Y Combinator Backed Search Engine For Gadget Parts

I have a great deal of trust for startups that choose niche and vertical markets as an entry strategy (my article: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/6_startup_lessons_2007.php). As a company founder, it takes an incredible amount of discipline to resist the temptation of trying to build an "everybody" product. The best way to build a company is not by going after an existing category, but by creating a new category you can be first in. Startups must focus on creating new markets over serving existing ones.

Moreover, as an Electrical Engineering student, I understand that a Search Engine for electronic components is certainly a product in much demand. To top it off, they also managed to extract specifications of the parts in .gif/pdf formats which is absolutely essential when buying IC's or Transistors.

Congratulations to the founders and YCombinator. Great work guys!

This is certainly a great product, and the fact that the founders are in fact "scratching an itch" gives me confidence that they'll continue to do fine on the tech side of things.

I do wonder, however, what the business model is here. My hope is that the major parts vendors will recognize that Octopart is a good thing for them, and will play ball--both on the technical/database integration front, and, hopefully in terms of monetizing the product. Because it really is a great product.

One technical quibble, though: Octopart could improve its result quality a good bit by incorporating some semantic analysis. An example: a search for "blue led 3mm leaded" returns as its first result an SMD (i.e. non-leaded) part. What's going on here? It's matching the phrase "Leaded Process Compatible: No;" with a bit of not-terribly-deep semantic matching (leveraging the fact that part specs speak a relatively contrived and regularized language) it should be possible to recognize that "Leaded Process Compatible: No" is not a match for leaded.

Quibbles aside, I'm looking forward to watching Octopart improve, and, hopefully, succeed. We all know the competition sucks, after all.

If this had existed a decade ago I might have ended up as an EE. As a kid I had just as much interest in electronics as I did in programming, but having no money and growing up in suburban hell with no decent electronics stores within driving distance, I couldn't pursue it. I think this is the most promising YC startup to date (based on what I know about them when they launch; obviously Reddit is successful with probability 1).

Joe Kraus calls vertical search "top down" entrepreneurship:

http://www.ikiw.org/2006/09/18/a-conversation-with-joe-kraus-co-founder-and-ceo-of-jotspot/

These guys appear to be scratching their own itch, so I think they have a shot at least.

I wonder if this was inspired by Langley Steinert's talk about vertical search.