Don: 0:00

has wide-reaching implications for content creators. Companies they're seeing their referral traffic just like plummet off a cliff like between the AI summaries and just them Google driving referrals to their own platforms like YouTube. Like the inbound traffic is really diminished and so a lot of companies now like they're really having to reevaluate like their whole like information discovery strategy.

William: 0:34

Welcome back to the Cloud Gambit, where we unravel the state of cloud computing markets strategy, emerging trends or whatever else. To the list, I'm William and with me, as always, is Yvonne.

Eyvonne: 0:54

How are you doing today, yvonne? How's everything going in Kentucky? Good, the sun's shining here today. It's warm outside, which is a nice change. It's taken until June for it to get warm and sunny, but it's a warm, sunny day, and so that's good.

William: 1:06

Yeah, and you know what's great about it is it's not humid. So usually around this time of year, as soon as you hit June, the humidity about kills you, and right now the humidity's low. It would be a great day to take a walk.

Eyvonne: 1:21

Yep, that is a bike ride is on my list as soon as we wrap this thing up this afternoon.

William: 1:27

Awesome. So today we're diving into one of the most, I would say, fundamental aspects really of like the modern web search, but not just any search discussion. We're talking about how the entire landscape is kind of shifting beneath our feet and what that means for developers, businesses alike, and our guest today is Don McKinnon, co-founder and CTO of Searchcraft. How are you doing today, Don?

Don: 1:57

I'm doing great, great to meet you all. I have to say, the reason I don't live in the South is because of the humidity, so that's why I'm in Colorado.

William: 2:08

It's very smart. Yeah, you have the dry sort of the dry climate. You know the carry around lip balm in your pocket climate, but we've got the scorching. You know if you walk outside you're sweating in a minute climate. So I would gladly trade climates for sure. So I guess, starting out, don, let's start out with your story. Take us through your journey. Who you are and how did you end up co-founding a search company? What were the, I guess, the pivotal moments that led you here?

Don: 2:44

Sure, let's see how far back do I go? I would say you know, I call myself a builder. That's kind of like my background and strength. I've been working in tech professionally since 98. My first job was at a startup during the dot-com era. Back then it was Pearl and PHP and and tickle was what I was writing, um. So.

Don: 3:08

But I kind of got my start on the tech side, um, working in media and publishing, um. So back then in like the early 2000s, late 90s, media and publishing was like really big um, those companies were huge and they had like thousands of employees in like manhattan and elsewhere like huge offices, right. So I I did about 12 years at a company called time inc and they owned a bunch of brands people are familiar with, even if they're not familiar with that company called like time and sports, illust, fortune, people, those brands, right. So I actually started working for them from a subsidiary that they had acquired in Boulder. There was like a winter sports subsidiary. They bought them and at the time I was one of the few people in Colorado that had a lot of experience with Tickle, which is a language you don't hear much about these days, but back then the platform was called Story Server, vignette Story Server, and it ran much of the web back then. So they brought me in to be like okay, well, we acquired this company, they're on ColdFusion, we're going to migrate from ColdFusion to Story Server and we need someone who's good at Tickle. So they brought me in. We need someone who's going to tickle. So they brought me in and I kind of ran the dev team for those sites. So I did that for a bit and then later you know publishing industry they like to kind of consolidate and, you know, sell each other their brands. So they sold off the ones that were here in Boulder.

Don: 4:37

So I moved to New York and I worked there for a bit on some other brands. I worked there for a bit on some other brands and so that's kind of when my role within the organization shifted from just being a developer to being like an engineering manager. So I started running dev teams and getting more involved in like stakeholder conversations, working with product managers and that whole thing. And I worked for that company for about 12 years, um, but then every pretty much every year I worked there, they were doing layoffs, um, and then one year they were like, okay, well, we're gonna just cut your whole department, so. But it ended up being kind of like a political situation in that, um, somebody else at the director level that was the same level as my boss wanted our group, but they didn't want to keep my boss, so they laid everyone off and then re-offered us all our jobs, except for him the next day to come back, and so we're like well, you know, we're kind of loyal to our boss. So we all said no and went off.

Don: 5:40

Um, so that's when I left there and but that was kind of a motivator for me to not work at these big companies anymore. Like you really have no control over your kind of your destiny. You know, if it doesn't matter how hard you work, if you're just like a number on a budget, like you could be cut right. So I got into consulting. At that time that was like 2013. So first there's like just freelance consulting back to publishing industry people. So, but not only back at time, but also condi, nast and other publishers in new york.

