My new product www.keywordfunnel.com

Show Bootstrapped
#21

I am in the early stages of looking for that elusive product-market fit, so all feedback is appreciated. I will email you off list.

I did a physics degree originally. Then my first job was in writing OR software (in FORTRAN!). PerfectTablePlan doesn’t fit into the classic OR mould and isn’t amenable to any of their standard approaches (e.g. linear programming) so I wouldn’t really consider it OR software. Also the solver is only a small part of the whole.

Keyword Funnel does have a tricky optimization problem in it. Partitioning keywords into adgroups automatically. That was the most challenging and fun bit to write. My first attempt to an hour plus to partition several thousands keywords. It can now do it in a few seconds. I don’t think there are many other pieces of software that can do this. Google has an online equivalent. But it is much less flexible.

#22

I would be interested to know a bit more about that, if you care to share (maybe offline).

1 Like
#23

Shure! I saw you emailed me, I will answer asap. In the meanwhile, you may check my intro, where I talked a little bit about some reasons I think we were not successful in building a product.

#24

Interesting.

People have asked me why I don’t generalize my genetic algorithm to other grouping problems (e.g. sports tournaments). But the more generic something is, the more complex it becomes and harder it is to market.

I guess the trick is to solve a problem that lots of people want to solve, where the contraints don’t vary too much between customers. Saying that, different people do have quite different requirements for their table plans. Handling a 50 seat wedding, a 500 seat state banquet and a 4000 seat charity event in the same software is quite a challenge! Especially when you have all the cultural issues.

Choosing the best market is perhaps the ultimate optimization problem!

2 Likes
#25

Couldn’t agree more! You want something that is generic enough to be a niche worth exploring and that is specific enough that the constraints don’t vary so much between customers. That is so difficult.

I wouldn’t generalize your product to fit other grouping problems. “Grouping problems” is just a too big thing. But maybe you can create other products for other niches with grouping problems, knowing that you may not reuse a lot of what you already have. Sports Tournaments is one… another pain that I saw often was assigning rooms to teachers/courses in universities.

#26

I have thought about that one several times. But I suspect that every school would have different constraints. Also selling to schools sounds like a nightmare combination of beaurocracy and limited budgets.