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Comment by pclark | Hacker News Reader

SearchMe saddens me because the tech was really great. They messed up with a terrible UI (= trying to be so "different" from Google) and then (I believe) a lack of funds for marketing.

In their most recent online site, I always felt it was great tech terrible product. Sucks.

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Lack of funding? They write in their document that total investment into the company was $45 Million

And they definitely used some of it for marketing. They had billboards all around the SF area.

Not sure billboards is effective "marketing" these days especially for Web services.

Probably recruitment

that isn't enough to build the technology and market it. I think the CEO said they needed ~$30M to build it, ~$30M to market it.

> it was going to take at least $100 million, half to build the back end across thousands of servers and half to get distribution (maybe more with Microsoft spending $100 million on Bing advertising alone). What we didn’t plan on was the terrible downturn in the economy which made it impossible to raise another $50 million to get distribution (mainly through toolbar deals). In this economy nobody wants to invest that kind of money in a company that is pre-revenue, even if the net result is potentially a multi-billion dollar company.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/24/searchme-may-go-offline...

With all due respect to these guys, 50M to market their product sounds unreal. They should publish their marketing plan and let let the public help them out.

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