Don: 6:15

Um, so I at that time I I went off on my own for a little bit and then I joined a consulting agency that a guy I knew started.

Don: 6:25

He was a PM that I had worked with previously.

Don: 6:29

He's like hey, you know, we have these big projects coming up and we really need someone who kind of knows everything about like you know how to stand up a tech stack and architect and all that.

Don: 6:39

So he brought me in and I ran the engineering team for that consulting company and we consulted for companies like Sony Music and Condé and Reuters and places like that, building out CMSs, doing like data migrations and then later building out like a bunch of like Elasticsearch implementations, and so that's kind of where I got into learning about search and like it takes to deal with relevancy issues and data indexing and cluster management things like that. So I did that agency for a bit. And then I ended up joining another agency with my current co-founder of Searchcraft. His name's Sharpie, so he's more of a product and design oriented person and I'm kind of like the engineering guy, and then we can kind of just combine forces and we did the consulting thing for a bit. But then on the side we were kind of building Searchcraft and about a year ago we decided, okay, maybe we should wind down the agency and try and do this product thing full-time.

William: 7:52

Sounds like a journey, quite the journey. That consulting work, grinding in the consulting space, is a really good experience because you come in usually as a consultant, you come into what some might refer to as a hot mess or just a really complicated problem, and the point being that that company may not have the engineering staff or the wherewithal to solve or migrate or do something. You know that requires very deep expertise. So when you come into those types of environments you don't, and then everything's like oh, we need it done as fast as possible when you you know we gotta meet those deadlines.

Don: 8:28

so yeah, that was kind of our niche, like we got known for that um at our agency is, is that, like a lot of non-technical founders would bring us in because they have a product vision but they didn't know what it meant to like scale from zero and build an mvp and they wanted somebody who had a reputation for moving quickly and that could handle everything.

Eyvonne: 8:48

And even at some startups that we worked at where they had technical people but they couldn't move as fast as we could, right, so they would call us One of the things a lot of folks don't understand who've never been in consulting or worked in and around it is really the trick in consulting work is being able to learn and think on your feet. Oftentimes, when you work for a consultant, you may have a core of experience, but very often you get thrown into a situation where you don't have the exact specific expertise that you need to solve the problem. It's more about being able to understand what's going on, pivot and then learn what you need to do. Learn what you need to know quickly and being able to implement. Was that your experience as well? Like you were thrown into all kinds of situations where, like, I've seen something kind of like this, but not this exact thing, in the past yeah, I mean, of course they ask, can you do this?

Don: 9:47

and we always say yes, of course we can, and then we figure it out along the way, even you know if we didn't know how to do it beforehand, but we figure it out. Um, so you just have to kind of be able to roll with like the unknown yeah, I love that.

William: 10:03

So I do want to dig really deep into Searchcraft and just the work that you all are doing and how things are pivoting. But just to kind of start things off and tee off the conversation like dramatic changes right now you know Google search consumption is kind of on the decline. I've seen like reports of like something like 30% drops in click-through rates. You know, with this whole like AI overview, and you know tools like all the GPTs, you know capturing more query volume, you know trending upwards. So from I guess, from your perspective, is this kind of where the industry is headed. Like what is? What are the new methods, I guess, for driving traffic to content, if that makes sense?

Don: 11:03

Sure, yeah, it's definitely. It is a big problem. It has wide reaching implications for content creators. Companies, totally. They're seeing their referral traffic just like plummet off a cliff like between the AI summaries and just them, google driving referrals to their own platforms like YouTube, like the inbound traffic is really diminished, and so a lot of companies. Now they're really having to reevaluate their whole information discovery strategy Before they could get by like okay, well, we don't need to make our search great, we'll just put this little magnifying glass up in the corner. Maybe people use it, maybe they don't, but it doesn't have to be great because people will find it on Google, right, but Google's not driving traffic to you anymore, so now they're having to really take a look at it and be like you know the search thing. We haven't invested in it in a decade. Uh, now we need to really think about like is it is our content that we're making like discoverable by people who are coming with us to us with an intent to find something right.

