At Startupy we’re building a boutique search engine for startup insights and the people and companies that have them. You can think of us as a digital playground where thinkers and creators curate, organize, map, and interconnect the world's most valuable insights and ideas.

Unlike vertical search aggregators, boutique search engines feel less like yellow pages, and more like texting your friends to ask for a recommendation. They have constrained supply, which is the foundation for their biggest moat - trust. Importantly, boutique search engines introduce new business models that don’t rely on advertising.

The solution is better search and better curation, all wrapped in a better business model - a combination I call boutique search engines.

The opportunity is in moving curated content feeds away from their never-ending-now orientation and towards more goal-oriented interfaces. People should be able to find whatever content they want on their terms and not be beholden to when the curator decides to publish.

Curation, when thought of in the context of sharing bite-sized, isolated bits in feed-like architectures, is predominantly about entertainment, not utility. It’s not wrong to say there is a market for this kind of curation. What people miss, though, is that this market is already captured by Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok.

It has become popular to say we live in the information age, and we need curation to help us sort through the mess. But thus far, the conversation around “curation” has been too focused on the content and not enough on the structure. We seem to have accepted the job of the curator as providing a product review, a list of links, a song... See more

When you monetize via ads, curation takes a backseat to featuring advertisers - there is just less digital real estate available to curate your own recommendations - so these platforms end up making ethically dubious design choices that generate massive trust gaps.

But here too, relevance depends on the sociology of the current moment. For example, on Behance, the online creative community, school and location are featured prominently as filters, implying that where you live and where you went to school is an important indicator of the quality of your design portfolio. In a world where talent is being... See more

There is no search architecture that will work universally across all categories. It’s hard to imagine you wanting the same UX to search for recipes than to search for freelancers. Whereas Google’s product begins and ends with a search bar, trading off functionality for simplicity, vertical search players like Yelp, Expedia, Zillow, and Behance... See more