But the question that I wonder is, why even cross platform, online search tools, which search your google drive, one drive, dropbox and show results in one place, even tend to fail,
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
The only product I have seen do well is Glean [1] but they are B2B so not exactly consumer-grade software.
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.
That’s fair. I was offering Buzee for free! The inertia is real. As much as they appreciated the speed, it seemed like they didn’t really want to find their files faster.
I wonder if you could have found success asking those companies if there was anything that the tool could do in addition to helping find files that would make it worth paying for, did you by chance try asking this? Sometimes startups pivot to nearby goals, and it works out. I have a feeling out there is a company you could have appealed to, maybe not 100% with just "find files fast" but maybe "find all x files, from x date, and x client"
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