Also this is not the first time I'm seeing a universal search startups fail, some even YC backed. It sounds like an interesting idea, but why is it failing, I can't seem to figure out, maybe not enough market or adaptation?
The original idea emerged from my workplace where everyone has thousands of documents on their machines but can't recall what's where, so they always ask each other for files, and then end up with several duplicates. It's a mess. I thought a natural language powered high-speed, low-footprint app would be a great USP, especially when you compare it against Windows Search.
Turned out, everyday office people (not nerdy hackers) have their own set ways of managing and discovering files on their machines. A guy I met keeps ONE 1000-page Word document instead of hundreds of smaller Word files because Ctrl+F in a Word document is more effective than Windows Search! Plus, a lot of files are now moving online to Google Drive or are locked behind Microsoft OneDrive, especially if it's a corporate workplace. Corporate work machines also made it quite impossible to install an app with that isn't code signed. So my target audience was kind of priced out for me!
I didn't start out to make an 'universal search app' but I fell for its allure somewhere along the way. I wanted to make a simple desktop search app that _just works_. Kind of like Everything [1] for Windows but full-text, cross-platform and less nerdy.
In the end, what I got was an app that fits my needs perfectly and I am really happy with it!
I have seen few startups even YC backed that didn't make it, I wonder why it's such a hard barrier to entry, even being a common problem everywhere
I think the everyday person works better with the separation of concerns that comes with using multiple services. For me personally, I vaguely recall that I came across this file/info on WhatsApp or on email or on Google Drive. Then I go use the search built into those services and it works well most of the time.
Buzee really helped me with local files (of which I had several thousand) but if you don’t have too many of those, Spotlight and Windows Search combined with some pragmatic file management seems to do the job fairly well.
So the pain point isn’t all that painful and the inertia of switching to a new omnichannel search interface is much higher.
This is why I kept imagining Buzee’s _real_ USP to come from a layer built on top of the file search engine. Imagine a personalised LLM trained on your files and organisation patterns only. Or a service that creates structured data out of the mess of your files. Or a butler service that organises data from every single service you use (goes beyond files to HN, Reddit, Spotify, Netflix, Strava etc.)
We’ll probably get something like that in a couple of years with a strong vendor lock-in. A privacy-first open source alternative seems difficult.
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