Don: 12:05

Like uh, companies like like York Times I like to use them, for example, because they have excellent content and their search is like really bad, like you can know the name of an article or know exactly what it's about.

Don: 12:19

Sorry to call them out, but and you search for it on their site and you can't find it, like you can find it on Google. You can't find it on their site. Because you can't find it. Like you can find it on google, you can't find on their site because they haven't put the investment forth to like really like build that experience up. Um, and that's kind of where we've seen, we've the the industry going. We've talked to like a lot of people in specifically in like content publishing, some of the bigger brands and, um, they're all kind of having to figure this out now and it is very much like a part of their strategy for like the next 12 to 18 months is like making either through like keyword search or AI search or like. Some of them haven't figured that piece out yet, but they all know they need to do something about it.

William: 13:00

I mean, how long has it been since ChatGPT popped? I mean, it's not been that long. And the amount of change. I mean I was talking to someone that got laid off. They worked on a marketing team and that marketing team just got like completely just wiped out because a lot of the tool, like the whole marketing framework that they set up, it's like almost like no longer valid and you know everything was. You know the whole advertising, paid ads, google search, all the different searches was kind of how they were driving top of funnel and all that just kind of almost changed I don't want to say overnight, but in the sort of in the context of how technologists view things, like it was very quick and there wasn't a lot of time for preparation I, I totally agree with that.

Don: 13:50

It moved much faster than people anticipated. Um, like, consumers have very much gotten used to going to chat gp key and ask some questions there now or another. You know ai answer versus like clicking through to a site now that it's like they're getting presented their information they look for right away. So why would they click through right? But that means all of that effort into SEO optimizations like out the window. I think you're going to see a lot. The marketing companies that do stick around. They're going to have to figure out like okay, well, how do I optimize now for these LLMs that are scraping our content? Like maybe that's, uh, you know, putting things into structuring content to more of like a question answer flow, like that could be a solution, but they've no one's really figured it out yet yes, so what?

William: 14:38

um, just kind of the genesis of uh search craft. So what, what were your uh specific motivations behind building it? Like, was it purely, I guess, what I want to get at? Was it purely technical, like frustrations and such? Or did you see like a market opportunity and just kind of jump on it Like, okay, this is missing or it's not as saturated as it could be. You know we can do better. How did that come about?

Don: 15:06

I mean there's a multitude of things I mean. Over time, at both agencies I worked at, we had kind of a deep understanding of how the existing search platforms work. You know Solar, elastic, we built those implementations out, algolia but for anything except for the SaaS-hosted ones, if you want to run it yourself, it takes a lot of kind-end expertise to do that. You have to know about clustering and sharding and a lot of these are written in Java so you have to learn about okay well, I've got to be a Java guy and tune my JVM and things like that. So we had been used to building things out with that. But like we're like you know there's room for something better. Um, those systems, you know they, they are very powerful but they do take a lot of effort. And since, as I mentioned, a lot of our customers were startups, right, or things where we had to move quickly and get MVPs out and they don't have time to spend weeks or months or whatever on search implementations. They have features to ship, so they don't want to be bogged down by that. So we're trying to move fast and take things off the shelf. But the off-the-shelf things that exist just were not good enough, right, and for people who aren't trained specifically in search, there's a learning curve for them to use these tools right. So, like, we're consultants At the end of the day, a lot of times we roll off a project and have to hand it over, but then we kept seeing customers coming back and they're like hey, you, you know, add some synonyms to our index or can you change the boost weighting on these fields or things like that and like things that they couldn't do themselves right. So we're like well, maybe there's an opportunity here where we can just make that experience better better for, like, developers, better for product people, so they don't have to come and call the consultants to come tune their index right. Um, so we, we wanted to make something with a better experience.

Don: 17:19

But at the same time, we're like, well, if we're gonna try and tackle this problem, let's reimagine it from like the ground up. And what that meant is like well, if I were to write something new today, where would I start? What language would I start with? Like all of those things, would I use an off-the-shelf library to exist? Probably not, because a lot of these products are built on, actually on the same common library called.

Don: 17:45

It's called lucene, I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, but it's a search library that was developed in 99, I believe it's had improvements over the years, but it's still like the core tech is fairly old at this time and if you're building something, you're only going to kind of be as fast and as performant as that core library. So we immediately didn't want to use that. There's a lot of learnings that we got from Lucene, but we wanted to start with something fresh. So that's why we were like well, let's, you know, rust is really taking off, let's invest in that and see how it goes. And so we kind of built it on the side, on like nights and weekends while we're doing our consulting work.

