Congrats to the founders. Great insight on really how Heroku can be beneficial.
10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
21–30 of 92 posts
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#22That's not a startup, it's a Gmail feature. Amazes me what gets financing nowadays...
It may look like that today, but when you pitch investors you sell them on the team, the market and the vision. You paint a compelling picture of how you get from where you are today to somewhere incredibly exciting.
Just to clarify: I have nothing against you and your team. Good luck to you and kudos!
It's just that I remember a time when starting a business meant creating a product, finding a market and people in that market willing to pay for your product.
I completely fail to see any of that in your case. But maybe building a feature for an existing product of a company in the idea of selling to that company IS a viable business model.
And maybe I am getting old...
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#23Great write-up. I'd heard of you but couldn't remember what your product was. Have you thought about putting a PR-type blurb at the top of your blog, like "Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox." with an obvious link to your website?
Good point. Added the blurb to the blog, but couldn't find a quick way of adding a link. That might require theme customisation. (Or am I wrong?)
I'm not familiar with posterous. If you don't want to change your template, you could copy & paste the link/lead into each blog post as if they're press releases, which they might effectively be.
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#24That's not a startup, it's a Gmail feature. Amazes me what gets financing nowadays...
It may look like that today, but when you pitch investors you sell them on the team, the market and the vision. You paint a compelling picture of how you get from where you are today to somewhere incredibly exciting.
what did you say to pg et al when they asked, "what if google just does this themselves"?
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may look like that today, but when you pitch investors you sell them on the team, the market and the vision. You paint a compelling picture of how you get from where you are today to somewhere incredibly exciting.
what did you say to pg et al when they asked, "what if google just does this themselves"?
we didn't ask that question because we don't care what the answer is. the biggest threat is almost always from another startup anyway, not google/microsoft/etc so we want to back the best founders. if you've met the rapportive team, you'll see pretty quickly why we funded them.
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#26That's not a startup, it's a Gmail feature. Amazes me what gets financing nowadays...
It may look like that today, but when you pitch investors you sell them on the team, the market and the vision. You paint a compelling picture of how you get from where you are today to somewhere incredibly exciting.
You guys seem really positive. How do you stay positive in the face of so much negativity that must come your way? This post is one example, but I assume there's a lot more where that came from.
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
what did you say to pg et al when they asked, "what if google just does this themselves"?
we didn't ask that question because we don't care what the answer is. the biggest threat is almost always from another startup anyway, not google/microsoft/etc so we want to back the best founders. if you've met the rapportive team, you'll see pretty quickly why we funded them.
Could you elaborate on why you wouldn't care? A competitor is a competitor, no matter if they're an elephant that can make waves, or a cheetah that can pivot on the dime. Shouldn't the mantra be to focus more on what your customers want/need rather than worry about threats from other companies?
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may look like that today, but when you pitch investors you sell them on the team, the market and the vision. You paint a compelling picture of how you get from where you are today to somewhere incredibly exciting.
Just to clarify: I have nothing against you and your team. Good luck to you and kudos! It's just that I remember a time when starting a business meant creating a product, finding a market and people in that market willing to pay for your product. I completely fail to see any of that in your case. But maybe building a feature for an existing product of a company in the idea of selling to that company IS a viable busin…
We think we have all three of those things.
We do have plans for features that we think people will be happy to charge for. Right now, we're not ready to talk too much about those features, but we think there is real pain we can remove.
We feel validated by the fact that people love the features we have right now so much that many have asked if they can pay for them.
Free is a strategy. We'll let you know how it works out :)
Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#29Great PR for Heroku and Nezumi: If we were on a cheap VPS, we would have crumbled to pieces like Cobb's limbo in Inception. As we were on Heroku, we could simply increase the number of dynos. I still vividly remember when our traffic hit. I was away from my desk, so I reached for my iPhone and dialed us up to 20 dynos using Nezumi. A few seconds later, we had scaled.
Glad it helped you out!
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Re: 10,000+ users in 24 hours & YC funding a few days later: lessons learnt
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may look like that today, but when you pitch investors you sell them on the team, the market and the vision. You paint a compelling picture of how you get from where you are today to somewhere incredibly exciting.
You guys seem really positive. How do you stay positive in the face of so much negativity that must come your way? This post is one example, but I assume there's a lot more where that came from.
Positivity is something I consciously work on.
1. If at every point you're taking what you believe to be approximately right decisions, given all the information you have at that time, then you can ban regrets from your mind. This is a good frame of mind to be in: you can focus on the future. The corollary is to arm yourself with information. For more on this, and more besides, see: http://bhorowitz.com/2010/05/30/how-andreessen-horowitz-eval...
2. Although we face a lot of negativity, it comes only in a few limited forms. Any negative statement, such as "your business will fail because Google will crush you like the tiny ants you are", should only have an impact the first time you hear it. You then decide what you think of the statement, and unless later information convinces you otherwise, your mind should be made. No regrets.
3. I consciously try not to emotionally react to situations. I also try to smile :)