Ask HN: Should I sell my project to the big player?
I built a semantic search engine in the legal space (non-U.S.), and am thinking about offering the system to one of the established players in that market.
There are several players in the market who have millions of subscribers. Their system, however, only search for legal documents based on whether or not the keywords you entered occur in the text.
My system, which took me about a year to build, uses semantic similarity to find relevant documents. That is to say, it will also find documents that talk about the topic you search for, even though different words are used.
Also, it finds matches not only on the document level, but on the level of individual paragraphs and snippets. Thus saving the user (mostly attorneys) valuable time, which they'd otherwise spend scrolling through pages of irrelevant text just to find the one or two sentences that are actually relevant to their case.
The system I have is up and running. It is not yet perfect. For instance, it fails when users are searching for a particular document by date and name of the court. Also, my database is only about half the size of that of the major players. But it works well enough that it demonstrates that the system works for the intended purpose of discovering court rulings relevant to your query based on semantic similarity.
Now that I have it, I find that I don't want to actually operate it, or deal with marketing, end users, data providers etc..
So what should I do now?
How would I, for instance, go about selling such a system to one of the established players?
To be of use to them, my system would need to be tightly integrated with their own. So I guess my offer should be to work with their team as some kind of technical consultant.
However, I've never done anything like this before, and wouldn't know how to to about it, who to talk to, how to position myself, what to offer, what price, etc..
Because it is such unfamiliar territory, I've already been putting the matter off for several months, and have even considered to just chalk the whole project up as a learning experience and to just move on. Part of me thinks, "If they really wanted such a thing, they'd just hire people to build it".
Also, if they expressed interest, what should I charge, and on what basis? Per month of consulting? Based on successful implementation? Mile-stones, perhaps?
I wouldn't actually be in control of how quickly the system gets implemented. Because I'd have to be working with their team, with a code base I don't understand, perhaps even in a language that I'm not proficient in (say, Java).
Any recommendations how I should proceed?