It was odd, but my envisioned development window was about 3-4 months (planning for 6) and I had potentially high upkeep after launch ($500-$1000pm for production ready servers). I could have found a co-founder or two and funded them for that period as well. So it would have been just enough + a buffer. At least in my mind. I realize you need more runway than to just get to launch and survive 2-3 months now.
The idea is a service that could open the black box of online video content. Right now you search for something and get the whole video as a result; if it's a 3 hour long podcast you're going to be doing a lot of seeking for specific information. I want to index and enable deep visualized search through video libraries and in videos. Basically splitting videos into linguistically salient topics, keywords and entities. That would allow you to analyze and visualize content (YouTube channels, videos, etc.) to find interesting information. Good for researchers and people looking for something specific, or people wanting to find new content (relationship graphs).
That sounds like a moonshot rather than a $100k, unless you already have a working prototype that simply needs to be refined for commercialization. (Meaning: an actual working prototype, not a demo created solely to show off the concept.) What you've suggested is a job that would take a team of developers a few months. I'm not surprised the investor was skeptical that a 1-man team could do it in 6.
And what are your plans for revenue? How do you plan to make money? You'll be dealing with a lot of legal questions related to IP licensing, and the legal fees alone would eat your $100k in a month or two, even before the licensing costs for the videos.
All-in-all, I can't fault the investor for turning you down. You haven't put enough thought into the business aspects of your idea for him to entrust his money to you.
And don't bring up this crypto bullshit. It's irrelevant that he's investing in crypto companies; he already knows he's gambling with those and he's not treating those like real investments. Given crypto's history, he just needs to bail at the right time to come out ahead.
> I want to index and enable deep visualized search through video libraries and in videos
Sounds very interesting. I was thinking about this the other day in the context of golf. Thanks to Youtube, I can learn from watching the swing of any player in the world/history. But while a golf swing takes only 2 seconds or so, they're all "locked up" in lengthy videos. And forget about searching for one person's swing vs another.
I think Google/YouTube is already doing this. For example when you Google search "how to reset a Macbook", the top result is a video that jumps to a particular highlighted section that answers the question.
This isn't the best example of this feature, but it sure has saved me a lot of time in other queries that I can't recall at the moment.
Exactly. Google does this through the video transcripts, and finds the query location in the video for you. The problem is that this isn't part of the video player itself (or YouTube search). It's also very basic, being just a transcript search - I want more data mined insights to be available.
The idea is a service that could open the black box of online video content. Right now you search for something and get the whole video as a result; if it's a 3 hour long podcast you're going to be doing a lot of seeking for specific information. I want to index and enable deep visualized search through video libraries and in videos. Basically splitting videos into linguistically salient topics, keywords and entities. That would allow you to analyze and visualize content (YouTube channels, videos, etc.) to find interesting information. Good for researchers and people looking for something specific, or people wanting to find new content (relationship graphs).