Hacker News Reader

Comment by grizzles | Hacker News Reader

Lucene is the standard. Companies have an upfront investment in it, and it would cost them more to change then to not change. If this is a business thing, you need to find the company that has thousands of Lucene instances and try to convince them that they will gain a measurable benefit.

How to convince people when you have invented something big?

You need hand them a peice of paper that says: This [existing setup] costs you $5000/mo. This [resindb] will cost you $200/mo.

If you can directly show a financial benefit to your buyer it becomes a no brainer for them. It's something many (especially SAAS) founders get wrong.

View on HN

Yes I should probably try to step out of the dev role and see things commercially or through a business utility perspective. My mind however wants me to dive even deeper into the rabbit hole that is search and relevance and the hard problems of concurrent read/write. I do believe I'm aligned well enough already for the database/search market but how to find time for marketing?

Edit: I read your post again and you are saying I need to be orders of magnitude cheeper than my competitors. Does the technical solution (being orders of magnitudes more performant) count in any way?

In my anecdotal experience, selling something, especially to businesses, typically comes down to 4 things (in descending order of what's easiest to sell):

Will it make them more money?

Will it save them money?

Will it make their (the decision maker's) life significantly easier?

Will it make their (the decision maker's) life feel dramatically better?

Notice how they get more subjective as the list goes down. Its hard to convince people of, or prove, subjective things. That last one is so hard that I'm not sure I've ever seen someone successfully sell something that way in person. But the first one needs almost no convincing at all.

Now, does your search engine do one or more of those things for people? If the added performance doesn't fulfill one of those desires, sorry but they probably won't be interested enough to go through the pain of switching and taking the risk of failure with a new and largely unproven system.

But if you can show that it will demonstrably fulfill one of those needs, say by cutting down the number of servers required, less down time, or better search results that also result in more sales or engagement, then you've got a product you can sell.

Thanks for that very good advise.

From what I hear, folks (not only here at HN) aren't really looking for speed, instead they look for features. I'm starting to look at performance less and less as something to strive for and more and more just a confirmation that the architecture is healthy.

Say my benchmarks are correct and I do in fact beat my closest competitor by some measurement. I'm thinking I should start utilizing that performance to achieve higher relevance, donate it if you will to that cause instead of the speed cause.

To me though, Lucene is not so much of a competitor as she is a role model. Well maybe she's both. My real competitor, some day, will hopefully be Elasticsearch. I've used versions 2 and 5. I'm underwhelmed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com