I Didn't Set Out to Start a Company I Set Out to Fix Two Things That Annoyed Me

Introduction

I co-founded Taliferro with Vikki Owens because of two things that genuinely annoyed both of us: search engines that never gave you the one answer you actually wanted, and passwords on absolutely everything. Not a market opportunity we identified in a spreadsheet — actual daily irritation that we decided to go build our way out of.

Search Was Broken, So We Built FIND

You know the feeling: you want one thing — a restaurant with an open table, a hosting company that isn't garbage — and instead you get thousands of links, most of which have nothing to do with what you asked. What if there were just one result? The right one? That question is where FIND started.

Search engines weren't always even this good. In the early web, spiders indexed pages and search engines leaned on crude rules — how many times a word like "the" appeared on a page — to decide relevance. The results were genuinely absurd: in 1997, AltaVista users searching "cheese" got hit with a satirical article from The Onion; a search for "girls" surfaced a Brazilian magazine instead of anything useful. Google's actual innovation in 1998 wasn't a better index — it was replacing those rules with math, ranking pages by how other pages linked to them. That's the shift that made "google it" a verb.

But even good search engines share the same blind spot: they don't know who's asking. Two different people searching the same three words usually want two different things, and a results page built from keyword matching and click patterns has no way to tell them apart — it just doesn't know you.

FIND is our answer to that gap — a search tool built around understanding context instead of just matching keywords, aiming for one relevant result instead of a page of links you have to sort through yourself. It's live today as one of Taliferro's free tools.

The Password That Broke the Camel's Back

The specific moment: I was trying to watch an episode of Stephen Colbert on Apple TV and got hit with a two-factor authentication prompt. I was already tired of a password for every site. Needing to 2FA my way into a television app was the last straw.

Passwords are easy to guess, hard to remember, and have to be managed across every site you use — and they get stolen constantly, through phishing or just sitting exposed in a browser's saved-password list. Two-factor authentication is a real improvement on security, but it adds friction to every single login, which is exactly why people route around it with weak, reused passwords in the first place. "Security questions" turned out to be worse than either — the answers ("what city were you born in?") are often guessable from a few public facts about someone, which defeats the point.

That frustration turned into an early passwordless authentication project — replacing the password with something tied to the device or the person instead of a string of characters to remember. It didn't end up sticking around as a standalone product, but the underlying conviction still shapes how we think about authentication in everything Taliferro builds now: friction should buy you real security, not just the feeling of it.

One day, while trying to watch an episode of Stephen Colbert on Apple TV, I was asked to perform 2-factor authentication. I was already sick of logging into every application and remembering passwords; however, as they say, having to 2-factor authenticate to watch a TV show broke the camel's back.

Funding the Passion Projects

At a previous job, I built a Laboratory Information System and learned firsthand how complicated running a lab actually is — how much of a lab's operating cost is friction that has nothing to do with the actual science. When that company shut down, I took what I'd learned and built a serverless version aimed at the same problem: tracking lab operations, from patient or client engagement through test result delivery, without the enterprise price tag that keeps most labs stuck on spreadsheets and basic tools.

That product — data collection from multiple sources, a customizable interface, dashboards, Shopify integration for B2C labs, status updates by text and email, passwordless record access, FIND-powered patient record search — became the seed that funded building out the rest of Taliferro. Search and passwords weren't abstract passion projects anymore; they were features solving a real, specific problem for a real, specific customer.

That's also where an e-commerce platform and a CRM integration came from — both grew out of the same lab work, then generalized into products other businesses could use. And it's why I started writing this blog in August 2022: sharing what we were actually learning, not marketing copy about what we hoped to learn.

Conclusion

None of the ideas behind Taliferro are new — better search, less password friction, lab software that doesn't require enterprise budget. What's true is that two specific annoyances turned into two real products, and those products funded everything that came after. That's still how we decide what to build.

Tyrone Showers