We are still scaling it up! Most challenging has been and still is scaling the team and culture. We care a lot about the people we hire and would always choose quality over quantity. It makes it difficult to hire fast but is also the main reason of our current success.

Our early customers were the ones we converted from the beta. So the question becomes—how did we get our first beta customers? We reached out first to our network and hustled from there. We did a lot of demos and got tons of ‘nos’ or worse, ‘maybes’. But then we convinced a first one, and then a second, and the product improved, the referrals started to come in and it got much easier. Pitch wise, we focused mainly on the speed. We spoke a lot more about the typo-tolerance than we do today, and one thing that really hasn’t changed at all: we demoed a lot!!! Actually, today, we still (nearly) never use slides in our sales pitches (well, we maybe should sometimes!)

Hint hint jobs@algolia.com ;)

One thing that has not been mentioned yet: the culture. We really value ownership a lot and that’s enabling us to make decisions without have to refer to each other all the time. We trust people to make the best decisions and to make sure they can do so, we are very transparent about basically everything that’s happening and prefer to over-communicate than keep things to ourselves. We also encourage everyone at the company to travel to the other office at least once a year. We have usually between 2 and 5 people from Paris in SF at any time, for example :) That’s helping a lot and makes sure everyone can get to know each other! Oh and we only speak English, including in the French office where we have currently 5 non-native French speaking employees \o/

Yes it is true! We basically saw so many unanswered questions on StackOverFlow about how to implement Lucene in mobile apps that we thought it would be a great problem to tackle :) The thing is the market was not as great as we expected/hoped or maybe more difficult to penetrate. We did, however, get a lot of positive feedback about the UX of the search with people wanted to do the same thing online. So we pivoted :) And that was one of our best decisions! We rapidly realized that all the choices we made for mobile were great fits for user-facing search! Because of the hardware constraints of mobile, we couldn’t use the traditional search approaches used by Elasticsearch for example. The form factor also drove a lot of our decisions (instant display of results as you type, typing mistake tolerance, factoring geo-distance in the ranking, etc.). In the end it shaped the technology and is a big reason for our current success :) We probably never would have made the same choices had we started on servers.

Short version: awesome! It would take a long time to cover all the great things about YC like the really smart and experienced partners, incredible batch mates you’re going to have, and the very helpful network of alumni… If I had to only pick one thing, I’d say that the experience of moving the full team (6 of us at that time) to the Bay Area was the most impactful. We worked and lived together for 3 months out of a house we rented in Menlo Park. Participating in a YC batch is very intense, and doing that all together from the same place, basically working night and days for 3 months, contributed a lot to our team and culture.

As a complement to what Julien just said, I’d add that we had the same idea of the kind of companies we wanted to build. We actually sat down for half a day and discussed the culture we wanted to build before giving it a go. Knowing that we share the same values was very important for us :)