Don: 18:30

And then about a year ago, uh, it got to the point where, like, okay, we feel like the core is like feature complete, and if we wanted to turn this now into an actual, like customer facing product, we could. So like, let's, uh, let's talk to some other development agencies similar to ours and see what they would think. And so we probably had like 50 to 100 phone calls with other dev shops and we're like okay, what are your pain points? Do you feel the same way that we do or are we like totally off base? And a lot of people were like, yeah, no, elastic is terrible to work with and I keep calling them out, but yeah, they are they are terrible to work with and I keep calling them out.

Don: 19:07

But yeah, they are terrible to work with. It takes too long, we have those problems and we think if you were to build something better, we would totally use it.

William: 19:15

Yeah, that's an interesting decision right there I got to say if you think of every other I can't remember. Off the top of my head I feel like most search stuff is going to be C++, but I think elastics, like elastic search it may be java what is java?

William: 19:31

yeah, yeah, it's java. Um, and just coming in and seeing, okay, everything that could be a possible competitor is, you know, basically using c++, but here we have rust. Yeah it, yeah, rust, yeah, yeah it's, it's bold, it's adventurous. I like it. What like? Is there any specific advantages, like out of the gate, that you notice with Rust, that gives you a distinct advantage there, like beyond, or just being like newer and core and more optimized, I guess?

Don: 20:04

Yeah, I mean we, we totally could have built it like java or c++. But, um, you know, going back to like we wanted a new foundation, um, I, I think you know building on top of lucene, like that's what solar and elastic did, and we're like, okay, let's try something new. Um, c++, right, you have a whole class of memory issues you could run into, like null pointer exceptions. The burden of memory management is very much on the developer to know what they're doing with C++, which there are some great C++ developers out there. But that's like you have a danger of that being kind of like tribalized knowledge, that maybe one or two devs in your team are really strong in the code base, but like if you expand the team, maintenance becomes more difficult.

Don: 20:55

Right, there's also this like growing interest in memory safe languages. If you go back to like the Biden administration, they put up forth a mandate to like shift towards memory safe languages to kind of avoid these like whole class of errors that people are getting into. And Rust just gives you that safety, both thread and memory safety, out of the box. The compiler for Rust is like very nice, it's really helpful with you, know, when you're in the code and writing and like providing you kind of guidance of where to go. I found that to be a big differentiator. Um, their whole like system of pattern matching and like algebraic types, and those are really pleasurable to work with and their inheritance model with with traits, is really really well thought out, like it's very well kind of designed and thought out language yeah, it's interesting too, because I think, I think this has happened but lenis decided to, you know, incorporate rust in the linux kernel, I'm pretty sure.

William: 21:54

Well, why not c++? Uh, he, everything, I don't know. I just think that that's interesting because of course he he's why we have linux essentially, and like why Git exists. So he, you know, probably has a good opinion on, you know, the solid things to incorporate. So yeah, you kind of got me wanting to, you know, take a peek at Rust and try, you know, do some learnings there.

Don: 22:21

Yeah, it's really, it's like they don't overload the standard library. So there's this whole package system with cargo and their, their crates, which are really nice. Um, I would say, you know, I did a lot of like development in other languages that have package vendors and I would say rust is probably the most convenient to work with as far as, like you know, dependency resolution and things like that. Um, so yeah, I would say, definitely give it a try.

William: 22:46

Um and I guess so. Not to, I guess, linger on programming languages, but, um, yeah, we shouldn't definitely. But uh, searchcraft has, you know, there's this interesting dual nature kind of like you alluded to. So you've you, you're both an agency, you know, providing, you know services, if you will, and you're also building a, a product that's, you know, positioned as this, like drop-in replacement for elastic search. Uh, how so does I guess? Uh, one benefit that just pops out, you know, on the top of my head, is like, oh, the agency work and the learnings from the agency work, or like, kind of like a direct um feedback loop, or you know a way to like inform your product development for the replacement that you're building. Is that, would that be true?

