and do run an agenda.
The problem is that mainstream internet has been monopolized by the capitalist, San Francisco liberal elites and Hollywood + bots with agendas.
It’s so fake, that even the most popular thoughts on the internet are usually not the most popular among the population.
Twitter is the only company to address this and even it is still censored and overrun by bots.
I dream of a day where the internet can be a free place to express opinions uncensored without interference from entities with agendas. But I fear this will never happen.
Congrats! I’m sorry you went through what you did.
Sometimes in our darkest hours our best ideas sprout. It may seem impossible or silly at the time but you never gave up! That’s what entrepreneurship is all about!
So it’s a search engine / app that aggregates answers from Reddit, YT, and TikTok?
Curious to learn more about this. I agree with the premise that Google Search is one-dimensional. I expect the challenge will be licensing the data as this is the meat grinder all the generate AI engines are running into (or lawsuits).
The “no SEO/Affiliate BS” is interesting too and a challenging one because the implicit reality is that content often has costs that are not clearly delineated, even UGC. While many people create UGC out of sheer interest / passion, there’s always an economy. Seems like the last decade+ of the internet was big platforms basically arbitraging “regular people” and UGC for their own economic gain. Even Reddit may need to figure out how to incrementally compensate their users if our data is used to feed AI (and Reddit – the platform – receives comp for this). In other words, to eliminate the incentives for “creators” to shill SEO, or do affiliate, or be “influencers”, what are the “platforms” going to do to spread the wealth directly?
Remember Google’s original mantra… “Don’t Be Evil”.
Super great idea! I’ve thought that a couple times too but don’t have the know how to build it.
HMU if i can help!
Congratulations! Cool story mate!👍
1. Check your neck posture. Make sure you aren’t hunched over. Look for corrective neck exercises, there’s plenty on youtube. Or find a physiotherapist who gets it.
2. Some neck traction and range-of-motion movements will help. I think this is what chiropractors do that actually adds value. But you can do it on your own too.
I’ve sat in as a med student and as a junior doctor to “pain clinics” and none of the doctors seemed to understand that no amount of painkillers and injections isngoing to fix shitty posture and lack of exercise.
Just an idea- you can use affiliate links to monetize it.