Octopart (YC W07) helps nearly a half a million people find parts every month

<i>Soon after that I sent Andres the link, and we started throwing around ideas for startup companies. In the spring of 2006 I got a phone call from Andres. He was having trouble finding a low temperature capacitor for his experiment and suggested that we build a database of electronic parts and make it easily searchable on the web.</i><p>I love seeing successful YC startups that are outside of the fairly insular "startups serving startups and other stuff startup people are interested in" space.<p>There's so many verticals out there that have passionate users that are being under-served by today's technology. It might be less sexy from a TechCrunch perspective, but I have the sense that's where a good amount of the lucrative business opportunities are going to be for this next era.<p>We don't need "a better Twitter", "the next Google", or to be "as big as Facebook". But we do need to bring the power of these products to more and more people and markets.

As a Computer Engineering student, Octopart is defiantly one of nicest sites for buying parts or just looking for data sheets. I actually wasn't aware it was a YC company, but it makes sense!

I love Octopart and wish it would become even more wildly successful. However...<p>The problem I have with Octopart and other "better search" engines (like Hipmunk, Padmapper, et al) is that the coverage is not 100%--not every item in inventory is shown on the search engine site.<p>The lack of complete coverage kills me when I'm looking for a very specific edge case, which are exactly the sorts of cases that would most benefit from a better search experience. When I really want that one 10uF/6.3V X7R ceramic capacitor made by TDK, and I can't find it on Octopart, it renders the whole of Octopart useless.<p>Until these sorts of frontend sites get better adoption from the people who actually <i>supply the inventory</i> (e.g. Octopart -&#62; Digikey, Hipmunk -&#62; Expedia, Padmapper -&#62; Craigslist), they cease to be useful in all the cases where they would provide major benefit.

I was wondering what happened to these guys - I was watching a YouTube video this weekend of PG speaking at a conference circa 2008 and he spend a good deal of time talking about Octopart and their business model...

Octopart if you want to start making money, build in some BOM management features. It's not a sexy area but BOM management is a pretty good problem to solve with designers, suppliers, CMs, etc. Don't forget the EOCs and MCOs too.

Its funny how often successful products and services are just obvious modifications of pre-existing ones. Correct me if Im wrong but this sounds like the Google of electronic parts. Thats not to downplay the genius or ingenuity of these companies by any means--in fact, if anything, its a compliment to their observational skills. Still, funny how it tends to be the obvious ideas which prove the most successful. Bravo

See also <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2286772" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2286772</a>