Don: 23:40

oh, yeah, very much so, um, like we. So my co-founder and I, we both come from that services background, um, and so you know, we've been the people that you know non-technical founders would lean on. They're like, okay, well, I don't really have someone who can stand up this application, can you guys help us? Um, and so we wanted to carry that over, that mentality and that spirit when we came, when we founded searchcraft, like and a lot of our competition. They don't do that. They're just like we're a sas company. You either download it or you buy it and then good luck, right, like you might be able to hire like a third party, like consultant, to help help you, right, maybe someone who's certified and like elastic or whatever.

Don: 24:22

Um, but we're very we're much more interested in having close, close relationships with our customers, um, so we can know, like, what are the problems you guys are specifically trying to solve and like are there pain points that, like, we can take from and learn and like maybe inform our product robot decisions based on like problems they're coming across or maybe features that we're missing, things like that. So, yeah, all of our customers were like, when they kind of sign up and they get going and they start building. We're like, yeah, have conversations with us, you know, talk to us on our Discord and if you get stuck, like we can help you.

William: 25:01

Gotcha, how do you balance? I mean, I know that being a startup and just being like young and lean, you know there's just only so many bodies to go around, but how do you balance resources between like services and the product, or is that? Is it to that part?

Don: 25:17

Yeah, and we're a small team, so I'm not so young anymore, but I do. I do work a lot of hours. I have a lot of coffee. Yeah, no, I no. I mean eventually, you know, as as we grow, we plan on kind of scaling the team up, but, um, that the services part will always remain important to kind of like the core of who we are. Um, and just like making sure that people don't get stuck.

William: 25:48

Gotcha and I did see. So you actually went and checked out the repo but you launched a container image and I think I saw something to the effect of it's like 90% or so smaller than elastic search I container image. I just thought that was like, yeah, it's a lot. Yeah, 90 percent's a solid number you can do the math.

Don: 26:15

You can go, look at elastic search docker container and look at ours and you'll see. And most of ours is actually debian.

William: 26:21

It's not the actual app that's taking up the space that's so funny because I actually just dockerized an application recently and, um, yeah, I use debbie and slim, the most slim down version. And then you know build time. You, you know install your all the packages you have, like your build time stuff you install, that's consistent, and you have some runtime things you do as well, like your entry point and, yeah, the the hardest or the longest part about it is building that base image up and only getting installed on it what you need. You know, that's where all the totally space and time comes from.

William: 26:55

Um, yeah, but that's awesome. Is that? Is that open? I didn't look at the licensing or anything. How does that does that take community contributions or like? What is the stance on that?

Don: 27:05

it doesn't we. So we, our core is not open source. All of our integrations are going to be but rsdks and and our clients and all that, but the core is not, and part of the reason for that is, like open source is very important to us. We didn't want to make a decision to open something up and then possibly pull that back later. Um, and we had some concerns with, you know, some of the larger cloud providers and kind of what make a decision to open something up and then possibly pull that back later. And we had some concerns with some of the larger cloud providers and kind of what happened with Elastic with their license. So we're like, well, let's not open that door at this time, but we still want people to be able to use it and not have to pay.

Don: 27:44

So that's why we have it. It's free to use. You can download it. We also have a free cloud hosted version, which we call SearchRef Cloud. That's got a free tier as well. You have options as a developer. You can either run it yourself, and that's totally fine, or you can use our hosted option and have a free tier. That's fine too. We really don't uh care like which way you go, as long as you like, try it out. Um, another reason why we didn't open it up is, like it's a very search, is a very like niche problem, and we were going to probably be the sole contributors to the repo anyway, so it just really didn't make sense for us at this time.

Eyvonne: 28:26

So, from a product side, as you're thinking about Searchcraft like what's your, what's your ideal use case, or if somebody's thinking like is this a good fit for me, like what's what's kind of your, you know the ideal either problem you're solving for or situation in which Searchcraft's a perfect fit.

Don: 28:46

Oh sure, yeah. So unlike Elastic, we're not trying to solve everyone's problems. So Elastic is really good at a lot of different things, so like log search, content search, et cetera, we're not trying to do like log search specifically. So if you're looking for a log search, you can hit me up. I can make some recommendations, but don't use search craft for that. We are very focused on content search, so human-oriented natural language content, and the reason I say that is we optimize a lot of our features around that and making sure that you can turn on these features at query time and still have very good performance for things like typo tolerance or fuzzy matching and whatnot, whereas some of our competitors, you know, if you want to turn on the full suite of features, you kind of have a trade-off. We're like, okay, I'm going to have a performance issue when I'm getting in the millions of documents.

Eyvonne: 29:39

Now, right, so very much the content providers, media, long form content, those those kinds of arenas yeah, like knowledge bases, documentation is great.

Don: 29:51

Uh, you know publishing content, like you know, news organizations um, e-commerce is like. This is kind of one of the things.

William: 30:13

I was really super excited. I mean a lot of it. You know, a lot of the stuff we've been talking about is really relevant and exciting, but, um, just kind of the current state of the market, um, like fundraising, for instance, like you know, let's I guess let's just talk about it every, every founder is dealing with it right now fundraising is hard. Um, the data is, you know, pretty stark. Like, basically, unless it seems like, unless you have ai prominently in your pitch, you have ai coming out of your palms and everything's AI it is significantly harder to raise capital in 2025. And we're seeing anybody that looks at the news for more than five minutes is seeing these AI companies raise money and it just massive valuations with you know where the math just doesn't even make sense, you know, while non, non AI companies tend to struggle. Do you have any experience here and, if so, like? What has been your experience with fundraising in this environment, or what are your thoughts?

Don: 31:46

no-transcript. Understand that ai does not always need to be the hammer that drives on the elf, right, um, but there's a good number of them that were really feeling the pressure to make sure their investments like have an ai angle to them, like from their partners or whatever right. So it's a question that was not asked so much at the beginning of when we started our fundraise but, like now and later on in the process, it very much was um, so like our core product, um, when we built it, did not rely on ai at all, uh, but the landscape, as you say, has shifted since we built that core. So, um, I think, um, you know it's ai is a very transformative technology. It's fundamentally changing the landscape of business, um, and that has impacts on and everyone's businesses.

Don: 32:39

Um, our view on ai is that, like, we're applying it where it makes sense to kind of augment and improve the overall experience. So, like AI is very good at applying transformations or analysis over an existing data set, so we're utilizing it to power, like some of those types of features like trend analysis and like generative data enrichment. We're also doing natural language processing, semantic search via our SDKs. So that's going to be a layer where, if customers want that kind of like transformative, like summary response, they can use that and we'll have that feature available to them. But if they don't want it, they don't have to have it, because some of our customers actually like, don't want ai like they've.

Don: 33:27

They've said like we just want a smaller vaster elastic, we don't want an ai feature and so like that's kind of why we don't ship that as part of our core, but we do have it available in both, like our cloud dashboard and our sdk, so like people can pull it in and use it or they can like opt out of it and not um, but we're kind of a big believer of choice. So that's kind of like we're not going to force that on customers if they don't want it, but it is there if they do gotcha.

William: 33:54

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I really I could be just totally wrong here. But just an observation. It seems like you have like real the, you know the foundational model companies, like companies that are actually building ai, or they build, do they procure and produce the infrastructure that powers it, and then you have, like it's almost like everybody else is kind of like using it or incorporate, either incorporating it with like existing features or making it as they go in and they pitch, or they try to get funding, like, yeah, we have this awesome thing, but we're using AI to enhance it like X, y and Z, because, let's face it, if you're building AI, there is a difference between those two things, I think.

Don: 34:39

Oh for sure, yeah, and these businesses are kind of just like they're going to wrap some llm or whatever, like do what differentiates them from, like the other people who are doing the same thing, right?

William: 34:56

um, I think a lot of those are going to fall away after a while, after the hype kind of settles a bit yeah, and I think that your, your response there is, I thought, pretty thoughtful because it's like one of you know, I just the media, youtube everywhere is so saturated with AI like, hey, you can vibe code this startup and that's just not the case. Maybe one day it will be and vibe coding is a real thing, but it's got its limits, of course. But it's got its limits, of course. You know you still have to be able to validate and know and like, look at what you're doing and you still need expertise. Yvonne and I were actually talking about that this morning um on, kind of like, the state of that um in the market. But you know, positioning like search craft in relation to the AI wave, I think the kind of the way you pitched it was wasn't disingenuous, it was hey, this is, this is what it is and this is how it's getting used.

Don: 35:50

So pretty, yeah, I mean pretty awesome as a tech company, you do have to be able to answer that question, because people will ask you like okay, well, what about AI? Why should I use your product if you don't have AI?

William: 36:01

so to check a box it's like the new, the new security team. Yeah, but yeah also like just because you produce an mcp server doesn't mean that you're an ai company, you know yes, I mean we're not in the model business.

Don: 36:19

We don't want to be and like we actually don't prescribe a specific model for, like, our implementation. Uh, we let people can. They can bring their own if they want. I mean, we can like stand the full thing up for them, but if they want to bring their own because they're already paying for like mistral or clot or whatever they can. So so I think we still don't know yet who's gonna be like the winners and losers on the model side, right?

William: 36:47

yeah, definitely, um. So I guess, like, as we near the end of the um the hour, um. So what? Just out of out of curiosity, what's your favorite developer tool outside of search, or what do you like working with?

Don: 37:04

um, oh wow, let me, let me think here uh I was, I.

William: 37:10

I was actually asked this question the other day and I froze.

Don: 37:13

I was like I don't know um, does it have to be okay? Can it be like a, a thing you pay for, like a sass thing? Is that okay? Oh yeah, I'm a big fan of Plausible. I don't know if you guys have used Plausible at all.

William: 37:31

Uh-uh.

Don: 37:32

So they're an analytics platform, but their whole thing is not tracking people and very much anonymous analytic reporting. So we pretty much use them on all of our marketing sites that we build, because it's just kind of less shady than the Google Analytics and it also means you can get by not having to do those giant consent banners that you have to do for GDPR, which is really nice, because I hate making those.

William: 38:04

Yeah, okay, next one. What's your biggest technical challenge, looking back, that you've overcome in building the new uh product?

Don: 38:18

okay, um, for me it's like having to do a lot of the. I mean, I I'm always building things I haven't had to build before, so at the beginning it was like learning about how do I build this core search library. But once we got past that building up the whole tooling and infrastructure around making a software sas company um, we have like internal, like analytics tracking for like what people are searching on and things like that, and they need to be scalable in a way where we could, um search across or like track analytics across, like multiple search index clusters, but have it in a, a central database. So we went with a product called ClickHouse. I don't know if you guys are familiar with ClickHouse, but the documentation is not great. So, figuring out how to stand that up and scale that on our AWS cloud, it took a while, and then we'd put it up get it up in production and we'd start getting traffic into it.

Don: 39:26

And then we put it up, get up in production and we'd start getting traffic into it and then, like we would have issues. I'm like, and this thing, like it, gets used by companies like ebay and netflix and these huge companies. So we know it's, it can scale. We just don't know how to like tune it properly. So there was quite a bit of a learning curve with that it properly.

William: 39:50

So there was quite a bit of a learning curve with that gotcha and I guess my last lightning round question is if you can give you know aspiring developers that are just kind of getting their you know, dipping their toes in the search um arena, you know what would be one piece of advice, uh, that you would give to them about choosing search infrastructure.

Don: 40:11

Well, hopefully you don't have to become an expert in search, because if you're having to become an expert in search, then I didn't do my job well. So we want it to be an experience where people can just pull it off the shelf, get it up and running and be on the way and build things that actually matter to their product, like building out their product features, not building search. So it really should not be something that people should have to deal with like, um, just kind of like like authentication, like you don't want to be dealing with those types of problems. You need to deal with problems that make your product unique and let, kind of like, the experts deal with those other issues. Right, that's my advice. Anyway, like I wouldn't if I was coming in, I now, like I wouldn't want to learn all they have to learn to build search, right, like, just do something off the shelf.

William: 41:04

I can honestly say search and authentication, identity and access management are two areas where I just want to off the shelf. I can honestly say search and authentication, identity and access management are two areas where I just want to run and hide.

Don: 41:13

Yeah, I've built out off systems and most people should not do that. They should absolutely not do that work.

William: 41:21

Totally agree. You got anything else, yvonne.

Eyvonne: 41:24

Before we wrap up no, I'm all good Love to know where to find Dawn online and if people want to know more where they can look.

William: 41:32

Yeah, where can we find you?

Don: 41:37

So you know I'm on LinkedIn and Blue Sky primarily. I'm not really on Twitter anymore, but if you go to dawnmckinnondev it has links to both Searchcraft and my LinkedIn and my GitHub and my Boost.

William: 41:51

Awesome and I'll link that. Yeah, I'll definitely link all those, especially the GitHub, and, yeah, everybody out there check it out and thank you so much for coming on and we appreciate the time.